Just because I tend to forget these things, I am putting it down on the site so it is immortalized !!! This small snippet of CSS is creating a fixed width centered layout, without using an outer containing div. Because we all love nice meaningful markup and we all hate div-itis.

body {
width: 960px; /* or whatever you want */
margin: 0 auto;
text-align: left;
}

The margin of "auto" for left and right will keep us nice and centered and our body width makes sure we get our pixel-perfect fixed layout :)