When The Pilgrims Landed, The First Thing They Did Was Eat A Few Indians
Posted on February 21, 2005
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For the first time in a while, no news at all to report about any of the sites. I’ve not made any changes to planetsuper nor have I made any to the Ideas site. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to code the search engine for the LT Essential Guide. The database itself is coded and displaying properly on the site, but the last bit of functionality I want to have is a comprehensive search engine allowing for custom queries to the database. That part’s actually pretty simple, I think; it’s getting the queries constructed that I’m still toying with. I’m pretty sure I know how I want to do it - I just don’t know how to implement it, hehe.
In other site-related news, use of the forums has really dropped off in the past week or so and I don’t know why. Maybe we’re all tired of each other or something, dunno. I was afraid that this is what would happen eventually. Everyone would come out and support the forums and use them but they wouldn’t last that long. It appears that I was right, unfortunately. 
The only other real news is that I’ve broken out my racing wheel and I’m practicing in order to get good enough to compete in an online league. I spoke with Jesse and we’ve got tentative plans to form a race team and race on the touring car circuits. I’ve been practicing hard so I can get good enough to compete with the other drivers. I think I’m getting there slowly but there’s still a lot of work to do before I feel like I’m ready to take my car out on the track with other drivers. I’d feel terrible if I ruined someone else’s race by wrecking them due to my own inexperience. Speaking of cars, Chris has designed two matching cars for the Clemson Racing team for Jesse and me to use. I’ve changed the site code slightly in the past couple of weeks to allow for images to be posted inline (yay!), so here’s four shots of the two Clemson cars taking a few laps. Chris took them last night so I’m not sure what the track is. My guess is Watkins Glen, but I can’t confirm that. I’m just putting the thumbnails here on the front page - click them for larger views. So without further ado…
 
The primarily purple car is mine, the orange Jesse’s. I’m told that mine is purple to match the stock car that Chris uses for his NASCAR simulations. They both look great, though, and I didn’t post any, but there are shots of both cars taking laps together and they look very spiffy running side-by-side. Hopefully that’s how they’ll run once we start racing, hehe. A while back, I directed Chris to the Clemson image and color standards page, so as far as I know, both cars adhere to the standards that the University requires for use of the school colors, logos, lettering, etc. At any rate, they look good and many kudos to Chris for doing a bang-up job and giving us what will be the best-looking cars on tour. Thanks, bud.
If You Were A Diving Board, What Would You Want Someone To Do With You?
Posted on February 9, 2005
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So it’s been a while since I’ve updated. With good reason, of course. Isn’t there always a good reason? Anyway, though, this time there really is a good reason. I’ve been busting my ass trying to get the Ideas of America website up and running. If you go and check it out, it may not look like there’s a lot there, but there really was a lot of things that had to go into it to get it where it is. Of course, if you don’t have the required password to see some of it, there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of content. The main part of the site is the Lethal Trumpet Essential Guide, which is still under extremely heavy construction as I continue coding it and Chris and I continue gathering the information for the database. For now, though, check out the cover gallery. The story archive is active, as well - passworded - if you want in, IM me or PM on the forums.
So I’m trying to find an easy-to-install pic hosting package for the site. I want something that I can easily install without having to have command line access to my host. The best software for hosting pics would either require that I have the ability to create the proper usename or would likely require a lot of code modification to change all instances of that username to one that I am able to create with my host. We’ll see what my searching turns up.
I guess this is probably going to be a pretty short update. There hasn’t been much happening lately. I’ve been so absorbed with working on the Ideas site, I’ve sort of neglected all my forums, even my own, heh. I really want to get the site done so it will be in what I like to call “content mode,” much how planetsuper is. Once that’s done, I can finally return to actually writing LT instead of just writing about LT. Dunno exactly how long that will be. I make pretty good progress almost daily on the Ideas site so it may be sooner rather than later. The last major project is searching the database, I think. And populating the database, of course. So there you have it: probably the most incoherent and rambling update to date! Enjoy :-p