Dave Ambrose

All done. Turns out I didn't have to take the board offline.

This is a bit of an experiment. We wanted to have a specific place where people could get the latest status on the magazine, and other efforts to improve our content. Our goal here is to be open, and keep you informed. This is also a place where you can ask about future directions, or share your ideas. This is not a place to discuss subscription issues. If you have any issues or questions, please contact either myself or Larry Greenberg (larrygre) All the normal forum rules apply here. If you haven't looked at them lately, please review them. Most importantly, be respectful and polite. Thanks in advance for your cooperation.

I need to take the board offline for about 20 minutes.

Maybe you can involve the older one. I once built a Tamiya Ferrari kit with my daughter. I did the assembly and painted the body. She did most of the detail painting. It wasn't contest quality, but she did a very good job, and it was a fun build for us.

Good evening everyone, I know that in the US, and indeed elsewhere, there are a lot of political happenings. But, for a lot of very good reasons, we don't allow political discussions, rants, slogans, dialectics, manifestos, policy statements, policy studies, issue white papers, or diatribes here. They generate a lot of heat, but very little light, and I don't know about the rest of you, but I get plenty of that elsewhere. Let's keep it that way. Thanks, Dave Ambrose

Nothing I know of to do that. The only user's list is on the main page -- even to the admins.

Let's go with coffee. Fewer calories, and we can stay up as late as we want.

Please send me a PM.

My goodness. Look at all the lefties coming out of the woodwork. For some reason, I seem to have a lot of left-handed friends. The nuns tried to make me write with my right hand. I wasn't having it. I learned to write right-handed, but switched back as soon as I could talk my way back into public school. Guess I know where I'm going after this life. I'll have to take some marshmallows. I was forced to use my right hand for a bunch of things after I broke my left elbow. (don't do that) I'm right eye dominant which makes firearm selection much more straightforward. Just to make up for it, my son is left eye dominant.

It's not your imagination. Updates are occurring more frequently. There was a long period where we weren't keeping on the latest release. There were a few reasons for that, including some health problems at my end. Now, the installer works much better, and we have better infrastructure. So, now, I'm doing a better job of keeping up. The forum software vendor is also doing a much better job on their minor releases. This last one installed in less than 10 minutes, and I didn't need a command line to do it. Most importantly, the last few minor releases didn't break anything. It literally took me two years, but I figured out how to fix the 404 problem. I don't think we announced it because we weren't quite willing to believe it was fixed, and didn't want to put a curse on it in any case. It's been a long road, but all the little improvements are starting to add up.

The board software will be getting a major update pretty soon. I think this will all work better once we install the update.

I dropped a Ford GT-40 headlamp cover. After way too much searching, I found it between the floor and the baseboard. Dive light to the rescue.

Not just yet. It only has 101K on it and is running well. Besides, new Frontiers look pretty much like the old Frontiers. Besides, after all the bucolic bovine byproduct we had to go through to get the model, trim, and color we wanted, we're going to get as many miles out of this as we can. We got 326K out of our 2001 Xterra. Still lots of life left in this one.

I got a box of . . . . body parts. Actually the ICM kit for American Sport Car Drivers from the 1910s. Looks good, and will fit nicely with the Ford Raceabout kit.

I got a little note from the DMV. Normally, they want money. Today, it was the title for our Nissan Frontier. The loan was paid off last month.

We sometimes lock threads so we can figure out the right way to handle a situation. If this thread briefly disappeared, it’s because I inadvertently hid the entire thread for a bit.

Please be mindful of our request not to discuss COVID-19. And I'm sure everyone knows about our injunction against politics.

Exactly. My dad grew up in Madison and went to UW. They're one of the three football teams I root for on Saturday.

The reindexing is done, and the lazy loading is working. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

I've finished with the maintenance. I activated a feature on the board that will cause the images to load as you scroll to them. This should eventually reduce the load on the server, improve forum response, and decrease the amount of network traffic. At least that's what the forum software vendor tells me. (I'm making the rash assumption they know what they're talking about) In the interim, page loading might be a slower. The server has to go back through and convert all or existing content. All 2,128,119 of them. This will take a while. Please bear with me, and with any luck, we'll enjoy the improvements in a few days.

Well, well, well. That was(n't) fun. But necessary. Judgements about quality are necessarily subjective. I think our interests are well served if we assume, until demonstrated otherwise, that people are posting things they think are valuable. The notion that you could ever reduce a concept like quality to something as simple as a single number, be it postings, or something else, is prima facie absurd. I don't think anyone is dominating the conversation. The total posts for the top 25 posters barely makes it to 10% of the total content on the board. We have a large, and active community. I'm very grateful for that, and it makes my volunteer work here very worthwhile indeed. I'm going to unlock the topic, but please, if you see an ideological rabbit hole, don't immediately jump in. If you're lucky, there will only be a rabbit in there who will kick you in the face. But more than likely, there will be a badger. It will not be in a good mood because badgers are never in a good mood. All you will get is a bloody fight. Thanks.

Long ago, we had problems with using too much disk space. We literally couldn’t find affordable hosting with enough capacity to host the board. That’s why we recommended using external hosting for photos. Now we have our own dedicated server and we can host our own photos. We didn’t emphasize embedding the photos until the Photobucket debacle I still wish we could recover the photos from Harry’s builds. the only downside to that is the size of our backup sets. We’re pushing 250 GB and growing at 8% per year. But, that’s okay. Backup disks are cheap and I have unlimited internet bandwidth.

I'm going to take the board offline for about 20 minutes Friday night at 9 PM PDT. I'll be doing a couple of tweaks to make the board better.

Well, y'all got me curious. Here are our top 25 posters: slusher 33727 Harry P. 29071 cobraman 22687 Ace-Garageguy 22642 crazyjim 19284 Snake45 17725 Danno 16294 Dr. Cranky 15374 martinfan5 14103 Tom Geiger 14082 High octane 12618 Casey 12470 Chuck Most 12118 Rob Hall 10867 Jantrix 10580 StevenGuthmiller 10459 espo 10384 Greg Myers 10000 ChrisR 9965 Foxer 9446 unclescott58 9361 MrObsessive 9120 george 53 8746 afx 8660 charlie8575 8423

I haven't tried it, but the free Apple photo editor will resize images. Please let me know how it works.