Dave Ambrose

We had to say goodbye to our cat Button today. She lived a very long, and mostly good life. She was an awesome companion, model building buddy, and kept the family tradition of the cat bringing us a rabbit at Easter. We will miss her very much.

Oooh, that's no good. Thanks, I'll look into that.

Thanks for taking notice. We are aware of this. Some years back, we started allowing higher resolution pictures on the forum. It means people can post pictures without resizing them, and we can zoom in to our heart's content. We also can use the pictures in our Forum Finds column. Our hosting plan gives us a massive amount of outbound bandwidth, so that isn't likely to be a problem. It does slow down page load times, but at this point, it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. Unfortunately, our forum software doesn't allow for downsizing the images on the fly. We're not the only ones in this situation, so perhaps they'll implement it in a future release.

Thanks for catching that. It should remedy itself in a few hours.

I tried to get that included in the migration plan, but they said "no." and wouldn't budge. It seems that some of you have frighteningly large stashes!

The mail system is having problems. Email alerts may not be working properly. We're working on it.

We are live on the new server. Final sync is done and our site is running on the new server. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

Every few years, we have to move to a new server. This updates the operating system, and various other software components that we can't change on the existing server. Sometime in the very near future, the Model Cars Magazine and website will be offline, while the server changeover takes place. We estimate this will take a couple of hours. We don't know exactly when it will take place. We've requested an off-hours transfer, but this board is pretty much 24/7. If you get no response from the forum, don't panic. It should be back soon. My espresso pot is armed and ready should anything need immediate attention. Thank you for your patience. This is a royal pain, but worth it in the long run. Update: The migration is scheduled for Tuesday night at 10:30 PM Pacific

I am so sorry. Our pets have that very special spot in our hearts, and losing them just hurts. I hope you find healing with time.

We're all victims of the laws of physics. ?

Two of my kids build Gundams and allied subjects. I don't know about other parts of the country, but here in SoCal, the IPMS' initial reaction to Gundams wasn't very friendly. My experience has been that some IPMS people resist seeing them as a legitimate genre. There have been similar problems with cars. We have a large and separate Gundam contest. It is very well attended and growing. As for reference, science fiction has a similar concern and that doesn't cause any problems, even with the IPMS. For Gundams, there are the animes, but for the most part, they treat them the same way we treat model cars, and that is paint them however you want. I gotta say, I've seen some seriously good paint at the contest. And yes, the builders are generally younger. I go to the Gundam contest and I'm the old guy in the room. My experience has been that the Gundam builders are very nice. We have a lot in common for tools, techniques, and the frustrations of glossy paint. ? Anecdotally, we're observing some evolution from Gundams to cars. Primarily Japanese cars, but sometimes other subjects as well.

My list of projects for this is growing. It's primary application is likely going to be telescope making, which is extreme tinkering. I can now properly trim screws to length, and that will be important too. I daresay that I'll find some model car uses for it, but I haven't come across any yet. I haven't had access to a good machine shop for over 30 years, so this will be a fun reunion.

Finished one of my summer projects. The lathe was an impulse buy while we were on vacation. With all the camping and telescope gear we were carrying, we almost had to fold space to get lathe on board. Picked up a top, and the tool chest after we got back home. I have enough tooling to do useful stuff now, and this is likely to become a well-used tool in my shop.

We sent the information to you.

We identified a problem with the database and fixed it. Things are running a lot better now. Hopefully, this was the root problem, and we won't have any more problems for a while. Let me know if we get sluggish again.

That should fix itself within 48 hours or so. There are database updates that happen in the background, and sometimes they take a while to catch up.

Today, we had a different problem that was unrelated to the sluggishness. It's been solved.

Nice list. Gotta try some of those. There was a good radio station in Madison, WI whose call sign I can't remember except it somewhat obviously started with W. Give Radio Paradise a try. (Quite) a while back, I learned that my best music category was eclectic. RP does a pretty good job at that. I'm also a fan of KEXP's YouTube channel.

Yup. Still having problems. I'll be working on it.

Boar's Head is family-owned. I was wondering if they'd been acquired by some private equity firm, but that isn't the case. According to Wikipedia, they had major sanitation issues at one of their packaging plants. They were basically cited monthly for a while, but a shut-down order was never issued. Ineffective enforcement should be cause for a major investigation.

What a treat! Those things are monsters.

The problems are intermittent. Looks like my first attempt partially remediated the problem. I've refined it a bit. Let me know if it gets slow again.

I just noticed that slowness. Gonna take a look.

It is, Mt. Laguna area.

The Milky Way was readily seen. The moon hadn't risen by the time we left so don't know what it would be like with the moon up. There was a lot of moisture in the air that evening, so transparency wasn't great, but still good.