Dave Ambrose

We're inventing new words, and uses for old words, faster than the curators can add them to their catalogs. Call me old school, but I still have Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language on my bookshelf. The title is something of a misnomer since it's very much oriented to the American dialect of English, and doesn't have British spellings of anything. Interestingly enough, it does have the British definition of table (a discussion subject) which, is the exact opposite of the American definition.

Slack is another chat platform. It's gotten fairly popular among software development and corporate types. It's supplanting the original IRC (Internet Relay Chat) in some areas. It isn't, but probably had the sole virtue of being available in the desired contexts. Welcome to the age of worldwide naming. No worries there. The field of computing hasn't gotten any less esoteric over the years. I had to constantly explain to my parents what I did for a living, and why they shouldn't be worried about my future. I had to at least try to keep things comprehensible to the uninitiated.

As someone who's had to name two companies in the last 10 years, I can attest that it's damn near impossible to come up with a name that's meaningful and unique. We end up with the weird names that have only the vaguest connection between them and the service or goods they offer. Quick, tell me what Slack and Twitch do without looking them up. But. . . the capitalization should have alerted you that it was a proper name. I did check out the site he posted, and it's legit. There are other users, but not a lot of discussion yet. A lot of people don't like the forum format and prefer the interactivity of a chat. We used to have a heavily used chatroom here, but we had to stop due to cost, and when we put it back, nobody used it. I wouldn't mind having that back. We had some good discussions there, and it was nice to have some friendly voices when I was on the road. Twitch is a video streaming and conferencing service. There is a whole model building subculture that streams the video while they build. I can see some situations where that might be pretty cool. The Coast Airbrush videocasts on Facebook are usually fairly interesting, but they move too slowly for me. I know it's easy to think of this as the universe, but we're hardly the last word in media platforms.

You might get them off with Walthers Solvaset. The model railroaders use it and it a lot more powerful than the Microscale products.

Wow. That's interesting. I need to go watch that movie again.

I don't know the specifics of Randy Ayer's situation, so I can't comment on that. A backup server of the requisite size would break our budget. However, we do run nightly backups which are not directly accessible, so if some scoundrel breaks in and trashes our site, we can recover with relatively little loss of content. Thank you for your good wishes. I'm recovering well.

Yes, this is a chatroom server. My son set one up for him and his gaming friends. Easy to get the meaning confused when lacking context.

Yeah, you'll just leave that right here. I see what you did. Maybe I should put on in my 1:1 Morris Minor Traveler?

Count me as another Ernie Irvan fan. Very nice build.

Boy, do I feel like an outlier. It varies, but I usually switch between Alternative, Jazz Fusion, and 20th Century Classical music. Favorites are Weather Report, and Return to Forever for Jazz. Classical is usually Hindemith, Prokofiev, Nielsen, and sometimes Ives. I sometimes binge on Tragically Hip.

Football, or baseball?

This trips my significance alarm. Thanks for the info. I definitely have a new line of inquiry.

The inclined launchers on the foredeck look like Hedgehogs. These are an anti submarine weapon. That would mesh nicely with the depth charges. I would visit my local fly fishing shop and ask for some leader. It comes in several sizes. It will be smaller than the stuff you find at your regular fishing shop.

It's a timeout, and not something like an error 500? Have you tried clearing your browser cache? If not, please try that. PM me your system info; browser, OS, internet provider. and if you're using anything like a VPN. Thanks, Dave Ambrose

Thanks, Bill. This is very useful information. I'm surprised that pasting from Word works as well as it seems to. Unless something has changed, Microsoft Word adds all kinds of formatting information to text that's copy/pasted from Word into anything else. There's actually a special paste button to accomplish that cleanly. I don't have it enabled, but maybe I should add it to the desktop editor? But, finding an editor that will preserve the formatting information would be useful. I could then make a public Dropbox folder to give people a place to save the information. I will look into that. Getting knocked out of the site completely is a new one to me, but as they say on Laugh In, veeery interesting.....That suggests a new line of inquiry. What exactly do you mean with you say knocked out. Do you get an error message of any kind? As for my IT people, I am my IT people. I haven't been diagnosed with either schizophrenia, or multiple personality disorder, so it's just me.

Thank you. I'm hoping to have the forum software upgrade done before the end of the year. Unfortunately, it's somewhat dependent on my recovery. My energy will disappear at unpredictable times, and I won't work on the server under those conditions. It's too easy to make catastrophic mistakes.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to post them here.

Its a problem in the forum software. I will be fixing it in the next couple of months.

As some have noticed, the board has been rough around the edges for a while. I apologize for the delays in getting things fixed. I’ve been fighting a major medical issue since May, and after surgery a few weeks ago, am finally on the road to recovery. We have a bunch of things to fix. Some of them are under the hood, and some will be all too visible. We’ve had significant growth in our user base, and performance has sometimes been slow. It will take us a while to fully remedy this situation, but I think you’ll like the final result. Initially, I’ll address some server issues that are affecting our page load times. Anyone dying for the gory details should send me a PM. If anyone out there knows a lot about mySQL, please send me a PM. This is going to take more than a few maintenance sessions. I'll try to keep them short and off hours, but that won't always be possible. Please bear with me. There will be another major forum software update. There are bug fixes, security updates, and updates for European data privacy requirements that we need to implement. The way the board works will change. I will do my best to minimize the changes, but I can't make any guarantees. I don't have all the details yet, but will announce what I know before I make the update. I have not forgotten about the 404 problem. Hopefully, this release will alleviate that, but I'm not counting on it. I am beginning to believe that the problem has something to do with the content of the posting though.

I ran into the same problem yesterday. I wonder if it's related to copying and pasting content? I'll have to test that. The URL was fine.

It pains me to be deleting some of these albums. There was a lot of interesting stuff. If you still have some of your old photos, please put them in the gallery.

We've started the process of cleaning up the photo galleries. We lost most of the pictures in a hack attack a few years ago. Sadly, they aren't on any of our backups. Now it turns out the empty photo albums are affecting our search results. This has other undesirable side effects, so we need to clean this up as quickly as we can. For the next few days, the other moderators and myself will be going through and deleting empty albums. The albums with pictures will stay. In the meantime, please feel free to put photos there. It's working just fine.

I'm having a hard time reconciling the bat shaped door handle with the longhorns on the radiator. But I gotta say, this was good for a laugh.

This comes from the way the site handles certain kinds of web requests. It's on my list of things to fix. In the meantime, you're fine. We don't store confidential data, and don't specifically need in-transit encryption, per se. But, the browsers have gotten more picky. It does help with security by authenticating that you're getting information from the right site. That's much more important to a bank than here tho.

Don't come to my house. We have horses nearby, and consequently lots of flying insects. Tarantulas are also indigenous. We get lots of spiders. I leave the hunting spiders alone, even if they're in the house. They're eliminating annoying pests. I just wish they had a bigger appetite for ants.* Various orb weavers in the back yard, and lots of funnel webs. My son comes home from 6th grade science class, and asks if he can have a tarantula for a pet. The science teacher's has had babies. Indulgent parent that I am, I said yes. That spider lasted 10 years before dying of old age. * Southern California is one large, Argentine ant colony.