A few new things today on the lowdrag ranch: I cut the number of wild rantings on the index page down to five. Ten was just too many (I underestimated my verbosity).
But then I realized I had a lot of old useless information that would never be displayed with the new useless information so I tweaked the script to package those up by month and make a little listing of links to them (lower right).
If you think it’s a pretty thing that makes them come out in reverse chronological order you’re wrong.
Also, there used to be a little nonsensical blurb under the banner picture, now there might be a different nonsensical blurb there. Woo.

Well, the party went great (I had a good time anyway). Muchos thankos to everyone.
Today I “finished” rewriting the J. Random Hero suite. I mention this just because the interface should look almost exactly the same as it did before and I hate to do that much work and have it go unnoticed. Actually I wanted to use some of the cooler features of Lincoln Stein’s excellent CGI.pm.
Incidentally, I’m going to go ahead and mention that I was previously using an ugly hack to keep the names on the same line as the checkboxes. i.e.
Some Hero
as opposed to:

Some Other Hero
Well, since I couldn’t figure out a way to do that with the OO interface to CGI.pm I’m using an even more gruesomely-ugly hack. And that’s the last I’ll say about that, but if anyone know the magic incantation to do that the right way I’m all ears.

Here’s a thrilling testimonial from an actual guitar hacker: I was tearing the frankencaster apart to put in a fresh set of Texas Specials and decided to try shielding the pickups from all that stray EMI and other RF noise floating around my house (since my conservatory also houses computers I can tell you that a CRT or even a TFT monitor can be made very loud with a single coil pickup and a few rectifiers). I also fixed up a inexplicable ground loop thing that goes on inside Stratocasters, but that’s another story. Anyhow, the results are in:

• ++ on the Texas Specials. Those babies are hot!
• ++ on shielding the tub. I now do not have to hold a certain compass heading to kill the hum. Yay!

I used 3M Copper shielding tape but I’ve heard of guys using conductive paint or even tin foil (Those guys must be goood). Anyway, there ya go, the lowdrag.org seal of approval.

Could it be that the new colors are even more odious than the old colors? If you’d rather see the old colors and you have modern browser do something like View->stylesheets->dark (That’s in Galeon, but it’s probably something similar in other things).
Speaking of which: Now I’m not one to dog someones software choices (well, unless it’s pine), but if you’re still using Netscape 4 you are a Luddite malcontent with a masochistic streak. Get a nice gopher browser and you can really wallow in self-pity.
Bitter? Me?

Hope you all had a nice Mother’s Day. I did, but having such a nice Mom, I don’t know how I wouldn’t.
Got back to work this weekend on the “ Submit-a-hero” thing. It’s not complete by any means (you can’t upload a picture yet and I’ll have to manually move stuff around to get it into the main mix (“manually” is the wrong term for that, but I mean there’s no web interface for administrating the thing)), but you can actually submit a hero (and I wish you would!). Give it a whirl, if you have any constructive suggestions please put ’em in the “Notes to the editor” box or mail ’em to me.

¡Viva La Raza! Minor site changes today; I changed the style sheets to exclude any reference to “font-size”, “font-adjust”, “font-*”. What do I care what size fonts you get? I had some reports that the fonts were showing up as unreadable-small in IE, so I figure this is the easy way out. If this causes anyone problems please let me know. Also I finally got rid of the floating, translucent xterm. Really, it was even getting on my nerves.
I went to see my boy T.F. Miles (AKA B-9) and his new band Funky Old Soul (Shockwave warning) with some of the boys the other night. (

• Jesse: “What’s the name of the band?”
• Spear: “Funky Old Soul.”
• Jesse: “What kind of music do they play?”
• Spear:”Both kinds.”

) I haven’t been to see a lot of Soul bands, but I’d say they’re pretty good. That night they were followed by DysFunkShun JunkShun (Major, major Shockwave warning, ie. I have no idea what’s on this site), also recommended.