This week I am releasing the long awaited Elmwood strip 1.2. I has many new features, most of which you can already check out. First of all you can now add links and images to your journal entires via HTML tags. You can also change you banner, even to an animated swf one. You can change you background color, and not just when you first create the blog but over and over as your heart desires. even better is that you are not limited to the color choices I selected. you can add you own hex value colors oif you would like.

The rest of the weeknend I will be producing new graphics.

I spent a lot of time working on the code this weekend. There are lots more features. You can now upload images to our server. The page then gives you the address of the image and the code you would need to display an image in your journal entry. It also gives you a thumbnail and a way to delete the images stored in your directory.

Now you can also stay logged in thanks to cookies when you are updating your journal and you switch to view your journal. There will be many more features in the next month. Hope you enjoy.

I am trying to add more feature requests as they come in. One problem I am having is that as soon as many people sign up we are going to need some sort of way to categorize them in order to have them easily searchable. I am thinking of dividing it into zip code clans. That seems liek the easiest way. Do you guys have a better idea. If so please post your idea in the forum.

Let it long live in peices sold on ebay. The powerbook met a 40oz bottle of beer in an unfortunate accident and is no longer with us. This is the powerbook that was used to create this page. I am taking this as a message from "god" to give up on crapple computers. So I am on a little break while I wait for my new portable intel-powered openGL workstation. Fuck Apple anyways. I hate them and their lame ass hardware. If it wasn't for OS X I would have dropped them a long time ago. If you don't believ they suck, get this when my powerbook was in repair for defective parts last month they returned it to me without the battery and then tried to blame it on me asking me if I was sure it had a bettery in it when I sent it. I am moving onto Linux which is by the way the operating system this sit eis running on.

Most of you are probably aware of the events surrounding last month's cirtical mass ride. In short, the ride was stopped by police officers and the end result was unnecessary use of violence by police against a completely unviolent group of bikeriders leading to the arrest of nine (some with felony charges). This month's ride set out with everyone aware of the possible consequences and therefore stronger and ready to have that much more fun.
We started from Niagara square through downtown and into the East side. We rode in a line that must have stretched at least a half mile. Counters along the way put the number between 180-200 total bicyclists! It was great fun with catcalls, songs, and rampant good-natured chatter throughout the procession. The people we passed looked curiously and often inquired what was up, someone would respond and give their own interpretation of what it was we were doing. It was great because everyone's explanation was different, some yelled back, "fun!," others talked about bikers' rights, that's the beauty of it, this event is open to everyone's views and mindsets. Another great aspect that I noticed was that as we traversed streets that would normally be tagged as "bad neighborhoods" (ie.: the fruit belt and later the west side on Grant St.) the people generally responded even warmer than in the so-called good neighborhoods. We even grew in number as many of the residents of these communities, already on their bikes, joined in the procession and swelled our numbers.
The entire ride was without any police interference (though there was one instance where a camera was setup and recorded us as we passed), clearly in response to the harsh backlash in the communities from last week's activities. Critical Mass is still going strong and I encourage anyone with a bike to come on out and have one hell of a good time.