Welcome to the area of the site where I’m supposed to give a synopsis of the progress to date but usually end up using as a forum to vent, question and philosophize. This month’s no exception but I *do* have more progress to report than usual.

About the car:
For the April Progress Update I’m pleased to announce that there’s been progress! Things are coming together nicely – sort of. I say “sort of” because I really haven’t had much fun mounting the grille, hood and front sheet metal. It’s tedious and time consuming.

The new tubing bender, notcher and clamps are just waiting to be used to make the roll cage. The chrome molly tubing arrived this week so all that’s left to do is to get a new cut-off saw and make templates for the first bends. At this time I’m deciding what the best material will be to use to make templates. Wish me luck.

The tools are from Williams Lowbuck Tools and they look great! I can’t wait to use them. I think it will be nice to build it myself since it’s not your normal roll cage. Another good thing about building it here is not having to transport the car somewhere else and leave it for who knows how long, or worry about it. I’ll cover the use of the tools and the entire build up of the cage in detail when the time comes.

The fuel lines are on the way from Pure Choice Motorsports! Pure Choice custom makes the braided lines to fit. I can’t wait! I always talk to Gary when I call them and he is so helpful. I’m not always the easiest guy to understand!

The fuel lines will take us one step further toward getting the engine fired up. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! I’m going to see if I can borrow a friend’s digital movie camera to document starting the engine for the first time. My Nikon 990 will do a short movie but there’s no sound – and we all know it’s the SOUND that makes your heart jump!

Murphy’s Law…
You all know Murphy’s Law right? “Everything that can go wrong –will”. I kind of live my life by this rule, always trying to think ahead to what ramifications might result from something I do. It plays (or should play) a big part in building a street rod, like where you run the fuel lines and how you bolt things together.

Of course there’s those unforeseen instances when there’s no way you could have ever envisioned the sequence of events that unfold before you. Take the President of the United States visit to Sioux Falls last Wednesday for example.

I’ve been working for the past few months on a new website for Yogi’s Inc. It was tested and tweaked for several weeks and is still being fine tuned daily, but we decided on Tuesday that it was finished enough to make it public. I worked from late Tuesday night into the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday to get it all switched over and ready to go. E-mails were sent to announce it’s début and Wednesday morning we were ready to rock!

About 10:30am Wednesday morning I noticed the site was starting to get really slow. It got worse and worse and I was getting worried. I checked all the sites on my web server and every one of them was super slow. The photos on this site wouldn’t even load and pages were timing out. Through process of elimination I concluded that it was my server’s connection to the Internet that was causing the problem and not the server itself. It shouldn’t be slow since there’s 3-T3 lines connecting it to the backbone of the Internet but it was now so slow that that many visitors weren’t able to access the server at all.

I called the service provider so find out what was going on. It seems that a local TV station who hosts their web site using the same connection was running a live video feed of the Presidents visit and they were sucking the bandwidth dry, leaving none for anyone else! Air force 1 was due to arrive at any moment and they were going to cover his visit on their web site from landing to takeoff.

By the time I hung up the phone I could have just as well shut my web server off. I stepped outside for a moment and just as I did, Air Force One flew directly above me in all its glory. I’m hoping that secret Service didn’t see me below, shaking my fist and cursing in anger ;)

Of all the days to launch a new web site! I was bombarded with e-mails reading “I liked the old site better, this one loads too slow” and “All the Links are broken”. Let me tell you, that’s just what a web developer wants to hear. I had no control over the situation and was considered by everyone to be the cause. So… for all of you who visited Yogi’s new site the first day and were disappointed I'm officially setting the record straight – blame it on George Bush and KELO TV. Who would have known? I guess Murphy would have.