Well, last weekend through Labor Day I finally fixed the shackles on my Samurai. I cut off all the upper mounts and moved them about an inch or inch and a half out. My shackles were not 45° like they should have been. The front were way, way flat and the rear were almost vertical. So my ride before was very rough on the bumps and all over the road on the street. Now they are all at about 45° and the ride is great.

Now I need to fix the lower shock mounts. I need to cut off the ones I have now and make new ones that are just over halfway down on the axles. That will give me another 2" of up travel on the shocks. Currently they are bottoming out and that's not so good.

I'm also going to start on my new front bumper. I have an idea, but I'm still trying to figure it out. I guess I'll check out some more photos on Pirate.

I finished up my Samurai and went to the Rubicon last weekend for the Disabled Sports event. It was awesome. I met up with lots of cool people and got to do some really challenging wheeling. Cadillac Hill, Big Sluice, and all the connecting trails. The Samurai crawled through without any problems.

Although I made it through all the trails, I did break a drive shaft. It was at the end of a trail, and I was trying to bump it over a big rock. Well, the drive shaft broke where I welded it to extend it a bit for my new lift suspension. I didn't sleeve it, so I knew it was going to break. Anyway, that's the only thing that broke on my rig. Just the rear drive shaft. So I'm going to fix that up this week by sleeving it with something to keep it solid.

Anyway, this weekend is WeRock, and I don't know if I'm going yet. It's a two day event, and it's $15 admission for each day. I don't know if I want to spend that kind of money just to stand around in the heat and watch. Maybe I'll go wheeling instead.

Saturday and Sunday were busy days for me. I finally got my Samurai on all fours and drove it around the back yard a bit. I still have a few issues with it, but nothing to big.

I need to clearance for the front shocks. I need to finish all my welds. I have one more rear shock to put into place. I have to build some bump stops to keep the shocks from bottoming out. And last, I just need to go over all the bolts and nuts. There is probably something on there that's loose.

All in all it has nice flex.

Last night I finished the upper shock mount for my rear shocks. Tonight I'm going to work on the lower mounts and that will finish off the rear end.

Then later this week I'll work on the shock mounts for the front end. I'm working towards finishing the suspension by this weekend.

Hope I make it.

Well, finally I have the new YJ springs bolted on and axles bolted to springs. It took awhile to get the right geometry setup so it was at the right height, but I finally did it.

Tonight I'm going to work on getting the shock towers and brackets mounted up and welded on. That should be easy compared to the springs. I should at least get the rear shocks mounted tonight. Front will be a bit more work.

I hope that by the end of the week I'll have the suspension done. Then it will only be drive shafts to worry about this weekend. I just might have a chance to make the Rubicon trip on the 18th. Whoohooo!

Well, it's been almost a month since I started the spring swap on my Samurai. I didn't get very far very fast because of a few problems. But today I finally finished the spring hanger brackets. I'll have the springs attached by the end of the weekend.

So now I have to figure out how to do the drive shafts and finish the shock mounts. My fab skills really need some work. Yep. It's slow, but it's getting there.

I'm hoping that I'll have it setting on it's wheels by tomorrow night.

I'm still working it. Last night I fooled with Rails until 3am trying to get it working with Apache. I wanted to try out the AJAX Scaffold stuff. It would core dump the WEBrick server, so since I already have Apache running I thought it would be easy to make it work.

I run Apache using mod_rewrite for mass virtual hosting. I don't really need to on this server, but that's my normal install. Anyway, I kept getting recursive redirection. So I switched back to normal virtual hosting and that fixed it right up. It also had problems with mod_ruby, so I'm running CGI. I wanted to run fast CGI, but that would just core dump also.

For now it's working. Once I get my other stuff moved over to Rails, then I'll reconfigure the server as a Rails only setup. But for now I have to keep my PHP stuff running for business.

Anyway, I've been checking out a bunch of documentation from IBM and other places. I've found some good material to start me off. I just need to concentrate on it and get stuff going.

Red Bull and hot dogs should get me through it. I just need to get my excitement level up and that should get my motivation going.

I'm going to have to add another book to my wish list.

Here I am trying to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It's very different.

I have the server installed, and it's running. I started writing stuff, but I always end up with some cryptic error that I can't figure out so I just trash can it and start over. It seems that it does not like Postgresql.

I have a long way to go to learn Ruby. Programming PHP for so many years, I just lost touch with other languages. But I really want to use Ruby on Rails to do my next project. I hope it doesn't kill me.

I really do need to do something different though. I seem to be in a rut. My PHP projects are stalled. I'm having trouble focusing on things. Like I just don't want to do it anymore. But it's all I know, so I have to keep it up.

Well, here goes nothing. Ruby on Rails here I come, ready or not.

For months now I've been trying to get a customer's web site listed on Google. It's been painful. So far I have yet to be able to get it listed.

TheChampions.biz

I have added their URL to lots of web sites that come up on Google at the top of their lists. Most of them are directory sites. I have added their URL to Yahoo, Google Maps, and even set it up on Google's Web Pages / Site Maps.

The tools from Google show that it's being crawled by their search engine. But if I do a link:thechampions.biz it shows nothing. If I do a search for "thechampions.biz", it comes up with plenty of sites that are indeed linking back to them, but they don't get indexed for some reason.

I have made sure there are no HTML errors on the site. I'm not using frames. I have the keywords setup. I have a block of keywords in the head and in the body. Every page has a link back to the home page. Everything is accessible. But it still does not get listed.

The are signed up with Link Market right now to do a link exchange. I hope that helps with getting them listed.

As far as I can tell, I have everything right.

Well, I decided to make my Samurai more flexy. I put the rear springs up front and tried to add Toyota springs to the rear. The Toyota springs have an offset center pin. So to get my axle in the right place, I needed to move the springs around on the frame. I didn't know that the springs were suppose to be even on both sides. So what I did was move the front of the spring 3" higher than the rear to get the right geometry on my pinion. I took it off the stands and it just sunk.

So, this weekend I'm going to start all over and see if I can fix the problem. I need to move the hangers back to the stock position and see what happens.

I also have some good YJ springs, the five pack heavy duty ones that don't flatten out. I might switch to them because I don't think the Toyota three pack will be strong enough.

Anyway, I'll let you all know this weekend.