Free Enterprises NOOzEpage

Well, it's fall 2008 now and we hope you had not as much trouble meeting us here as we did. We were given a month's notice to move this website from the confines of AOL as a server/host.I would have been a loyal customer indefinitely. Am I lazy? Did they do a half way decent job in keeping up their product? I don't know... I would imagine that the beginning of the end happens when a company starts to prioritize profits above customer service. Don't get me wrong; they did a great job on the mechanical part. What they left by the wayside was the pulling of that great product from the shelves. It was another one of those irritating decisions that you can tell was made at the higher levels of management, and totally designed with profits in mind. It is akin to "would you like a fries with that?" Another example is where there is a Google assisted browser connected with AOL. The difference between it and pure Google is that the AOL version lays more advertising that the pure and makes it a little harder to find what you're looking for. You have to go further. Look at the stock prices of the respective companies. Google asks questions like "is it good for the internet"; AOL (Time Warner ticker) asks "will we make more money...." If you take a survey of all the companies that *remain* out in front, you will find that they are ones that go the extra length for customers. The writing was on the wall for AOL when they spun off AOL Press as a web editor. In its place they installed a system that framed and put a console around everything you were doing. Further, they surrounded it with their own advertising. Lastly, they put in automatic code inserting mechanisms. The difference between this and AOL Press was that it was deliberately harder to write your own code; they discouraged individual programmers in favor of deliberately confusing automatic inserts advertising devices. I wonder what the decision sounded like when it went down: "From now on, we are going to discourage individual programmers. Let's put in a bunch of confusing code so they can't edit their pages easily...., and we need to dump. Er, uh, enhance" their frames with our own advertising. Later in life, if you decided to download code, you would get huge percentages of "dummy code" like "&:bsp &:bsp..." in the places of all the spaces and carridge returns, etc. Further, they would redefine the font every 5th or tenth word or so and so on so it would be hard to do any editing. If you hadn't saved your pages in a text file, you would spend as much time editing out and searching through this "dummy code" as you would actually writing! Oh well, Now to learn another FTP uploadoing process and get on with it! By the way, please pardon our construction as we work from the main pages out to reestablish the rest of our links! .

[9-21-2006] LIZA FINALLY GETS CAUGHT UP TO...With a complete rebuild, a new trial set of outriggers, a pilot who was "doing other things", a newly piloted Paul Neidermann's boat along with Warren Beuchamp, and Daniel Grow, Liza had some tough competition at Rockford Hydrobowl 2006

A crusty version of Vogalonga 2000is here

[9-21-06 post] While comming back from the Halloween Hydrobowl2005, the most winningest boat in Hydrobowl history was wrecked up bigtime along with the trailer. It proved a fascinating adventure though, recovering from being marooned out in the middle of nowhere.

[9-21-2006 post] Although it is old news, a pedal powered boat traveling over the oceans of Hawaii is still fascinatingly new! check here!

Vogalonga 2001 is almost done

[4-2004] New Drive unit has been PATENTED!! It is no. 6,712,653 Versions of it have been pedaled for over hundreds and hundreds mile. The page is available for viewing here

[8-01] This drive performed at the Steve Shutt Memorial Hydrobowl

[11--15--01] Writeup for the Human powered Boat Summit is. . .er, . . uh, just back there. For a trip through the warm, interesting Tampa Bay in the St. Petersburg (Florida) area in a fast touring proa, check it out.

[6-02] During the early half of the 2001 racing season, a proa set a record using the new drive unit in the criterium; it was the first hydrobowler to go under 15 minutes. Also, this boat became the 2001 hydrobowl points champion by winning Sparta, Rockford and Elkhart.

[9-06] Watch for the Steve Shutt Memorial Hydrobowl callout comming soon! Race will be near Jul 28 (actual TBD), Fun ride Sunday 2007 in Elkhart Indiana.

The results of previous hydrobowls are here

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11-10-08