jon

Ok try that. Sorry.

A pretty good deal on a year subsciption to Alpinist

You mean like this???

I think the reality here is that we are going to have to ditch the other themes and support only one. Maybe with the new software we will have a light and a dark theme to choose from, but having more then two really creates a headache. Quite honestly I forget there are other theme

Ok we'll look into.

We tried to use a picture of you at Smiffy having a belay smoke but Marlboro wouldn't agree to the licensing terms.

Is this an actual complaint? I'm looking right now on Win7/IE and the line height seems ok.

I'd like to tell you guys a bit about the new site design and what changes you can anticipate in the next couple months. I met my goal of having this done within a month of the birthday date. For several years we've been wanting to redesign the site as it was obviously in a poor state of affairs. Not only did it look like crap, functionally the content section of the site created a lot of unneeded resistance in getting articles published. Each time we'd talk about it, make some mockups, talk about it some more, get frustrated, and then find something else to put our limited time into. The limiting factor besides time was that I wasn't a web designer, so we were never going to get the design we really wanted. About a year ago it became clear to me the only way this was going to get done was to hire a designer. So I put out a craigslist ad, got a couple good responses, and probably several thousand from India. I found someone who I thought was going to be a good fit, only to be told as I was ready to start he couldn't do it. So I follow up with another person, send him specs, and then he flakes out. After several months the first designer gets back and says he has time, makes some mockups that I wasn't very wild about, then drops off the face of the earth. Now I'm really irritated. This was so important to us I decided to pay $75 to put an ad on Smashing Mag, a leading design and developer website, in hopes of connecting with a great, motivated designer. I got a lot of great responses and eventually got hooked up with Lisa from Toronto. I gave Lisa some ideas of what we wanted, made it clear that we were designing for our users and that advertising space would be put in afterwards. Her first mockups were incredible, much better then the previous designer, and I knew this was going to workout. She was prompt and a great communicator and we look forward to continue working with her. If you are looking for a web designer I highly recommend her. Let's talk about the design a bit. On the content part of the site the design is responsive; instead of having separate designs or scripts for each device it responds to your screen width. Right now this is only on the front content part of the site, but our goal is to have the whole site working in this manner over time. Now you might be thinking the front of the site looks great, but the forum and gallery look like you put the top and bottom on and that's it. Well that is basically what we did. As I indicated above we are moving to a new forum and gallery software, and I didn't want to invest time and money into something that is about to change. This design change is going to be a work in progress and we will be iterating on it over the next few months (years really) as we get some user and testing feedback. If there is a problem or something you don't like about it please give us a shout. We will likely be spending some time polishing the forum design just a bit to match the changes. Next up is the forum and gallery. I'm hoping I can have this done by the end of the Nov or Dec, but it's a complex project.

I heard a rumor the upgrade fairy might be visiting tonight.

Thanks for the Alt-J rec. Gary Clark jr has been a good find.

I'm with Pete. Nessy was flying the holographic plane into the towers full of nucular explosives. It's the only explanation.

Holographic planes crashing into towers spreading holographic debris that ends up in holographic investigation hangers!

Bill, I'm sorry I'm too enthralled with Jessica Simpson's dad cheating on his wife with a dude to respond at the moment.

Thanks everyone, better safe then sorry

This is extremely environmentally toxic. But I suppose Ron Paul DOES want to abolish environmental regulations, so.... And Obama has kept Gitmo open so I guess its all relevant. Kev, you know what they did before Gitmo, right?

Why is that illegal, Bill?

You are almost on point. There are two problems. 1) Education is getting too expensive for the returns, and 2) Institutions are willing to give near worthless educations, both in degrees and substance. We graduate high school students who are either already pretty capable and might benefit from two years of intensive professional study or are completely incapable and in need of serious vocational training that begins in high school. Ivan, I understand your point, but our system is doing a complete disservice to young people. A year ago there was an article in the NYT about education debts talking about a girl who went to NYU with a degree in Womens Studies and is in 200k in debt and making $15/hour as a photography assistance. Now, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be womens studies or any similar types of degree, but don't you think there should be a come to jesus talk when someone decides to do something like this "these are your professional options which are very limited with this degree and you need to be aware of this before embarking on this". Instead it's "fuck yeah we got another one to fund our department and research." Mitt's answer to education expenses is for kids to go into the military if they can't afford it. How pragmatic.

Hey, if we owe you a t-shirt we will get them out soon. If you haven't claimed your prizes from a previous contest please message me this week or we will give them to someone else. If you chose gear as a prize we will have it out soon.

Congrats to hefeweizen, KaskadskyjKozak, and Otto. Message me for prizes.

12 years ago today we started cascadeclimbers.com. When we started this there wasn't a course you could take or a book to read on how to start and run a successful online community. It's been a lot of trial and error, driving by braille, and hoping you are doing the right thing. Big Thanks While we may have hatched the idea and put the foundation in place, the truth is we wouldn't be here today without three groups of people. The moderators. Our moderator group has changed little since we started, in fact I think we have close to half as many. Their presence is crucial to the health of our forum. They deserve a huge amount of gratitude. The sponsors. Two years into this we started offering advertising to our local retailers. It's their support that pays the server bills and pays for software licenses. It's a tough time to be in retail and they deserve your support. You. This all would just be a shell without you. We wouldn't have over 6000 trip reports without you. Some of you have been a part of this since the beginning, and we thank you for being part of the journey. We broke our trip report record in August which was a huge accomplishment. The Future of CascadeClimbers We've got some great stuff in the pipeline that we'd like to share with you. More Articles. We have a number of great articles and gear reviews in the finishing stages. We will be doing more of these in the coming year. New Server. We are in the final stages of negotiations on a new server located in Seattle. It's like going from a Corolla to a Bugatti. In fact that isn't even a good comparison. This server will probably be 100x faster and no more downtime. New Site Design. Site design is looking kinda stale, hey? In what turned out to be a much more drawn out process that any of us had imagined, we hired a designer and have a slick new design for cc.com. The design is responsive and will work well on any screen width or device. It's been a huge project. The design is done. Base code is done. Articles and blog posts are converted over. We just need to reskin the forum and gallery. This should be done by the end of the month. It will be awesome. New Forum Software. We have been with the current forum software (UBB) since we started cc.com. It has served us well. However, the development on it has pretty much come to a crawl. After evaluating the options we have decided to make a switch. The new software is really great and I think once everyone gets used to it we know you will love it. I'm in the process now of planning and testing conversions. It's a lot of work but it's the best product for the future. You guys are going to love it. New Gallery Software. Along with switching forum software we are also moving to a new gallery software that integrates better with the forum software. No more copying URLs. No more yelling at your screen because your upload isn't working; it will actually work. Along with the forum switch this is a big job, we have 15k posts with gallery images in it and we need to make sure it all converts correctly. Again, it will be a huge improvement that everyone is really going to love. New Trip Report System. After we migrate to the new board we will start making massive improvements to the TR system. Easier to post, easier to search. There is more as well that we will talk about as the above get's rolled out. How to support our cause There are a number of things you can do to support cc.com. * Continue to post great info and trip reports. * Get your friends to stop lurking and post. The more the merrier. * Join our Facebook page and consider liking your favorite content here. It helps get the word out about us. * Tell your local retailers that support us how much you appreciate their support of cc.com. * When buying online use our price tools to make your purchases. We get a bit of a kickback which helps us fund our projects. Over the course of the month we'll talk a bit more about the above more in detail. Thanks again everyone!

I don't even see the cheeseburger. Is it out of frame on top?

I was crossing at Lynden the other day and the guy was asking me all these questions about my roof box because he needed one because he had 4 german sheperds that didn't fit in his suburban. I almost blurted out "Mitt Romney can fit 2 shepards in this box", but decided that wasn't a good idear.

Well prejudice usually goes hand in hand with closed mindedness. You can blame the mexicans for coming here trying to make a better life for themselves, but they wouldn't come if farmers didn't give them jobs without a valid greencard. The problem is employers. It's no different then Indians coming to Redmond and Seattle to work (legally). You can jump up and down and say "they are stealing our jobs!", you can jump up and down at Amazon "you are giving our jobs away!". In reality our kids would rather play DS something and dream of being the next red bull guy then get smart, have some fucking foresight, and invest in themselves. So we are giving those jobs away. You can blame "the blacks", and opening this up to all races really in any poor region, what kind of expectations do you have of people that are offered a shit education where the parents aren't educated so they can help, shit jobs after their education if there is even a job. Do these people really see a future for themselves? Mr. Romney is for lower corporations taxes, and lowering the taxes of the beneficiaries of those companies (Bush tax cuts on dividends). In doing so, he says that will decrease unemployment. Well guess what? Corporations, especially public ones exist to make money for their shareholders, not create job. They employ as few people as they can to make money. If Amazon could run on 10 employees they would. The problem in this country is two fold. Our tax system is slanted towards helping corporations and the "1%" get richer, and at the same time is prohibiting the middle class entrepreneur of getting into the 5% (I call 5% Romney middle class, those making close to $250k) because not only of a large tax burden for operating a small business, but as I've stated before large risk. The biggest risk is health coverage. How many people over thirty with a family and mortgage are going to go out on their own knowing that if things don't go hell they will not be able to provide health coverage? If we had universal health coverage in this country you will see a huge increase in the number of people going into business for themselves and increasing innovation. You see the 5%'ers on the right stomping up and down and they should be they are paying an unfair amount of taxes compared to large corporations. Their corporate taxes aren't 18% they are closer to 35%. It's like this enormous speed bump for most middle class people, and any corporation you go up against whether it is a restaurant or a widget has a huge, huge advantage. But you never see this as part of the discussion with Republicans, the only thing you hear come out of their mouths is talking about tax holidays for large corporations and such. They don't give a shit about middle class business owners.