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Porsche Club of America
The Northeast Region

By Steve Berry
NOR'EASTER Online - April 2004

Once again, here it is a new month and still I have a lack of progress to report on my track preparation activities. I had hoped to have most of the general preparation underway - brakes torn down, pads replaced if necessary, wheels inspected for cracks and cleaned, fluids and filters changed (oil, anti-freeze, transaxle, brake etc). I had even hoped on installing a larger primary oil cooler on my S2 to deal with the load of track driving. 
   
Some of this will have to wait for a bit though because once again I was released from my last contract. Fortunately I was able to find other contract work fairly quickly, but this is likely to be very short term. Because of the uncertainty of having a job this season, I'm going to have to seriously cut back on my plans for racing and track events yet again this year. Unfortunately, I am not alone in this situation. It does seem odd that I keep hearing how things are getting better, with the economy on the upturn but I know more people out of work or just about to be - than in the past two years!
  
I don't want to give the impression that I'm all doom and gloom, I do believe that things are going to get better, especially in the electronics industry which has been beaten down pretty brutally recently. There does seem to be more activity on the major job boards, but in the two weeks that I spent hunting there were very few call backs, and many of those were from recruiters looking to place square pegs in round holes. These days it takes a perfectly round peg to be considered for the available job "holes". 
   
In between cruising the internet job boards and "networking" for a job, I spent some time playing with creating a web site. It's wasn't too hard to do, but it did take some time experimenting with how each page lays out to try and get it to look right. I can see how large websites with tons of graphics and complicated special effects would take a lot of work and upkeep. Mine however is very simple with very little that couldn't be viewed five years ago (an eternity in web years). I even went the extra step and purchased a domain name - mainly because Yahoo was having a special - and pointed it at the storage that my DSL provider gave to me and voila - you can all now check out what a few days of boredom brings at www.stephenwberry.com. Of course I'm only telling all of you so I can bump up my "hit" counter...
  
I even managed to incorporate a web "blog" onto my site. What? You don't know what a web blog is? Well that's ok, I really didn't know either until my curiosity got the better of me one day and I visited one. Basically it's a Lot Of Junk. Well, maybe it’s better described as a public journal or commentary of different sites that the author visits. It was very easy to set up and Google has a button on their toolbar that makes it simple to add content without having to start up a web editor to code the page. So now I'm bloggin... I feel so "in". 
   
The first DE event on the NER calendar is Beaver Run, a still brand new track that sounds like a great start to the driving season! If I had the spare cash right now I'd certainly shake out some cobwebs from the winter - I encourage all of you to take the plunge if you can.
   
That's all that I have for this month. Be safe and have fun!