pawtucket

go to the link and right click and save target as to download

For the past three years, I have been toying with the idea of taking "Your Story" and doing it in an audio format. One problem was logistics. GS does not have a private jet to whisk me around. Another was quality of the sound doing it over the internet. I tested various methods and none worked satisfactorily. In the past 18 months, a thing called Podcasts have swept across the internet. Along with it, methods that deliver quality transmissions. So I have been experimenting for the past couple of months and finally felt comfortable with the results. I asked a number of people if they would be willing to be interviewed and set one up this past week. I am going to make it a show with some interesting features and have an interview as the main feature. I am editing the first one now, but took a few bits out for you to sample. Here it is http://www.greasespotcafe.com/audio/gsradio.mp3 all comments are welcome, this is a work in progress.

Let it Snow Let it Snow Let it Snow

email me

is the blurriness toward the edges of the screen?

It is a cool concept and it works.

Just curious what the police would say about it. Might be worth a call. Inviting adults is one thing...

On the iMac go to the Apple on the menu bar and pick System Preferences then pick Sharing Under Services, check on Personal File Sharing, Windows Sharing, and Printer Sharing. On the Windows machine, in My Computer right click on the C drive and pick sharing and security and Share Drive As. On the Mac, open a finder window and click on Network. That should yield a folder called Workgroup double click that and you should see the Windows C drive. If not email me and we can walk through some other stuff

I'll tape the game and skip through the game to watch the commercials and the half time show. Very Motown at half time as well as some New Orleans music.

The Billboard project I honestly can’t say who originally had the idea for putting up a billboard. I believe that it started as a topic in the Waydale forums. The concept was simple, the execution wasn’t. Jimextwi was putting together an exway site and the billboard was going to have that site’s URL on the billboard. I know that Waydale didn’t want to be involved, alhough the site was gracious enough to let the discussion remain. Redeemed and Dagoo were getting involved as was Jeff, the air force guy. We were still thinking of something short and clever that would catch an innie’s attention. This went on for what seemed like months. Daggoo was doing graphics almost within a day of a new idea. She, rightfully so, got frustrated and too busy to pump out all these graphics. Monies were being collected and the project was realistically going to go from concept to a billboard. Jim contacted the billboard people. (one thing we hadn’t considered was that New Knoxville wasn’t known for billboards save the ones that TWI put up for themselves.) There was one billboard available that was right at an exit heading right into NK. (igotout, what route was that?) Somewhere in this time frame, I think, pamsandiego arrived at Waydale. I took over the graphics, Daggoo gave me some graphics to work with on the billboard. We went through bunches of ideas. Frustration, as I recall, was mounting also. There was no accounting for the money, which I will just say became a lesson learned. That aside, we agreed to get this thing up. I am not sure who came up with what we finally used, my leaning is to credit pamsandiego. The final “slogan” was “YOUR DOUBTS, Are Real & Reasonable” Everyone thought that would catch attention. So I did some mockups for everyone’s approval. Jim put up some content on the website, www.exwayworld.com, so that they would have a place to go to if they tried to access the URL. The site was in it’s infancy, so we had a link to Waydale at the site also. I believe there was a link to Jim’s Yahoo site. I took my vacation the week the billboard went up to North Carolina. The billboard went up on a Friday in the afternoon. Just in time for Sunday night services? Within 12 hours the site had been hit with graffiti. New Knoxville is not known for it’s graffiti problem. They painted over the URL. Within 13 hours, everyone and their cousins was asking on the forums, “why did you put the URL so low on the billboard?” LOL The billboard was up for over a month. There wasn’t a scientific way to find out if it “worked”. The project became legendary, but not for the intended reasons. No tangible results. Leap forward about 3-4 years. I met up with an old friend. She had been in my twig, many moons earlier. I went to her apartment to meet her son and daughter. I arrived just as a fellowship was ending. We caught up on each others lives. During the evening, I told her about Greasespot (Not something I usually do) She was not familiar with it. I told her about the billboard project and her eyes lit up as did some of the others in the room. She then proceeded to tell me about a girl that went to her fellowship, but wasn’t there that evening. This girl and some family members had left in the past 2 years and what got them thinking about leaving was this billboard that read, “Your doubts are real and reasonable” Well I don’t tear up while drinking coffee, but I did that night. The billboard DID have some tangible results. Here is a picture of the billboard right after it went up.

Wayne's world

when you are sending you have to check in a box to have it saved to your sent box.

Congratulations and all the best to the both of you. (me thinks it was speeded along after they got GS tshirts)

There is/was a lot of hearsay on this thread. I'm not going to have victims "revictimized" And I am definitely not going to put possible victims on display. We have deleted and edited any posts that cross that line.

I continued reading the Waydale site on a daily basis. I saw that there was a systemic problem with the Way. The Bible was not so much the Word of God as it was becoming a means to justify morally despicable actions. Multiple tiers of privilege existed and the corruption was greater as you looked higher on the tiers. The Way was not a special group with the hand of God protecting it. It was a corporate business. God wasn’t even on the board. I was at a point in my life that I was generally happy. I had dealt with some demons of my own. I was content. I never liked content. I had goals and dreams that hadn’t been realized and I examined them; purged the unrealistic and sought some new ones. Reading Waydale was bringing up a lot of anger in me. I wondered what had happened to a number of old friends in the way. One girl, in particular, that I had absolutely lost track of was on my mind to reconnect. Waydale had started a “friend finder” forum. I wanted to put her name in the forum. This meant that I had to register. I didn’t want to use my real name. When I knew this girl, Pam, I was the only person from Pawtucket, so I thought that would be a good name to use. I posted in the friend finder forum and within about a week, I was connected to her. She was in North Carolina. I then tracked down two other friends from RI. Low and behold, they were in North Carolina also. Well I decided that I would take some time off and fly over to see them later that year. During the interim, I started posting on Waydale. And somewhere in this time, I got involved with “The Billboard Project”

Let’s take a quick trip backwards about 8-10 years earlier. The Internet, which had been gaining popularity for years, was now the stomping ground for followers of the Way as well as exway. I had first gotten “online” in the late 80’s and got on the “world wide web” in the early 90’s. I spent many hours looking for any info on the Way. I had been out long enough to look and see what had happened. My searches came up empty, but then the searches weren’t at all like “Google.” Every year or so, I would do a search and not find a thing. I was happy with my life sans PFAL and The Way. But I had many questions that had never been answered. I had seen brief glimpses of the sexual abuse. I always thought that it was an individual problem and had NO idea that it was systemic. In the late 90’s, I found Trancenet. It was hard to follow and very chaotic. I didn’t get involved, just read some and lost interest. About a year later, I did my annual search and that yielded, Waydale. This site had some testicular fortitude. I read the site quite a bit for a few weeks. I had no idea about the forums. Then one day I saw the forums, once I clicked that button, my life would take a strange new twist. Orange Cat, Larry the naked lawyer, a dentist, Karl and some guy named extwi were amongst the characters lurking in this forum. I was not familiar with “forums” and found them similar to newsgroups but more linear. I enjoyed the banter going on. I had no idea how long this group had interacted, but they had this common bond, The Way International. Some of them were “corps”, that was scary. I had found that members of the Corps were “cliquish” I read and enjoyed with no intention to post. Extwi would reply to requests or questions in a matter of minutes. My first impression was that he had way too much time on his hands. He ran a tight ship. I liked the format and thought that it could have many useful applications (I was on the cutting edge, but on an old blade -- ezboard had 1000’s of boards from Wicca to Baldness cures already up) I read the forums every day. I was being updated on the status of TWI. No more Emporia, No more Rome City and NO MORE Rock of Ages! PFAL is replaced by WAP; no more green, it is replaced by RED. I was intrigued by the players and the changes. In a matter of a few weeks, Pawtucket would be born....

http://www.flock.com/about/ I just heard about this one last month. It is called Flock and is in Beta.

The first thing we celebrate for the New Years, is "dropping the ball" George Carlin's probably already done a bit on it.

New Years Day

Digi, Someone would call me on my cell as I was driving home and would tell me what was going on in chat. I would respond through them. Those were fun times. The holidays were tough that first year. I had the forums going full steam and no website! So I started work on that. It was a long process with many pitfalls. I decided that I would try to have it up by the 1 year anniversary in April. A certain Pam in San Diego was instrumental in editing. I wanted to be distinct from Waydale so I had a section for the waydale docs and worked on original GS stuff. In my spare time, I worked on a logo. I wanted a 50's feel. And I wanted a tag-line. I don't know if you ever get focused on something and can't let go? Well the tag line became that obsession. I finally came up with a logo that I liked, much like the current one. In fact some of the color combos are in rotation in the banners now. I settled on the "despite Martindales...." under the banner. Until one day while on the phone with Pam, we were exchanging ideas and she said, "midnight has come and gone". THAT was IT!! With that out of the way, I could get back to the work of the site. It was the end of March and the site was close to finished, just some editing and writing copy. And only a few knew anything about the new site. I started a countdown on the forums, committing me to a timeline. Then on the 2nd week of April, my house burned down. The house had to be gutted and rebuilt that took up whatever spare brain cells that I had to work on the site!!! I knew that the information that the site contained needed to get up. It was about 5 months that the info hadn't been on a public site. So I decided that the site HAD to go up on schedule. I had taken care of just about all within my power with my house, now the insurance company was taking care of everything. I was on assignment out of town for an extended period of time so I had most of my belongings with me. More on the grand opening next. Here is one of the early logos.

There is a linux utility that will let you change windows passwords. I'll look it up for you, if you still need it.

This will be the first Christmas since the Nixon Administration that all the siblings are sober at the same time. Mine came true.

As a DIRECT result of the Allens' pursuit, Martindale was ousted.

Okay. continuing. That summer and fall there were reports that the trial was going forward. I'll have to look up the exact date, but TWI suddenly made an offer that settled the case. That was quickly followed by an announcement that Waydale would shut its doors. Greasespot got its "baptism by fire" the day Waydale closed. Lots of people were angry that it was closing and wanted to vent about that. My posts per day went from a dozen to 5 and 6 hundred in a matter of hours. I didn't prepare for the TIME that it was going to take to manage the deluge. And people wanted the documents and articles. I had downloaded the content, but had NO time to build a site. By Christmas, I was ready to throw the whole thing in. I managed to get a few people to help, but it was taking on a life of it's own. And there was no shortage of people "suggesting" how I manage it. Waydale was a tight ship. I don't think more than ten minutes went by with an offensive post and it was edited and made "good" I was NOT going to run GS like that. Nothing against the way that Waydale ran, I just could not see that being a long term solution. Somewhere during this time our forums, which were hosted by EZBoard, were using ads -- pop up ads. So the experience at GS was becoming less enjoyable. Somewhere in that time, my father had a stroke -- distracting me and I was trying to maintain a long distance relationship and work a very demanding job. And the holidays, too. More later.... (someone stop me if I am putting you to sleep) -- blame likeaneagle.

What Raf FAILS to mention is that his infamous mistake started THE about an hour after I opened the doors of Greasespot Cafe. I was not a happy camper that night. Although I came to appreciate THE, I was unsure that GS's grand opening was timed properly. It consisted of a forum board only. It would take a lot of time to get any where near the information available on Waydale. The light usage of the site for a few months allowed me to think about what I wanted to do. Originally I wanted to have professional counselors on board, to give direction. I spoke with a good friend, an ex-way clergyman, who was a counselor. There were too many variables to do something effective on a forum board. All news still happened at Waydale. I wanted to let people tell their stories. The first to do so was our own Groucho. I set the front page up like a newspaper. "The After Midnight Gazette" Groucho had the first feature story. I'll dig up the code for it and put it up for your enjoyment. And a note on the Christian/NonChristian site. I decided early on that I could not have any affiliations. I felt that the process would be hindered with ties.