yo helm - while i'm in the thread - i forgot to tell you "thank you" for a critique you gave me back in the days of the old purple pixelation.  It was that green ogre lizard creature i was making with a club.  Pixelation crashed just before i finished the piece.  You were the only one that realized that, design wise, the legs would benifit greatly by being shorter.  I didn't want to believe ya and i fought the idea, but i did it anyway. boy oh boy - i should listen to you more often.    I'm not sure if you saw the finished peice though.

and since i dont really want to steal this thread in anyway, i'll just post em in URL's

before:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v169/calypson/ogreisher.png

after:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v169/calypson/guntback.png

ooOOoo...  O_o  fight!

oh yeah?!?!  well.. well.. MY dad can beat up YOUR dad! so there!  ....and im not inviting you to my birthday party 

seriously:
but yeah, thanks guys for the input.  and yes - i think i will try to get a vid of my shopping cart racing on there.  might be interesting.  I'll try to fix the site up sometime soon.  more C+C is still welcome

sounds like a sure plan, pep.  I'll make a few calls and such.  and yes, a cart would be used to get you going.

some more ideas from last night:
a huge shopping cart durby.  send an invitation to all the near-by engineering colleges to compete in a downhill course. some requirements would include: steering, breaks, size restrictions, weight restrictions, personal safty, shopping cart safty features etc.  There would be an entrance fee and whoever wins the race gets to take home the purse.  I think we're getting a little too ambitious

anyway: me and my friends have a video diary of our lives.  alot of the video pertains to our shopping cart racing as well as alot of other funny things we do.  maybe I'll try to upload some clips

just a little about me:

so okay - my friends show up at my house everynight at about midnight and want me to do stuff with em.  After buying a "german baker's dozen," (which is shoving every possible donut that can fit into the box...and say theres only 12 inside) we sit around wondering what we should do.  Then it hit us!  lets go down to the mall (which is closed by then), grab some shopping carts and race!  It was an instant hit among us teens up here in utah.

basically, you just sit in a shopping cart while holding onto the back of a truck.  The truck will do some crazy turns and such and then finally do a final sharp turn for the carts to fling off of.  The two carts then 'race' by seeing who will go the farthest.  Either that or whoever survives crashing into a curb of an island in the middle of a parking lot. 

recently that hasn't been good enough for us.  We decided to do 2 things: 1) become pro shopper riders with mad trix and  2) break the land speed record for a shopping cart.  so we started to research.  I'll use these numbers to explain our research of each...

1) become the worlds first pro shopping cart riders:
well we've done some testing of lots of carts recently.  from sturdy metal to cracking plastic.  But just untill recently we have not found a cart perfect enough for use to do nice carves and swings.  FAMILY DOLLAR!!! dun dUN DUN!  The carts from 'family dollar' are perfect.  very light weight, metal, sturdy, small, smooth.  but after having our fun with the FD carts we still weren't satisfied. we needed more ways to do trix.  IDEA - put all 4 wheels of the cart on rolling casters!  we wold be able to do carves, 360's, swings, backwards, and even switches of the sort.  we began editing our cart today and have yet to ride it.  we took out all of the kid seat stuff and all evidence that it once was a fd cart.  we are in the process of painting it black and adding a big yellow flaming smiley-face in the front. 

2) Break the landspeed record for a shopping cart:
well thats all fine and dandy, but what exactly is the record set at currently?  that took a little research, but we tracked it down.  some canadian chick broke the record at 45 mph going down a hill untill her fine tuned caster wheels went out.  unfortunately after breaking the landspeed record, she also broke the road-rash record right after.  and although we haven't started building our speed cart quite yet, here is the plan:  add in 4 fixed inflatible tires (instead of casters,) wide wheel base, weighted bottom, wearing full protective gear (including: pads, helmet, leather, and such.)  We'd be pulled by a car in a wide and smooth open area (know of such a place?).  We were thinking of the salt flats, but that may be too rough.

although shopping cart racing is fun - we're running out of places to go.  the mall has a warrent out for our arrest (or so it seems), cosco as upgraded their sucurity since we've been racing there, and church parking lots are way too small we decided....well thats about it for me.  let me know what you think....or any ideas or whatnot.