dave's Boompa Blog

Boompa in the Oakland Tribune

Boompa in the Oakland Tribune

Well, I guess we've completed our trifecta of Bay Area newspapers now. Funny that the pic is pretty similar to the Chronicle one. Many thanks to Janis Mara who was kind enogh to come in and listen to us blab.

And as usual thanks to our users for making this an awesome enough site to grab some interest.

Test Drive Unlimited for X360

So recently I picked up Test Drive Unlimited for the XBox360. I tend to really enjoy racers, but most of the time tend to go for more arcadey racers like Burnout. TDU though is amazing. First off, the premise of the game is that the "course" is actually just one of the islands in Hawaii. The developers have rendered every road, mountain and blade of grass for you to cruise around. It's kind of like GTA in the fact that you can go anywhere and pick up missions or races as you choose, but unlike GTA the controls in TDU are just spot on.

There's a few hundred real world cars licensed in the game and all of them feature detailed interiors, engine roars and a sublime amount of attention to detail. That means that instead of lusting over Shaggy's Lotus I can now try it out online. OK, it's not the same, but I swear, TDU features some pretty awesome handling. The great part about the mission setup is that unlike other racers where you compete in track races, in TDU you can drive wherever you want on the island. I find myself crusing around and just enjoying the scenery more then competiting in the races.

Also, it's a MOOR (massively multiplayer online racer) so there's hundreds of people on the island at any one time if you are hooked up to xbox live. You can decide to compete in the predertimed races or time trials or simply pull up to another player and shout "let's go". It's pretty refereshing for a racing game and I'm enjoying it immensely.

Some of the cool bonus stuff is that you can buy clothes for your driver, make mods to your vehicles and buy houses (with ample garage space) to store your collection. Even better, you can download updates including new cars on XBOX live.

If you happen to have a 360, my gamertag is "stillitmoves".

Ethan's a father!

Just got off the phone with Ethan. As of 1am this morning he is officially the proud father of a baby girl! He's still chilling at the hospital so if you're looking for him or looking for pictures it'll be awhile till he can post.

On an unrelataed note our DB server went nuts yesterday and I didn't notice it till late in the night, but everything is back to normal.

Shot by Shot Filming Locations

Cinema Astoria

Totally unrelated to the site but I found this cool link that shows shot by shot location photos of famous movies. It's got the Karate Kid, Back to the Future, Goonies and a whole mess of others.

More News Feeds Added

We added the following blogs to our Boompa's news aggregation service. As usual if you think there's someone we should be adding please let us know. Remember too that any member can submit news to boompa at any time.

TopSpeed.com

Jalopnik.com

Autoblog.com

Kickingtires.com

Quick Survey for Members

Hey everyone, if you get a chance please fill out this survey (it's the normal anonymous "hey do you like this stuff" form) to help ethan and I out. It's just a preliminary deal for getting some tasteful ads (1 per page, never annoying) across the site so we can keep boompa going. If you dig the site or think it has great potential we'd really appreciate 2 minutes to fill it out.

Thanks duders.

New homepage live

Well, we missed our 24 hour challenge because of the weekend, but the new homepage is live on the site. I think it's a pretty big improvment over the previous one but that's for you all to decide. Ethan also redid the add a ride form from scratch so that it's a little less buggy. If you notice problems with either new pages lemme know and we'll try and fix it quick.

On the off chance you're seeing any weirdness with the display, please delete your browser cache. I made the mistake of saving over some old images and if you come to the site frequently you may see the old ones.

New homepage design in the works.

Update: We got close, but decided to hold off on the push till monday.

I'm currently working on a homepage redesign for boompa. I'm gonna try and convince Ethan to pass me some of that special SMARTY variable sauce in the morning tomorrow so that we can try and get it out before I sneak away for the weekend.

It's gonna have some pretty drastic changes and be a lot more community focused. If we can get it out real quick I'll try and do a writeup about the process involved so you can get an inside peek at our methodology.

As an off-topic aside I'm currently jamming out to some old suede albums. I forgot how awesome they used to be. I also bought the Rome: Season 1 DVD pack. I luuuurv Rome and it's prolly my second favorite current TV series next to Deadwood.

Fixed some more guide stuff

I fixed a bunch of display side issues with the guides pages including...

1. Now people can't see guides that are in the draft stage.
2. You can now edit your guides directly from the garage level.
3. Added a bunch of icon stuff to differentiant drafts from published guides.
4. Fixed some of the warning popups that weren't displaying properly while editing your guides.

Ethan's currently working on a rewrite of the add a vehicle form that will include a lot of the draft saving features that the guide form now has. It should also clear up that pesky "undefined" error we've been seeing crop up with mods. After that we should be done with our week of cleanup and will likely start on some new features.

In the next week or two we're also going to need to do a fairly major push soon to incorporate some ads onto the site. They'll be tasteful and incorporated into the design in the normal clean-cut boompa style, but just thought I'd give the heads up. Gotta pay the bills.

Drank some Beers... Went to STIRR

Every month or so Ethan and I head down to the valley to pretend like we actually know what we're doing and attend STIRR, a mixer where young companies meet with VCs who want to powergrind their buisnesses to level 60 in 3 days (ZOMGz lets crit for millions!). Yeah, kinda shady, but we like going simply to chat it up with other peeps trying new stuff and of course... drink some beer. Ethan was supposed to take a mess of photos, but despite his "best photographer" claim, most of them were blurry or just horrible. This one falls in the horrible pile, but it's just too silly to throw away so I thought I'd post it up for giggles.