What happened to the site? It's been down for weeks!

In the past twelve years, "BMX Basics" has been hosted on a variety of servers. Since 2005, it's been on the trusty IBM x350 quad-processor machine in my basement. This system recently died. I had to restore from backup out at my new Rackspace site.

What else are you doing?

In addition to writing for Speed:Sport:Life, I'm also contributing to The Truth About Cars and Autofiends. If you enjoyed the old "One Racer's Perspective" columns from 1991-1993, you might enjoy Avoidable Contact, as it's a similar length and format.

I'm also hoping to announce that I will be competing in at least one televised professional auto race this year in addition to my full schedule racing in NASA's Great Lakes Region. Cross your fingers for me.

BMX Basics - All of It! I'd like to thank Damien Norris for creating something I didn't know we all needed until I saw it - The Complete BMX Basics In Portable Document Format. This is a true masterwork - not for the articles it contains, as they were done by me and are all pretty lame, of course - but for the massive effort and skill involved in creating a comprehensive PDF. It is five hundred and ninety-one pages. Please take a look at it and let me know what you think!

No! I'm Not Dead, At Least Not Yet! Nearly five years after my retirement from BMX, I'm still getting emails almost daily about BMX Basics. The two questions I hear most often:

• Do you still ride? No, it's now too physically difficult for me to ride a BMX bike for more than a few minutes at a time. In the fall of '06, however, I took a long afternoon out with my bunnyhop stand to finally pick up the art of hopping with my weak (right) foot forward. The good news is that I could clear eighteen inches that way; the bad news is that I could only clear twenty with my strong foot forward, and that I limped for weeks afterwards. Nope, I'm done.

As always, best of wishes to all my readers for your 2009 racing season!