What's new in the Hoboken Chicken Emergencyclopedia?

Finally! A new update (September 12, 2000)
The Emergencyclopedia is now moved to the official site -- www.pinkwater.com and it is going through a renewal of interest. A group of volunteers is organizing to beat back the inertia that has hobbled the project for the last three years.

If you are interested in helping out, we now have a HOWTO document online for contributors. If you want to dive right in an start submitting corrections and bugfixes, an errata page is also available.

The illustrious Mister P has been very prolific over the past few years and there are a bunch of new books that need to be indexed as well. People with lots of time on their hands (shut-ins, incarcerated persons, and graduate students) are particularly encouraged to pitch in. There is even talk of a fancy new searchable thingy coming to the HCE. Of course, improvements to this site are progressing about as fast as glaciation, so don't hold your breath.

Very likely none of you noticed, but while the site was housed at earthlink, there were several hundred entries missing from the first few pages (mostly A, B, and C) due to an obscure bug in the tar utility supplied with NEXTSTEP 3.3. I was able to dig the now 10 year old NeXT cube that was the original home of the emergencyclopedia out of the basement, make up some coaxial network connectors for it and salvage the data. Fun stuff. Maybe I'll do it again in another decade. I'm glad we're back and I hope you enjoy the site!

--Ian


Old stuff begins here

The Emergencyclopedia has movedto Earthlink as a new, temporary home. I was no longer able to keep the site at its former location (cube.mpms.org), and I have not yet come up with a permanant new home for the project. I am resisting just keeping it here or putting it on Geocities because I really enjoyed being able to read the log files every day to see who was visting the site. For the person from the Navy's Space Warfare Systems Command who visited at least once every week, I hope you're still enjoying the site.

Also in the works is the possibility of expanding the project into a nonprofit group to promote Pinwater scholarship, Internet madness, and potato salad. Well, we're still working on the mission statement and the logistics, but updates will be posted to this page as they become available.

For those still interested, here's the old news:

The project of marking up Hal's Pinkwater index is finally through the first iteration as of 12/27/97 (hooray!). There are still lots of dead links; the next step is to ferret those out and fix them. I hope to use some kind of automated testing tool for that job because there are literally thousands of links and trying them all out manually just wouldn't be very practical.

The work also continues to add more Pinkwater books to the Emergencyclopedia. There are all those Larry books coming out from Scholastic right now and the Second Grade something or other. These will need to be indexed and added to the list. There are still some fairly major works including Fishwhistle, Chicago Days Hoboken Nights, and The Afterlife Diet to be compled into the mix as well. It has begun to sink in that this is a neverending task. This was put into perspective for me by my friend Rory Litwin who said that the Emergencyclopedia is now a respectable size for a book(!!).

I'm still looking for more reviews and analyses of Pinkwater books. If you are interested in contributing, send me an email and we can talk about it.

If you are interested in learning more about the server that hosts the Emergencyclopedia, click here.