Race Shop Rat Wanted

Katy/Richmond Texas Area

A race shop in the Richmond/Katy Texas area is in need of a shop Rat for part time employment. Primary duties are to keep the shop clean, and secondary duties include cleaning race cars and trucks, and light maintenance.

There is a lot of opportunity to learn how to work on these cars as experience progresses. Opportunity to turn into a full time position. Starts with 5-hour work days Monday through Friday for $7.25hr. Wage, hours, and duties progress at the rate of the ability of the employee demonstrates. I might consider making this a 3-hour after school job for a local high school Senior looking for employment after high school. Would also consider the right (physically able) retiree looking for a little extra income to supplement his Social Security. Racing experience or CDL a plus — but not a requirement.

This is a perfect position for an honest, dependable and hard working person who would like to work in a race shop and on drag racing cars. We treat this as a serious position and have a low tolerance for being late, missing work, or goofing off.

If you are interested — send me an email telling me about yourself and why you would be the person we'd want to fill this position with.
Email Dave

Pass this along to anyone who you think might be interested.

Royal Purple Continues DDS Sponsorship for 2012

DDS Enterprises, Inc., is please to announce that yesterday we signed an agreement with Royal Purple to provide product sponsorship for the Texas Whale and Big Red Ram for 2012. Royal Purple's Break in oil, synthetic motor oil, gear lube, and Purple Ice is used exclusively in the motors, cooling systems, and rear axle assemblies of our race car. We are very happy to have these products sponsored by the best in those categories.

Dallas received his trophy in the mail yesterday. Thank you to those who voted for him.

The DDS Enterprises web site has just completed a complete redesign to give it a cleaner and more modern “Look & Feel” and update the information contained within. Feel free to go check it out at: www.DDSEnterprise.com

Mopar's Generation Next

 

 

I just finished reading Rob Wolf's excellent editorial in the most current issue of Mopar Collector's Guide — called "Generation Next", an obvious play on Generation X.

In the editorial, Wolf points out that those of us who experienced the Muscle car Revolution first-hand — were the baby-boomers, and are now between 55-70. The Next'rs are in their mid-to-late thirties and their forties. They saw these cars in the childhood when they were still street driven and at shows. The editorial further points out that there is a crop of these Generation Next people working at dealerships, restoration shops, and racing — but they might be the end of the line, and the last to be able to even work on these cars.

That's very true in large part — but there are exceptions. My son Dallas is 24, has been racing Mopars since he was 16 (when he also obtained his NHRA Class IV License), is the crew Chief for all of the cars we race on a National Circuit — and yesterday won NMCA's 2011 "Crew Member of the Year" award at the Award's Dinner at PRI. The newest car he's ever raced is a 78 Aspen — and the oldest a 63 Plymouth. Steven, the Shop Rat at my shop is 19 and works part-time (25-hours a week) at my shop. He too is a Mopar man, and is capable of doing a engine/transmission swap on a mid-60s Mopar pretty quickly. He works for minimum wage because he is able to work on the old Mopars as much as swinging the mop. He has another part-time job where he pulls engines and transmissions on imports for twice what I pay him — but he rather work on old Mopars with us rather than working full time for his other employer. My youngest daughter is 13, and has been going to races with me since birth. She can tell you the year of any B-body and we're setting up my 10-second Vitamin C (63 Plymouth NSS car) for when she hits 16.

These kids are rare — but they do exist. They can exist in greater numbers if "Generation Next" will take the time to pass the heritage along. It takes a little psychology — and it takes getting to them when they're still young. In the case of Dallas, I took him to every car show and race I ever attended since he could be pushed in a stroller. He learned old Mopars before he could be corrupted but any kids with Imports. Same with motorcycles. I'm a Harley man, and much to his mother's chagrin, I bought him a large touring bike at 15 and took him riding with me until turning him on his own at 18. He learned from me, instead of on a crotch rocket by some punk with his hat on backwards and 300 body piercings. Steven's father is a die-hard Mopar man, and like Dallas, Steven never saw an import parked on the property. My youngest daughter was given her first go-cart at 5, and helped to assemble her 6-speed dune buggy at 8. She started driving on the property at 10.

My generation did a lot to create the Generation Next people, and now it is their duty to pass this along to their kids — and the earlier the better. Take them to car shows and tell them about why these cars are so special. Include them with the washing and working on your cars. Build a project together. I bought Dallas his first car at 15 — a 78 Magnum with a warmed over 360, as he had a special license to drive to and from school. He still has that car. We built his (now — but started as a 12-second) 10-second 72 Demon together when he was 15 — which we still have.

It doesn't have to end with the "Generation Next", if the Generation next will take the time to drag their kids away from the X-Box, and get them into the garage working on cars with them. A father is his son's biggest influence — and he only has a limited time to use that influence. My generation needs to do the same with our grandchildren.

 

 

MoparStyle Racing has completed a complete redesign of its web site. Please stop by for a little visit.

http://www.MoparStyleracing.com

Be a Reseller of Domain Names & Hosting

Back in 2003, I signed up with the same type of reseller plan running Go Daddy, and resold all of the products that Go Daddy sells (with the same back office as Go Daddy) under the name of Old Hippie Hosting (www.OldHippieHosting.com). It cost me $79.95 a year to be a reseller plus $8 a year for the domain name OldHippieHosting.com.

As a reseller, I was given the tools to create a web site (like www.SouthernStarHosting.com or GoDaddy.com), given a base rate for those products, and the ability to charge whatever I want above those rates — for my profit. The same back office that runs the far larger and more popular Go Daddy handled all of the order taking, billing, new customer setup, and the 24/7 support. My strategy was to keep the advertising expenses down (I don't have a pretty race driver doing commercials for me) and the prices even lower. I wasn't looking to make a lot from a few people — but a little from a lot of people.

I did very well with Old Hippie Hosting, and was then offered an opportunity to sell my same opportunity to other resellers — and so Old Hippie Domains was created. Southern Star Hosting became its first Pro Reseller (more on an annual basis — but a lower base cost for the products) so I could offer domains and hosting for even less. Despite charging far less than most everyone else for Domains registration and transfers, SSL Certificates and eCommerce, eFax and all of the other products — I'm doing pretty good my 6th year as a reseller.

If you are looking to make some extra scratch, feel like you have a good marketing plan, and have $79 a year to invest in your business — then you'll want to check out www.OldHippieDomains.com and give this some thought. All you have to do to set yourself up is:

1. Think of a good business name and register it
2. Sign up to be a reseller and forward your domain as instructed
3. Spend an hour or two selecting the template for your reseller business
4. Determine which products you want to sell, and the mark up of it
5. Do as little or as much advertising as you want.
6. Collect your commissions.

Everything else is handled professionally for you by the same experts that handle the big boys. They handle the credit cards, renewals, notifications, support, and everything else in your name. You literally don't worry about any of it. I've been doing this for almost 9 years — and have not once had a complaint with how a product or service was handled. All of my web sites are customers of  Southern Star Hosting — so I can promise that the back office is Top Shelf.

Web Sites

Lots of options here:

Option #1

 Web Site Tonight on Southern Star Hosting. This is cheap, quick, and easy. You basically select a template from hundreds, and do a little tweaking of it with a GUI — and boom you have a web site.

With Web Site Tonight, everything works just like you'd expect. Need to move a section? Just drag and drop it. Want to add some text? Just click and type. Need help getting started? Choose from over 3,000 design and color combinations in our template library, including 120 pre-built websites customized to fit your business or style – just replace the text and images and you're ready to go! There is a large library of images you have free access to for your site.

Click on the link to see how you can do all of this for under $4 a month, with all of the cool freebies. You can build a pretty cool personal/club site pretty quick and cheap; but I think it still might lack a little of the professionalism required for all but the smallest "Mom & Pop" shops. While it has some options, it will most be lacking many for a lot of people. If your name is still available as a domain name (I was recently offered over $10,000 to give up DaveSchultz.com) — you need to register it — and this would be a great start on learning how to create web sites with that name.

 

Option #2

Create a web site using Word Press on Big Kahuna Hosting — or Southern Star Hosting.

Word Press is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that Word Press is both free and priceless at the same time.

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and there are thousands of plug-ins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen Word Press to power the place on the web they call “home”. While Word Press is mainly a blog, as opposed to a web site — it can easy be modified to be used as a site. I use to code my personal sites in HTML, and/or use Front Page — but I've recently converted most all of my sites to Word Press for a variety of reasons.

• Quick & Easy. Most of the hard work has been done, and so it doesn't take too long to have a site ready for context.
• Secure. Front Page and many of the web site builders have turned into "Hacker's Highways" and most have abandon them. Word Press is continually updated to thwart hackers, and upgrading is just a simple click in your control panel. No longer do you have to unzip the package, modify the config file, FTP to the site, and cross your fingers when running the upgrade script. Now you are notified when there is a revision or upgrade available — and you click a button to automatically apply it.
• Tons of great features. If it can be done on the Internet — then there most likely is an add-on and/or widget to do it. Likewise you can customize the sidebar with installing (or creating) widgets — and dragging them in the order you want them to appear on your site.
• Design flexibility. There are thousands of templates to get you pretty close to what you want — or if you want to experiment a little with php and CSS — you can get the site to look exactly the way you want. You don't have to be an expert on php, html, or CSS to modify the templates (just have a basic understanding of those languages) as most templates are laid out and the code documented pretty well. You can get away with not having to do any of that — if you find a template you can live with without modifications.

The below are a few sample sites we've done with Word Press.

MoparStyle Racing	Texas Whale Racing
Big Red Ram	Vitamin C Racing
NSS Racing	Nostalgia Drag Racers
Dave Duell Classic	Magnum GT
Mopar Style
Dave Schultz	DD$
Bulk Photo Scanning	Old Hippie
Damn Yankees	Redneck Humor
Chairman Obama	Get Out of the UN

 

Big Kahuna hosting has a support board, and one of the threads contains a step-by-step set of instructions for the novice to set up their own Word Press site. Any questions on the topic can be asked — and it will get an answer on that thread. Word Press is absolutely free (it is open source), you are free to customize it, and if you have a hosting account at either Big Kahuna Hosting of Southern Star Hosting — you will find an automatic installer. 

If you can post to a board — then you can add posts and pages in Word Press. As cheap as it costs for a domain name an hosting account, you have absolutely nothing to lose learning to put together your own site — and you most likely can make a good bit of revenue off it from linking banners, google ads, and eBay ads.

Option #3

We'll install Word Press, set up, configure, create your look and feel, and install the better add-ons — making your site ready for you to add your context. For $495 we will:

• Discuss with you your site by phone, listen to your needs, and make appropriate recommendations
• Install newest version onto your Big Kahuna Hosting account with an available MySql database
• Configure all of the options
• Create a child of Twenty-Eleven theme that won't get over-written with a future theme update
• Install the best add-ons for options and Search Engine Optimization
• Create a Contact page that uses a CAPTCHA to reduce spam
• Create a custom header banner graphic to your specifications
• Modify background, NavBar and other colors to your specifications
• Apply a custom script that makes the site display better on iPhones and iPads.
• Set up your sidebar with the widgets of your choice.
• Create the pages you desire and make ready for your context
• Create a custom navbar menu
• Add rotating banner code for revenue — if that's your desire

This generally takes a 8-10 for someone with our experience, and maybe 30-50 hours for someone having to figure it all out for the first time. You can certainly save the money and do the above yourself (between the manual, experimenting, and asking your questions on the Big Kahuna Hosting board) — but sometimes you just rather pay an expert instead. There are some things we're capable of doing with our racecars (like chassis work) — but often we can get a better job from the expert and make more money doing what we do best for the same time we'd have spent doing it.

Option #4

Joomla. Joomla is a very popular and very powerful option for those needing more sophistication than Word Press offers their business. While it too is a free to the public web site application, it is both more complicated to setup, and to modify. It is really something better suited to a web master who has created a \quite a few different php/mysql applications in the past. Big Kahuna Hosting accounts allow for automatic installation on an account with an available database, but you will need to prepare yourself for far more complexity than the other options listed above. An example of a Joomla site is www.BigKahunaHosting.com.

There are fewer templates, most are no free, and they all will need some tweaking to fit your needs. There are also far fewer add-ons, and the frequent upgrades are more manual in nature than with Word Press. If you have an available database, it certainly is worthwhile to give it a shot to see if you can make it work, as you might find you're more of a natural. We certainly can do your site for you using Joomla, but because of the complexity it has to be done on a per-hour basis — and you can expect a site to cost you between $2500 and $5000 to be fully ready for your context — with a custom look and feel you desire.

While you can just jump in there when you do your own web site; you need to do a little more homework when you want someone to quote one for you. Think about what information you want your site to have, how you'd like that information to be organized, and have an idea of the look and feel you're shooting for. Browse around other sites (we've listed some here on this page) and make notes on what it is your are looking for, and what site you'd like to be the starting basis for your site — and what you'd like different.

We stand ready to help.

DDS Enterprises makes domain registration or transfers cheap and easy through its subsidiary Southern Star Hosting. While the the cost is cheap, the service is of the highest quality. Customers are provided with 24/7 telephone support, and the domain manager control panel is the easiest to use. Options include “Private Registration”, to keep the domain registration confidential to those not having a “Need to Know”.