I'm going to let Tucker handle your questions about GPS mapping and that sort of thing. He's the one who owns, controls and understands all the tools he uses to do that. But I get the impression he can darn near thread a needle with his eyes closed and his back turned from 50 miles away with his GPS tools.

As far as a Cattleguard subscription goes, That's included in the CDG Membership which costs $25 per year. It supports the cost of research, publishing and distribution for Cattleguard plus other things CDG does including hosting and maintenance of this site.

To buy a CDG membership, please first complete our membership form and send it to us. Be sure to check the box on that form that says you want to buy a CDG membership. After you submit that form, you can pay for your CDG membership through our shopping cart here on the site using your Paypal, Master Card, Visa or Discover account. All these payment methods are supported by Paypal even if you don't have a Paypal Account. Considering the amount of time and effort we've spent building and updating this site in the last year, I'd say $25 a year is a pretty fair bargain.

Almost the same answer applies to the Old West Park. You can contribute to the Old West Park and pay for it through our shopping cart here on the site using Paypal, Master Card, Visa or Discover. All these payment options are supported by Paypal even if you don't have a PayPal account.

To contribute to Old West Park, begin by completing our membership form. If you already own a CDG membership, just give us your name and addresss information and check the box on the form that says you want to Contribute to Old West Park. Then in the additional information blocks at the bottom of that page, tell us whose name should appear on each share certificate.

Each $25 contributed to Old West Park buys 1 share in the park. See this page for more info about the park.

I believe CDG either just sent or is about to send ownership shares to a couple of dozen folks who contributed to the Old West Park in the past couple of years. The original park concept was to produce a deed to 1 square foot of the park in exchange for a $25 contribution. They later learned they'd have difficulty doing that because New Mexico real estate laws wouldn't let them deed a piece of land too small to put a septic system on. So after a couple of years of research and lawyer head-banging, they worked out the share system instead. As a result, $25 now buys a share of the park instead of an actual deed. The certificates were supposed to be sent in December; but Tucker was sick for over 3 weeks and I'm not sure if the mailing actually got sent yet or not.

To make payments using your credit card if you don't have a PayPal account, go to our shopping cart page and add the item (or items) you want to buy to your cart. Then click the checkout button on the page that appears. You'll be taken to a page where you can either enter your PayPal account info or begin the process of entering your credit card info. Just follow the directions on the check-out screen and you'll be good to go shortly afterwards.

I hope this answers your basic questions. I'm sure Tucker can handle any questions I have overlooked.

Happy New Year!

Best Professional Regards,
The Web Guy

I guess I'm now the unofficial secretary for Tucker who has been out for a month with health issues and is gradually getting back in the saddle now. But I did ask him about the GPS topic today and here's what I learned...

You are right. CDG did buy the GPS coordinates for the corners of every parcel in the Criswell a year ago. So, yes, we CAN and will provide the corner-point locations of your parcel to our registered members. If you are not presently a registered CDG member (Tip: 2007 memberships expired on 12/31/07!), you can renew your membership here on this site by going to our Membership Renewal and Service Request Form, completing that form and sending it to us. When you do that, you'll be invited to pay for your membership renewal and any other service you may have requested online. The annual membership renewal fee is $25. That entitles you to Website and Cattleguard access for 2008 PLUS access to CDG's other services as well.

If you then want the coordinates for a parcel of land, send us the legal description of the parcel and ask us for the GPS coordinates. In turn we'll put it on our list to look up those coordinates up and send them to you just as soon as we figure out where Tucker put the danged list! If you're in more of a hurry than that or you need the coordinates for more than one parcel, and you're in a position to be a bit philanthropic, you might want to consider making one community-minded contribution toward the Old West Park for each parcel you want coordinates on. Bells tend to go off around CDG's Office when Old West Park Contributions come in. So, all the noise might wake someone up and make them look harder for that list we KNOW Tucker stuffed in a corner here somewhere!

I am teasing of course, but the concept is right. Tucker has been out for a month so we're obviously playing catch-up here. Still, like any other cash-starved non-profit, we do tend to notice when cash comes flying in our door.

So, if you want the GPS coordinates for your parcel, the FIRST thing to do is make sure your membership is paid for calendar year 2008. At $25 a year, that shouldn't be a hard thing for anyone to do. Then if you want the GPS coordinates for one Criswell parcel send us the property description and ask for the coordinates. Then sit back and wait patiently and we'll send them to you just as fast as we can get to it.

If you're in a big rush and want to get our attention or encourage us to work faster, feel free to make a contribution to the Old West Park when you submit your GPS request. The Old West Park is something of a pet project around here. As a result, contributions to it tend to get our attention faster than just about anything else except fresh hot coffee.

For the record, you can pay for your membership renewal and/or make contributions to the Old West Park right here on our site using your Paypal, Visa, Master Card, Discover, or American Express account. In fact, as soon as you send us your Membership Renewal and Service Request Form, you'll immediately be invited to pay us using our electronic shopping cart and one of the accounts mentioned above.

Finally, you asked questions about the Old West Park and how it works. Please visit our Old West Park page

As I noted above, you can make contributions to the Old West Park using our Membership Renewal and Service Request Form and our shopping cart.

I hope this answers your questions!

When we discussed building this site last year, one subject that was on our mind from the beginning was to provide a place where visitors could post comments and feedback.

The fly in that ointment was over the past five years every web guestbook or comments system we've seen has been flooded with ads and junk posts. In fact, guestbooks were early favorites among spammers and junk posters as places to post ads for porn, or snakeoil, or spyware, or virus programs or other useless products, they want to pawn off on an unsuspecting public.

The truth is deliberate spamming of practically every legit venue on the web has become a HUGE problem for site owners and web pros over the past few years. Why? Because billions are being spent on web ads and thousands of web entrepreneurs are eager to tap into that huge motherlode of cash while spending almost nothing for access to the sites where they post their "ads" or the thousands of workers they pay pennies a day to post them whereever they can.

As if thousands of desperate web workers in India, Africa and China eagerly posting spam everywhere wasn't bad enough, two years ago the first web bots entered the picture... and the situation went from bad to worse. These bots are designed to crawl sites and find places where they can post ads... leaving their stench behind.

Suddenly there was no venue anywhere on the web that wasn't being inundated with spam and attacked by spammers and bots alike. The largest and most visible victims (like Google and MSN and AOL and Al Gore) got lots of embarrassment and press ridicule when they fell victim to the bots and thousands of spam posts appeared on their sites. The rest of us were left to "slug it out" in the trenches.

In short, the first primitive cyber war had begun and experts started asking if we can fight such a war and win it. Meanwhile out in the real world, we had battles to fight and sites to build and clients who wanted sites built and needed to get things accomplished.

So we started looking for a guestbook and it took months to find it. But, because of that research, we eventually found the guestbook we use today, Talkback. What a fine tool it is... we're convinced it's the best product of its type on the web today.

The author of this program designed it from the start to automatically detect spam posts and to either sequester or delete them instantly. After months of searching, Talkback was our tool of choice. We've been fans and supporters ever since.

We installed the product on the "SaveTheRange" site and one other in September '07. The results were impressive. The program proved able to correctly detect and block spam posts 99.9% of the time. It was wrong in just one case out of 1,000. In fact, the accuracy was so high we decided posts Talkback deemed valid would be allowed to appear in our guestbook without human intervention. Spam posts on the other hand are placed in a queue for manual review.

Yes, along the way, there've been some bumps in the road. The first came in December when hackers attacking the guestbook found a way to penetrate our server's security. So we took the guestbook down in the weeks before Christmas. Then we reinstalled a much more secure version in January. A similar thing happened in April and we took it down again.

Now it's the first of May and our guestbook is back and it's stronger and more secure than ever! Plus it has now been enhanced to block spambots too and it does so in a socially-conscious way. To see what we mean, visit www.ReCaptcha.net

Welcome to SaveTheRange.com and our Talkback guestbook. Please take a moment to post here. Tell us what you think of our site and our guestbook too. It's our way of advancing the state of the art on the web AND our Weapon of Spam Destruction!

Hi Jeff,

It's the web guy here. Your photos are real nice. Thanks for sharing them. We'll take the time to add some (or all) of them to the site's galleries as soon as Tucker and I can get our sleep schedules better synchronized and talk on the phone or in person.

As far as Tucker being busy is concerned, I'll only say that at my age of 57, the guy makes me feel like a piker. For a man who is clearly a few years older than me (perhaps quite a few), he has been busier than a one-armed paper hanger with the 7 year itch this year.

For starters, he personally built not one but two complete Criswell cabins this summer plus he operated both that used grader and the dozer CDG bought at least a couple of days each week -- working hard to "move mountains" in some cases. He also redesigned and rebuilt the web site too. (Okay, I did most of the leg-work on that. But he certainly worried about it and talked with me about the project every day -- often for hours at a time -- for weeks. I suspect he also paid the whole development cost out of his own pocket too.) He also designed and had a custom trailer built for hauling complete cabin kits out to the range in a single trip. Plus he's been busy giving tours and whatever out on the range two or three other days a week as well.

Here's how the new site is doing... According to our stats, we hosted 223 Visitors in July, 236 in August, 375 in September and 320 so far in October. So, the trend is definitely up! The site has also drawn a few bucks in contributions too. The cash flow hasn't been great yet; but it's at least encouraging.

Looking at it another way, here's a map showing where in the world our October visitors came from...

In the first month, we had 93 spammers and a dozen real posters who tried to post in our guestbook. All the spammers were caught and blocked by our software. We also had 1 false detection (a good post erroneously treated as spam), which I caught and corrected; but most real posts got through fine. So, the new guestbook works well.

As for that rapscallion, Tucker, for a man who is well past retirement age and had major hip replacement surgery less than a year ago, Tucker has accomplished amazing things this year. He does it all because he loves the land and is doing his best to try to help others get a foothold there. For a man at least in his 70's, he works harder than any two 35 year olds I know and moves as fast as a forest fire just about all the time.

What he hasn't bothered to mention here (and he may kick me for doing so) is that during this same year when he has worked so hard on all these projects in a constant exhausting effort to try to help others, that new hip has given him 50 fits all year. I won't elaborate except to say our friend Tucker is an amazing man who has worked tirelessly for a long time now in his efforts to make the Criswell dream come true for all those who invested their dreams and their money in hopes they could eventually live there or get some sort of return from their investment. Frankly, I for one am amazed and disappointed that he doesn't get more support, participation, appreciation or encouragement from the Criswell owners than he does.

Certainly each of us who knows Tucker realizes what he has accomplished almost single-handedly on behalf of the Criswell Landowners is nothing short of amazing. Yet looking at the map above, it's obvious dozens of Criswell owners come here every month and look and go away quietly without offering one word of encouragement or thanks or appreciation or even $1 in cash to help support the efforts of one of the few people on earth who has ever given a damn about helping them or making their dreams come true and their investments pay off. It says a lot that 8 times as many spammers were interested in abusing our guestbook this month than Criswell Owners were in using it to record their visits here. To me, that's a disgrace. In my judgment those silent and thankless owners deserve to get exactly what they've contributed to this effort - which is nothing at all. I believe you get from life what you put into it. In that respect, Tucker McHugh will always be a wealthy man.

Sadly, I can't say the same for the hundreds of Criswell Owners who haven't offered a word of thanks or encouragement or raised a finger or invested a dollar to help.

So, thanks for taking the time to say, "Thanks!" Jeff. And thanks also for your personal participation and words of encouragement. As hard as Tucker works in his efforts to make the Criswell investments pay off for everyone, you have NO idea how important getting a few words of appreciation and encouragement are to him!

Sign me...
The Web Guy
NOT a Criswell Owner and proud I'm not a member of such a stingy, thankless group!