This past weekend, TJCL held its annual fall planning meeting. Once they have been approved, the official minutes will be posted on this site so that you can see the inner workings of the TJCL government. In the mean time, allow me to summarize:

The Executive Board met as a whole for the first time at 10:00 AM on Saturday, November 20th at Rossview High School, Clarksville, site of the 2005 TJCL Convention. Mr. Williams, one of the two state co-chairs, was kind enough to join us approximately 15 minutes later. The meeting was attended by the entire executive board, representatives of the Rossview JCL, and a couple of people who just love JCL enough to show up anyway.

State convention was the primary topic of discussion. Many of you will be glad to hear that we will be keeping the three day schedule introduced last year. We will also be having our 2nd annual That's Entertainment, which will be hosted by 2nd Vice President Jonathan Thomason and co-hosted by Secretary Emily Hindalong. Start preparing your acts now!

The one other piece of news I'm prepared to share about the schedule relates to testing. In order to balance the two testing sessions out more, Vocabulary and Derivatives have been moved to the afternoon testing session, to be replaced with Literature and Hellenics in the morning.

Over the course of the next few months, there will be several announcements here regarding convention, competitions, nominations, Torch issues, and more. Remember to stay with TJCL.org for all your Latin updates.

Live from Nashville, this is Evan Broder, signing off.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Demodocus.com, it is the "Home of All Things Classical" and maintained by Tennessee's own David Lindsey. Every few months Demodocus has a series of contests to help prepare for JCL conventions and just give JCL'ers a chance to show off. This month is one of those later cases.

I highly encourage all Tennesseeans to go to Demodocus.com and enter the October, 2004 Online Contests. Let's once again show the rest of the world what the "vacuum cleaners sucking up useless Latin knowledge" are made of!

Congratulations! Your computer has been found worthy of accessing this magnificent site. Well, it's a little more complex than that, but we'll leave it at the magic of computing for now.

The site you are seeing has been graciously provided by Monster Labs, Inc. and Sitemason. I highly encourage you to check out their products; you will find a link to the Sitemason website on the right of the page.

This site is, as most are, under construction, and if anyone would like to help me try to assemble a worthy collection of random facts (such as: What place did Tennessee get in NJCL certamen in 1999? Who was the TJCL secretary in 1997?), please contact me at webmaster@tjcl.org

Thanks, and enjoy the site,
Evan
Your one and only TJCL webmaster

Having just gotten back from Nationals, I've been thinking about the NJCL website contest some. This year I didn't enter TJCL.org in the website contest because Austin had just turned over control to me and none of the content was mine. However, next year I'd like to enter and hopefully win. I consider the biggest problem right now to be the design. It's extremely plain (that's not necessarily a bad thing), and purple and gold have to be used very carefully in web design for them to work.

Anyway, to get to the point, I desperately need someone to help me come up with a design. As Austin's work shows (no offence, Austin), us nerds are not designers, so I am reaching out to all of you JCL'ers. I don't need anything fancy. I'll take anything from a full fledged HTML template to a description, and anything in between. Please feel free to send me Photoshop files, colored or uncolored sketches, anything!

Unfortunately, I can't offer any real prizes for the design I chose, but you will earn my unending gratitude (and that of the other TJCL'ers, based on the comments I've heard from them). If you come to Nationals next year, you may get a fellowship prize too.

Send any ideas you have to me. My contact information is listed on The TJCL Executive Board, 2005

My standard disclaimer:
By submitting a design to TJCL.org you waive all rights to your design with the exception of receiving credit for said design in the form of your name on the site. Waived rights include but are not limited to monetary or other compensation for services and copyrights to said design. All designs become the property of TJCL. Submitted designs may or may not be returned to the artist. Judging mechanisms are completely arbitrary and subject to change. Designs may be altered, changed, manipulated, or mangled as seen fit.

Blankets will not be provided by U. of Richmond. You may want to bring your own. Of course, the weather says it's going to be lows high-60's/low-70's for the whole week.

-Evan

The deadline for submitting t-shirt designs is quickly approaching. Any member of TJCL can submit a design, regardless of if they are going to nationals or not. Submit designs to Nancy Howell at MLK. The address is 613 17th Ave N, Nashville TN, 37203. If you have a digitized form of the design, that can be emailed to her at praeceptrix@mlklatin.org. Designs are due by June 1st.

Ms. Howell - please post any additional info you have.

This is an announcement of both good and bad news. The good news is that the company I'm working with has agreed to allow us to host TJCL.org with them at no charge. Not only that, I'm migrating the site to a new format that will allow anyone (to whom I give permission) to make changes without having any knowledge of HTML, SSI, HTTP, or other fancy web acronyms.

The bad news takes a slightly longer form: I will not be able to visit the forum nearly as often as I have because my home computer is set to point to the new version of the site (you guys can't see it yet). Also, full awards listings for state may be a little longer in the coming.

And one piece of news that is neither good nor bad: with the new site, I plan to make a new design for the TJCL.org site. I only have rare spurts of artistic nature, so if anyone who is more artistically inclined would like to sketch, photoshop, draw, etc a possible new template, I would be forever in their debt. Please keep in mind the medium - a website - and as such it needs to support multiple level navigation and stuff like that. Even a handdrawn sketch would work.

By submitting a design to TJCL.org you waive all rights to your design with the exception of receiving credit for said design in the form of your name on the site. Waived rights include but are not limited to monetary or other compensation for services and copyrights to said design. All designs become the property of TJCL. Submitted designs may or may not be returned to the artist. Judging mechanisms are completely arbitrary and subject to change. Designs may be altered, changed, manipulated, or mangled as seen fit.

Submit designs to Evan Broder at firstvp@tjcl.org

I'm here to report several minor updates. The link "TJCL Convention" on the right now links to information from the 2004 TJCL convention. Currently Best of Show awards are posted; more are coming. The 2004-2005 officers list has been posted, and I've created a section for old TJCL executive boards. A very requested piece of information, the TJCL constitution, will be posted just as soon as I can get a hold of an updated copy.

Former TJCL officers and new ones, please let me know of any updates you might have that could go on the website, such as Torch issues, pictures - anything.