What kind of balls do you have? We now have pong balls that are guaranteed to bring attention to your game. They have our two-color logo printed on them, and they are now shipping. Because it cost us so much to print the two colors on the ball (we refused to settle for just one color), we are selling these close to our costs. We just want you guys to have the best balls ever. Buy yours today so you will have them by the time school begins.

Multiplayer game update: We are getting there. We've been playing each other quite a bit, and there are several bugs that need to be worked out. We also want to add some more features before the final release, but we will probably have some type of beta testing available so that you guys can help us figure out what we need to fix. You'll be sure to know when the final version of the game is out.

What kind of balls do you have? BPONG.COM will soon have custom balls with our logo on them. The final proof has been approved and sent to the factory for printing. I'll be putting the balls on the merchandise page so you can preorder them, but they will probably not ship until mid-August (see below). These balls are 2-star quality 40 mm balls, which is the regulation size specified by the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF). I hate allowing the ITTF to dictate the official size of a ping pong ball, but I guess that's how it goes until we start our International Beer Pong Federation (IBPF). These balls with the two-color logo will stand out at any pong / beirut event you have. Be sure to order yourself some balls today.

Shipment Delays: As those of you that have ordered know, I always ship your orders the next business day. However, I will not be able to ship any merchandise from August 6 through August 13 or 16. I will be in Chicago interviewing for possible internships for next summer, and then I will be in Vegas. Therefore, either order your stuff before August 4 or expect it to ship out in mid-August. We apologize for the delay.

The latest news around here is that we now have the new order of shirts in. This means that we now have Medium Shirts back in stock, and we also printed a limited number of XXLs because of a few requests.

In order to print XXL shirts, the printer charged me an additional $2.00 per shirt. Therefore, we're selling the XXLs for $2.00 more. In order to accommodate this change, I had to rewrite a good portion of the code that does the cost calculations for ordering. I think I have it working, but please bear with us if problems arise. If you spot any problems in the ordering scripts, please email me and let me know what problems you are experiencing.

As far as balls are concerned, we are waiting on the production and shipment. I know that the balls will be 2-star quality 40 mm balls. They should be delivered at my door in about 15 days from today. I'll keep you informed as to the status. We'll probably pre-sell balls once I am more certain of when I will receive them.

I hope everybody had a great 4th of July weekend. I'd love to tell you what I did, but I really don't know.

So what's new around BPONG.COM? The new shirts are ordered. Well, they are the same design, but we will soon have mediums back in stock. We are also adding some XXLs upon request. They cost $2-3 more to print, so I will have to sell them for more. The balls will also be ordered this week, and I think we might have the money to finally print up some stickers, too.

That's about it for now. If you guys have any phat stories that you can remember from this weekend, I'd love to hear them.

I'm back in town now. Thanks for all your patience since I could not ship orders over the past week. They all went out today, however. Here are a few more updates of what is going on. We've mentioned most of these before, but we are just getting around to taking care of these.

First, the long-rumored multiplayer game is still under development. We think we have completed 90% of the first beta version. We'll keep you posted on how it goes.

We also wanted to have printed pong balls by this time. That has not yet happened, but it is on the list of the next things to buy. Finally, be warned that we are almost out of Medium Shirts. If you order one and I am out, you can either wait a couple of weeks for the new ones to come in or cancel your order until we get more shirts. We will also have a small amount of XXL shirts to see how well they sell.

Have you checked out the game recently? We made some small changes and released v1.21 of the online beer pong / beirut game. The new features include a reset button so you can start over when you know your game sucks and a rank at the end of the game that tells you how you rank even if you don't make the top 100 list. We also optimized the game so the actual file size that you have to download is about half of the size as the original file.

We are also getting close to a beta version of our multiplayer online game that will allow you to play against other people. As of right now, we plan to email people that have entered an email address and made the top 100 scoreboards. We will eventually open up game testing to more and more players as we sort out the bugs.

Did you guys miss us? We sure missed ourselves. Here's what happened so you know why we disappeared for about a week. Basically some guy was running a site with our host, and he had a gaming forum on which a hack was released that was supposed to be private. Therefore, a huge attack was launched against our hosting server, and our hosting company pulled the server to prevent data loss, although the attack may have made the server unresponsive anyway. We should have been up sooner, but since the server was down anyway, our hosting company went ahead and made some upgrades, which led to some other unforeseen problems that took longer to solve than expected.

We are back now, though. If we ever disappear again, know that we will be back as soon as possible.

Finals are finally over, and we're starting to work on the new features that we plan to release by the end of the summer. (If anybody knows a lawyer that needs some help this summer, please let me know.) Anyway, we are making some good progress on our next release of the online game, and I plan on ordering pong balls sometime next week. I'll be keeping everybody posted as we get stuff done. As always, your orders for beer pong / beirut shirts and posters always ship either the day you order them or next business day.

I'm in the middle of studying for finals right now. I normally don't get stressed over this stuff, but I'm feeling the pressure pretty good right now. I suppose when your grades are based 100% on your final exams, you tend to feel it a bit more. However, I wanted to take a quick break to let you guys know of a few major developments I've made recently.

First, after two years of searching, I have located a place that will print pong balls for me. They are not as cheap as I would like (it's going to cost around $6 for a pack of 6), but at least we'll have some phat balls for you guys.

Next, I've been working on some major plans for the summer. Assuming I have the time, I hope to have some new features added to the site. For example, my boy is working on the new release of the online beer pong game, which will allow you to play against your friends. Other new features will include the ability for you to list your tournaments, manage your tournaments, and search for tournaments. I don't know how this is all going to come out in the end, but if it works out well, I'd like to set things up where we will track players and teams throughout tournament play and regular play. In doing so, we will automatically rank players. With this information, you will be able to search for the best players in your region, your state, or the country. There's a lot more involved there then you or I probably realize, but it's one of the things I'm reaching for. For exmaple, how do I keep people from submitting false data? I have some ideas, but there are a lot of similar issues I have not yet thought about.

Anyway, I'll be done with finals in mid-May. I'll then get busy on the new site features and putting in an order for pong balls. Depending on the printer turn-around, I'd expect some pong balls by the end of June. I might also be putting up some polling for cups. Do you guys want hard, washable cups or the softer, more standard cups? I've had requests for both. I need to price them out, but I think the harder cups will cost around $15 for 24, and the softer cups will be more in the range of $12 for 24. It isn't cheap, but that's what it costs. If you can find printers that will do stuff for me cheaper, please let me know.

For those of you that are wondering, yes, the new shirts are in. As always, any shirts and/or posters that you order will almost always be shipped by the next business day.

A person recently emailed me stating that he was hesitant to order stuff from us. He took the chance and was very happy. However, this brings up a question for the viewers: do you have any suggestions of things that we can do to increase buyer confidence? I am certain that any buyers will be very pleased with what we have to offer and the relationships I build with our customers, but if you have any suggestions that will help people gain confidence in me and my site initially, please let me know.

I'm getting close to final exams, so that means it's time to start learning all of the stuff that I should have been learning the past three or four months. Finals means two things. The bad news is that I will be busy and won't have time to do much more beyond shipping out your orders. The good news is that once finals are done, I should have time to start working on some major new additions for the site, many of which I have mentioned to some of you in response to your personal emails.

Many of you viewers have written in to say that I have the best site on the web that is devoted to beer pong and beirut. I don't know if I agree or not, but if I have the time to implement my plans this summer, I'll be inclined to agree. If you stop checking the site over the summer, be sure to check back by the time August/September rolls around, especially if you are involved in hosting any type of tournaments. The current site represents 10% or less of what I have had planned out for a few years. I'm hoping to try to get 50% of those plans done this summer, but we'll have to see how much work I have, how much beer I drink, and how lazy I am.