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News & Updates from 2004:

20 December 2004
I added a program to my Programming page, Excel to HTML Table Conversion Program. It's an Excel macro, which like it's name suggests, will convert a highlighted range in Excel into a simple (no formatting) table in html. This generates much more streamlined code than the built-in Save As HTML in Excel. I changed the wording on that page for each of the programs to read, "Download Source Code," and ,"View Source Code," which is a little bit easier to understand than the way it was before. I've also added a link to DOS Box, an x86 emulator that lets you easily take screen captures of certain Q-Basic programs that you wouldn't otherwise be able to capture with Windows XP.


14 December 2004
I added a new entry to my Soapbox. The essay is titled Evolution (Why Won't People Accept It?) Evolution's a topic that for some reason gets me pretty worked up. I think a large part of it is the type of attitude it takes to just completely disregard science, common sense, and all of the evidence that supports it. Anyway, this is my longest soapbox entry to date. Hopefully at least a few people will read it and it will make them think.


9 December 2004
It's only a third of the way through December, and I've managed to meet my goal of adding at least two new items to this website this month. Granted, they're not big items, but they're new, none the less. The first is my wish list of new features for Excel, added to the Miscellaneous section of this site. (I use Excel a lot.) The second is that I've added a couple of new Q-BASIC programs to the Programming page, Black Jack and the Tank Game. They're both games that I wrote back in high school. They may not have been written with the best programming practices, but they're still fun, stupid, little games. Now let's see if I can add anything else before the month is up.


30 November 2004
The end of November is upon us, and I haven't added any new content to my site since my last update in October. I've missed my goal of adding something new every month. But, just to say that I did something, I changed up a little bit the way my "sub-menu" pages look. On the Aviation, Graphics, Misc, and My Writings pages, I made the links bold, so that they stand out a bit more from the descriptions.

But, there is a reason why I've been too busy to work on my website- I've been busy working on the website for my job. I couldn't justify doing it on company time (I'm an engineer and my time's much more valuable on other projects), so I did it on my own time. And there was a lot to do. I completely redid the look of the whole site, using a lot of CSS to do it (though I'd like to use even more the next time). I also went through each individual page and cleaned up the code by hand (at one point, we had used Front Page, and it generated such dirty, cluttered, non-compliant code that you'd be ashamed to admit that you were the webmaster of the site). So, it took me a little over a month to get it all done, but I'm pretty proud of the way it turned out. Our website is Carter Aviation Technologies. To see what I had to deal with to start off, take a look at the old home page. I'd already cleaned up the code, and I've updated the links to point to the new pages, but at least you can see what the page looked like. So, with that project done, hopefully I'll have some time in December to add new content, maybe even get two new pages added to get my average back to at least one addition per month.


20 October 2004
I added the Programming section to the site. It's got its own entry in the left-hand menu on each page. I also took out the TI-85 entry from the menu, since I figured that that was really just a subset of programming. So, there's a link to the TI-85 page from the programming page. I hope to do more work on the programming page, adding more programs, and maybe changing the layout a bit. But this is something that I had started over a month ago, and progress has been slow because I haven't been able to spend a lot of time on it. So, I figured it was better just to clean up and post what I had just to have something. So, I hope it's useful, and hopefully there will be more programs up there, soon.


2 September 2004
Last week, I wrote a new essay and added it to my Soapbox. The essay is titled, Grammar Police (And Why I Don't Like Them). The gist of it is that languaged was developed by and for common people, long before there were ever scholars to come up with defined "rules" of grammar. So people shouldn't be such sticklers when it comes to writing. Okay, okay- somebody pointed out a grammatical error on my work website, and it pissed me off, so I wrote this essay. I also went through and added the date to each of the other soapbox entries. I figured that since they were organized that way on the soapbox menu page, that it made sense to make the date clearly visible on each essay page.


22 September 2004
This past weekend, I added photos of a self-sculpture to my Artwork page, and added dates of when I did each piece to their descriptions. I had been holding off on writing this update, since I started working on a Programming page over the weekend, and wanted this update to include both of those items. But work on the programming page has stalled out, so it may be several more weeks until it's ready.


24 August 2004
I improved the slide show on my photo pages. When running the slideshow, it will not advance to the next picture until that picture has been downloaded to your computer. In the previous version, for large images if the delay was set too low, the program would advance to the next image before it was loaded. Once this happened, the computer would be downloading two images at once, splitting the bandwidth, so the problem never corrected itself until the user hit Stop. This is a very good improvement, in my mind. It makes the slide show appear more seamless. Along with that improvement came a new delay option: ASAP, which makes the slideshow advance through the pictures as soon as they load. The improved pages include: Cozumel Slideshow, Europe I Slideshow, Europe II Slideshow, French Polynesia Slideshow, Midwest Slideshow, Philmont Slideshow, and Wedding Slideshow. I also made the small correction of renaming the Wedding slideshow page to "Wedding Photo Slideshow," instead of "French Polynesia Photo Slideshow" (that's the one I used as a starting point).


23 August 2004
I took care of a little site maintenance. When I had made the Wedding and French Polynesia photo pages, I got a little lazy and didn't put in real alt tags. I just put alt="" to make it pass the W3C Validator, but didn't put in any actual captions. So, I went through and put in real captions. I also took out a link from my links page. I did have a link to prattstreet.com, which used to be the website for a band that I used to know a few members of, but now it's an adult site. So it's gone. At the same time, I added a link to Rowe's Place, the site of a guy that I worked with when I had my co-op with Lockheed Martin/EnergoTech.


21 July 2004
I finished adding the slideshow option to the remaining photo pages, Cozumel Photos, Europe I Photos, Europe II Photos, Midwest Photos, and Philmont Photos. I did not add a slideshow to the Misc Photos page, since there are only two photos on that page. To view all photo pages, go to the main Photographs page.

I also changed the intro on the home page, because I devote a little more time to the site than I thought I was going to be able to, and new content gets added on a fairly regular basis (usually, at least one update per month, sometimes more). Here's what the old intro said, for posterity's sake:

     Hello, and welcome to jefflewis.net. This is my own little corner of the web, where I can show off some of the things I've done, as well as hopefully provide some useful information. I've even included a touch of information about myself (After all, this is a personal web site).
     This site began as just a few pages back on my school account years ago. Since then, it's grown in fits and spurts to what you see today, going through a few face lifts along the way. But I'm not in school anymore, and I have a real job to keep me occupied, so I don't devote nearly as much time to this site as I used to. I'll still try to keep it maintained, but the addition of new content won't occur nearly as often as it did before (and even that wasn't a whole heck of a lot).
     But anyway, here's my site. Take a look around at the different sections to see what you see. At the worst, it'll help you kill a few minutes of time.


18 July 2004
Going through looking at some of my recent photo pages, I realized that it was kind of a pain to have to click a thumbnail, click back, click a thumbnail, click back... when you wanted to see all of the photos. So, I made up a slideshow page, that lets you either manually click through the photos, or just set it to run automatically. So far, I've added this option to two pages. So, I've put links to the French Polynesia Slideshow and Wedding Slideshow on their respective sites, French Polynesia Photos and Wedding Photos. I plan on adding this slideshow option to all of the photo pages in the near future. Since the slideshow code is pretty generic from one page to the next, it shouldn't be much of a problem if I decide to improve the slideshow.


9 July 2004
We got the wedding photos from the photographer, and I've finally gotten them put onto the site. They're on the Wedding Photos page. I've also made the appropriate entry on the Photos page.

I've also made several small changes over the past week and a half. I changed the Info About Me page to call Irma my wife, instead of fiancée. I took down the Wedding Information link from the home page- I figured that there wouldn't be too much traffic coming to my site anymore that needed to know wedding stuff. But I am keeping the site, so I put a link on the Misc page, and on the Wedding Photos page.

Aside from wedding stuff, I added a bit of information to the Prime Number List page. I tested the program on the page, and it will run up to a prime number of at least 5 million. I stopped the program before it could get any higher. Also, I've switched servers again. Same company, but a new account with twice the storage space. Oh, and I almost forgot, I've added two links to the bottom of the home page. One is a link to TinyURL.com to help support their site (they give you redirect links so that you don't have to deal with huge urls, or urls that aren't valid html). The other is a link to Amazon.com to help support this site. If you follow that link to Amazon and buy something, anything, I make a commission from it. I know this borders on advertising, but I put it down at the bottom of the page so that it wouldn't be intrusive, and it's only on the home page, no other pages on the site. Though there is a similar Amazon link on the Autogyro page, but it's there to actually be of use for people looking for more info on autogyros. I just figure that if they're going to buy a book, anyway, why not get a little something for it?


25 June 2004
We finally got all of our honeymoon pictures developed, so I've added them to the Photos page. They're listed under French Polynesia. We're still waiting on getting the wedding photos from the photographer, so it'll still be a little while until they get posted.


21 June 2004
First off, a non website related bit of news. Irma and I got married, on June 6th. Of course, we both enjoyed the ceremony, but everyone we've talked to said it was a nice wedding, too. So, it was a good day for us. Then it was on to our honeymoon in Bora Bora, Moorea, and Tahiti. We just got back from that this weekend. It'll be a little while before I have the pictures posted. Between the wedding and the honeymoon, we had lots of film to develop, so we opted not to go with the one hour developing to save us some money. The photos should be developed soon. Once I've had a chance to go through them, and pick out the best ones, I'll put them up on a web page. Until then, you can get a teaser by looking at the five photos I took with my cell phone in Bora Bora. Just follow the French Polynesia link on my Phone Pictures page.

27 May 2004
It's coming up on the end of the month, so I wanted to edit my website just to say that I did something to it. Since I still have a project lingering over my head of adding the categorical listings to the Aircraft Image Archive, I decided to add another category. I added Non-Military Aircraft Photos page I and page II. I only have one more category to go, piston aircraft, to replace the last of the pages from my old site format. I'm leaving the out of date versions of those pages online until I replace them because they're the entry page for a lot of the visitors to this site, and I didn't want those visitors getting a 404 error. The only other lingering maintenance project I have is to read Dr. Charnov's autogiro history book so that I can improve/correct my autogyro page. After that, I can focus on new content (and when I say focus, I mean in between my job, working around the house, getting married, raising a four year old, playing tennis, and all the other projects I have going).

Even though this isn't an update to my site, I thought I'd include it here, anyway. While doing some research for an aircraft engine, I went to the SMA Engines website. I noticed just how similar their logo was to mine. I've reprinted their logo below, resized to make it the same size as mine, shown next to mine for comparison:

   

Now, I don't know how they came up with their logo, but I do know that I came up with mine on my own, back in '99 when I had my co-op with Lockheed Martin, before I'd ever even heard of SMA. Maybe someone had come across my site, and my logo was in the back of their mind when they created the SMA logo, or maybe both of us came up with the design independently, but the resemblance is uncanny. And just a note, there are several related versions of my logo. Take a look around this site to see what I mean. Or to see my original logo, before I scaled it to fit my new site format, take a look at this page.

21 April 2004
I just finished up another big website maintenance project. It was one that I had started several months ago, but only just recently started devoting a significant amount of time to. I have gone through every maintained page on my website and fixed the html code so that it is valid according to the World Wide Web Consortium standards. I have put a small image in the lower right corner of each of my web pages to indicate that they are written with valid code:



There are still several pages on this site that I have not corrected, nor do I plan to correct. These are old, archived pages. They are not meant for public viewing, except to see how this site used to look, when it was hosted on other servers (example).

Most pages only contained three errors (missing information tags that told browsers the html version and the character set, and a tag in the title that said font=+2 instead of font="+2"), so they were fairly easy to fix. However, I had gotten into a bad practice of leaving out the alt tags from images, so it took a lot of time to fix the photo pages. But it's all done, now, so there shouldn't be any chance of a browser not displaying the pages properly.

Take a look at the validation results from some popular web sites. It's amazing how few of them are written with valid code. Actually, in a quick half hour search, I couldn't find any other than the World Wide Web Consortium, itself (at least at the time of this update- I hear the Wired News makes an attempt to stay valid).

Google (Not Valid)
Microsoft (Not Valid)
Yahoo! (Not Valid)
CNN (Not Valid)
Wired News (Not Valid)
World Wide Web Consortium (Valid)


2 April 2004
With all the hoopla surrounding gay marriage in the media recently, I thought I'd thrown in my two cents worth. So, I made a new entry to My Soapbox, titled Legality of Homosexual Marriage, where I argue why it should be legal. Seeing as how only about twenty people a month read my soapbox essays, I suppose it's time that I got back to work on some of my more popular sections, like finalizing the categorical listings for the aircraft image archive, and refining my autogyro essay, or even making sure that all of my pages are written in valid HTML code.


10 March 2004
I've added another entry to My Soapbox, titled E-mails and Misinformation, Part II. As you can probably guess, it's a continuation of an earlier soapbox entry. Its just a little more information on why it's important to be careful on e-mail forwards, and not to perpetuate hoaxes and myths.

Last week or the week before, I added another category to the categorical listings of my Aircraft Image Archive. The new pages are Rotorcraft I and Rotorcraft II.


23 February 2004
Since tomorrow is Fastnacht Day (most of you probably know it as Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday), I thought I'd post my family's fastnacht recipe. Fastnachts are a potato based donut, almost the consistency of a cake donut. It's a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition to make them the night before, or the morning of, the Tuesday before Lent, and eat them on that Tuesday. It was a way to empty your larder of all the fat and butter and good stuff that you weren't allowed to eat during Lent, and have one last day of good eating before the Lenten fast. I've also added a link to the recipe to the Misc page.

I've also added three links to my Links page (Lake Arrowhead Water Level History, Lake Kickapoo Water Level History, and Wichita Falls Water System), as well as updated my brother John's link, though I don't think he has any content, yet.


9 February 2004
I've added a new section to my site, Wedding Information. Since the wedding information is of a more personal nature than the rest of the site, I figured that I ought to keep it separate. The wedding section is where I will keep all of the information and updates about the wedding.


31 January 2004
I've added a new essay to My Soapbox, titled E-mails and Misinformation. It explains some of the problems of perpetuating urban legends, and has a link to snopes to tell people how to debunk, and in a few cases confirm, those e-mails.


14 January 2004
I've added a new section to my site, My Soapbox. It's a subsection of My Writings. I've been tempted several times to write essays (rants) expressing my opinion on several subjects. But I figured that because of their opinionated nature and short length, that they didn't warrant being in the main My Writings section, and consequently they just never got written. So that's why I've made the soapbox, so that I can express my opinion on anything that I feel like writing about. I don't really expect too many people to read it, but just writing it down makes me feel better. And to go along with the new section, I've also put in the first essay, Squeamish People & the Morality of Wasting Animals.