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News & Updates from 2005:

7 December 2005
Well, I finally jumped on the bandwagon and started my own blog, which I'm going to call Jeff's Lunchbreak, since my lunchbreak is about the only time I get to work on this site. I've been debating doing this for a while, now, trying to figure out the best way to organize my site without watering down my other two writing sections. But since I've been considering it, several things have happened to me that I've wanted to write short essays about, but didn't figure belonged in the My Writings section of the site, or even in my Soapbox, which convinced me to finally take the plunge and make a blog. So, that brings the total to three sections on my site devoted to essays. I figure I can still get away with it by making the main My Writings section devoted to my more serious, well researched essays, the type of thing that I wouldn't mind having published in a book or magazine; having my Soapbox be devoted to issues that were more controversial and topical, but still trying to keep them relatively well researched, kind of like extended op-eds; and then having the blog be for all the short essays that were left over.

So, I've added a link to the blog to the main My Writings page, and did a little reorganization to that page to make it clear that two of the links (the Soapbox and the blog) were to collections of essays, and that the rest of the links were to actual individual essays.

Just as a note, I'm going to post all of these updates that usually go on my homepage to the blog, but not vice versa. That way, if anyone every actually subscribes to the RSS feed for the blog, they'll get normal website updates along with it. I'm also going to include copies of all new soapbox entries to the blog, to give visitors a section for feedback.


5 December 2005
Here's one for the news column, as opposed to my normal website updates. The content from one of my pages is actually making it into print, my paper airplane folded from a Post-It Note. Weldon Owen has published a book titled, Post-It Notes: Ideas That Stick. Below are pictures of the front cover of the book, and the page spread that has my paper airplane. It's amazing how much better they made it look- I guess that's what graphics artists do.




The book officially goes on sale tomorrow. When I last checked, Amazon only had one copy left in stock, even though it didn't even have any pictures of it, yet. Who'd have thought that such a frivolous book would be so popular? Or maybe it's just all the contributors' families buying copies (just like when I went to see the Nutcracker here in Wichita Falls, you could tell that 95% of the audience was there just to watch somebody that they knew). Anyway, here's the link to buy it from Amazon. I haven't read it, yet, so I can't say how good of a book it is (except for idea #16- that one rocks).


2 December 2005
Well, I've got several updates for today, so let's start with the most useful. On my Programming page, I added a VB program called Photo Page Generator 2.0. It's a modified version of an earlier program I have on there. This new version reads a directory to get all of the images, writes the html code to put them in thumbnails, and generates a webpage for each photo (with navigation links and a handy-dandy javascript that dynamically resizes the image to fit the window). I even wrote up a readme file with detailed instructions on how to use the program. For a more in depth description of the way this program will make pages and my reasoning behind it, read my update from 18 July 2005.

I added several links to my Links page. The first section is Other Jeff Lewis's. I figured I'd inlcude links to people that share my namesake. The other section is Personal Websites & Blogs. These are a few sites that I've been visiting quite a bit, lately.

And for the least obvious change to most visitors, I've added an index.html file to each directory on my account (example). When looking at my site statistics, I noticed that several people were linking directly to my graphics directories, and I'd just rather that they didn't do that. I could just as easily have adjusted the settings to my site to keep people from viewing directories, but by doing an index.html page, I could give them links to relevant pages.

And finally, just a bit of commentary on my own part. I made a concious effort to focus on the types of projects I did for this update. If you go and look at my updates over the past few months, you'll notice a lot of time spent on the religion vs. science issue. And that's just what I've written- you can imagine how much reading I've been doing on it. But even with as interesting and important an issue as this is (I still can't believe that nearly half the U.S. population rejects evolution, or that so many people in Texas voted for a constitutional ammendment to outlaw gay marriage), I don't want to become consumed by it (my wife used the term obsessed). There are too many other interesting topics and ways I could be spending my time, that I don't want to concentrate so much on this one issue. I imagine that I'll still write about this issue from time to time, but I'll try to keep it balanced with the type of content that got people visiting my site in the first place.


23 November 2005
I just updated the About Me page and my Mini Bio. The biggest change to the About Me page is that I added two new lists: My Favorite Books and My Favorite T.V. Shows. On my Mini Bio, I mainly just cleaned it up a bit, and added a touch more information about my wedding, and about the fact that I now play tennis. On both pages, I removed a few of the specific details. Maybe I'm being a bit paranoid, but I figure if someone wants to steal my identity, they should at least do an hour's worth of research, and not have it all right there on a silver platter.


7 November 2005
I added a new entry to My Soapbox, titled Ode to Computers. I spend enough time complaining on my soapbox, so I figured it was about time that I write something positive. I was originally just going to write about my new laptop, but figured I'd extend it to computers in general. So go ahead and read a brief history of the computers I've owned, and why I like computers so much.


2 November 2005
I added a new entry to My Soapbox, titled Fed Up with American Public & Religious Fundamentalism, Part II. I started this essay back in August, but because of various distractions, it's taken me until now to finish it. It's mainly in response to three specific things that I saw/read that point to how Americans are abandoning science, sense and reason in favor of the mystical. It's a sad state of affairs for our country, and I just really wanted to write about it to vent some of my feelings.


26 October 2005
I added a new entry to My Soapbox, titled Legalizing Homosexual Marriage, Part II, explaining some of the reasons why I think homosexual marriage should be legal. This essay started its life when I got a chain e-mail about the upcoming Proposition 2 in Texas, a proposal for a Texas Constitutional ammendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman. It's one of the issues being voted on in the November 8th Constitutional Amendments Election. Since I live in Texas, and since this is an issue that's gotten me worked up enough before to write an essay about it, I wrote up an e-mail response to that chain e-mail. That response brought up a few points that I hadn't written about in my previous soapbox entry, and put into more elegant wording a few of the points from that previous essay, so I cleaned it up a bit and put it on this website. Hopefully, it will get a few people to look at this issue from a different viewpoint.


11 October 2005
I added a new page to the Photos section, titled Guatemala 2005 Medical Mission Photos. As the name implies, my wife and I went on a medical mission to Quiche in Guatemala. It was organized by the Wichita County Medical Alliance, and hosted by Agape in Action. She's a nurse, so she actually did a lot of good, circulating and scrubbing in. I basically washed and sterilized instruments, did odd jobs, and helped cook and clean up after breakfast. After five days of hard work at the hospital, we got two days of sightseeing. The photo page is heavily tilted towards the two days that we went sightseeing. I decided not to post most of the photos of the actual operations, and aside from that, there's not much to see inside a hospital.


26 September 2005
I added a new page to the Writings section, for lack of a better place to put it. The page is titled Factoids Debunked & Verified. I took a look at one of those fact list e-mails that ends up getting forwarded to everyone, investigating the "facts" to see which ones were true and which ones were false. Not surprisingly, most of them were false, or at the least, misleading distortions of facts. Only a handful were actual facts that could be accepted without qualification.


31 August 2005
I've updated the Rotorcraft Speed Limitations page, part of my Aviation Theory section. Basically, I cleaned up the part on official rotorcraft speed records, added information about unofficial world speed records for rotorcraft (the 315 mph Bell Model 533), and listed some notable attempts at high speed rotorcraft.


15 August 2005
I've added two new essays to this site which are a little more controversial than my normal fare. Both explore the conflicts between religion and science. The first is (at least what I hope to be) a rather constructive essay entitled How to Interpret the Bible. In it, I look at what seem to be the main camps of Biblical interpretation in this country and how likely each one seems, based on what comes from the Bible itself and with what science tells us about the world. I've listed it on the My Writings page. The second essay is in My Soapbox, titled Fed Up with the U.S. Public. It's more of a rant on the hypocrisy and ignorance of our country, religious fundamentalism in particular. So, now that I've gotten that all off my chest, maybe I can get back to some less controversial topics, like airplanes.


26 July 2005
I've finished modifying nearly all of my photo pages so that when you click on one of the thumbnail images, it takes you to an html page with the picture on it, instead of linking directly to the picture. The reasons for this change are explained in the 18 July update, but basically it's for improved navigation. The pages that have been updated include: French Polynesia, Wedding, Cozumel, Europe I, Europe II, U.S. Midwest, and Philmont. For several of those pages, I also changed the order of the thumbnails, to keep related photos grouped together (originally it was in alphabetical order by file name). I tried to do that chronologically to the best of my memory. The Misc Photos page did not get updated, since it only has two photos in it. The Phone Photos section is going to take some work to update, since it originally pointed to the online albums I had with Sprint, but I've since changed carriers so Sprint erased those pages. I don't know how long it'll be until I get a chance to remake those pages, but probably not anytime soon.


18 July 2005
I've begun to modify my photo pages. So far, the only page completed is the French Polynesia Photos. It's not a huge change, and won't be immediately apparent. But what I'm doing is making it so that when you click on one of the thumbnail images, it takes you to an html page with the picture on it, instead of linking directly to the picture. The advantage is that I can incorporate navigation links into that html page, so that if a visitor wants to view all of the photos, it's just a matter of clicking "Next" on each page, and not having to repeatedly hit the "Back" button on his/her browser, finding the next image, and clicking on it. The principal reason why I had left the thumbnails linking directly to the pictures for so long is because of the way that most browsers will automatically resize an image if it's too big to fit into the window. But, they only do this when the picture's linked to directly, not when it's embedded in a page. Simply using a "width=100%" tag or height=100%" in the picture tag wouldn't have worked, because the browser window could be too small in width or height, and there's no way of telling beforehand what it's going to be. Also, that stretches the image to larger than its original size, making it look pixellated, if the browser window is too big. So, I had to come up with a java script to do the job (actually, I originally developed it for a page at work, since I had to put photo credit with each picture: CarterCopter Photos).
The other thing I did was to write a Visual Basic program to generate all of the pages for me, since it would have been extremely tedious to do it by hand. So, expect to see the other pages get converted as I get a chance to work on them this week and next.

A smaller change I made to the French Polynesia Photos page, and that I plan on making to just about all the pages on my site, eventually, is that I added a link that says "Back to All Photos." I'm going to try to improve the navigation on my site, giving all content pages a link to the menu page that links to them. I had done that a long time ago with one of the earlier versions of my site, but stopped because I figured then that people would be entering my page from the homepage, and could just click their browser's "Back" button, so what was the sense of putting a link to do the same thing. I've since realized that the vast majority of people don't enter your site through your homepage, but through one of the content pages by following a link from a search engine (like Google). So, by giving those links to menu pages from the content pages, it will hopefully make it easier for people to find related information to whatever search term it was that got them to my site, and maybe get a few more people to look at more of the pages on my site.

28 June 2005
This entry applies to the "News" portion of the "News & Updates." I have not had a chance to do much on my website this month. First, I was busy with work flight testing, and we accomplished quite a goal on Friday, June 17th. The CarterCopter broke mu-1. Since most people probably don't know what that means, to put it simply, it means that the rotor blade was turning so slowly that the retreating blade saw reverse flow over the entire blade. By slowing the rotor down so much and using wings to provide lift, the CarterCopter is able to fly much more efficiently than conventional rotorcraft. This technology could eventually allow rotorcraft to fly at speeds approaching 400-500 mph. To read more, look at our website: http://www.cartercopters.com. In related news, the Carter website made slashdot today, the ultimate nerd website. Now I feel like we've really accomplished something. Unfortunately, our hosting company wasn't set up to handle the influx of traffic, so the Carter website is currently running at a snail's pace.

So, if we broke mu-1 over a week ago, why am I taking so long to make the announcement? Well, we had a 75 page proposal due yesterday. Through a miscommunication, we had thought someone else was working on it all month, only to find out a week before the proposal was due that they had been waiting on us to give them information. So, the day after our historic flight mentioned above, we got to work on the proposal, starting from scratch. I was here to ten or eleven o'clock at night most nights last week, and 10:30 pm on Saturday. But we pulled through and got it done, and it's a pretty good proposal. And, well, maybe this paragraph doesn't belong here on my website, but I'm pretty damned proud of what we were able to do in a week. And, it did keep me from working on this site, so I guess that it's a little bit related, so there you go.

23 May 2005
I've added a new essay to my the My Writings page, titled "Musings on Being Famous." It's a short essay I wrote about why I've given up on becoming famous. The main theme is that no matter how famous one becomes, they're still just a "flash in the pan" in the grand scheme of things. They probably won't be remembered 1000 years from now, and even if they are, the memory will be little more than a name and some vague idea of what they did to become famous.


20 May 2005
I've added a new section with 5 pictures to my Artwork page, "Technical Drawings." While some people may consider this art, and others won't, I figured that a lot of the technical skills are the same as computer art, so I put it on my site, anyway. All four pictures are of aircraft that I helped develop at Carter Aviation Technologies.

And for a slight organizational change, the News & Updates Archive was just getting to be too big, since I'd been keeping it all on one page since I started it in May of 2003. So, I broke it down into years, so that each page is a little smaller.


18 May 2005
I've switched to a new hosting company that provides a LOT more storage space on their servers (2,000 MB vs. 200 MB), and a good bit more bandwidth per month (30 GB vs. 5 GB) than my old hosting company, and for a little cheaper price, to boot. If you're reading this, it means that the DNS servers have updated their entries to point to this new server.

Over the past few days, I've added a few more of my Q-BASIC programs to my Programming page - Advanced Pong 2.0, Fake DOS Emulator, and Morse Code Translator. I've also added a couple old classics not written by me - Gorilla and Nibbles, as well as a Description of how to run Nibbles on a fast computer. That's probably it for Q-BASIC programs that I'm going to add to this site. Any further work on the programming page will be in more modern languages.


29 April 2005
Well, I finally got around to one of my lingering website maintenance projects that I've been telling myself I was going to do for the past two years. I've converted the old Piston Aircraft Image page into my "new" (2-year old) site format. To cut down on load time, it's split up into 4 pages (I, II, III, IV) of around 30 images each, just like the rest of the categorical aircraft image pages. That was the last of the categorical listings that I had to convert over to the new format, so my only lingering maintenance project left is to read Dr. Charnov's autogiro history book so that I can improve/correct my autogyro page. I've updated the main Aircraft Images page with links to the new piston pages.

I've also updated the Quotes page with a few more quotes that I like.


15 April 2005
I've made a slight change to the layout of the site. While doing a little research for the site I keep up at work (http://www.cartercopters.com, I came across a discussion about fixed-width vs. liquid layout. I'd always been a fan of liquid layout, because I think that you should try to make your site accessible to everyone. However, the fixed-width camp makes a good point in that with increasing monitor sizes, liquid layouts can become too wide, making line lengths too long to be easily readable. I agree, but I still want to keep the accessibility. Since my site is still layed out with tables (I haven't switched to pure css, yet), it was an easy enough matter to get rid of the percentage width declaration in the main table tag, and to declare an absolute width in one of the <td> tags. This works as a kind of max width, allowing the table to resize to smaller widths, but never growing past that one, which is exactly what I wanted. On a few pages, like photo thumbnail pages, I did it a little differently. Since there was only a small amount of text, but a lot of thumbnails, I enclosed the text in a width limiting table, but let the rest of the page expand to the browser window (example: French Polynesia Photos). And on a few pages that didn't have much text at all, I just left them alone (example: Aircraft Image page). So, it wasn't a big change per page, and most people probably won't notice much difference, but it did take me a fair amount of time to implement it on just about every single page of my site. As far as switching to css, I'll wait until 90% of my visitors are using a browser that supports the max-width element in css.


17 March 2005
I've posted a new essay to the Aviation Theory section, entitled Theoretical Max Propeller Efficiency. It's a derivation of a method used to calculate the theoretical limit of how well a propeller can perform based on horsepower, rotor diameter, and airspeed. There is also a short discussion of trends in propeller performance that these formulas can help illustrate. It feels good to post something a little more educational and useful, for a change. I've also updated the main Aviation page, to better describe the nature of the Aviation Theory section.


28 February 2005
A few small updates. I added thumbnail screen shots of the Q-Basic games on the Programming page. I've uploaded a newer version of the source code in the X-Plane, UDP & Visual Basic tutorial, fixing a slight bug in the way it converts a floating point variable into 4 8-bit numbers (there was a typo where 23 should have been 32). I've also updated the links page, removing a few dead links, and adding links to Peroxide Propulstion and Velocity Aircraft.


31 January 2005
Just a small update- I added video of me flying my Ercoupe to the Ercoupe page. My wife took the videos with our digital camera when we went up to Pittsburgh for the holidays. I added the videos some time around the middle of the month, but never got around to noting it here until just now.