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News & Updates from 2006:

20 December 2006
I imagine this will be my last update of the year, and with it being the holiday season, I thought I'd do a more light hearted update. A month or two ago I wrote a Visual Basic program that makes images that look pretty cool (to me, at least - my wife and daughter were rather unimpressed when I showed it to them). So, I've taken some of the better looking images and put them on my artwork page (in the Abstract Series II section), and put an executable and the source code of the program, titled Circle Gradient Pattern Generator, by the way, on my downloads page and programming page, respectively. And while I was at it on the artwork page, it was getting kind of long where visitors had to do a lot of scrolling to see what I had, so I put a little menu at the top of the page with thumbnail images.


8 December 2006
I recently had a brief e-mail correspondence with a creationist (brief as in number of e-mails exchanged, not the lengths of the e-mails). Anyway, I thought that some of what I wrote in my final reply was pretty good, and thought that maybe some other people might find it interesting. So, I cleaned up a few spots, made a few arguments a little better, cut out some of the more rambling sections, and made a new essay titled, Confidence in Historical Knowledge, and made the appropriate addition to my Writings page.


30 November 2006
I got my website update in for November with 8 hours to spare, and it's not a chintzy update, either. I've updated my Tutorial on Programming a UDP Interface for X-Plane using Visual Basic. This new version is for X-Plane version 8, which made some changes to the way it formatted UDP packets. I've also included some additional information in this tutorial that wasn't in the previous one for X-Plane version 6, and updated the sample source code to make it easier to follow, and easier to use as a foundation for other applications.


10 October 2006
With the new movie, Flyboys just having been released, there's been a little discussion about it on one of the e-mail lists I subscribe to. One person asked the question of why biplanes have been displaced by monoplanes (modern aircraft with only a single set of wings). What is it about monoplanes that makes them better? So, I wrote up a little reply. After sending it in to the e-mail group, I figured, "hey, that would be pretty good to put on my website." So, I cleaned it up a little bit, added a couple pictures, and created a page called Biplanes vs. Monoplanes in my Aviation Theory section.


18 August 2006
I've got a nice, good substantive update for today - I've added a new page to my Photos section, titled Guatemala 2006 Medical Mission Photos. My wife and I just got back from a week long medical mission to Guatemala, organized by the Wichita County Medical Alliance, and hosted by Agape in Action. This was my second year to go, and Irma's third. Irma is a nurse, and she's bilingual, so she worked mostly at the clinic meeting with patients. I'm not medically trained, so I mostly washed and sterilized instruments, along with any other odd jobs that needed to be done. We spent 5 1/2 days working in Quiche, one days sightseeing (Lake Atitlan and Antigua), and the rest of the time travelling. Once again, it was a very worthwhile trip to help as many people as we did. And like I did for the photos from last years trip, I've posted mostly photos from the day of sightseeing, and not many photos from inside the operating rooms, since a lot of people are bothered by those types of photos.

For a couple smaller updates, I've updated my Links page, adding a few sites, and fixing links for a few others that have moved from their old addresses to Science Blogs. For my Photo Page Generator program, I've posted an html version of the Readme file, and updated the links on the Programming and Downloads pages accordingly.


22 June 2006
Well, I fell a little behind in keeping up with my goal of at least one update per month. I've actually been spending much of the time that I'd normally devote to this site writing essays. Normally, I add my essays to this site, but for various reasons, I'd rather not do that with these. But, in the interest of adding something to this site so that it can continue to grow, I've added four photos to the Miscellaneous page of my Photo section. They're pictures from a day trip my family took about a year ago to Palo Duro Canyon, just outside Amarillo, TX. I'd originally intended to make a whole new section for those pictures, but once I got to looking at them, there really just weren't enough good ones. And while I was at it, I updated this section to my new format, where clicking on a thumbnail takes you to an html page with the picture on it, instead of linking directly to the picture. I hadn't done it before because there were only two pictures, but now that there are six, I figure it's worth the improved navigation.


24 April 2006
I finished the project noted in the previous update - updating my Aircraft Image Archive in the same way that I updated my photo galleries last year. The pages have been updated 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. While I was at it, I added navigation links to the bottom of each thumbnail page, so visitors won't have to go back to the main archive page every time they want to go to the next page in a category. This update also coverred my AeroDesign© East 2001 page. Anybody looking at the Aerodesign page needs to be sure to see this picture of a wing tip vortex - a little out of focus, but still very cool.


12 April 2006
I've begun a project to update my Aircraft Image Archive in the same way that I updated my photo galleries last year. The pages are being update 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 2005 update, but basically it's for improved navigation. While I'm at it, I'm slightly changing the order in which the images appear. The first time I made the page, everything was sorted alphabetically, but that puts things like "C-130" ahead of "C-47," and "F-101" ahead of "F-14." So, while still in mostly alphabetical order, I've modified it a few places to follow the proper numerical sequential order. So far, the completed pages include all of the alphabetical listings, and the jet fighter listings in the categorical section. I won't post another update on this until all of the categorical listings have been updated.


21 February 2006
I made a few changes last week that I'm just now documenting. First off, I did a slight bit of reorganization. I created a How To page, with directions for various projects. Some of these projects were previously listed on my Misc page, but I figured this new organization made a bit more sense. I added a link to the How To page to the main menu in the left hand column that appears on all of my pages, and removed the Mp3 entry from that menu, and moved it to the misc page. I figured there was so little content on the Mp3 page that it wasn't worth having its own entry in the main menu. In the new How To section, I created two new pages, Potato Salad Recipe and Wacky Cake Recipe.


9 February 2006
Well, it's finally come to this. I'm selling my RX-7. It was the first nice car I bought after I graduated from college, and it's a damn nice sports car, but it's time to get rid of it. My wife and I had been discussing selling it for a while - a two-seat sports car doesn't lend itself well to a family life, and I hadn't really been driving it all that much. And then, while it was parked on the side of the road in front of our house, another car came by and side-swiped it. I could get it fixed up, but if I'm just going to sell it, anyway, why go through all that hassle? So, I've put an ad in the paper that'll start running tomorrow, with a reference to a page on this site with more information on the car. I think it's a fair asking price no matter what, but if somebody buys it who's going to do a lot of the repairs on their own, it could end up being a really good deal for them. Or, even though I hate to think about it, for that price, somebody could part the car out and make a reasonable profit. Anyway, if you're reading this and live anywhere near Wichita Falls, TX, and have any interest in owning a good sports car, take a look at that page.

Update 11 Feb 06: Wow, that didn't take long. Somebody bought my car already - last night, the very same day that the ad first ran in the paper.


31 January 2006
Just a small update, on my newly added French Polynesia Travelling Tips page, I've added a small paragraph about the lack of a night life on Bora Bora and Moorea (not that that's a bad thing- just so people know what to expect), and another short paragraph about the small Navy Museum on Bora Bora. I also slightly changed the introduction to the restaurant, Bloody Mary's. I had said that it was our favorite restaurant on Bora Bora. But, with as few of restaurants as are on the island, that doesn't do it justice, since it's really quite a good restuarant by any standards.


30 January 2006
Last week, I updated my page on How to Interpret the Bible, and I'm just now getting around to documenting it. In case you've never seen it, it's an essay where I explore what seem to me to be the main positions concerning the divinity of the Bible, ranging from being divinely inspired, literal, and completely inerrant in all translations, to being a book written by humans, containing myths and stories from other cultures. In the end, I come to the conclusion that that last option seems the most likely. Most of the changes I made to the essay were small, mainly just changing the wording in a few places to make it read better. The biggest, most useful change, was that for Bible passages, I added links to BibleGateway.com, to the relevant chapters in both the King James Version and the New International Version of the Bible. Now, people can easily read the passages firsthand, 1) without having to rely on my quotation, and 2) saving them time from looking up the passage in a print version of the Bible.


11 January 2006
In keeping with putting up constructive material on this website, as opposed to just ranting and raving on My Soapbox or blog, I've made a new page called French Polynesia Travelling Tips. I'd received several e-mails from people asking our advice and about our experiences in French Polynesia, so I figured it was about time to make a page for it. I added a link to the page on the French Polynesia Photos page.


9 January 2006
Time for my first update of the new year. I've added a Downloads section to this site. It contains compiled, executable versions of a few of the programs on my Programming page. I figured that it would be nice to make a few of my better/more useful programs available to those people that don't have Visual Basic installed on their computers, which is probably most people. To that end, I modified my Photo Page Generator program to make it suitable to run as a stand-alone program, making a configuration file that users could save to/load from, so that their settings could be recorded for the different times that they run the program (in the VB program, I just saved it as part of the source code). I also made a change to the program to allow you to make multiple galleries using images from the same directory. I've put the source code for that latest version of that program onto my Programming page, as well making a note on that page about the Downloads section.

And, since it's a new year, I've re-organized the News & Updates Archive, putting all of the 2005 posts onto a new, separate page, and starting over on the main page with 2006 posts.