Banner Images

Here are all the pictures I use in the blog’s banner and how those pictures came to be.

Biltmore Estate
In May 2018 we had a Peace Corps reunion in Asheville and went to the Biltmore. They had some Dale Chihuly glasswork on display including these two boats.

Chihuly at Biltmore

Chihuly at Biltmore

Munich and Prague

In May 2018 I went with Bob, Eric and Andrew to Munich and Prague. The first picture is the New City Hall from St. Peter’s belltower while the second is from the Theatine Church in Munich, while the others were taken in Prague including some subway art and pictures of the Charles Bridge and the art nouveau Svatopluk Čech Bridge.

Munich

Theatine Church Munich

Prague

Subway in Prague

Charles Bridge Prague

Charles Bridge Prague

Svatapluk Cech Bridge

Svatapluk Cech Bridge

California

For my 50th birthday in 2015, I took a trip to San Francisco. San Francisco has a couple of great bridges including the Golden Gate bridge and the Bay Bridge.

Golden Gate Bridge

Bay Bridge

I drove south of San Francisco to Monterey and beyond that where the Pacific Coast Highway runs along some beautiful coastline, including this picture and the Bixby Creek Bridge.

Big Sur

Bixby Creek Bridge

In that same area is a great state park called Point Lobos State Reserve which lets you get up close the shore.

Point Lobos

Cozumel

On Mom’s 75th birthday cruise, one of the stops was Cozumel, Mexico. We hired a van and stopped at a beach with some neat rock and a blowhole that wasn’t working due to low tide.

cropped-cozumel.jpg

Colorado National Monument and Arches National Park

In September 2013 I drove a U Haul truck out to Salt Lake City and we stopped by these two national parks. This first image is Colorado National Monument, a panorama image from the Grand View viewpoint:

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And here is a shot from Arches National Park of the South Window:

6181_s-window-panorama1.jpg

Yellowstone and Grand Tetons

In May 2013 I went out to Salt Lake City and visited the Bonneville Salt Flats, Golden Spike National Historic Site, Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National Park. This first picture was taken at Golden Spike where they have replica trains and replica train tracks from the completion of the transcontinental railroad:

goldenspike.jpg

Later that day I drove out to the Bonneville Salt Flats and took this picture:

copy-bonneville.jpg

Also at Bonneville I took this picture of the sun setting over Nevada:

bonnevillesunset.jpg

In Grand Teton National Park I took this picture of the Tetons from the Willow Flats area:

tetons.jpg

On the Cascade Canyon hike from Jenny Lake, Susan said she liked the texture of this log:

log.jpg

Then in Yellowstone, I took this picture of the Sapphire Pool hot spring:

sapphirepool.jpg

Also in Yellowstone, I took this picture of travertine terrace formations at Mammoth Hot Springs:

mammoth.jpg

Ireland

A lot of pictures come from my July 2008 trip to Ireland (gallery). In chronological order, they pretty much tell everywhere I went. We started in Dublin, and while Susan’s choir was practicing, I walked down to the River Liffey and took pictures of a lot of different cool bridges. This is the Mellows Bridge. I uploaded this picture to Wikipedia.

Leaving Dublin and heading south, we stopped by the Rock of Cashel, a hill with some old churches on top of it. This is a neat picture, not as good cropped as at full size.

Continue reading “Banner Images”

301 Redirect

Now that the new blog is in place, it needs people to be able to find it. I looked in the logs and nobody is getting to it via search engines. Jeb was going to set up some redirects at some point to automatically forward people from the old pages to the new ones. Sometimes you will run across a web page that tells you the original page has moved and will transfer you to the new page in a couple of seconds. You can do this with meta tags or with some javascript. But the best way to do this is through a 301 redirect which users won’t even notice and Google and other search engines accept as an official move of your site. The “301” number means the page has moved permanently. If Google was sending people to your old page, when they see the 301 redirect they should keep sending them to the new site. With websites, it is all about keeping your page rank with Google. For instance, on the Flashlight Wiki this month, 3,553 visitors were referred by search engines. 3,296 of those were referred by Google (93%). Second place is Yahoo with 93 referrals (2.6%). Not that the blog is a money making site, but it’s nice to be noticed. Continue reading “301 Redirect”

MediaWiki Extension MetaKeywordsTag

My cousin, Mary, invited me to be her Facebook friend today and I gladly accepted. On her page she had a link to 2012 as the Year of Code, saying her New Year’s resolution was to learn more code. At the link they had a quote by someone saying:

A young person asked me for advice for “those who aren’t technical.” My answer was “Get technical.”

Continue reading “MediaWiki Extension MetaKeywordsTag”

Sorting Like an iPod

At work we use drafting software called Microstation. It originally ran on UNIX workstations, but was soon ported to PC’s. However there are still little UNIX touches. One weird thing in UNIX is how things are sorted. Usually when you sort things with numbers and letters in the name, the numbers sort to the top. In UNIX for whatever reason, the numbers sort to the bottom. Since Mac OS has been based on UNIX for a while (I guess this is why, I don’t know for sure), the iPod sorts songs the same way. So 10,000 Maniacs is at the end of my Artists list instead of the top. Continue reading “Sorting Like an iPod”