Salutations on the Memorial Day Weekend

I guess I'll be doing a little work on the site this Memorial Day weekend.

As of 2 pm Saturday, I "modernized" four crew pages, crews 14 through 17. As of 4:30 pm I added one half page to the chronology. I updated two more crew pages on Sunday. It's slow going on the crew pages, unfortunately. As of end of day 5/31 I updated the Terrell through Rinehart crew pages. The Park Crew pages took a little more time because of the number of images and the extra page devoted to their unfortunate loss. I can see that I'll have to come back and fine-tune some of these pages, but hopefully the pages are improved over what they used to be.

Grand Rapids Reunion

As I have mentioned, the VPB-118 Reunion is planned for August of this year, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There's been a little bit of head-scratching about what the activities might be in Grand Rapids. I've pointed out that Battle Creek, not terribly far away, is where the Kellogg's cereal empire is centered. This evening I happened to look at an email newsletter that just came in and was stunned to see this enormous cast horse, designed by Leonardo DaVinci five hundred years ago. This is a modern casting of a recreation of his sculpture. I guess this would be an interesting attraction to visit! At this time I have no idea if this is under consideration, but it pretty much debunks that notion that there's not a lot of note in the area. I provided a link to the story alongside the image.

Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park Welcomes Six-Millionth Visitor

Update

I apologize for not updating the site or this blog in a while. I've been studying JavaScript as well as doing some JavaScript freelance work. Which leads in to something I'd like to comment on.

59% of the visitors to the VPB-118 site that are using Internet Explorer are using either version 7 or version 6(!) of this browser. Out of all visitors, 56% are using Internet Explorer, so that means that one third of the visitors to the site are using outdated versions of what many people consider to be the worst web browser available. Internet Explorer 8 (the improved, current version) is considered by many to be the slowest and most problem-plagued (as in virus/bot attacks) browser there is.

I don't really want to fall into a Microsoft-bashing mode, because they do have some great policies, for example free development programs available for download. The Windows operating system has become far more stable and reliable than I imagined possible in the early days of Windows 3.1, when several crashes a day were not considered unusual. However, Microsoft does have a bad history when it comes to their browser. With version 8 they have mostly redeemed themselves in terms of standards compliance, but in the past they have flaunted the concerns of web designers and programmers by retaining their own versions of event handling and document object model. With the web design and programming that I do, I still have to compensate for many of these wrong policies, as do many others.

Long story short, I would recommend that everyone use the fastest, most standards-compliant browsers available for a better experience. Check this out: speed comparisons. I hate to have to put it this way, but if you want your pages to load fast and be rendered the way they were intended, use anything but Internet Explorer. If you use something like Opera and it won't work with certain sites, install Firefox, which has wonderful compatibility in my experience. Did you know that Apple's Safari browser is available for the Windows platform also? It is, and it's a good browser.

I mostly use Opera because it has a lot of features like "notes" and "mouse gestures" that allow me to get around really fast in the app and get a lot done. Opera sometimes doesn't get recognized as a standard browser, so there are some sites that refuse it entry, which I think is kind of nasty. I also use Chrome, which I like a lot. It is by far the best app for printing web pages from; the accuracy is fantastic; also it is very fast - especially on sites that Google (the parent) owns, such as YouTube, Blogger (where we are now), and Google Analytics. Firefox is, as I stated, very solid and reliable. Safari is very slick and performs well.

Opera
Firefox
Chrome
Safari

2010 VPB-118 Reunion

Word is that this year's reunion will take place before Labor Day in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There is supposed to be something in the mail soon. The reunion is for crew, family and friends (by invitation). If you are not on the mailing list but are eligible and interested in attending, please shoot me an email and I'll pass on your information!

Progress Report

I'm making a brief comment here to let folks know I'm still slugging away on the website but have to divide my time between a number of activities so progress is not as fast as I would have desired. I have upgraded the first eight crew pages to the new format and hope to have them all changed over in a short while. I hope everyone stays healthy and prosperous.

New format for crews pages

I am converting to a new look for the crews pages. You can see a preview here. It will take a while to convert all of the pages to the new look. Some of the pages with images relating to the crews will be consolidated into the new crew pages as part of the slide show plug-in on the bottom of the page. Other collections of photos such as log books and scrapbooks will be put in image galleries but will either have their own pages or will have a tab in the respective crew page. The few people that do not have JavaScript enabled will still be able to see the images, but they will all just open on one page. Thanks for visiting the site to find out about VPB-118!

VPB-118 Sub-domain

I'm loving my new site hosting situation. I created a sub-domain on my site for VPB-118. This is no biggie and as a matter of fact none of the paths on the new server are affected. If you are using bookmarks to go to the site, you will possibly need to update them, however, because I took out an unnecessary level that was on the old site (entirely my own fault). So if you have been getting "Error 404" messages, the reason is probably the new paths to the VPB-118 stuff. So I guess I should tell you the address for the new sub-domain: www.vpb-118.hypercontinuum.com.