2011 Overhaul

This site has been alive since 1998, starting out as a very basic set of pages set up on Tripod to share some terribly badly scanned train slides. While that is still the main purpose of this site (although I simply take bad digital pictures now and thus don't have to scan them), the time had come to make some changes.

If you visited in 2010, you might have noticed that there hadn't been any updates here for a while. I haven't died, but getting a job back with my old company has curtailed the travel a bit. The other problem was that I had been running out of web space for a long time. This is why many of the old links took you back to Tripod, I just didn't have room here.

So now I have my third host in GoDaddy.com who gives me 10x the space at about half the cost. Plus cheaper domain registration. Plus Danica Patrick. So with that I thought I'd try to get all the files - surprisingly there are more than 3000 pictures, plus the same number of thumbnail images, and double that again if you count all the FrontPage nonsense - onto the new host and give the site a visual spruce up. 

I decided to go for the 'garish red light district look' and I'm not sure I'm in love with it either, so have fiddled with the Tehachapi pages as a starting point and others may follow in time. The 'thumbnail' pages are being rebuilt using a CSS file to define the look, which takes ages, but should make life easier when I decide to change everything back. Some of the stuff that has been moved over from Tripod may be a little dodgy, broken and clunky as well, but in time it will all get an overhaul.

In other recent news, I am now a certified Apple Fanboi as I try to find my way around a new MacBook Air - 13 inch/4gb RAM, 256gb SSD with a gorgeous 27 inch Apple cinema display. It runs Photoshop CS5 very well. Surprisingly well. For years I used a freebie copy of PS called Photoshop LE (this is pre "Elements") that came with a scanner that I bought in 1998. I've taught myself a lot since then, but a lot more since I bought a 'proper' version of PS in 2008. Unsurprisingly, newer images look a lot better than older images on this site. And some of the old ones are real stinkers. Maybe they will get a makeover in time.

Screen sizes are also getting bigger and network speeds for most people are improving too, so the old 800 x 600 pictures that fitted nicely into a 1024x768 browser window now look tiny. Most of the new pics going forward will be bigger - about 1000x1000 sized.

Anyway, that's the news that isn't... feedback always welcome.

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