November 2004

This month seems to have been one of unrelenting rain and dreary skies. Blecchhh! Almost unable to make progress at anything-and yes the leaves are still on the ground.

August 2004

The boat has been successfully rolled upright.

She has a name at last: Pangur Ban, after the white cat from the ancient Irish poem.

July 2004

Spent most of this month on vacation. The weekend of the 4th attended a friend's medieval/SCA-themed wedding in West Virginia. From there we went to Washington D.C. for a week, then hopped up to Mystic Connecticut for a day at the Seaport Museum. The rest of the time was spent on boat building and house renovations.

My impressions of Mystic

Pictures from Mystic.

Construction details from Mystic.

Progress on the boat project.

June 2004

There is only one step from fanaticism to barbarism. -- Denis Diderot, Essay on the Merit of Virtue

There must, somewhere, be a publisher of self-righteous word play for church signs. It's pretty innocuous stuff for the most part. I thought it might be nice if ministers wrote their own material once in a while. I think I was wrong. Last week, this appeared on a church I pass each day during my commute.

Read it. Now read it again. Now substitute Islam for Christianity, and put it outside the nearest Mosque. The result would be a visit from our Patriot Police.

We don't need fanatical anything.

May 2004

Not much to report really. Just a sort of grudging progress on all fronts. Some work on the boat, some work on the house, some work on the yard, some work on the web, blah, blah, blah . . .

If you haven't already found User Friendly, take a look.

April 2004

Added something like 1770 family photos on 43 index pages. This is mostly for the benefit of family members who might like copies. As part of the effort to store and index the thousands of family pictures I inherited, I've begun a series of articles on storing, sorting and filing photographs, as well as a section on the threats to preservation of photographs. These are in very rough draft form as yet, but may prove useful even before they are complete. The boat project is momentarily stalled by a combination of remodeling, programming class work, and a really nasty case of the flu.