Welcome!

We just look dead because I haven't bothered to update the front page in a few years.

Currently working on a new site that will hopefully include the photo gallery that I took down from here - with tons more photos, including my wildlife and landscape stuff.

I haven't flown commercial in around seven years - well before Sep 11, 2001. I had to take a commercial flight a couple weeks ago and boy, have things changed.

Some of the changes that have been made in the name of security I can understand - more extensive screening of checked baggage, better security at the passenger screening area, etc. But a lot of the changes are simply ridiculous: "security theater" as it's been called. The latest insanity involves the prohibition of liquids and gels. Grandma can't take her bottled water aboard the aircraft any more. And you can forget about buying duty-free liquor or perfumes during your layover.

But what's extra-stupid about this new ban is that it's not being enforced. I could easily have carried on a bottle of water in my backpack - no one is searching passengers or their carry-on luggage before they walk down the gangway. Furthermore, it's been reported that the flight crews don't care. They see passengers drinking from their water bottles, or applying their lip gloss, and they don't care.

This ban on gels and liquids is a reactionary measure designed to make us feel safer. In practice, it's totally ineffective at actually preventing liquids or gels from being brought aboard. It is Security Theater.

The world lost an aviation pioneer this week. Scott Crossfield went down in his Cessna 210 in bad weather.

I won't try to summarize his biography here - there's just too much to tell. You can google him for yourself and spend days reading all about him.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Crossfield at Oshkosh last year. He gave a 30 minute talk about himself and his career. It was completely unscripted - he just talked off the top of his head for half an hour. He took questions from the audience, and those would often lead him into more great stories. I wish I had recorded that presentation. He hung around afterwards and talked individually to the people that came up to meet him. He was a very personable guy and still had a razor sharp mind - pretty amazing for his age.

An aside: During that same trip to Oshkosh, my buddy and I were making the 2 mile walk back to our campsite one night when a car pulled up alongside and the driver offered us a lift. As the door opened and the dome light came on, I saw it was Bob Hoover behind the wheel. :D

I love the aviation community.

As of today, the Orlando Sanford International Airport (KSFB) has become Class C. I'm listening to the scanner and it seems to be going relatively smoothly for the first day. I did hear one poor guy doing closed traffic call the tower and request to depart to the east. Tower told him he'd have to land and contact clearance delivery. WTF? I hope that's not going to be SOP; there's waaay too much flight training going on at the airport for that to be practical.

Well, I decided to start putting some of my photography on the site. I'm kinda torn over this because while I love to share these images with others who can appreciate them, I hate the idea that some people are going to be stealing these and using them for their own purposes. There's not a whole lot I can do about that though. I did format them to rather crappy low-quality jepgs, so at least they won't be print-worthy. I think they're good enough for web viewing.

I'll be adding more galleries over time. You'll see some empty ones right now. Those are just placeholders until I get around to uploading more. I have tens of thousands of images taken over the last 10 years or so. No, I'm not planning to upload them all. ;) But it does take a while to select which ones are worthy, then format and upload them. So keep checking back to see what's new in the Gallery!

I managed to get the entire site layout done in CSS. And I learned something that I already knew: Internet Explorer sucks. I mean, sucks a lot. I guess they figure since they have 80-some percent of the browser market that they can ignore standards and make their browser do whatever they want.

CSS is actually really cool, and a really good idea. Once you understand it, it's pretty simple to lay out a site however you want. Writing the style sheets and the html is fairly painless. With very little effort your site displays just like you envisioned it. Well, on every browser except IE, that is. OMFG. It takes 10 or 20 minutes to get your website up and running under Firefox or Opera or any relatively standards-compliant browser. Then you spend the next 4 or 5 hours writing stupid f-ing hacks to make it display in IE close to what you intended. Yea, I'm a little miffed.

I still want to do a little more to clean up the CSS a bit. The overall look of the site won't change though. Unless you're using IE, and in that case, God be with you because I'm not.

Oh, and I did get a new antenna by the way. :)

I'm in the process of making some formatting changes to the site. You probably (and by that I mean, hopefully) won't see any changes. The original design of the site relied on about 90% tables and 10% CSS. I'm trying to turn that ratio around. You might need to clear your cache if you're seeing funky things. I had to re-do all the title images (the planes in the upper left of the screen), so if they look all whackajaw, then you're looking at an old copy. Clearing your cache and reloading the page should fix that.

Please let me know if you see anything too crazy with the site. I'm working on some other surprises as well. :)