Rozworld’s WebLog

123ehost.com, my web hosting company just added blogging software to the available packages I can install on my website. I chose Word Press to install and I now have a professional Blog on my site that I control. I was kind of waiting for them to make it available. Word press allows me to edit my blog entries from a web user interface, it categorizes the entries with ease, and allows readers to automatically make comments. All the old entries have been copied from the old blog. I’m really looking forward to having fun with this software. Please enjoy!

My Great Aunt Mona’s slide collection as great historic significance to our family because it encompasses 20 years of color 35 mm film between the 1950’s and the 1970s. I was recently able to digitally scan in this collection and archive it. It contains about 460 slides mostly from Mona and Ron’s time in Alaska in the 1960s but there are a lot from those special times when they came back to Wisconsin to visit family and friends. The link to a sampling of the slides can be found here :

Mona and Ron’s Slide Collection

I’ll make a CD copy of the collection for any family member or friend who would like a copy.

I wanted to share these two photos that I have in my digital collection of the same glacier only 35 years apart. The pictures are of Portage glacier in Alaska just outside of Anchorage along the Seward Hwy. The first one was taken in 1961 and features my great-uncle Ron in the photo. You can see Portage glacier coming down into the glacial lake. The second one was taken by yours truly in 1996 and shows portage glacier receding back up into the mountains. Now these two photos were taken about the same time of year and glaciers in general do not change much throughout the year. There still is copious amounts of pack ice on Portage Lake in both photos, but the glacier itself is noticeably smaller. Now this is not a scientific study but this looks to me likes it’s evidence of global warming.

With our digital photo collection approaching 10,000 files, I thought it was time to start looking at digital photo organizer software. So far I have tried the organizers from Canon and Adobe and they both have features that I find annoying, including white mattes around each thumbnail in Adobe’s software and Canon’s is slow and non-intuitive to navigate. The last organizer I tried was Picasa from Google, which is a free download from http://picasa.google.com. Once I tried Picasa, I really liked the user interface. It has very cool zoom in and edit features, the search is easily available, and you can turn tagged images into web pages for display on a website. I would highly recommend Picasa.

Every once in awhile a random blogger will stumble upon my website and decide they would like to use an image for their own blog without my permission. This has happened twice in the last year and both times I decided to have a little fun with their blogs. What happens is that they make a link to an image on my website so that it appears on their site. Well, if I change my picture but the name of the file remains the same, I can to some extent, control what shows up on their blog. Most recently, a stay-at-home christian mother in Texas, decided she would like to use Stretch’s READ poster. I was flattered but I couldn’t resist. So I changed the Image to : Stretch’s Science Poster.

Here’s what the blogger had to say on her site  http://laughter4daystocome.blogspot.com. 

(UPDATE: Originally I had posted an image I found online, a take-off on those READ posters you see at the library. After GiBees commented on it, I logged in to respond and noticed the image had been changed. Instead of the READ across the top it had some new age drivel that I do not endorse, so I pulled it off. I would never encouarage someone to put down the Bible and read more science–I would say quite the opposite. My apologies.)

I think she was clueless in more ways than one.