My hosting provider moved my account to a new server, but neglected to move my files along with it. There is also a new database server, but my tables didn't get copied either. Finally, a new PHP configuration broke some features in my site scripts that had to be updated. This all took me by surprise since the "migration" was not well publicized. I think the hosting provider hoped everything would go seamlessly and no one would notice. I guess my stuff must be a wierd exception.

Anyway, I have it all fixed now, so hopefully things work as well (or poorly) as usual.

I have new projects to post (I wish I had more time to work on them). In particular, I have begun learning to make my very own violin with the help of Mr. William Bartruff, who is an expert. I'll post some progress when I can.

Visitors to my site probably won't notice anything, but I have a good excuse to post a new article: I finally implemented very basic forms to add and update articles. Before, I had to use phpMyAdmin to do it. That wasn't too hard, but this is better.

I also got clued in about some new CSS things, so my articles are easier to enter and also better for "accessibility" (i.e. more readable by text-to-speech synthesizers).

I'm trying to update my existing articles to use the new CSS.

There is a new photo gallery on the site menu. I'm not a photographer at all, not even an amateur. These pictures represent my first attempt at artistic photography.

The photos are not full-resolution. Most of them are cropped considerably. In these cases, you get the full 7.1 MP detail, but only the subject is visible, and none of the background. Since I used Irfanview to auto-crop, any fortunate composition is merest serendipity. Some images didn't work cropped, so I scaled them. They are all 800x600. My site's gallery programming will sometimes do it's own wacky image resizing, so if you want the images at their normal size, just right-click them in your browser and use one of the other options for viewing them.

Some of these make pretty OK desktop background wallpapers, but not the 800x600 versions. So if you want the full-resolution version of something, drop me a note.

I'm using a cheap Kodak C743 point-and-shoot style camera. Nothing fancy.

After writing my "Recent Reads" post, I remembered that I had a wish list of books on Amazon. I set this list up years ago and haven't visited it since.

So I logged in to Amazon (after numerous attempts trying to remember my username and password) and opened up my list. After cleaning out some of the books I'm not interested in anymore, and adding a few new ones, it seems that I'm mostly interested in Model Shipbuilding and Computer Graphics. In fact, most of the books I am really interested in are already at home waiting for me to read them, and these tend to be in the history and philosophy genres.

Anyway, here is my Amazon wish list.

I've added a new art gallery with several of my works from my Basic Drawing class (ART 1060 at the University of Utah). I took this class more than two years ago and have finally posted some of my amateur drawings, as I was once encouraged to do by my colleagues and instructor.

The pictures that I have digitized are of a rather poor quality, something that I hope to remedy as soon as I have the proper lighting conditions, a tripod, and time to do it right all at once.

I was somewhat of an art prodigy as a young kid, always tracing something out of The Lore of Flight or The Lore of Ships. I made a number of my own drawings during my High School years, very little of which I still have. Unfortunately, my mind has been pulled to the left ever since I started programming computers professionally and it is difficult now to get that old creative spark back. My brothers, Dave and Joe, seem to have retained a good deal of talent while I stagnated.

I'll post more pictures as I can find them (I do have quite a few from Basic Drawing left to digitize). Of course, if I should ever produce anything new, I will make a point to post that as well.