September 28, 2003
UK pictures
The travel pictures from out year in England are here.
About this site
[Update 10/2003] These pages tell a little about us and describe recent happenings that might interest our families and friends. There are pages with news, lots of pictures, info about work, books/music/movies/humor, and living in England, links to other sites, and how to contact us. Usually, we update these pages every few days with news or pictures or both. We've had this site, in one form or another, since 1996.
For best results... These pages look best with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 or 5--with JavaScript and style sheets enabled, and lots of colors available. They will also look sort of OK with Netscape Navigator 4. If you can't see some of the text or pictures, make your browser window larger. For more tips, or a cure for insomnia, see Tools.
Browse and enjoy.
Tools
Digital camera
In November, 2002, the Fuji MX-500 I'd had for four years started to go. I dropped it and the battery door latch snapped, requiring a rubber band to keep the batteries in the camera. Then, after returning from Florida, I discovered that the final 24 images I'd taken there were gone, due to a corrupt memory card. I'm not sure whether that was due to the camera, the card or airport security, but it was the final straw. For Christmas, 2002 I replaced the Fuji with an Olympus C-5050.
My birthday present in 1998 was a Fuji MX-500 digital camera. The camera takes pictures and stores them in JPEG form, so there is no need to go to the developer. So far the only annoyance is the slight delay in taking the picture after pressing the shutter release. It takes about 5 seconds to store the picture/recharge the flash after it is snapped. The exposure, white balance and flash (plus other stuff) is adjustable. The flash is "hot" so I have it cranked down to the minimum. The camera (like all digital cams, I gather) eats batteries—more so when using the LCD as a viewfinder or to review pictures. It has a macro feature that allows very close-up shots (like those of the flowers in Jamaica.)
All the 1998 Jamaica pictures, by the way, were taken in the lower of the camera's two resolutions (640x480, rather than 1280x1024.) This was mainly due to my fear of running out of storage space for pictures while in Jamaica. Higher res pictures take up more space. As it turned out, I snapped about 160 shots (more, but I junked the clearly bad ones on the spot) and had some storage left. Next time, I'll switch to high res for the flower type shots and low res for the "Look honey, another Coconut Rum and pineapple juice!" shots. The lower res is fine for JPEGs that appear on the WWW, not so good for printing. Generally, I use the larger image size and medium compression: that yields about 23 shots on an 8 meg disk--conveniently close to a roll of film, and the image resolution is fine.
Chemical to digital
Kodak developing (through Shoppers Food Warehouse, anyway) offers the option of getting your prints on disk as well as on paper. The result is a 3.5" disk or two with JPEG images on them—perfect for sending to the WWW...
Image editing
I now use Paint Shop Pro, which is nice. In the past I've used Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photo House, which came free with my UK computer.
Web cam
When I had a cam on this site, it was done with an 8mm video camera, the Snappy, and a great software package called WebCam32. To get images from 8mm video, I used the Snappy image grabber, version 3.
Layout and formatting
I created the first version of this site with Microsoft
FrontPage 98. I switched to Macromedia Homesite version 4 in September, 1999, then version 5 in September, 2001. The style sheets and most of the DHTML and javascript (the little that remains) is hand-crafted.
I use a server-side programming language called PHP. It's fun. The advantage is that I can generate the menu at the top of each page and the footer at the bottom from a standard template. That means the site it easier to maintain becuase I don't need to edit every single page to make basic changes. I also use PHP to take the selection you make from the Favorite Picture or Daily Archive lists and builds a page to display the picture you chose. On the IK Pictures site, PHP drives all the picture display, so I only needed to build the basic thumbnail pages. When you select a thumbnail, PHP builds the page that displays the larger version of the picture.
Help
12/18/98 - I've found two books that have been
a great help in understanding style sheets and JavaScript -- JavaScript: The
Definitive Guide by David Flanagan (published by O'Reilly) and The DHTML
Companion by Robert Jon Mudry (published by Prentice Hall).
Site Host
This site is lives at Pair Networks (http:/www.pair.com)
And Thanks To...
Thanks to brother Tom for scanning pictures of the kids from summer, 1997. Thanks to Payton Smith, Greg Wilska and Dave Wessner, who in October of 1999 opened these pages in there respective browsers and lived to report back.