Date Events
10/14/2006 The U. N. imposed sanctions on North Korea for exploding an atomic bomb last Sunday that threatens the peace of the world. Their leader Kim Jong II is a very unstable person as is the whole country. He has spent a large amount of money on weapons research while leaving his people in poverty. He is a client country of China who sustains him financially and is afraid that his country falls, they will be over run by refugees. However, they are very angry with him now and have signed off on the U.N. sanctions against him. China as one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council has veto powers.
  Auburn no. 11 upset Florida No. 2. Arkansas upset Auburn No. 2 last week to become number 17. Should go higher this week. Adrian Peterson Oklahoma Hiesman trophy candidate was injured and is out for the season. He broke a collar bone. It is most likely that he will go to the pros next year even though he is only a junior this year.
  SMU beat  Marshall 31-21 to go 4 and 3 giving them hope of a 6 game winning season making them bowl eligible. This season can possibly the best season they have had since they were punished by the NCAA with a death penalty about ten years ago. They might even have turned the corner to become a respectable football team as they had always been preceding the death penalty. They also have freshman quarterback, Justin Willis who is breaking all freshman quarterback records. Hope for the future.
10/15/2006 Lorena Ochoa beat Anna Sorenson by two strokes in the Samung golf World  championship.  She now leads Anna in money earnings for the year, tournament wins,  and championship points for the year. Anna still has a chance if she wins the year end championship tournament in November for which she would receive a one million dollar winning bonus. This year could possibly be the year that Lorena becomes the dominant women's golfer in the world and continue own in future years. I hope so, but Anna is tough and has reined for many years being one of the best in women's golf history.
  New Orleans beat Philadelphia 31-24 one week after Philadelphia beat Dallas putting Dallas again in a good position to win the NFC East, since they also won.  Today Dallas's Tony Roma threw his first NFL pass completion and touchdown pass. All of Dallas is waiting for him to take over as the quarterback starter over Drew Bledsoe, since he is the future and Drew is the past.
10/16/2006 Finished reading the book La Belle France by Alistair Horne. It is the best book I have ever read on this subject from the Roman era of AD 358 to the present government in 2006. France has the most volatile history that I am aware of. It is almost unbelievable the turmoil it has under gone and still survives as an important nation in the world. Its citizens are very hard to please and they have had some very bad leaders resulting in much violence and civil war in Paris. They are also very independent minded even though the U.S. and Britain, and Russia has bailed them out of two World Wars where they  would have been defeated by Germany.  Had this not happened, they would certainly not be a very important nation today. Without going into detail, as most everyone knows the two most important events in their history were their Revolution in 1789 and the rise and fall of Napoleon in 1789 and 1815 respectively. Also a very important event in their history is the rise to power of General De Gaulle.  They needed him to save their country more than once after World War II. They needed him to save their country more than once after World War II.  In spite of all this, Paris is regarded as the most beautiful city in the world and their contribution to politics, art and culture is recognized as very important to the world.
10/17/2006 Watched an inspiring and moving  DVD Finding Neverland starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Dustin Hoffman, and Radha Mitchell. This story is about the playwright James H. Barrie and what inspired him to write the classic play Peter Pan- The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow up in 1904. Although it is semi fictional, Barrie was the guardian of the orphaned boys who inspired him to write the play. Finding Neverland was hailed as one of the year 2004's best motion pictures of the year.
  Looked at very interesting video on youtube.com of a pair of Mexican nine year old boys and their rock band. One played the drums and one played the electronic guitar and sang. They were very good. It looked like the video was taken in their garage. Completed first coat paint on my garage door.  I plan to finish it within the week.
10/18/2006 Sent e-mails to SMU and McKinney School District protesting against Playboy taking nude photos of SMU female students and to McKinney  School Board protesting against parent's undue influence over the school management, particularly in sports. These e-mails are in response to these two issues reported in the newspapers.
10/19/2006 Watched Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal win today at the Madrid Masters Series Tennis Tournament. Roger is ranked number 1 in the world and Rafael is ranked number 2. They both moved on and there is a possibility they could meet in the final. Of course, Roger is my  favorite tennis player, and I hope he wins the tournament. Andy Murray was upset by Novak Đjoković. I was happy Andy lost. I don't like him.
10/20/2006 Rafael Nadal was defeated by TomᚠBerdych in the Madrid Master Series Championship knocking him out of a chance to win the event. Since I want Roger Federer to win the championship, I was happy.
  Fernando Gonzales beat Tomas Berdych and Roger Federer beat David Nalbandian to advanc3e to the final match in the Madrid Master Series Championship.
10/22/2006 Roger Federer beat Fernando Gonzales for the Madrid Master Series Championship. Maria Sharapova beat Daniela Hantuchova for the Zurich Open Championship. Both Philadelphia and Washington lost today giving Dallas a chance to take the East NFL lead if they can beat New York tomorrow.
10/23/06 The Dallas Cowboys fell apart today losing to the New York Giants 36-22 in front of their home crowd. Drew Bledsoe, the starting quarterback, was pulled at half time primarily because he threw an interception in the end zone at the end of the half which would have given the Cowboys the half time lead. He was replaced by rookie Tony Romo who did as poor a job as Bledsoe, if not worse, throwing three interceptions, one of which was thrown into the end zone resulting in a 96 yard return for a Giants touchdown which sealed the game win for them. This was Roma's first time to play in a regular NFL game with the game on the line. Romo did show some sparks of ability that Bledsoe does not have, namely the ability to move in the pocket to avoid sacks. He also threw two touchdown passes. The Cowboys offensive line was the main contributor to the loss. They were not able to block effectively for the run or protect Bledsoe. It will be interesting to see who the coach Parcells starts at quarterback next week. All the fans want him to start Romo again and let him learn from his mistakes. With a chance to go to the playoffs still a possibility the veteran Bledsoe could start again next week. I personally think Parcells made a bad decision to pull Bledsoe in the Giants game. I'm not sure Roma has enough experience to take them to the playoffs. Parcells has rolled the dice; however, and may think he has to give Roma a chance to prove himself. It could go either way. Parcells said at the end of the game he would have to think about who to start next week.
10/24/06 Had to recreate several pages on my personal website ralphduvall.com because they got erased someway. I am not sure how. I am having trouble saving pages after I create them for some reason. I may have to reload the software I use MS FrontPage. In order to save them I had to use the option "do not overwrite files". This is not right at all and it ended up that new pages were not written on my C hard drive. To get them on my hard drive, I had to download them from the remote site. This is altogether wrong. If the problem does not go away, I am going have to figure it out. It made just take a re installation of the software. I would not have had to do this,  if I saved my original data to my H backup disk. I am now saving every thing I create at the end of every day on my H backup drive to prevent this from happening again. This is first time I have had any problem of losing data on my C drive, the main drive on my PC.
10/25/06 It looks to me that it is time to pull out of the Iraq war in a measured way. It was a major mistake to go in there in the first place even if they had had weapons of mass destruction. which they did not. There would not have been a threat to the United States. The administration deceived the American public into believing there were WMD.  All you have to do is read history to understand that the Shiites and the Sunnis have been killing each other since Islam was formed in the 600's A.D. That is not ever going to change unless they themselves change it. No outside source will ever change it.
10/26/06 Bill Parcells, the Dallas Cowboys coach, made a decision to go with rookie quarterback Tony Roma in next Sunday's game against Carolina. Drew Bledsoe will be the backup. Most people think that Roma will be the starter for the rest of the season. This could easily change, if he plays poorly against Carolina. In particular, if he throws too many interceptions. This something that Parcells thinks is very important. I personally think it is a bad decision. I hope I am wrong, because Roma  needs to be the quarterback for the future. If he does not work out, this could affect decisions on who to try and add to the roster next year. It could also mean that Parcells might lose his job. I am more worried about the effect on the team and the city of Dallas than Parcells or the owner Jerry Jones. I have never like Jerry Jones and never will. He fired Tom Landry, the Dallas legendary coach, without telling him before he announced it to the press right after he purchased the Cowboy franchise. This is unforgivable. I would love it, if Jones  was still in Little Rock.

Completed the second coat of paint on my garage door. I had to go to Home Depot to match the paint to my house color. They did a great job. The door still does not look acceptable to me. I will have to put on a third coat at least. I will keep at it until I get it looking acceptable to me.
10/27/2006 Ford manufactured their last Taurus today. It is a great car and the most popular in the decade of the 90's. Ford has just let it wither on the vine. It is a shame, because they could have supported it more by updating it and promoting it. I believe they will regret it in the end. I own a 1995 Taurus I bought used for $10,000 about six years ago.  It is still running great with only 75,000 miles on it. I have had no serious problems with it so far and plan to continue to drive it until it can no longer be maintained. I love it.
10/28/2006 Redesigned my web site ralphduvall.com to give it a completely different look, which I believe will make it more attractive. I have not made a final decision yet and will try it out for a while before deciding. Right now it looks good. I continue to add to my web site everyday with new items. I am also following my decision to keep up my journal everyday.
10/29/2006 Completed reading an excellent non fiction book on the history of Russia which I have added to my list of favorite books on this web site. The name Russia a History. It gives a complete history from the very beginnings to the fall of the Super power a recent and most important event in their history and the world. It shows that Communism is not a practical government for a country.

Southern California a national champion or in the championship game for several of the past seasons fell from the undefeated ranks and dropped way down in the standing giving other teams a chance to jump over them in the race for a national champion. They were defeated by Oregon State at Oregon State 33-31 failing on the last play to make a two point conversion which would have tied the score. Oklahoma State defeated the favorite Missouri at Missouri. Texas Tech lost to Texas at Texas Tech when Texas came from behind with 25 unanswered points in the second half while holding Tech scoreless. It was an ugly game for Tech having many opportunities to score without being able to. Tech is going to have to really evaluate this game to see what they need to do to correct their mistakes if they are going to remain in contention for a bowl bid. They were expected to beat Texas,  since they have a very high scoring offense.
10/30/2006 The Dallas Cowboys defeated the Carolina Panthers at Carolina today an unexpected victory, 35 to 14, based on their performance the last few weeks. Bill Parcells, the coach, rolled the dice on his future by starting the rookie, Tony Roma, who replaced the veteran Drew Bledsoe. Roma performed exceptionally well backed up by  much improved offensive and defensive lines. It was a team victory. Roma got everyone in in pass patterns giving Terrell Owens more chances than he has had since coming to Cowboys. Owens also came through many times, but it was the quarterback, Roma, who inspired his teammates to victory. Surprisingly, he was very very quick on  releasing the ball with plenty of velocity and accuracy. He also scrambled several times to give the Cowboys important drive saving first downs. His quickness saved him from many sacks. At this stage, he seems to be just what the Cowboys need to make a good drive toward the playoffs. The Carolina Panthers also helped him by playing a very poor game. Stay tuned for future reports on the success or failure of the Cowboys.
10/31/2006 Attended first day of class for MS FrontPage, a software program that writes HTML code needed to interface to internet browsers. Purchased book that goes with the class. HTML code is necessary to post a web site on the internet.

SMU beat UAB tonight 22-9 making their record 5 and 4 for the season. They might become bowl eligible with one additional victory. They have three games left. There best chance is against Rice.  Their other two opponents are Tulsa and Houston, both of which have very good teams. There chance at a bowl depends on how many and who in addition have six victories.
11/01/2006 Went to see the movie "Flags of Our Fathers" with my son. It was a very good anti war movie directed by Clint Eastwood.  It focuses on the cynical creation of heroes. In this case it was three men who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima which resulted in the photograph that became the most famous photograph in history. It served the purpose of giving the United States hope for victory over Japan in World War II and raising the money needed to continue the war by selling war bonds. The three men mentioned above were the reason that the fund raising was successful as they toured the United States extensively to make this a success. Although this was a success, it raised several questions about the morality of  war. It destroyed the lives of two of the men and the third never spoke to his family or anyone regarding the experiences he had in the fighting at Imo Jima. It was hell on earth. The soldiers fighting there fought for their fellow soldiers more than anything else. There were six soldiers who helped raise the flag and only three of them survived long enough for the picture to reach the newspapers. Although none of the survivors thought of themselves as heroes and felt guilt that the three others had died, they were convinced by the government to tour to sell war bonds. Two of them died in poverty.  One commented that he was only trying to stay alive.

The story is more complicated than this. The whole story was a myth. The flag photographed was the second flag raised that day. The first flag raisers (there were also six of them) were never given any recognition. Nor was the movie photographer who took pictures of both flag raisings. The only photographer given any recognition was the one who took the picture that showed up in the newspapers. Only through fate was this photograph even taken. The photographer who took the picture missed his chance to take a picture of the first flag raising and made sure he got to the second flag raising. He snapped his still photograph at the same time as the movie photographer was taking his picture. It was only by accident that the picture came out so perfect that it was  used in the war bond drive. It made headlines all over the world.  It was a chancy shot much like a photographer taking an action photo at a football game. Not all pictures taken at football games are good enough to be reproduced in  newspapers.

In addition to this was the fact that one of the men given recognition in the picture was not even in the picture. He was in the original flag raising and was killed shortly after. This error was later corrected, but the mother of this man was not even invited to the celebration for the six flag raisers of the second flag.  Draw your on conclusions.

Note: The fighting at Iwo  Jima continued for another 35 days after the flag raising, and there were heavy casualties on both sides. Only about 1000 Japanese out of 12,000 survived. There were about 5600 out of 8000 American survivors.
11/02/2006 Attended my second class on MS FrontPage at Richland College. The class is going very well. MS FrontPage is a software program that generates HTML coding used for designing web sites. I am using it to design my web site ralphduvall.com.

Watched the football game between unbeaten West Virginia number 3 and unbeaten Louisville number 5. Louisville won 44-34. It is going to be very interesting where Louisville is finally ranked if they go unbeaten the rest of the year. Both of these teams are from the Eastern Conference and in the past have not seen much recognition nation wide because they have always been considered to be in a weak conference. Ohio State also unbeaten is ranked number one. Ohio State plays Michigan number 2 the last game of their season and one of these teams will lose, possibly leaving Louisville number 1 or 2. This would assure Louisville a spot in the national championship game, highly unusual. Wait to hear the conclusions at the end of the year.
11/03/2006  
11/04/2006  
11/05/2006 (4)Nikolay Davydenko (RUS) d. (17)Dominik Hrbaty (SVK) 6-1 6-2 6-2 at the BNP Paribas Masters in Paris, France. I like Nikolay a lot. He plays more tennis tournaments than anyone and is ranked fifth in the world. This win will give him a lot of confidence going into the year championship match in Shanghai next week when the top 8 players in the world play to be the  tennis champion of the year. Roger Federer  and Rafael Nadal, the world's number one and two male tennis players, will be there. It will be very difficult for him to beat either of them. I am hoping Roger wins and that Rafael is beaten before he gets to the championship match.
 

Louisville is now ranked number 3 in the nation. If they stay there, it will get a chance to win the National football title. They have to beat another undefeated team, Rutgers, next week, which will be tough.

The Dallas Cowboys lost to Washington today 22-19 mainly due to the 11 penalties they received at critical times. As a team they got outplayed even though they had a chance to win in the last second.  A Washington player came straight thru the line unblocked for an easy block, then a face guard holding penalty on the runback gave Washington an additional 15 yards putting them in field goal range for a free kick after the clock ran out. Their inexperienced kicker barely made it for the win.

Undefeated Indianapolis beat last years American Conference champions New England 27-20. New England played a terrible game with five turnovers. You can't win with five turnovers. Disappointing me, since I am a New England fan. I do not like Indianapolis even though they probably have the best quarterback in pro football, Peyton Manning. I am a fan of Tom Brady the New England Patriots quarterback who has won three Super Bowls. He had a very poor game.
11/06/2006 Worked the entire day on updating my ipod from CD's. It is now one half full.
11/07/2006 The professional Women's year end championship started today in Madrid. I watched it from 11 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. Maria Sharapova,  Nadia Petrova, and Justin Henin Hardenne were first day winners. The top eight women players in the world are there. Each one plays the other in a round robin, and the two best from each of two groups go to the semifinals.Then the tournament is played in a normal manner. If you lose,  you are out.

Attended my MS FrontPage class at Richland College from 1:30 P.M. to 4:00 P.M. I am learning quite a bit from this class, which I intend to apply to the design of my web site ralphduvall.com.
11/08/2006 Attended MS FrontPage class at Richland College  in Dallas, Texas.
11/10/2006 Watched Semi finals of Professional Womens Tennis year end Tournament. Maria Sharaprova, Amelie Mauresmo , Kim Clijsters, and     Justin Henin Hardenne advanced.  Amelie Mauresmo and  Justin Henin Hardenne  advanced to the final with Amelia defeating Kim, and   Justin Henin Hardenne defeating Maria.   Justin Henin Hardenne defeated Amelia in the final and is now the number one ranked female tennis player in the world.
11/11/2006  The semifinals of the tournament mentioned above was actually played on this day.

Key football games for me were the defeat of Tenneesee  by Arkansas and the defeat of Texas A&M by Nebraska. Not really important to me, but very significant to the nation was the defeat of undefeated Texas by Kansas State.

Completed design of my son's Apartment Finder Web Site and posted it on the web. He plans to earn money from this site by finding Apartments for renters.
11/12/2006 The finals for the Women's Tennis Tournament mentioned above were actually played on this day.

The Dallas Cowboys defeated the Arizona Cardinals today, keeping them in the playoff picture.
11/13/2006  
11/14/2006 Attended web  site design class at Richland College.
11/15/2006 Designed two new web sites for my son Andy.

My brother Phillip came to visit me from Texarkana. He brought me a 200 GB external hard drive filled with Mp3 and Mp4G songs that I can load onto my ipod. My ipod will only hold 30GB of songs, so I am going to have to select the ones I want from the external drive he brought me. This is a great gift. I never saw so much music in one place before. He also brought me changes he wanted to make to his web site. I am more than happy to do this to pay him back in a small way. He also brought me a device that will let me play my ipod thru my radio in my car.
11/16/2006 Designed a web site in my web site class today at Richland College
11/17/2006 Roger Federer beat David Nalbandian  in the first round of the men year end tennis playoffs in Shanghai.
11/18/2006 Roger Federer beat Rafael Nadal in the second round of the year end men tennis playoffs at Shanghai.

Ohio State the number one college team in America beat Michigan the number two college team.

Arkansas beat Tenneessee to win the Western Division of the South Eastern Conference giving them a good chance to go to a major bowl in January.
11/19/2006 Roger Federer beat James Blake for the Shanghai Masters cup final. the last tournament of the year. Only the top 8 tennis players in the word were invited to this tournament.

Watched the Dallas Cowboys beat the undefeated Indianapolis Colts 21 to 14 for an upset victory that brought them back in contention for the division title or a wild card spot in the playoffs leading up to the Super Bowl in January.

Watched player of the Year and leading money winner Lorena Ochoa came in second in the year end golf championship in West Palm Beach, Florida. The winner Jullieta Granada, a 20 year old rookie, won one million dollars, the largest pot in the history of Women's Golf. She jumped to fourth place in year end earnings for Women golfers. Only 8 players were in the field after several days of playoffs.
11/20/2006 Finished designing the first draft of my brother Phillip's web site.
11/21/2006 Spent the whole day loading songs from the external drive my brother brought me onto my ipod. I have not made a noticeable dent yet in the 15 GB's of empty space on the ipod.

Watched the New York Giants get beaten by the Jacksonville  Jaguars. The Dallas Cowboys are now tied with the New York Giants for first place in the Eastern conference. Still a lot of games to play though. Can't get too excited yet.
11/22/2006  
11/23/2006 Had Lunch with my son , his wife, and Bille my former wife at My Concino. Worked  on updating my ipod with new songs. Had some difficulty in achieving predictability in the process.
11/24/2006 Watched the Dallas Cowboys beat Tampa Bay continuing their drive to the playoffs. Also watched LSU beat Arkansas, and Texas A&M. This two loses put in jeopardy Arkansas or Texas going to a BCS Bowl. Continued updating my ipod with new songs. Downloaded the latest version of itunes and that seemed to help considerably. Had to learn all new procedures from the internet for the latest version. Version 7.

Watched the Dallas Mavericks beat their major rival, the San Antonio Spurs in San Antonio. As usual, it was very close. The game was not decided until San Antonio missed a shot at the buzzer ending the game.
11/25/2006 Had lunch with my daughter, my grandson and Billie at Sonny Bryans. Continued updating my ipod with new songs. I think I have finally figured out how to make my work predictable. Watched Oklahoma beat Oklahoma State and Georgia beat Georgia Tech. Oklahoma earned the right to play for the Big 12 Championship against Nebraska.
11/26/2006 Spent the whole day trying to fix the problem of publishing my site thru FrontPage. No support techs can help me. They all blame each other. I can no longer publish my web site meaning I cannot make any changes to it making it useless to me.
11/27/2006 Same as on 11/26/2006.
11/28/2006 Made more attempts to fix problem of publishing my web site thru FrontPage to my hosting service. The hosting service and my internet service provider are continuing to say the other as at fault. This is getting nowhere. It is going around in circles. I don't believe either of them know what they are talking about. I have talked to several different support techs and I get different answers from all of them.

Web site design class was canceled for the whole week due to injury of the instructor. We will meet longer hours each class starting next week in order to cover all of the material.
11/29/2006 Made decision to drop Time Warner as my internet service provider and have asked ATT to install high speed DSL as soon as possible. Continued adding more songs to my ipod from the external drive my brother gave me.
11/30/2006  
12/01/2006 Prepared 4 copies of my 1954-1955 AHS football films on DVD to send to my football team mates at that time.
12/02/2006 Got phone calls wishing me Happy Birthday from my son, my daughter, my brother, and Billie, my former wife. Got a card from my sister. Got gift cards from my son and daughter. Had lunch with my son at Mi Concina.

Florida won the SEC beating Arkansas. UCLA beat Southern Cal. Oklahoma beat Nebraska. As a result Ohio State and Florida will play for the national championship. Nebraska and Auburn will play in the Cotton Bowl. Arkansas will play Wisconsin in the Capital One Bowl in Florida. Texas will play Iowa in the Alamo Bowl. Oklahoma will play Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl. Wake Forest will play Louisville in the Orange Bowl. LSU will play Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl. Michigan will play Southern California in the Rose Bowl.
12/03/2006 The Dallas Cowboys beat the New York Giants in New York 23-20 to take a two game lead in the NFC Eastern Division. Everyone thinks they will hang on to win this division, but they can't let down. They have more games to play. Tony Romo did not look as sharp has has in the last four games, but he came through when it counted in the last minute of the game driving his team in field goal range sparked by a 42 yard pass to his tight end. Martin Gramatica in his first game with the Cowboys kicked the winning field goal from 46 yards. This was a Cinderella day for the Cowboys.
   
12/05/2006 Attended Web Site Design class at Richland for the first time since my teacher hurt her foot. I am learning quite a few things I did not know and it is helping improve the appearance of my personal web site. I have learned quite a few other things that don't apply to my present web site, but help me in designing my next web site. This call is very difficult, but very worthwhile. Some things taught by the instructor is not directly related to MS FrontPage which is the name of the course. I am not sure she should have spent so much time in class teaching how to design a web site by not using FrontPage. I think it is confusing to the students. Designing without using FrontPage has quite a few limitations to it, and she has not pointed this out to the class. I don't know whether they will catch this or not. Time will tell. It is good information to know, but I think she should have reserved this toward the last day of class as another way to design a web site, but point out its limitations. She also taught us how to create blogs on free web sites which is useful, but not part of the FrontPage subject.
12/06/2006 Spent most of the day putting new songs on my ipod. I am still learning how to do this in the most efficient way.
12/07/2006 Same as 12/05/2006.
12/08/2006 Spent the day putting new songs on my ipod and studying website design information that I have recently learned.
12/09/2006 Same as 12/08/2006.
12/10/2006 Dallas Cowboys were beaten 42-13 by the New Orleans Saints putting them in jeopardy of not making the playoffs they played so poorly. They are still leading their division, but there are three more games to play and many more teams have a chance to catch them and pass them. Only the future will tell.
12/11/2006 Same as 12/09/2006
12/12/2006 Attended last web site design class for the semester and called my daughter to wish he a happy birthday which is today.
12/13/2006 Made six copies of Ladies in Lavender CD for my daughter's drill team officers from Pearce high school when she attended there. She was one of the officers. Received a phone call from my Aunt Uldine, my mother's sister, and talked for a long while. She is getting old now about 80. We had a good visit. Studied notes from my web site design class and added more songs to my ipod.
12/16/2006 Went to dinner and a play "Its a Wonderful Life" with my son and his wife. It was a great play and the first time I have seen a live performance in many years.
12/17/2006 The Dallas Cowboys made it to the playoffs for the first time in four years helped my Minnesota and Carolina losses. They now must beat Philadelphia and Detroit to insure the Eastern Division championship. With that they can have a much easier schedule in the playoffs.
12/18/2006 Installed ATT DSL. It works fine, but it was not the problem with my MS FrontPage. I called Microsoft and was lucky to get a good technician. He took control of my screen and found that my firewall was blocking MS FrontPage. He gave it access, and it solved all of my problems. Hurray! I am canceling my Time Warner Cable high speed internet and staying with DSL. They are much cheaper and I did not notice any loss of speed.
12/19/2006 Spent quite a bit of time modifying all of my web sites and adding music to my ipod. Had some difficulty with both that I am trying to work out. I am adding custom design colors to my web sites which I learned how to do in my web site class. Despite the difficulties, I was successful except one irritating technical problem on one of my sites where I was not able to add the color background to the site that I wanted. I have tried everything and have finally given up for now. The site still looks good, but just does not have the color I wanted. I wanted the background color you see in this chart. I was able to put it everywhere else I tried.
12/20/2006 Same as 12/19/2006
12/21/2006 Same as 12/20/2006 and also went to Mimosa Park with my daughter and her two sons. Had a great time. Her older son is learning how to ride a two wheel bike.
12/22/2006 Same as 12/20/2006. Made new CD copies of "Ladies in Lavender", "Michael Martin Murphy Cowboy Songs", and "1954 AHS Football" DVD for Billie and Don Day a former team player with me on the 1954 AHS football team.
12/23/2006 Started redesigning my 1960 Engineering Web Site. I am trying to improve its appearance.
12/24/2006 Same as 12/23/23/2006 and loaded a lot of new Christmas songs on to my computer and starting listening to them.
12/25/2006 Had breakfast with my son and his wife. Listened to a lot of Christmas songs on my computer and watched the Cowboys lose to the Philadelphia Eagles. They were soundly beaten and outplayed. If they don't do better than they did today, they will get beat in the first game they play in the playoffs. They were disgusting.
12/26/2006 Continued working with my 1960 SMU web site. I tried several color combinations for background and font color and finally decided on what I liked best. It took quite a few attempts to get there and a lot of time.
01/02/2007 The Cowboys lost their first playoff game in 10 years to the Seattle Seahawks 21-20. The future of the team and Bill Parcells the coach is very uncertain at this time. It will be up to the owner Jerry Jones. A sad thing happened at the end of the game when their young and talented quarterback, Tony Romo, dropped the ball he was to hold for the game winning field goal. I am hoping this does nothing to his confidence, because he is the future of this team. Without him, they will go nowhere. Since he is very inexperienced in game time, there is no doubt he will have to continue to go thru a learning curve. He should be able to achieve this successfully.
01/08/2007 I have been working for the last week on developing a new web site which will describe the detailed history of Southern Methodist University. I plan for this sight to much more professional looking and much more attractive than anything I have designed so far. I have chosen a free template for the site which I can modify to my own requirements. Purchasing a template is expensive, and I am lucky to find a free one that I can use. I also considered using a free web site design company which would give me a little more flexibility, but it would require me to show their ads on my site.  After thinking about it, I decided I don't want to do this. I have not found a site on the web that has the detail that I plan, although I am sure there are  many very similar. I hope to make a small contribution of my own on this subject  which will be of use to someone, somewhere, sometime.
02/17/2008 Bill Parcells has resigned as the coach of the Dallas Cowboys and Wade Phillips has been hired. The Indianapolis Colts have won the Super Bowl over the Chicago Bears. Roger Federer (men) and Serena Williams (women) have won the Australian Open Championships. I can't agree with the hiring of Wade Phillips, but time will tell. Jerry has been very unsuccessful in terms of winning championships and team records since he bought the Cowboys except under Jimmie Johnson (aided by a huge trade involving Herschel Walker for twelve picks)  whom he hired and fired over  his own  ego problems. Johnson won two super bowls but the four coaches he has hired  since have not been successful at all except for Barry Switzer who won a super bowl with Jimmy Johnson's team. Barry did not last long after that. I believe this is primarily because Jerry Jones wants to have a hand in every detail of the team. It is an ego trip for him. He might as well coach it as well. Jerry has talked the citizens of Arlington, Texas into building him a state of the art football stadium. I don't think the Cowboys will have success on the field until Jerry Jones is no longer the owner. The next owner will be his son. He will be better and should be the owner now. In spite of all of this the Cowboys are still the premiere franchise in the NFL and Jerry has made a lot of money off it. The  franchise was built by Tom Landry the first coach of the team for 29 years along with the first owner Clint Murchinson.
02/17/2007 I have been off spending most of my time working on two new web sites, perfectphotos.biz and the history of SMU. These two sites have consumed nearly of my time staring on 01/08/2007. I have been designing them with a free template downloaded from the internet, They look great, but they have both been very difficult. Yesterday I lost the ability to modify these web sites, and I have sent an email to the vendor of the template asking what possibly could have happened. I am frozen on these two sites until I can fix the problem. I have tried everything I can think of. Unless the vendor can help me , I will have to give up on using a template on these two sites. perfectphotos.biz has already been posted as a commercial site for my son's wife and one of her girl friends, but I cannot make any changes to it. They are trying to make some money off of it. This has all been very disappointing after all of the hard work that has been put into designing these sites. The girls have also spent a lot of time on it, putting data on the site under my supervision.
06/042007 Today has been a very eventful day. After attending my MS Publisher 2003 Class at Richland College, I went to my computer at home to see if I could find by Hobbies web page I lost several months ago when my system crashed. I had been able to recover most of the work I had done before the crash by using a backup  DVD of my web site that I update occasionally as extra backup. Without it, I would have not been able to get back to where I was before today.  I am updating this DVD even more often now because of the bad experience I had. I usual backup everything to my external hard E drive every day and will continue to do this. I have also starting to back it up to my C drive. Recently I have purchased a Flash drive for my school work and may purchase another one for another drive to back up my web site. I don't believe you can have too much back up. My working drive is my F drive. Some how, that I don't fully understand yet, I lost my backup on my external E drive during my bad experience. I believe what happened is that before I realized I had bad data, I backed up my external drive with the bad data.  I plan to start keeping two time sets of data one each on my external E drive and my C drive so they won't be the same. If one goes bad the other may still be good enough. The DVD did not include any of my work that I had accomplished on my Hobbies page, and until today I had completely lost it to my disappointment. Even though I did not expect to find it, I looked in my Recycle Bin just to see if I could find some old files that I had sent there. Much to my surprise, I was able to find nearly everything, even maybe everything, that I had lost. I am not sure how it got there, but I will take it. If it is not all of it, it is very close , so I now have recreated this web page and published it to the web again. In doing so, I was able to find the the Journal page I am working on now because it was part of my Hobbies web page. You can notice that there is a four month gap from my last entry in my Journal, but I have now restarted this section of my web site.

During this time, I have been able to solve the problem mentioned above 0n 02/17/07 with the help of the troubleshooter for the free template I downloaded and was able to complete My History of SMU. I learned quite a bit about SMU that I did not know doing this,so it was worth the effort. I posted it, and I was able to find it quite high up on the Google site for "The History of SMU" which made me happy. However, yesterday I decided to take it down from the world wide web because I am uncertain about copyright Laws. I believe since I referenced everything in detail and it is a historical document, that it will not infringe any copyrights, but I am not 100% sure, and I don't want to risk a lawsuit. I still have the work on a hard drive, if I want to post it again, but don't plan to at this time. In looking at modern day web sites that have templates built in, I have decided that I would like to be able to design a template myself, and I have taken a first step toward that by ordering a book on the subject. I have not been able to find any templates for sale to my complete satisfaction, and want to be able to tailor one to my own ideas before I start a new web site project.

I also redesigned my web site slightly to make it easier for a web searcher to find the work I have done on tracing my families ancestry to Mareen DuVall an immigrant to the new world in the 1600's. I am hoping to get some contacts from people who are also researching Mareen's ancestry and perhaps contribute something new. Time will tell how high up on Google I can get this link to work, I designed to look the same as the link to my History of SMU. I'll report back on the success or failure of this effort later in my journal.
06/052007 Spent today investigating whether to add a blog to my site. I can get free help downloading Word Press a free blog program into my existing web site, but decided against it. I am not sure I am ready to get into discussions of my thoughts with other people over the internet. Also I definitely do not want to deal with spam blog responses.

I finished reading The Sea Wolf by Jack London today and gained some renewed inspiration in trying to do some quality reading of both fiction and non fiction. I have been exploring the 100 best novels and non fiction books by several lists posted on the internet. I was a little disappointed in the selections. I have read some of them and was not impressed by all of them. Also there are quite a few I have no interest in reading. Still, I am going to pick some to read. I also updated my favorite authors page on this web site. I had forgotten about many of the books I have  read in the past that I really enjoyed and thought were more quality reads than some I had posted on this page. I downgraded all but three of my fiction book list and substituted higher quality books ahead of them on my list. I am a big reader, and I read a lot of fiction that I do not classify as quality as compared to what I have read in the past, but I enjoy a good mystery or action book( even if it is low quality) before bed time as compared to watching TV.  I am always on the lookout for a good quality book either fiction or non fiction book to read, but they are few and far between.
06/06/07 Attended Publisher 2003 class at Richland and my first grandson's baseball game at Spring Valley Elementary School. Viewed TCM Movie The Sea Wolf. The only thing similar about to the book were the characters. The plot was entirely different and like all movies, it lacked the punch of the book.
06/08/2007 Watched No. 1 Roger Federer barely beat No. 4 Dyvendenko 7-5,7/6,7/6 to get to the finals of the French Open which is the only major played on clay. He is going to have to play a lot better that that to beat Rafael Nadal in the Finals Sunday who won his match easily. Roger has only beaten Nadal one time on clay and lost 5 or 6 times to him on clay. He has beaten him on grass and hard court.  Nadal is Mr. Clay. No one can beat him on clay. He has only lost once and that was to Roger two weeks ago in like 85 games. Roger is the underdog in spite of being the overwhelming Number 1 in the tennis game today. Rafael is number 2. They are way ahead of anyone else in rankings. The French Open is the only Open that Roger has never won. That is his greatest desire now in his career,  where he has done everything else. If he could win the French, many critics who hesitate to call him the greatest ever in Tennis might have to give in and call him that.

Also added a Poetry/Lyrics section to my web site under Hobbies. Made 6 entries of my favorites.

Received book on CSS design today. At first glance, it does not look like it will be worth my time, but I will look again a little harder later.
6/10/07 Roger Federer lost to Rafael Nadal in  4 sets in the finals of the French Open, a clay court. No one else has ever taken him to four sets at the French. Roger has done that the last two years in the finals. Roger is the second best clay player in the world. He will have to wait another year to try to get a win there. This guy Nadal is already the best clay court player in the history of the game, and it will take quite an effort on Federer's part to beat him, although he still feels confident he will eventually. He wants a win at the French Open more than anything. Many great tennis champions have never won there, but he does not want end up like them. Federer is most likely to set all of the all time records of Major championships and all other tennis records except those on clay before he retires, and he wants that French win as one of his accomplishments. I did not think he played very well Sunday, myself. I think he can play better, so I think he will win a French Open eventually. My son takes it especially hard when Federer loses to Nadal. I tried to tell him to not take it so personally. To all of us, it is just a spectator sport, and we should only want to be entertained with good matches, but it hard to see Federer struggle against Nadal, since Federer is such a true champion and representative of the sport of Tennis, and such a good guy. He has already won a good Ambassador award. He is loved around the world, and of course is still ranked Number one, a ranking he has held longer than anyone in history. Nadal is ranked Number 2.

Suzanne Peterson from Norway won the second Women's Major golf championship of this year. This is her second win of the year tying Lorena Ocaha from Mexico for two wins this year, and pushing her for the number one ranked Women's golf player in the world. She has a ways to go yet, although the total money one by each is about the same now ahead of all others. Lorena took over the number one ranking from Anna Sorensten just this year. Sorentsen holding it for longer than anyone else in history. Lorena has yet to win a Major, but now Peterson has one her first. To me Women's golf is much more exciting than Men's with Tiger dominating that sport entirely. More women have a chance to win and it is more exciting.
06/11/07 Attended my MS Publisher 2003 class today at Richland.. I am learning a lot. It is a very powerful tool. I don't know that I have much use for it right now, but you never can tell about the future.

After class, I spent quite a bit of time trying to duplicate the design layouts of some of the modern design web sites using pictures and image maps for links within the pictures. I know how to do this now. I am still not satisfied with what I have come up with. MS Front Page does not allow for much flexibility here I found out. I have decided that the design of my site before I knew anything about all of these sophisticated techniques is better than any thing I can come up with now. I like it simple and I think it looks good. I did have an occasion to add some sophistication to my picture template by using Photoshop a little more, but my original design still looks good and may be better because it is simple. Right now I have several different versions of the picture on several experimental pages, but most of them I left with the original design. If I design a new site for a different purpose, I might experiment with new layouts, but for now I am satisfied with what I have.

I signed up for a full semester load at Richland of new computer courses consisting of the new software Microsoft is introducing in 2007. I will be going four days a week, more than I have ever attempted before. I will see how it works out. Those of in class now have first shot at getting into these classes, and I took advantage of this. Later the classes could start to get full, and I would not be able to get in.
06/13/07 Posted 59 pictures of the University of Texas at Dallas  I took yesterday on my personal web site. It is located in the city of Richardson where I live, and is not far from my home. They are not quite as beautiful as the campus buildings at SMU, but they are interesting. They are all clean cut modern design. It is mainly a commuter university. There are no dorms or Greek housing on the campus. Apartments have been built close to the campus. I believe the land they are on is owned by UTD, but don't appear to be what I would call part of the campus itself. I saw very few students on the campus. It could be because it is summer school. This land and some of the buildings were donated to the state of Texas by the founders of Texas Instruments and there are buildings named for them on the campus.

Attended my MS Publisher 2003 class today at Richland. I plan to take at least an hour taking pictures of the Richland campus soon and posting them on my personal web site.
06/15/07 Sent Pictures of 1955 AHS 50 Year Reunion to Wayne Beck webmaster for AHS to post. Created a map of my web site and posted it on index page. This will allow the viewer to find out everything inside the site and navigate to it.
06/16/07 Attended the musical Chicago with my son, his wife and her mother at the Dallas Musical Theatre in the State Fair Grounds. Not quite as good as the movie which was made from the musical, but was very enjoyable. My son is going to look into purchasing season tickets for us to next year's Summer Musicals in Dallas.
06/17/07 Had dinner with my daughter and her family on Father's day. I enjoyed it very much. She has two sons ,seven and two years old, that are a joy to me. Her husband just purchased a new Hondo Accord. He gave me a ride in it. Nice Car!
06/18/07 Attended Publisher 2003 class. Modified my son's web site to include the words " Dallas Tennis Lessons" hoping this will bring his Tennis Lessons web site up on MSN and Yahoo when the words dallas tennis lessons are typed in on a search of the two browsers. At this time his site is not coming up on these two browsers. Also it might come up on Google as a non sponsored site. Need to look into getting it de listed as a sponsored site but still retain its number one position on Google when these words are typed in. His friend is working with his site keeping it at the top by bidding on these key words every day.. I am thinking it would be better not to designated as a Sponsored site since people tend to shy away from sponsored sites because they think they are too expensive. He is hardly getting any hits on his web site right now, whereas last year he was getting quite a few. At this time his business at teaching tennis lessons is so successful that this is not hurting him any, but I am thinking towards the future.
06/19/07 Received a false alarm call from the Richardson Police because my alarm went off when I went out to pick up the paper. I did not get back in time to receive the alarm company's phone call or turn the alarm off although it was less than 5 minutes. I am arranging with the alarm company to give me 5 minutes to get the alarm turned off before they would normally call the police. I hope this will solve this problem in the future. 97% of alarms in the city of Richardson are false, so I can see why the city is upset about this. I don't want to contribute to a decision by them to no longer respond to alarms by the Richardson Police Department. This has been a very serious problem in the city of Dallas, and they have discussed this as a solution to false alarms. I can't remember what their decision was.
06/26/07 Attended Pinnacle Class at Richland. Will need a Hi-Speed Flash Drive for this class because it entails use of a lot of music and pictures. I checked I have got a Hi-Speed Flash Drive. You can tell by the icon that comes on the package. This class did not make. Not enough students.
06/27/07 Attended Publisher Class at Richland. The class is getting a little harder as we move into more complex material. I have some homework to do while we are off next week for Fourth of July which I think will challenge me a little. Looked into buying a color printer. I still cannot justify the cost unless I really get into using Publisher a lot. Printed a black and white Flyer for my son's tennis teaching. Don't see much demand from my family or myself for Publisher altho it is a very powerful tool. Printed out my Fall School schedule using Publisher's Calendars features. I am signed up for the maximum free courses at Richland, 6 hours. That is six one hour courses. I noted to Richland I would like to see some more classes on web design especially template design, but doubt if they will do it for us seniors. Can't get any of my senior friends interested in designing web sites.

I am still trying to come up with an idea for a good web site  design project. I want to come of with something original and not depend on the pictures like I had to scan in for the SMU History Web Site I designed and took down from the web. It was a very good web site I thought except for that. I have decided to never depend on someone else's template however, if I start a new project.
06/28/07 Watched Wimbleton and LPGA Open today. Not much excitement.
06/29/07 Watched Roger Federer beat Marat Safin at Wimbleton to advance. It was not much of a challenge for Roger. Watched LPGA Open. Did not get to watch much because of rain delay. They are getting pretty far behind because of two days of this. I think they will have to play Monday.

We are close to record rains for June here in Dallas. It is affecting my son's tennis teaching. He is still making a lot of money doing this and still believes he will make much more money than he did being a branch manager at Wells Fargo and without a doubt is much happier. I am still a little skeptical about the long run, however. It is peak tennis time now in Dallas, but I don't know what the winter months will be like.

My son's wife is in Italy with her mother and her aunt for about 10 days. She lost her luggage and is having to spend money for clothes. I plan to post the pictures she takes on my personal web site. I am hoping that she has gotten all her traveling ideas out of the way now and will settle down and start a family. My son tells me this is the case, but it remains to be seen. The goal is that she will no longer have to work. They have a good start, since they have paid off the the mortgage on their house and now own it.
06/30/07 Visited Barnes and Noble bookstore with my daughter and her two sons. Oldest son used his gift card to purchase several books, and I also used mine to purchase two books. The youngest son played with the Thomas Train set along with other kids. There is a warning about these trains having leaded paint on them because they were made in China. Talked to the manager and she told me that they have sent all of the trains back that they received a warning on.

Also had lunch with them. We had pizza at a place they like, but I had never been there before. It was good.

Discussed my daughter's on line pom sales business. It is still doing well (approxm $30K/year) even though she does nothing to promote it other than a web site. She does not have time. Raising two children is a full time job in its self. I told her I could design her a catalog using Publisher 2003, and she is going to give me a sample catalog of one of her competitors. She wants one smaller than what she has seen. I could design it, but would have to contract a publisher to print it since it takes special paper and a color printer. I am assuming that I could take my Publisher 2003 files to a publisher and they could print several copies of it for a fee.

Editoral Comment: The war in Iraq is continuing to go badly. We should never have gone in there in the first place and President Bush is too stubborn to admit he made a terrible mistake. It is nothing but civil war and will continue to be for the next 1000 years at least. Time to get out. The religious factions there hate each other, always have,  always will, and will continue to fight each other indefinitely. The American people have spoken. They put the Democrats in power in the Congress to get us out of there, but they have not been united enough to do anything about it themselves. Bush will be in power, if he is not impeached, for another 18 months. I don't see how the Republicans can get another president elected unless they pressure Bush to get out of Iraq before the next election.

I can't decide who I would vote on for  president, but  definitely will not vote for the Democrat contender Hillary Clinton. She is not qualified, and  I dislike her tremendously based on her past history. I may have to produce  a write in vote just for myself.
07/05/07 Posted grandchildren pictures from Hilton Head on the Atlantic cost on my web site as well as Leigh's (my son's wife) pictures from Italy.

Complete reading a second book The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas and enjoyed it very much. I am getting to be a big fan of his.
07/08/07 Watched an history making Wimbledon tennis match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal far and above the number 1 and number 2 players in the world. It was much closer than I expected as it went 5 sets. Federer the favorite almost lost to Nadal. These two are great rivals. Federer has never beaten Nadal at the French Open and Nadal has never beaten Federer at Wimbledon, although he came closer today than ever. I thought Federer was going to lose it being down 15-40 twice in the fifth set, but he was finally was able to break Nadal in the fifth and sixth games to win it. Very exciting. Federer is now tied with Borg with five Wimbledon's in a row and Borg was there to greet him in the winners circle after the match. He was very fortunate to win. He has never challenged Nadal at the French Open the way Nadal challenged him today. It would have been a record no matter who won. Nadal was looking to be only the second man in history to win the French and Wimbledon back to back in the same year. Borg also has that record. It will be a big challenge again for Federer if he has to play Nadal in the final at the U.S. Open in August of this year. It could go either way. Nadal is only 20 and Federer is 25, so he will eventually overtake Federer as time goes on. Tennis is a young man's game. Federer is on track to become the best player in tennis history if  Nadal does not do him in. He has now won 11 major championships behind the record of Pete Samparas who won 14. My son would have been devastated if Federer had lost. His birthday is on the 13th of this month and we had a family gathering at Cedar Creek Lake to celebrate at his mother's lake house there. It was very peaceful and relaxing there, but the drive there is not  pleasant, having to go through some seedy areas of Texas before arriving at the lake. It was the first time I have been there. The lake is surrounded with houses about an hour and a half drive from Dallas. I guess it is worth the drive if you are big lake fan which I am not. It would be ok, if  I could just live on a lake and not be involved in maintenance and all of the boat things and still be close to my children and grand children on a day to day basis. I would require a home in Dallas if I got bored at the lake. This situation is not likely as I am a bachelor and being close to my children and grandchildren is my greatest pleasure. I would have no interest in going to the lake or living on a lake by myself.
7/13/07 Downloaded new Microsoft software for designing web pages. I went thru their example page design. I don't see anything there yet which would want me to use it instead of MS Front Page. I will continue looking at it. It is a lot more sophisticated and gives more detail control..
7/14/07 Solved problem with publishing my web sit that I have had for 4 days. Sometimes it takes this long to figure things out. My system was locked into automatically publishing the last web site published and for some reason, it thought it was the all of drive F. This was a software glitch, because I have never tried to publish all of drive F. This would take hours and hours. I unchecked this setting, and I am now able to select which web site i want to publish whenever I start up. ninety  eight percent of this time it will be My Web Sites. Think goodness I discovered this. It has been a problem for several days and I tried everything from re booting to reinstalling MS Front Page.
7/15/07 Spent part of the day loading songs that I have never heard onto my ipod. I got these songs from the external drive my brother Phillip gave me. I have enough songs from this drive that I have not heard to last me a very long time. Several times what my ipod will hold. The ipod is about 25 GB while the drive is over 150GB. Since I accidentally deleted all the songs I had on the ipod, I am loading it back up with new songs. I am tending more toward just music with no vocals. I can read with this kind of music playing while with vocals I am distracted.  There is a lot of good music on the external drive that is just music. I have my ipod connected wirelessly to my hi fidelity stereo system. This is about the only way I listen to music anymore. Much more enjoyable than listening thru ear plugs or headphones for me. Went to a movie with my son today also. His wife is out of town. She won't go to action movies with him so he and I go see them. Saw the fourth Die Hard movie starring Bruce Willis. It is on track to be the best of the sequels money wise. I thought it was pretty good for action although a little unbelievable like most action movies. I do like Bruce Willis in these movies. He is very good.
7/19/07 Completed Publisher Class at Richland College. For my class project I finished by designing and printing a 3 foot Banner advertising a Yoga Class for a friend. Ordered a Dell Color Laser Printer so I can design and print Publications in color from my home now that I have the Publisher Program installed on my computer. I installed the Publisher 2007 program by downloading it from the internet. I have it for a 2 month trial. I plan to purchase it at a student discount when the trial period expires. I have never owned a color printer before.
7/20/07 Received and installed the Dell Laser Color Printer. It went faster than I an anticipated. I like ordering computers, and computer peripherals from Dell. I can order them on line and receive them in a day or two at my home without having to drive anywhere. I do most of my shopping on line when I can. Designed a Mary Kay Banner for a friend and a Generic Happy Birthday Banner for Leigh and printed them out on my new Laser Color Printer. It takes four pages of  paper that must be taped together. Also printed out a color draft of a sales postcard for my daughter's Pom Business. I am going to love this printer. It is really the best printer you can have for production color printing. Laser printers do not have to be reloaded with ink pods as often as ink jet printers and the ink pods do not dry up. Many schools and small businesses use this printer. I don't like to have second quality peripheral parts for my computer system. Hoping to use this printer for years to print publications in color for my friends and family for free. If someone other wants something published,  I can do as well as a professional printer company and do it for less. If I run across an opportunity to do this I will. I know how to use this Publisher software Program real well now and can do this.
7/21/07 Have just finished reading histories of Spain and Germany and have started reading history of Europe. I was surprised to learn that the German nation really only came into being relatively late in Europe. This was because there was so much regional and local government that they could never agree to be a nation. France, England, Greece, and Italy were nations before Germany.  When they did become a nation they were unfortunate to fall under the heels of misguided military minded men, the last of course was Hitler when they became a split Germany after their loss in World War II. They finally do have a new united Germany and have been successful economically, but no one can ever forget they fell under the spell of military men who played up their desire to feel superior to everyone else. No one can ever trust Germany as a nation again, although they are working hard to overcome this.  Also learned the sad history of Spain. Not only were they long occupied by the Moslems, they lost their Spanish Empire because they, like the Germans, could never agree to be united.  They tried several times to have an assembly under the king to help run the government, but were unable to do so and their kings were also ineffective in uniting the country. The civil war as late as 1936 was the result. They fell under a military dictator Franco around 1940 and he was in power until his death.. It is only within the last 40 years are so that they have had an assembly that could agree on running the country. Actually the king is still officially the head of the government. They are now recovering from their past, just as Germany is. They have had long struggles.
9/07/2007 Roger Federer won the U.S. Open Tennis Championship for the fourth time in a row. He is, undoubtedly, one of the greatest athletes to ever live. You only have to watch him play to see this. I am talking about in all sports. I have observed great athletes in all sports, and he stands out above all of  them I have ever seen. Also, star athletes of today are  better than  those in the past due to the increased quality of competition brought about by greatly increased monetary compensation.  If  he continues his career in this fashion, he will set all Tennis records. He already holds quite a few. He is only 26 years old.
9/17/2007 I have been pretty busy and not kept up this journal as I should, but I need to make some entries now to catch up. After becoming very interested in the discovery and conquest of South America, I have started a systematic reading activity on this subject. I became interested in this subject by accident one day when I picked up a book for $6.00 at Barnes and Noble on Christopher Columbus. Obviously this was not a best seller and the store had marked it down considerably to get rid of it. I have always been a history buff and thought what have I got to lose for $6.00. Since then, I have continued reading books on this subject and plan to continue to read them. I check all of these books out of the Richardson library. I have been keeping a detailed account of every nonfiction book I read under the books link above.  I am reading very little fiction right now. I originally started this section of my web site to document books that I have thought to be the most important ones, but have now decided to document every non fiction book I read in detail. They cover a wide range of subjects on history, not just South America. I can then look back and see which are the most important. Actually they are all important. I am not buying any of these books, but checking them out of the Richardson library. If I were to accumulate a library of purchased books someday, these books will be picked from the books being documented in detail in the books section of this web site. I am not going to go into any detail here other than to state that this effort is ongoing and will continue to be ongoing. I read a lot of books, so this section could take up a lot of memory on my hard drives as time goes on. I read for about three hours every night. I am discovering that I learned very little about the world while I was in college and during my 40 year working career. Now that I am retired, I am discovering a whole new world from reading non fiction books primarily on history, but on other subjects as well. One of my main points of interest has been discovering how civilizations arose in certain areas of the globe and not in others and understanding why. South America, by the way, was one of those areas of the globe, although its influence has not been as great as other areas of the globe. Not to get into the details of that right now, however.
09/13/2008

09/13/2008

 Well, its time to make another entry into my journal. I have taken on a project to update the DuVall Family tree with my mother's ancestors. the Pritchards. I have a wealth of information to input into my program Family Tree Maker thanks to research done by Joe Herring, one of my cousins on the Pritchard side of the family. He has gathered and sent to me in MS Word format the genealogy of the Pritchard, the Fortune, the Peterson, and the Crawford families. The Fortune family is on the side of my grandmother's father, the Peterson family is on the mother's side of the my grandfather, and the Crawford family is on the mother's side of my grandmother. I have these word documents posted on my personal web site and had originally not intended to input the data into the Family Tree Maker software, hoping and assuming that this was the responsibility of Joe Herring who gathered the data. I now know that he will never to do this, since it has been years and he has not even purchased the software. Without the Family Tree Maker software, it is impossible to see the whole picture of your relations. So, I have decided to input all of the data on the four families listed above. This is going to be a very large project. So far, I have input data that shows at least our direct ancestors from these four families, but this is a small part of the overall picture. I have forwarded this information in the form of a gedcom file to the four people in our family who I think would have an interest. Namely, my brother, Phillip, Joe Herring, Joey DuVall (my cousin who  originated the Family Tree Maker software with the DuVall family data inputted), and Dan Lewis, my sister's son. So far, I have only heard back from my brother who requested the information. I know that he has the Family Tree Maker software program on his PC. I don't think Joe Herring or Dan Lewis will ever purchase Family Tree Maker software, so they will not be able to see the whole picture or create interesting reports using the software. Joey DuVall probably has no interest in the Pritchard side of the family since his mother is not a Pritchard, so that leaves only me and my brother Phillip with an interest. Hopefully, one or more of our children will have an interest when they get to our age. The data will be available to them on DVD's, since this is how I will back it all up. Also of course it is on two of my PC hard drives and on my brother's PC hard drive.

I have not told anyone this, but I also plan to post this gedcom file on a free web site so that any one with an interest can look at the genealogy tree, but will not be able to create any interesting reports. I keep hoping someone besides myself and my brother will purchase the Family Tree Maker software, and I don't want to give them an incentive to not purchase it. Eventually, when everything is complete and posted on the free web site, I will tell everyone on both sides of my family about it. That is: the ones I have email addresses for. I do have quite a few of these except on the Pritchard side. I only have two of these, and probably will never have any more. Hopefully, this information will be available by email to more members of future generations on the Pritchard side.

The current date is September 13, 2008. I have just finished taking several several Photo Shop Elements 6 classes at Richland College. These classes teach material that professional photographers can use to enhance the appearance of their photographs. It is much more powerful than Photo Shop Elements 3, and consequentially much more difficult to learn. I have been holding my own in the classes with an instructor in the room, but I don't think I know enough to go out on my own to enhance the pictures I take. I am scheduled to take several more classes on this subject, and maybe I will learn enough to do work on my own. I am taking this class mainly as an intellectual project. Photo Shop 6 seems to be the most popular course presently being taught at Richland College, and I estimate that about one third of them are professional photographers. This software package will allow them to produce even better pictures than they can now. Photo Shop 6 is designed to take the photos from your digital camera and enhance them  greatly. I am also learning from talking to these students that they have very high quality digital cameras that the use. Much more powerful and expensive than what is called "point ant shoot" cameras which are the low end cameras most people own. Most people are not even aware that Photo Shop Elements 6 exists, but all pictures they see in magazines or most publications have been enhanced by Photo Shop Elements 6. That is why they look perfect and much better than a picture taken from a digital camera which has not been enhanced. I have also noticed that most of the professional photographers in my classes seem to know quite a bit about Photo Shop Elements 6 and they have little trouble in following the teachers lectures and examples. These people make their living by selling the pictures and art they produce. There are also many amateur photographers in class which get much more out of it than I do.

 

On a different subject altogether, I have been trying to decide who to vote for president. My original idea was to vote out every one in the Republican party up for election including the president.  I have long memory, and I remember it was them who got us into the Iraq war under false pretenses, almost destroying this country.

My dilemma is that I don't like any of the candidates in either the Republican or the Democratic Parties.. None of them or their VP running mates seem qualified to be president of the United States. I don't know how this came about, but it is obvious to me. It seems that we have a weakness in picking qualified people.

Very recently the Republican Party candidate has picked a women for his running mate. She seems to be very popular, because of her personality and the Democrats are worried. I am also worried that she could easily become the president in the next four years because the Republican running for president is 72 years old. She is the least qualified to be president than any of the others in the race, which could be disastrous for the country. The country has gone wild about her and she is the most popular person in either party. I afraid the people are going to vote Republican just because she is on the Republican ticket with no thought of whether she could do the job as president if case of the death of the Republican presidential candidate. In my opinion she can not even come close.

The Democratic Presidential candidate also seems not to have the required experience to be president also. He was elected because of his race and his speaking abilities. The country at this time wants the people to come together like it has never before. He chose not to pick the women whom he defeated during his race for the president. Mainly, because he wanted to be his own man. Although she has endorsed him, many of her followers especially women will not follow her endorsement. The Democratic candidate had no idea the Republicans would put a women on their ticket that would be so popular. So it turns out he made a bad decision by not taken his women opponent to be his VP.

I have never seen or heard of such a mess in the United States as this race is turning into, so I am worried.

 

The players in this race are as follows:

Republicans:

John McCain president and Sarah Palin vice-president

Democrats:

Barack Obama and Joe Biden

So I am worried about the future of the United States.

At this time, I am leaning toward voting for the Democrat candidates. Mainly because John McCain agreed with with George Bush and helped plan the Iraq war and has stated he wants the United States to have a long time military presence in the area in spite of the fact that the Iraqs still cannot rule themselves.

 
11/25/2009

 

 Its been quite a while since I have made any comments, but I am going to try to be more consistent. The new president( I voted for him and would like to see him succeed'. He is also the first black man ever voted in to the high office of President in this country. There has also been much controversy just on this subject). Barak Obama has been working hard to get complex health plan adopted. I am very much in favor of a health plan adopted by Congress after all the arguments on both sides have been argued to death. I must admit that I have a very serious interest in this health plan. Under Medicare I have reached the donut whole every year since it was adopted and it is costing me about $6000 extra  a year just for drugs. The donut holed is a plan which allows the drug companies to make you pay full price for their drugs after a certain level has been reached by yourself and the drug companies. I can also blame this on the Republicans  during the  Bush Republican administration. This rule was put in by their approval. I have read that under a new plan the drug companies would charge you only one half of the cost during the donut hole. It would eventually be removed over a period of many years which probably not help me at my age of 72, although it well help me considerably until I die(. I did not expect to hear so much opposition he is running into. It is true that he tried too fast, but I think we will have watered down policy signed by him in January of 2010. Congress has never been able to approve a health plan although may presidents have tried. I have noticed that the Republicans in Congress have voted "no" to any health plan. They have voted  in a block. They see this as a way to win back the Presidency in 2012. It is a very obvious that there is a historical event between the Democrats and the Republicans. I for one, will never vote for a Republican again until I see some rational thought from them, since they are the ones who got us into all of the trouble we have at the moment. The second biggest debate is the economy which has crashed on Wall Street close to the great depression in 1929. Another is the two wars we are conducting in Iraq and Afkanistan. I think we should withdraw from them as soon as possible, since they have no established governments because a civil war is raging in both countries. Let's stay out of both these wars and spend the  necessary money saved on the Health plan, which would solve the problem of funding the plan. That is another argument by those who oppose the plan. That is the estimates to fund the plan which has stirred up even more controversy.

 

 

 

I have finally figured out how to continue to use MS FrontPage 2003 to edit this web site. It has been the most difficult problem I have ever solved. I have been working with two server companies for over a month to try and solve this problem. the first soulution came about, because the company  I switched to (APlus.net ) had adopted a plan that would not support MS 2003. Only one help person from the company told me this after I had been working with as many as 6 support persons over a two week  period. This tells me that they have not trained their support personnel sufficiantly to know the very basics of their compan's capabilities. This does not speak well for the company. I had changed to them because the original company(

web.com) could not solve my problem also after about 5 weeks working with them. The problem was that I could not use their normal condition of publish the file by just selecting publish it in their conventional  way. This also tells me that they have not trained their support personnel properly, since they did not even know that the Company (Web.com).  Finally a salesman from my original company (Web.com) told me of a plan that could support FrontPage with a new Web.com  plan for a little more expense. Their engineers started using Linux to interface with FrontPage 2003. After searching the internet , I found that no server company still supports FrontPage except my original server company (Web.com), because of the age of FrontPage . Web.com has not posted this capability on the internet. Actually, I found very few companies posted on the internet that are web server companies. I have been using it for over 7 years and it is an excellent product, although you can no longer buy it from Microsoft who designed it. I don't know why, since there must be many people who use it extensively. This program generates HTML code recognized by the internet and HTML is the only language that will work on the internet. MS FrontPage2003 converts natural language into HTML code. This is a very powerful tool. It would take months and months to write the required HTML code recognized by the internet. As it is, I can save about 80% of the time needed to write the HTML code required by using FrontPage 2003 to convert my normal language (language in English words) to HTML. You don't have to know anything about learning a programming language to use FrontPage 2003 .

I have learned how to get around the problem of "timing out" by using a short cut method for converting only a single file at a time. This is not a problem because I only change one to five pages at a time when I modify my Web Site. As it stood Microsoft was trying to look at every file on my web site which is very large (about 2 Gigabytes) and they would not wait long enough for this to happen and and generated the error message  " You have timed out. No changes have been made."

I have never got this error in the 7 years I have been using FrontPage. It had to be that the two web Server companies changed something at their end.  I could always use the shortcut on all pages except on Photo Gallery files. I needed to solve this, because the majority of files I produce are Photo Gallery files. I did a lot of experimenting to solve this problem , deciding I would have to stop generating Photo Gallery files and create long files which took quite a bit of time on my part.

I noticed that every time I tried to create a Photo Gallery page, it gave me the message that page  listed the name of the Photo Gallery file missing. I thought if I could find this and use the shortcut method on it, it might be a solution. I looked for a folder which contained all of the Photo Gallery files that I had created in 7 years, and surprisingly  I found the name of the missing file showing up on the uncompleted file after I had published. That is what the short cut method does, published it. I found the name of the file showing in the Photo Gallery Folder which had not been published. I tried the shortcut method on this file and to my astonishment, it solved the problem and I can now publish Photo Gallery pages. I know that no one but a FrontPage user would understand what I have documented here, but I know I can always  come back to this Page on my Web Site, if I forget how I solved this problem. You don't know all of the hours I spent on this problem, but it has been by far the hardest problem I have ever solved related to FrontPage. It has been worth the effort, since I can continue to use FrontPage until no one will support it. I hope that never occurs my life time.

One final note: I don't no why, when or how my original web server company(Web.com) changed to make it impossible to use FrontPage as I had been using for 7 years.

 

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