Welcome

Tlanchinol, Mexico 2004

We are pleased that you have stopped by to look at our pictures. We have been blessed to have taken a number of family trips. Our son, Jay, has just received his degree in biology and, along the way, turned my wife into an avid bird-watcher or "birder." She is also an accomplished quilter and artist. Jay loves everything about the outdoors as well as sports and computers. Melissa, our daughter, is a history major, and loves to read and to travel to far-away places. I enjoy computers, reading, hiking, museums, history, and beautiful or majestic new places. Our families are scattered across the United States and Europe, and we have more or less "adopted" several girls from Hong Kong and Macao. My two sisters each had twins 19 days apart and a brother recently adopted two little ones. We now have six new three year old nieces and nephews along with a few older ones. All of this has presented opportunities for a number of trips where we took a lot of pictures.

We hope this site will enable you to quickly see what interests you. To this end, we have no advertisements or other fancy stuff that requires you to manually scroll each picture into view. The guiding principle is simplicity rather than fancy features and we hope we have accomplished this goal.


Information and Instructions

  • This site has been developed solely for showing pictures to family and friends. Because the target audience is extremely limited, no effort has been expended to make this site work with every type of computer or software which might be used to access this site. Specifically, the only target software this site has been developed for and tested under includes the following: Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, and Mozilla Firefox. Other software will probably work just fine, but I have made no effort for this to happen. If a family member or friend contacts me with a request to support another configuration, I will consider it depending on how close I am to that relative or friend. ;-)
  • I like to use a Pocket PC to view the web, but this site specifically will not work correctly with the default configuration of a Pocket PC. I am not sure about Palm devices as yet.
  • This site works best if your screen resolution is set to 1024 x 768 or higher. If you must set the screen to a lower resolution (e.g., 800 x 600), you may be able to improve your viewing experience by pressing the F11 key which will hide toolbars and menus until you press F11 again.
  • This site is based on a simple home page, this welcome page, and a number of journal and slide shows. Simply move your mouse cursor around until it turns into a hand and click to see where it takes you.
  • A journal is a simple list of recollections describing a trip.
  • A picture album, under my definition, contains a set of thumbnails running down the left side of the screen and larger pictures with descriptions which appear when you click a thumbnail. A picture album also contains a grid of the thumbnails which allows you to see all of the pictures on one web page (which may have to be scrolled vertically). You can access this grid by clicking the right-most button at the upper left of the navigation bar on the screen with the thumbnails and larger pictures. By clicking on any thumbnail (or text link) in the grid, you can return to the larger picture associated with the cell you click on.
  • The grid and the page with larger pictures are actually one web page with multiple sections (called frames) which are not all visible at the same time. The only downside of this design is that if you hit the back button on your browser, you will usually be returned to the home page rather than the frames that aren't visible as you might expect.
  • Since I dynamically update the text on each picture to make it fit better on small screens (to the right of portrait shots and below landscape photos), you will often see the text for the next picture alongside the current picture before the next photo is completely downloaded and shown. I have tried to prevent this behavior without success. I'll keep trying, but you'll have to ignore the problem until I succeed.

Future Plans

  • Right now, the speed of the slide show feature is fixed. I would like to enhance this so that pictures with longer descriptions pause longer. I would also like to have an option screen to permit the user to select the speed from slow, medium, or fast choices and have the computer remember the setting between sessions.
  • I would eventually like to write a program that will let the user enter descriptions for each picture quickly, and then generate these web pages automatically. (Yes, I know that several graphics programs already do this, but they usually mess up the viewing experience by adding fluff that makes people with low resolution screens have to scroll each time they view a new picture.) Anyway, if I had such a program, it might be practical to share it with family members that could use it for their own pictures and websites.