Number 12

Hello all. After doing so well two weeks in a row with getting material into "Waiting For The Dawn," I'll be stepping back for a couple of weeks to do maintenance on the pages I already have. There's a lot I'd like to spiff up in preparation for the hordes of new visitors we will be receiving any day now. This week, I've done a lot of work on f.17, my photo archive. I've attacked my photos with JPEG compression so that they all load a lot faster, and added Thumbnails which allow you to randomly access pages or go to the old-style big and slow pages if you so choose. I think I'm getting the hang of Photoshop and scanners now, but the current big mystery for me is what is lost with JPEG compression. For the most part, there seems to be little difference in the final result (although maybe my screen is too low a resolution to tell). Well, someday I'll re-scan everything, and then have high resolution scans rather than the originals as the alternatives.

While I'm working on these pages, might I suggest the following link in line with last week's discussion of spaceophilia. It is the Project Mercury Web Page being served out of Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers. I used it for a scrap of background for last week's commentary, but there's a lot there to explore, including the Gemini, Apollo, and other missions under the category of "history". For Mercury, at least, the pages are set up as dry technical reports, which as a geek I found to be very informative and entertaining. The dryness of the language, probably lifted from some report or press release, encourages the imagination to fill in the personal details and read between the lines. For instance, in one of the "Little Joe" missions, they were working on a test of the emergency capsule ejection system, when it lit off as they were working on it (apparently no injuries resulted)! These are the gems of detail that are generally lost in the historical record but can be found on this unsupposing web archive.

Charles