As I have returned from the wilderness I find my natural tendency for the proliferation of words increasing slowly, as can be evidenced by the slow increase in output to this page. It is taking place however on another front. Years after the completion of A Journeyman's Rite, posted here, I have recently found myself inspired to pick up that long set aside tale and finally produce the obviously intended sequel. I am happy to report that some progress is being made on that front. The characters are coming back to life for me, and the story is taking shape on paper (or, more realistically, on the screen [in a Word file]). But before I get very far along with that, I'd like to "clean up" the copy that is linked to. Though I was quite pleased to accomplish the blog posting of the book at all, which was quite a project at the time, the pasting wasn't really satisfactory. All the proper form was lost, and correcting it for readability presented a task I didn't quite know how to deal with, nor did I have the patience for it. I've been rethinking that, and perhaps soon I'll get around to correcting it.

In the meantime, I've been trying to figure how best to incorporate Facebook into my online reality. Twitter seems pretty much a waste of my time, but so many of my friends and family are now using Facebook that, as I mentioned before, it strikes me as a good way to easily and quickly pass along articles of interest. The columns that don't provide those click-points, I will continue to post here.

This is also a better forum for presenting things of a more personal and mundane nature, such as Google Earth discoveries or Flight Simulator experiences. I can easily loose myself for hours in either of those pursuits. GE 5.0 is truly awesome, but for the life of me I can't figure out why, since they provide a map of Mars, there is no Moon. There are definitely improvements over 4.0 in the 3D renderings of some locations. For example, before the upgrade, where there was merely an aerial photo of Baylor Hospital (where I go twice a week), there is now good 3D detail of the building and the surrounding area. Austin is also quite good, though Houston and New Orleans have lots of room for improvement. Check out Walt Disney World. You can tell from the photo credits how much help was provided by the Disney company, which almost makes it the next best thing to going.

Happily, Microsoft recently passed along an update for the NVidia driver used by my laptop, which really has improved my overall Google Earth (and Flight Simulator) experiences. So, because of that, I encourage everyone (Windows users only, of course) to keep up with available updates. It's easy, it's free, and it often fixes problems; and we Windows users know there is always room for improvement.