I’ve updated to WordPress 2.0.3.  The upgrade seems to have gone smoothly, but a bug could always be lurking somewhere.  Hopefully everything keeps running smoothly.

I’ve read the last several issues of World Airshow News. It’s quite a good magazine, but as I’ve read I keep finding out about my heros dying. A few months ago I found out Bobby Younkin and Jimmy Franklin had died in a midair collision. Having seen both of them perform many many times (I have some photos of them doing performances in my photogallery), it was something of a shock. Then I noticed that one of the rotating top pictures I did for this blog was Jimmy Franklin’s black and silver Waco. Well, “it happens” I tell myself. It’s not like I don’t know death. At least they died doing what they love.

Reading more issues of World Airshow News I discover a lot of famous airshow pilots are no longer living (and they didn’t exactly die in their sleep). Sort of scary considering these are the best pilots in the world at what they do. Well, today I’m reading the latest issue and find out that Eric Beard died in January. I’ve seen his Russian Thunder routine several times. He was a top notch flyer and I’ve always noted how difficult many of his routines were. It’s quite sad.

Well, I started thinking about it and it turns out that another picture I use in my rotating top pictures is of him. I’m 98% sure it’s him. I haven’t seen any Sukhoi’s or Yak’s done up like his, so I’m fairly sure it’s him. Maybe I’m bad luckfor these guys.

Here’s some more info for those intersted:

Jimmy Franklin’s Wikipedia entry
Jimmy Franklin Memorial page
News article on Jimmy and Bobby’s midair
Eric Beard’s site

I need to pay a little closer attention to the WordPress site.  WordPress 2.0.2, a security update, was released nearly a week ago.  Well, I’ve upgraded to it now.  Everything seems to be working fine.

Well, short on the heels of my delayed upgrade to 2.0, WordPress 2.0.1 has been released this past week.  Now that I have a little time, I’d done the upgrade myself.  It works.  Everything seems to have gone smoothly.

Well, I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.0. I was really concerned that all the hard work I put into getting everything pretty much the way I wanted would have been wasted in the upgrade requiring lots of effort to fix. Well, I was wrong. It is fine. I followed the upgrade instructions and things went fine. I only had to do some minor tweaking to my stylesheets, but that’s it. Everything works great. We’ll see if I start feeling any benefit from the upgrade, though.

I’ve created my restaurant critique section. At this time I don’t have any reviews completed, but I have listed some restaurant names that I will complete my reviews for in the near future. I just need to sit down, type everything up and organize pictures that I have in along with them. Stay tuned.

I added a current weather plug-in to WordPress. The upside is that it works well, but the downside is that IE doesn’t support PNG transparency. The icons it comes with look really nice, but just aren’t any good in IE. There are some alternate icons that use GIF transparency, but they suck. So, until I redo the icons myself to negate the need for transparency, they’ll look “right” on browsers other than IE.

I’ve updated some of my firearms content with better or more pictures. I also added a couple more pieces. That new digital camera really produces large images to work with. I can’t wait to get these new pieces to the range to try out.

I just did some CSS changes to fix some page displays in Internet Explorer. I haven’t really been testing much in IE, because I rarely use it. In fact, I’ve done more testing in Konquerer than IE. Since both Konquerer and Firefox displayed the same I thought I had things right. Well, that was wrong and I had some weird shifting and column wrapping crop up on me in some odd places. After much playing around I think I’ve squashed those bugs. I’ve only tested IE version 6, so I have no idea if it’s broken in other IE versions as of yet. Konquerer and Firefox both seem fine still. I’m starting to dislike CSS, but maybe I should just be complaining about Microsoft’s support for it. If they would just fix their JPEG renderer so my gradients would appear smoother in IE too.

I’ve decided to start making some pages for the weapons I own. Might add a little flavor to content aside from my posts. First up is my AK-74M. The links (at least for now) will go under the “My Stuff” category in the sidebar.