Author: John Chappell


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I’ve seen these hundreds, nay, thousands of times on websites, but only recently did the truly ominous implication strike me so bluntly. It’s like the ultimate personal surrender, the terminal consignment of self, the final relinquishment of free will. You either SUBMIT or you don’t, there are no options, there’s no in-between. There’s often small print at the bottom that says something similar to this one. As is well known, understood, and expected, nobody clicks off to some other page to read whatever it is before they SUBMIT. Maybe you should think about it. I’m going to. Even so, there’s still no guarantee that what one is about to SUBMIT to will have anything to do with one’s expectations. Just remember, once you SUBMIT, THAT’S IT. Have you ever seen an UN-SUBMIT button afterwards? I didn’t think so.

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Aurora Borealis

September 23, 2020

General, Life, Wisdom

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Besides family members, there are other Instagram accounts I follow, such as iflscience, lightsnature, lovely_earthshotz, iss (Space Station), setiinstitute, starlitlandscapes, nasa, and others. Recently, one of them posted an aurora borealis video that not only blew my mind but brought tears to my eyes. I thought, “If anyone wanted proof there’s a god…” Of course, I know the scientific explanation of how these lights are created. But, the fact that such mesmerizing beauty can result from a few cosmic particles interacting with a few other particles seemed to raise the question, “Why should it be that way?” This reminded me of the old adage about a tree falling in the forest, whether it makes a sound if there’s nobody there to hear it. Would the incredible beauty of the northern lights exist if there was nobody there to see it? If one generalizes from that question to all of the other beauty that exists in nature on our little planet, not to mention the cosmos, perhaps one would discern an answer to the age old question, “Why are we here?” Seems obvious to me at the moment.

China Grade Upgrade

May 17, 2020

Family Matters, General, Memory Lane

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The Covid-19 stay-at-home days have given me a little incentive and a little time to attend to some webmaster things needing attention. Some of my sites still have sections and pages that aren’t “mobile friendly”. One of them was the China Grade Memorial on the Harpshot website. So, this weekend, I upgraded it to hopefully be more usable and more mobile friendly. This involved more use of javascript which used to be criticized but is now mainstream web design practice. I used a free image gallery framework called Galleria. It’s not as satisfying as building web pages from scratch with nothing but a text editor, but I think those days are mostly gone. It still required some webmaster expertise so I didn’t feel like a total ________. Shoot, one thing about getting older is not being able to remember words. So, I’ve taken to using a blank line to hold the place until it comes to me. <sigh>



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