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Work precludes travel much this year. I will make little trips as I can and stick the pictures up. In the mean time I will add old ones as they turn up or are requested.
14 March 2004
since I moved to this database. Superman is followed by the White Squirrel Towns with over 50,000 and the Longaberger basket building with over 30,000.
01 January 2004
Photos reorganized, colors tweaked, etc.
20 October 2003
Pictures added from short jaunt that covered the entired coast of the lower peninsula of Michigan and the Ontario coast of Lake Huron (and Georgian Bay).
10 August 2003
First batch of pictures from a recent visit to Georgia and Florida. More will follow. These are dolphin, my niece, and an alligator.
06 July 2003
As promised, there are several new ones in the gallery.
03 July 2003
I've changed computers and need to get the photo upload and database insertion updated. I'll do this soon.
24 July 2002
I took a short (four day) drive to the Black Hills and back three days after returning from the Canada drive. See the new photos.
11 July 2002
Tonight and the next day or two I am going to be inserting lots of photos into the gallery. Some are from a trip with a friend to the Chocolate Festival and the Forevertron in Wisconsin, but most are from a drive through New England and Eastern Canada. The easiest way to see what's new is the New page in the photo gallery.
18 May 2002
I was in California for business, but I managed to get a couple of days of driving in. Check the New section.
18 March 2002
Motivated by my recent pictures and determined to prove that I can do better, I dug up my photo album from last summer's Block Five Party (in Rockford, Illinois), and scanned these images. I intend to scan the pictures of strangers from Block Five some time soon, but we all know about intentions.
16 March 2002
Last weekend I took a few pictures of the Snaggs, a local group featuring Holland Zander. The lighting was horrible, but I managed to get a couple of decent shots.
I also got a few more recent road trip pictures uploaded, so check the new page.
13 March 2002
I had to do some work in Kansas City in February and took the long way home. Some photos of alligators and elephants and a circus cemetery have been added.
02 March 2002
I visited the Groundhog Day festivities in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, this year and took a few pictures. A few other photos have trickled onto the site, too. More will follow shortly.
01 January 2002
I drove through Kenton Christmas Eve and found some new signs and a few squirrels. I also added a few remaining pictures from the trip.
Apparently the pictures of one of my new cows hasn't been developed yet, so that page update is going to wait for a while.
30 December 2001
I've added new pictures from some recent trips, one to Kansas City and one down the Mississippi. There are a few more rolls to get in. I have some white squirrel signs to add (I couldn't get the squirrels themselves to cooperate) and I have three more cow clones. Those will come in a few days. In the mean time, there are several assorted photos.
13 September 2001
I am in the process of scanning photographs from my recent road trip from Edmonton to Fairbanks and back. The digital "from the road" photos are already in the gallery. The film ones are being scanned and should probably be done in three or four days. You can check the new page of the photo gallery or search for "alberta", "british columbia", "yukon", or "alaska". That should bring up all of them.
17 July 2001
On the fourth of July I traveled to Plymouth, Wisconsin, where I found another giant cow. I also found one in my own back yard, so I added a new page for giant cows not located in Wisconsin or Georgia. Send me feedback if you see a clone of these!
14 June 2001
A recent road trip revealed that there are at least two Giant Cow Clones in Georgia! These cows were apparently cloned from the Giant Cows of Wisconsin. Are there more of these cow clones out there?
13 June 2001
I have processed the photos from the three road trips I've taken this spring and put them in the gallery. My scanner is on the blink, so these are just the digital images.
30 May 2001
It's true! My Memorial Day Weekend expedition brought me charging down the eastern side of Wisconsin, where I discovered not one but two more cows identical to the three already featured on my clearly named Giant Cows of Wisconsin page. It's a conspiracy!
01 May 2001
On 29 April 2001 I revisited all three cows on the way back from a little road trip. I have replaced the pictures of Chatty Belle and Sissy with new ones (with me in them). I updated the text slightly. I took some pictures of key features of two of them (I didn't think of it when I was in Neillsville) and may update the page to include this information. Or not.
05 March 2001
Yes, I have added real advertising banners to the top of each page. I'm doing it to try to get back a little of the money I spend on this site. The broker and the concept are under review, so feel free to use feedback to let me know what you think.
19 February 2001
I've added a page with book reviews. These are books that I've purchased or been given related to road trips and roadside attractions and the like. Some of them are out of print. Those that are in print can be purchase from Amazon.com by clicking on the picture or the title. You can also purchase them from your favorite local store or online reseller or whatever. I won't get the kickback, but you'll get the book and the author will get his or her cut, so it's no big deal.
20 January 2001
The database server I was using was flaking out big time today, keeping the site down for about four hours with no end in site, so I moved it to another. Since I was unable to copy a current copy of the data, I had to use last night's backup. This means that any postcards sent between about 0500 and 1800 UTC (midnight and 1 pm Eastern) were lost. I am sorry for this inconvenience. The database problems seem to be behind us now.
14 January 2001
I've been dragging the digital camera around for a few weeks and finally got the photos added to the site. I also changed the naming on the Muffler Man and Paul Bunyan photos to fit a standard of sorts.
15 November 2000
The Public Radio International program This American Life produced, as pledge premiums, some really cool secret decoder wheels, designed by Chris Ware.
At the end of four Autumn shows they are giving out pieces of a secret encoded message. If you listen, decode, and send in the results, you could win prizes.
They've also got Windows, Mac, and Web versions of the wheel.
I thought it would be fun to encode my own messages, so I wrote an encoder, which anyone can use. The messages should be decoded with the wheel.
You may well ask, "If you could write an encoder, couldn't you write a decoder?" Of course I could, but not for you, you cheater. You have to use the wheel, just like everybody else. Or write your own program.
04 November 2000
Looks like I broke the feedback option when I reorganized the site. Oops. It's fixed now.
25 September 2000
I visited Exeter, Ontario, over the weekend to see the White Squirrel Festival and photograph a couple of the little beasts. The town has been added to my White Squirrel Towns page. I will write something about the festival and include photos of the parade and costumes and such later.
19 September 2000
I have scanned a couple of dozen additional photos, bringing the total to over 600. I have some from the Grotto of the Holy Ghost in Dickeyville and the Forevertron that will be scanned as soon as I get a chance.
I've added a link to both the main page and the gallery page that displays a random photograph. It seemed like a good idea at the time. If you wish to link direction to the random photo script, the URL is "http://www.thom.org/gallery/random.php".
13 September 2000
Added a half dozen or so photos from the Fred Smith (aka Wisconsin) Concrete Park. It was hard to scan them, because they have a lot of contrast and sharp edges. These are in the Grottos and Concrete Places section.
10 September 2000
I've scanned in over four dozen new photos, some dating back to 1990, but most within the last few years. I've also rescanned a few as I came upon the prints, since I've got a much better scanner now. See here and here for examples.
I added some signs featuring white squirrels to the Olney and Marionville sections. I've also rescanned the Kenton squirrel.
04 September 2000
Added over two dozen photographs to the photo gallery, including many from road trips in 1994 and 1995.
03 September 2000
Modified main page to show the twenty most popular photos and generate this What's New list from the database.
I moved all my data to another database server last week, and so far it hasn't gone down once. That's a terrific improvement over the every hour outages I was seeing before.
28 August 2000
I discovered that the WebTV viewer, and presumably WebTV itself, does not provide the HTTP_REFERER variable, which means that no WebTV visitors were able to see my photos. I've worked around this.
27 August 2000
Speaking of the database, the server has been acting like crap the last month or so, restarting every hour or two. This breaks the photo gallery, among other things. I added a trap for it to explain the error. The outages are usually just a minute or so.
I am cleaning up all the pages on the site, making them use the common start and end stuff. The travel section will be last, since I've got to insert that crap into the database.
I've redone the title banner, including a cute little logo and bogus banner ads. No, those aren't real ads. Yet.
I've finished getting all my previously uploaded photos into the photo gallery, bringing the total up to almost 400 images. I will be adding more as I get them scanned.
16 July 2000
I replaced PHP 4.0.0 with PHP 4.0.1. The entire photo gallery has been rewritten. It now uses a database, and there are ten times as many photos available.
24 June 2000
I have two ongoing projects which are getting a few hours a week:
Since I've now visited the real Stonehenge, in addition to three domestic replicas, I decided to make a page called Stonehenge in America