A Simple Class Reunion Website Design – FREE

I’ve noticed that there aren’t a lot of high school class reunion websites. I suppose that’s because classes only have one reunion a year. Why bother with a website – and who’ll pay for it?

Nevertheless, since I graduated from Grand Haven High School, there have been fifty other graduating classes. You’d think someone in some of those classes would be interested in putting up a site and maintaining it just as a hobby. You can do that these days for less than the cost of dinner for two, or a tank of gas. And unlike those two pastimes, tinkering around with a Class Reunion website can provide hours of entertainment and fun. Besides that, as the “Class Webmaster,” (albeit self-appointed) you’d probably get a seat at the head table – right up there with the Class President, Secretary, and all those former “preppies” who snubbed you in the old days.

I hate ClassMates.Con (oops! – I meant “.Com,” of course). They keep sending me messages about all my old classmates who are eager to check out my profile and get together, with invitations to come to the site and see who they are. Then when I go there they meet me at my home page with their hand out – pimping their site with a “Choose Gold!” button. They’ll tell me who “Friend X” is and let us get together for $59 – their “best value.”

Best value? I’m dubious. I can do a lot better than that over on the corner of Hall and Division in Grand Rapids. And I’d even get to see the merchandise first. And, she’d probably even lie to me and tell me I was “hot” for an old guy.

So, I thought a good way to pimp my books might be to build a class reunion website template and give it away for free. The catch is that in order to go live with it, a person would be smart to read Chapter 9 of my book Solutions for Secretaries of Small NPO’s, but then, you can read that for free on Google if you can stand reading books on a screen. I don’t like to do that, and I hope others hate it too, and will therefore decide to pop for the price of the book (hint: it's discounted at amazon.com, barns&noble.com, etc.) Even if they don’t, they’ll maybe stumble across my author/publisher website, so my small but growing library might get a little exposure.

My class reunion website is Spartan and “user friendly.” Rather than cluck about all its virtues, I’ll just point you towards my real, live online example – www.ghhs58.org. Go there and browse around, and if that encourages you to put up a similar site for your class, the link to the freebie is at the bottom right-hand side of the GHHS58 home page. You’ll find the download in the SfS site’s “Examples/Downloads” area. Inside the downloaded ZIP file you’ll find a README text that’ll get you started and walk you thorough the process up to the point of launch.

C’mon – give it a shot. If you’re smart enough to get here and read this, you know all you have to know to handle the project. Quite whining and making excuses. Just do it!

-=glw=-

Our Makoonsag

Preface

I once read a personal memoir written by an old man who was one of the children of a North Manitou Island Lightkeeper. The light station was located on the north Island's southern-most point, several miles from the few other people who lived on the island. Some of them were farmers and loggers, but most were summer residents who left as the days began to grow shorter. It was a lonely place, open to the winds and the weather.

The Manitou Passage was still an important maritime asset then, with several ships negotiating the treacherous waters between the towering Sleeping Bear Dunes on the mainland, and the two nearby islands, North Manitou and South Manitou. The significance of the maritime traffic and the danger in that immediate area was marked by the presence of two lighthouse stations and three lifesaving stations. But as time marched on, the importance of shipping was diminished by the growth of railroads, motor freight and air travel. By the late years of the twentieth century, the Manitou Passage was only a footnote in history books, and important only as a beautifully scenic tourist destination. The islands were eventually deserted by all the families who had once thought of them as "home."

Makoonsag is an Ojibwa word meaning "bear cubs"; Mishe-Mokwa is "the Great Bear" referred to in Longfellow's famous "Song of Hiawatha." Those familiar with the area know the Indian legend explaining the presence of the great dune and the two nearby islands. I was conceived on South Manitou, so certain things in the memoir I was reading that evening struck close to home, even bringing tears as in my mind's eye the words on the page morphed into moving pictures of what used to be. That inspired the only attempt I've made at poetry during my adult life.

[-=glw=-]

Our Makoonsag

West of watchful Mishe-Mokwa, lay the cold and lonely Islands
on the slate and restless waters, 'neath the clouds that darkly threaten,
warning boats to stay at bay.

Hosting now the north winds only and the snows its gales blow fiercely
into fields and woods and ruins, drifting over trails and pathways
where our feet oft found their way.

Out of season and abandoned, save for tiny beasts and migrants,
islands where we once made merry; silent now and solitary
on this wintry New Year's Day.

On the mainland we now frolic, having moved across the Passage,
seeking fortunes then elusive (never found on either Island) ...
lighter work for greater pay.

But quiet moments bring to mind the warmth of simple village folk,
faithful kin and caring neighbors, farmsteads once so full of laughter;
journeys made by horse and sleigh.

Dauntless seamen making crossings challenging the angry billows,
worried wives a'watching seaward, catching ropes upon deliverance.
Voyagers back, now home to stay.

Sands still warm on summer evenings soothing bare feet of the children,
racing beams around the lighthouse, finding shapes in starry heavens.
Bath and bedtime after play.

Sought we all for "something better", fooled by fickle expectations,
one by one the Islands leaving. Dreaming then, now sadly knowing,
the better life we'd cast away.

While coldly we forsook our Islands, steadfast they to our hearts cling,
fostering such recollections! Absence hindering not remembrance,
pictures saved there oft replay.

Save we facts and share we fables of our much revered makoonsag;
generations hence might know them as have we, their privileged stewards,
passing on our legacy.

Gene L Warner
January 1, 2004

What's All This "What's All This ... Stuff, Anyhow? (A Tribute to Bob Pease)

Robert A Pease is one of my heroes. He has written a column for Electronic Design News (now called "EDN") magazine for, oh, I don't know how many years. Seems like forever. The articles are usually titled "What's All This ... Stuff, Anyhow?" Sometimes the "..." was something about electronics; and sometimes not. A rant about the Alternative Minimum Tax or a recounting of his latest hiking adventure was just as likely. It was and is the kind of stuff we put into "blogs" today.

"RAP" has been working at National Semiconductor for 30-years. Other than that, I don't know much about his background. He's obviously a pretty smart fellow. I didn't know it at the time, but I built my business, in part, on the fruits of his labor.

I'm not much of an education snob, because my formal academic life ended with a Diploma from Grand Haven High School. My family was financially impaired and up to that point I hadn't excelled much as a very good student, so the only person who thought it was a shame I wasn't going to college was my English teacher, Miss. Geraldine Dykhuizen. My Dad had graduated from the eighth grade, and thought I'd already done quite well, having gone four more years beyond that. So I joined the U.S. Air Force.

The Air Force gave me a choice of two schools: "Gunnery Systems Maintenance" or "Aircraft Electronic Navigation Systems Maintenance." The first school was in Denver, but "gunnery systems" sounded like something that involved grease and oil and dirty clothes. So I picked the second choice, which took me to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. That was a good choice because of the wide variety of navigation equipment, which was common to a wide variety of aircraft. I was wrong about the Denver deal; that was really about taking care of the short-range radar enabled computer system that ran the cannons on the back of the B-52 bomber. I would have wound up working in the same kind of outfit anyway, an "Armaments and Electronic Squadron", or "A&E" outfit. Their part of it was called the "Fire Control" shop. Ours was "COM/NAV," which stood for communications and navigation.

Anyway, I entered the Air Force tech school at Keesler in the spring of 1959. I learned all about how all sorts of vacuum tubes worked. Transistors were around by then, but they didn't bother teaching anything about that. PN junctions were inherently too noisy to ever be of any use in military applications, they said. For the three years after that, I worked in a thermionic world on B-52's and KC-135's of the Strategic Air Command's 4228th Strategic Wing at Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi. We were a combat-ready outfit, flying daily missions with two hot bombers, helping to keep the Soviets convinced that we were capable of holding up our end of keeping the peace through the cooperative policy of "M.A.D." - "Mutually Assured Destruction." We thought we were pretty hot stuff. I was damned good at what I did, and thought I was pretty hot stuff.

When I re-entered civilian life however, I discovered quite quickly that when it came to electronics, I knew a lot about the kind of stuff they have on B-52 bombers and KC-135 tankers, but outside of the Air Force, there weren't many outfits in need of a person like that. RCA offered me a good job on a ship that sailed down the line from Cape Canaveral to track things that NASA launched, but didn't need me right then, promising to eventually be in touch, and "Don't call us; we'll call you." "Eventually" turned out to be a long time, and when I got to the point where I didn't have the price of a plain McDonald's hamburger, let alone the rent, I had to hire in somewhere else.

The want-ad in the paper talked about "military-aerospace" work and mentioned names like General Dynamics, Teledyne and North American/Rockwell, so I bit on that. It turned out to be a company that made test chambers for electronic stuff, and the field service job was actually highly refrigeration-centric - oily stuff; dirty cloths. A few weeks later I was their resident "expert" at Autonetics in Anaheim. The real expert they had on that project needed a vacation and they needed a body just for the sake of having a continuing presence on the project. I was young, clean-cut, nice looking, and the one they could most easily do without at the factory, so they sent me. So, there I finally was - in the big time, in the big city ... and not very far from DisneyLand and Knotts Berry Farm. RCA finally called, but I'd promised the guy who owned the chamber company that I'd stick it out for a month before deciding to quit. RCA said, "Well then, thanks. And have a nice life."

The chamber company was in the technological dark ages, trying to use old Brown Instruments (Minneapolis-Honeywell) and Bristol Instruments stuff to control their reliability test chambers. Autonetics was working on cutting-edge Minute Man and F-111 hardware. The general idea was to put that stuff inside a test chamber that simulated what it would be subjected to in the real world by exposing it to vibration and extremes of hot and cold temperature, then documenting its failure rate. Obviously, the test chambers were nowhere near as reliable as the cutting-edge stuff, so all the chamber failures complicated the task of getting good MBTF (Mean Time Between Failures) data.

But that presented a good chance for me. Being inquisitive, innovative, and a loner, I busied myself with a project of designing some instruments and controls that would work as good as the military-aerospace stuff. But I didn't know anything about transistors! I'd noticed, of course, that Autonetics was using those noisy transistors in spite of what the Air Force thought, and I was smart enough to figure out that unveiling a new "secret weapon" made out of vacuum tubes would get me laughed at. So I decided to figure out on my own exactly how transistors worked. That proved to be really tough, because I knew that current flow involved electrons. The books all talked about "holes." If current flow was really about holes, why is it still called "electron-ics"? Even today, I'm good at using transistors to switch things. But should any transistor circuit I design have the misfortune of getting itself into a linear mode, that's bad. It usually ends up with smoke and fire, and the room smells real bad for a while.

I was able to avoid that issue for a while, choosing for my first kitchen-table invention (I was working on these things clandestinely in my apartment) a programmer based on punched tape and relay logic. It was noisy (audibly), but was compact (by our standards) and had lots of flashing lights, so caught the owner's interest. He offered me a great deal: come back to Michigan and invent more stuff like that, or stay in L.A. but find some other job.

When I got back to Michigan, I began to feel cornered. There's only so much you can do with relay logic. And I still hadn't been able to get past the mental block that was preventing me from understanding transistors. I was very secretive about what I was working on because I didn't need for anyone to have any expectations. Sometimes it wasn't easy to avoid attracting attention. Electronic components are really stinky when they burn up, and electrolytic capacitors can make pretty good firecrackers.

So what's any of this got to do with Bob Pease?

Nothing yet at this point. It was only early 1970, but in early 1970 God was good to me, and had a salesman from some electronic distributor bring me some brains. Salesmen never like to come in empty-handed, and this one came bearing some little printed "Application Notes" written by some guy named Robert J. Widlar at some company called "National Semiconductor." Among the more interesting ones were these two. That day proved to be a watershed in my career!

These papers talked about little "black box" like thingies (tin cans, actually) that I could hang a few external resistors and capacitors on and achieve just about any kind of function I needed to do. They were full of transistors, but I didn't need to know anything about that. All I needed to know was what Bob Widlar had written in these "AN's," and some of the stuff on the spec sheets. Best of all, National's stuff was written in plain English, rather than the usual verbose "engineer-speak" that only confuses practical people in its attempt to impress peers by making sure they have no idea what the heck the author is talking about. Even a High School graduate could get what Widlar was talking about.

Eventually I learned how to do the math, and that put an end to the "smoke testing." I could design whole products on paper, and know they were going to work pretty good without even having to build a prototype. That was fun, because next-door to my lab we had an ex-NASA "scientist" who used the other method; tinkering until by trial and error whatever he was working on finally worked. When his stuff went into production, he was often left scratching his head over a pile of gizmos that didn't work as good as his jury-rigged prototype, and sometimes didn't work at all. NASA scientist vs. High School graduate. My boss explained that quite easily; I was a "boy-genius."

Within a couple of years, most of the electronic instruments and controls shipping on our chambers were made in-house. We used lots of LM301's and LM308's. For power supplies we used National's LM304's and LM305's. What began on my kitchen table in Fullerton turned into the company's "ACS Division" (Automatic Control Systems). The owner was really pleased with himself, especially when taking visiting customers and site inspectors on the plant tour.

In the midst of this, Bob Pease came to National to become one of Bob Widlar's colleagues. I don't think I ever heard of Bob Pease until his "Pease Porridge" column began to show up in Electronic Design News. I still get EDN and that's always the first page I turn to (and usually the only page, now). In addition to that, he was instrumental in the development of some other IC's that greatly simplified my life. One was the indestructible LM317 positive voltage regulator. I've been using that from the time it became available. Another is its complimentary negative regulator, his LM337. We're still using both of these in production parts even today.

However, I think Bob's best achievement is his having carried on the tradition of no-nonsense technical writing. Thanks to that tradition at National I, a dummy, was able to launch a career that has served me well for the past 37-years. I've owned and operated my own business for the past 31-years based upon what I learned from the likes of Bob Widlar, Bob Dobkin and Bob Pease, and the income derived from that has provided a pretty good life for us; my wife and I and the five children who grew up under this roof. This just goes to show you, what you're doing might be doing lots of others a lot of good, even though you'll probably never know it.

In his "Pease Porridge" feature, Bob's moniker is to entitle his articles the same basic way - "What's All This _____ Stuff, Anyhow?" I've been tempted to use that a couple of times here, but felt a little sheepish about doing that. After all, that's Bob's trademark, registered or not.

But after thinking it over, I've decided to go ahead and do it. Each time I do, it'll be my little tribute to a guy who has really made a mark, on my life and, no doubt, many others.

[=-glw=-]