Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

I know Bogey is getting tired of dealing with my ineptitude, but I can’t help but call the resident expert when something new comes up. Today, it’s Drupal.

I ran across this web content managing package by chance, and it seems to have everything I could ever want in maintaining the site: Blog, archive management, categories for archives, MySQL support built in, and photo capability. Unfortunately, it is PHP-based, and I can’t even master HTML yet.

With all this shuffling of knowledge going on in my brain this week, I haven’t even had time to develop what might be considered an original thought. The synapses are on fire from sparking all weekend, and they want to shut down fo a while. Instead, I’ve added some important links to the page. For those of you interested in International Affairs from a military perspective (professional journals), check them out. Included is my first-ever published article, circa 1984.

Well, for the last two days I’ve been getting a new web site set up on a hosting server, getting a new domain name established, and trying to build readable web pages. All this and two rounds of golf in the South Texas wind.

The new site will be operational in a day or two…as soon as Bogey gets a chance to critique my work. Whether the link to the blog is bunkermulligan.net or bunkermulligan.net/weblog I don’t yet know. As soon as it is operational, I’ll make a post.

…to my son-in-law, Bogey, and my son, Birdie. Both will add to this blog on occassion.

Birdie will soon be blogging from Baghdad, so I’ll move the blog to a web site where he can post photos. More to come once we move!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a program. I finally finished one for our local golf association, but it took far longer than expected. Basically, it took two weeks to do what should have taken two hours. We have a DOS-based program on the computer to sort through names and handicaps to build teams for the weekend group. We all throw some money in the pot, and while we’re playing, the manager runs the names and teams are formed. Unfortunately, the program gets confused when names are deleted, or added after other actions have been run. I offered to put a new Windows-based program together. The Windows environment isn’t friendly for programming print operations, and that still needs work in my program.

I’ve worked with FORTRAN, BASIC, QBASIC, C++, and Visual Basic. All are similar, but each has its quirks. The biggest problem I ran into with this project was dealing with a grid control. The MS VB FlexGrid doesn’t allow edits within the grid itself, so everything I had to work with (data) could really only be displayed in the grid. It offered no other functionality that I could see. And printing, as I mentioned, isn’t as straight-forward as it is in BASIC, for example. I haven’t yet figured out how to TAB in my printouts like I could in “plain ol’ BASIC” with a Tab(20) command to go to the 20th column.

And it has been frustrating going through the MSDN documentation–“TAB” has so many variants. And web searches take me to a lot of sites with lots of information, most of which is way beyond the simple tasks I’m working.

Well, the program works. I still have some refinements to work on, but the core is in place. And I’m re-learning my programming skills. It ain’t like riding a bike!

During lunch this morning we watched the reenactment of the first manned powered flight at Kitty Hawk. Phenomenal is the best word I can come up with.

Imagine you and your next-door neighbor deciding to build a rocket that could take you to Saturn and return you safely home. Or, how about designing a submarine to take you to the bottom of the Marianas Trench?
And you’ll do it all yourself