Suspended in a sunbeam.

A Pale Blue Dot

In 1990, Voyager 1, having finished its primary mission, and well beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto and on its way out of the solar system, turned its camera back towards the sun and took a series of photos of the planets from over 4 billion miles away. Earth showed as a pale blue dot less than one pixel in size on Voyage's imaging sensor. Due to its being so close to the sun from such a distance, Earth happened to lie within one of the resulting scattered light rays on the image.

Carl Sagan wrote the following about the image...

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

This month is the 10th Anniversary of the passing of Carl Sagan.

Life is Beautiful

87-year-old Yup'ik Dance Diva

Note: THIS LINK MAY GO AWAY AT ANY TIME.

Web Site Update

Work on the vintage railroad images and the Google Map project is slowly progressing. Managed to insert an overlay of the state railroad network (c. 1993) for the upper layers of the map. Now need to figure out how to go back to color code the line segments by railroad company. Other items on the agenda are to create a sidebar list of locations, to create color coded icons and perhaps to work out a filtering method to allow selection by railroad company. Once all this is worked out will get back to filling in all the missing information for all the images.

Have also completed the initial work on another project that maps out the locations of historic school insurance photographs available online from the SC state archives. Having a major problem matching photographs with locations. so far have able to match about a third of the over 2600 photographs with a definite map location. Progress made so far in this endeavor can be found here. Be sure to read the Details page to find out what this is all about. As envisioned the final product will allow selection of school photographs by county. Due to the amount of work that will be require to obtain a good map location many of the photographs of schools located in urban areas will most likely not be included in this project. Expect to have roughtly 1000, mostly rural, school photographs mapped out.

Recently learned of a new method to create a time line web application using MIT's Simile Timeline API. Far less complex than the Google Map API. Decided to create a timeline of Civil War events that occurred in the old Beaufort District. Progress made so far can be seen here. Would eventually like to create a Google Earth layer using the timeline feature with a historic map overlay and possibly a similar map version using the Google Map API as well. A SC railroad history timeline Is under consideration once all of the above are completed.

Life is Beautiful

For about the past 8 years I have been a "member" of a informal collection of folks that exchange jokes, funny pictures, weird stories and whatnot via e-mail. While the jokes are mostly good, some even make you laugh until you got to pee, occasionally some item comes along that makes you smile and think "Life is Beautiful." At least I do, I don't know about the rest of those jokers I exchange e-mails with. So I decided to start a Life is Beautiful series on this otherwise useless blog. The first entry follows.

Might as well kick this series off with a song that came my way about this time last year. I got the song from a neighbor. So to all fathers of daughters out there this is for you.

My Baby Girl

A lady at work gave me a copy of this. This is her brother singing. His daughter got married last weekend. He wrote this song for her and recorded it. He then played it at the wedding reception and danced with her during the song. Her mother died with cancer about 7 years ago. It is very sweet! Grab a Kleenex.

Thought y'all might want to hear this. Of course, I am partial and think Big Brother did a great job. He and Ashleigh are going to dance to this at the reception.... Donna

Dad wrote this song for my wedding!! Grab a tissue. Love, Ashleigh

Google Map + SC Vintage RR Images

Since July I have been updating the RR history section. My latest accomplishment is this Google Map mash-up of vintage SC railroad images. It is still far from complete and additional bells and whitsles will be applied as I figure out the coding.

Crocodile Hunter

Goodbye. You will be missed.

Update

Have been making somev progress on several fronts with the web site. Joe's SC Railroad Research Pages have been updated and moved to Bartoliniville. Likewise with the top pages for Amanda, Fish and Eats.

Flickr

I've been busy posting scanned photos and vintage postcards to Flickr the past few weeks. Go here to view them.

“ Beautiful Beaufort, by the sea, 26-miles from Yemassee”

This is all I can remember from the song. I don't know the song title, or who or when it was written. It is my typical refrain when replying to the question, “Where are you from?” Back in 1986, while preparing to depart for a summer field season in southwest Alaska, David asked me the question and I replied with my usual response. The following year David told me that his father recalled hearing the song in the early 1950s when he was at Paris Island for recruit training. So the song was around then and there is a good chance that it was around even earlier, perhaps composed by a Marine recruit during WW2.

Progress is being made

Work on the web site is slowly progressing. Other commitments, like work, kids school, the garden, expanding the box turtle corral and just plain living have conspired to reduce my free time to a bare minimum.

Pages I consider mostly complete are:

• Home Page
• AK - Top Page
• SC - Top Page
• SC - Lay of the Land
• Beaufort - Top Page
• Beaufort - 1927

Pages started and nearing completion:

• AK - Lay of the Land
• Beaufort - My Memories

Still need to re-design and relocate my existing sites to Bartoliniville.

• Joe's SC Railroads Research Pages
• Saw Dust in the Swamps
• Cashs Depot
• Amanda's Site

I just might complete all currently planed pages in time to renew the domain and web host service.

Site is coming together.

Finally Decided on a common design and theme. You would think that after 5 years of messing around with creating a web site I would have it together once I got the domain name and hosting worked out. Not hardly. Soon (?) I will relocate and reformat all the pages from my free web host accounts over to Bartoliniville.

Whats in a name

The name, Bartoliniville, was coined in the summer of 1988 while stranded near the mouth of the Joshua Green River in the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge .

It refers to my "dream" resort of grass huts on a white sandy beach down in Belize. Forgot who came up with the name, Brian, David, or Randy. Anyway it was a long summer back in '88.

Gee wiz Joe, what has taken you so long?

Five years have elapsed since I first consived of creating a web site called "Bartoliniville" and finially I got off my duff and registered a domain, bartoliniville.us, and found a hosting service, Go Daddy. Com (I like their commercials and the 2005 Marine Corp Birthday video , and the price was right.). Now all I got to do is to start posting some content.

This Web site coming soon