John Ratcliff's Weblog

Well, I had a lot of fun setting up my website. I found a webhosting service that lets you add all kinds of doo-dads to your site. Currently, if you go to some of the sidebar links, it will cause pop-ups to occur. However, I just paid for the premium service and in a day or two that should stop. Of all the services offered, the ones I like the most are the mailing list and polls. I'm looking forward to getting a movie mailing list of my friends together so I can email them when a new showing is coming up. I like the polls because I can put up a new poll before a movie showing to let people vote on what they want to watch, and I can put up another poll afterwards so people can let me know what they thought about it. It sounds like it's going to be fun. Once my website settles into shape I hope to get on a more normal posting schedule. I had a few folks drop by from one of the 16mm film forums today so, hopefully, this will be a great opportunity to meet some other c

I transferred all of my favorite weblinks to my blog template today. I will update them from time to time. I added them for my own reference purposes as much as for anyone else. In my last blog post I said I would talk about 'favorite' films. Well, that's the topic today and this is where you get to help out. Send me an email if you have your own suggestions and I will add them to the lists. The first point to be made about these lists is that I am talking about movies that would be fun to 'show'. This is not necessarily a favorite movie list. Many of our favorite films are dramas, sometimes quite serious dramas, or perhaps mysteries as well. However, these kinds of movies tend to be far too serious to be appropriate for an evening of fun with friends. Showing a film is a social event; with lots of intermissions at reel changes, cartoons for the kids, as well as food and fun. A very serious film does not match the tone we are trying to set. Additionall

Life Trivia As I said in my first blog post, I plan to just talk about the trivia in my life. This blog is going to be about my new hobby, which is 16MM film collecting. This is an incredibly exciting hobby and, in my opinion, is one of the most fun things a person can be a collector of. I liken it to owning a work of art that, instead of hanging on a wall, allows you to create a social event out of sharing a piece of movie history. I'll start by explaining how I fell into this hobby to begin with. Over the last couple of years there has been this guy here in Lake St. Louis who was showing movies off of his dock. He would set up a projection screen and a portable multimedia projector and show movies on DVD. Some people would just be sitting in his back yard on lawn chairs, others would float out in the water off of the dock, but the most fun was when you were just going along on your boat with friends and could pull right up to a 'float-in' theatre. Even t

This is weblog post number one. This weblog is in honor of Suz Dodd who passed away last week. Suz was a member of the mooville network of web loggers. Mooville is an online community where a number of previous and current Simutronics employees post web logs about what is happening in their lives. When reading Suz's web log, and others, I have found that I maintain a sense of 'connection' to friends who have long since moved away. No, we don't see each other every day any more, nor do we hardly ever make a phone call, but simply by browsing their web logs I feel like I 'know' what's happening in their lives. We are all saddened by Suz's passing. It has been especially hard on Bruce Ferguson who was so very close to Suz. So, you see, this weblog is not just in honor of Suz, but also for those of us who continue on and remember her fondly. Will I continue to post to my weblog? I certainly hope so. I doubt I will be one of those 'once