John Ratcliff's Weblog

I have been thinking about getting a new sports car for the past six months or so. I was leaning heavily towards getting either an Acura NSX or a Lotus Elise. A concern I had about both of those cars is visibility. My primary requirement in a sports car is that it be a convertible. The Acura NSX does not come as a convertible but you can get a targa top which makes is almost the same. The Lotus Elise is a convertible but I have heard that rear visibility is very poor. Either of these cars would have put me in the price range of 35-40k, which is pretty high on my psychological scale of what I am willing to piss away so I can have a fun car to drive. Meanwhile, I have been toying for years with the idea of getting a Beck Porsche 550 replica . This is not your ordinary kit car. The frame for a Beck Porshe is exactingly made just to produce this vehicle. The engine itself is simply a small Volkswagen engine and can be inexpensively and easily maintained; unlike the exotics I was c...

Each year our lodge runs a raffle as a fund raiser for the temple. Last year I donated an antique Masonic watch and the raffle was very successful. This year I decided to donate as a raffle item a summer BBQ and pool party. As you can see from past photographs on this blog, my wife and I are somewhat experts at throwing summer pool parties by now. I really enjoyed putting the document together today, especially selecting the representative photographs that went with it. It brought back lots of good memories and made me anxious for another summer of fun in the sun. Here is a link to the file as a PDF .

This is probably going to be one of those posts that I make, regret, and later take down. However, in my defense, I wrote this one dead sober. This morning an editorial from Washington Post editorialist David Ignatius appeared in my copy of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. It is an absolutely excellent editorial and I was really thrilled to see it in print. In his article Mr. Ignatius argues how absolutely appalled the founding fathers of our country would be to see the degree to which religion has been infused into our political debate. As I said, it is an excellent editorial and I strongly encourage you to read it here . I wanted to tell Mr. Ignatius how much I enjoyed his editorial so I wrote him an email. I told him that as pleased as I was to hear his message that, frankly, I feel that whenever someone raises this topic it generally falls on deaf ears; at least on anyone who doesn't already agree with that view to begin with. As I was writing the email it occurred to me that I ...

Over the holidays I worked on a Mandelbrot exploration program. This is an alpha-pre-release. It requires a Windows machine with DirectX 9 to run. You may not be able to see the 3d graphics view on some older graphics cards. You can install the program using this link. It is only an 8mb installer. Includes full source. Dfrac_1.0.exe You can read the documentation online at this link: Dfrac.htm Here are some screenshots from the program, showing some 3d and 2d views.