Saturday, January 15, 2011 - Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM
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Rio Grande River, Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM, March 26, 2009
Never a duh! moment
Back on January 9th I started a project to update the bones of this website. There were lots of things bugging me, the big one being poor navigation. Stuff accumulates and there are now about 1,500 pages here on lots of unrelated topics. It's a mess. I've tried several navigation schemes over the years and none of them pleased me. Determined to do something about it I set out to tune up some underlying structural issues while thinking about the navigation mess.
In the process I bumped up against the HTML <strong> tag which hadn't been working for a long time and I wanted it back. It is widely used around this site but you would never know it. I made a few half hearted attempts to figure out what went awry in the past but now I wanted it fixed, dammit. I'm a self taught tinker in this HTML and CSS world and I assumed I had tinkered with something in the CSS files that was suppressing it but I couldn't figure out what I might have done.
By yesterday I had had enough. I was going to fix this thing once and for all and I spent most of the day trying.
I went to bed last night no closer to an answer than when I started. Frustrated, I was. This morning I went at it again, this time in a very systematic way and finally isolated the problem in a CSS file. For some reason way back in the dim past in some experiment I had added "font-weight: lighter;" to the body element and then forgot to take it back out. Well DUH!
Night camp
Site 23 - Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - good signal
- Go to the Percha Dam State Park website
- Locate Percha Dam State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather in Arrey NM
Heliograph route between Fort Cummings NM and Tubac, AZ
1886 heliograph transmissions between Tubac near Nogales Arizona/Mexico, and Fort Cummings New Mexico: Joe Marques (Flagstaff) was doing some research in old Flagstaff newspapers and found something that might interest. In the Arizona Weekly Champion, Saturday August 7, 1886, page 2 column 1, it says: "A message was recently sent by the government heliograph (signalling by sunlight flashes) from Fort Cummings, N.M. to Tubac, Ariz., a distance of 400 miles, and an answer received in four hours." What a great [research] find! This was during the Geronimo Campaign of 1886, and the heliograph system at that time did indeed extend between the two stations. From Tubac, the most westerly terminus, the intermediate stations were Baldy Peak or possibly Josephine Peak just a little south of Baldy), Fort Huachuca, Antelope Spring, Emma Monk, White's Ranch, Bowie Peak (or Helen's Dome), Steins Peak, and Camp Henely (east of Fort Cummings). This means the message would have been relayed seven times, one way. It most likely was a test message, and relatively short, but I would love to know what it and the reply really said. The 1886 "airline" distance between Tubac and Fort Cummings; and of course on to Fort Cummings. I calculate the one-way distance between the two extremes as being 241 miles, with round trip of course being 482 miles.