Welcome to my home page! I hope you enjoy your visit. You'll find a variety of stuff here including a lot of links to other sites, but some of my own documents and such are right here near the top. I've also included two pages about myself: an about me page that contains my biography and description and my school related info, and another page all about my interests, hobbies, etc. that contains most of my links.
Important notice! Yahoo is terminating its free Geocities web hosting on October 26, 2009, so I will need to move my web pages by then. I have not decided on a new web host yet (suggestions, anyone?), but to make this transition easier, I have registered my own domain name -- http://www.jmarshall.net/. This domain will point to my web pages, wherever I choose to host them, and it works now (pointing to Geocities) so please update your bookmarks as soon as possible. All pages that currently exist can be reached by changing www.oocities.org/dronak to www.jmarshall.net. However, I am considering restructuring my site when I move it to a new host, so please be aware that you may not find the same information at the same addresses in the future. Feel free to contact me if you find something missing in the future. I apologize for the inconvenience, but expect that using my own domain name will allow any possible future web host changes to be transparent to my visitors. Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.
This year (2009) is the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) and marks the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope by Galileo Galilei. A few highlights: 365 Days of Astronomy producing a new astronomy podcast episode for every day of 2009 and Galileoscope telescope kits are now on sale if you want to pick up your own high-quality telescope for a low cost ($15, and you'd be hard-pressed to find something better than the Galileoscope at that price). Some past highlights: 100 Hours of Astronomy on April 2-5 and You Decide Hubble's Next Discovery. For additional information, you can try the international IYA site above or the US Node's IYA Site. There are many activities all around the globe all year long, and everyone should find something of interest to help them rediscover their place in the universe and realize the impact of astronomy and basic science on our daily lives, so I encourage you to participate in whatever way you can.
I put a copy of my dissertation's catalog of objects up on one of my other accounts. I'm not sure when/if it will ever get published in an astronomy journal, so hopefully putting it on a web page will help it get some more attention. People interested in using the catalog for scientific research should use my dissertation as the reference/citation and get all the detailed information they need from there. If you want a copy of my dissertation, contact me and I'll arrange to get you one.
All of the awards my pages have won are on my Awards Page, but there aren't any new ones and a lot of the links back the awarders have died, so they've been removed. My favorite social activity is ballroom dancing, and here are two relevant links I'd like to keep here to help promote it: my grad school's club, Ballroom At Maryland and My Ballroom Dancing Page. The comics at Piled Higher and Deeper were an instant favorite of mine; they provide a humorous (and accurate) look at life as a grad student. Granted, current/former grad students will relate to it better (I think it's a riot), but at least some of it should be amusing to most people. If for any reason you'd like to get me something, I have an Amazon.com wish list plus a few simple lists I made here: anime and manga, gamebooks, music CDs, old time radio, professional wrestling tapes, and puzzle books. I've also started a page to collect Nikoli puzzle rules in English because they can be hard to find. I don't know Japanese though, so I'm usually working off of automatic translations and some trial-and-error experience trying puzzles. If anyone can help me with getting correct and accurate English rules for Nikoli's puzzles, drop me an e-mail. I'd greatly appreciate the help. Thanks.
Next, some minor notes: Except for Yahoo's server-generated and automatically inserted garbage code my pages would meet the HTML 4.01 Transitional standards as verified by the W3C HTML Validation Service, and my pages should work just fine in a text-only browser since they're practically all text anyway. I just found out that, unfortunately, Yahoo has decided to automatically reset the hit counters on pages that have no hits in the last 90 days, causing a loss of stats for infrequently visited pages. As a countermeasure, I've set up Google Analytics to track my web stats for me, but this isn't giving me a public hit counter, so I've set up a new one (text only!) using a script I found and was experimenting with elsewhere before. All page counters have now been reset to zero because it was easier than trying to initialize them to the correct numbers after Yahoo's self-resets. I don't expect any more resets any time soon though, so hopefully these new hit counters will remain accurate (and they are tracking total hits, not unique visitors, FYI). If any aren't displaying or you see any other problem with them, let me know and I'll fix it. Sorry about the ads and such, but this was a quick, easy solution for post-graduation. I may consider something better later, but I'm OK with this for now. (Try Firefox with the Adblock Plus extension for a way to remove many ads from most web pages.) Please only send me plain ASCII e-mails, mainly because there are six good reasons not to send HTML or MIME in e-mails; that page will also explain ways to configure your mail program to send text only messages.
That's about all I have to say here for now. So stay for a while, check out my lists, poke around some other sites, send me your comments, etc. My pages really only contain some of my own files and things and lots of links to places I like to visit. It's also pretty low on graphics (except for the awards page) using little beyond background images. I never really wanted to have a high-graphics site; I like it the way it is, it loads pretty quickly and gets you right to the information without having to wait for lots of images to load. Still, I hope you enjoy what my pages have to offer.
Canonical Smiley List
Quite possibly the largest list of its kind you'll find and thus probably one
of the best sources of information on emoticons (as they are also called).
It contains just about every single smiley and one-line symbol I've come across
in my travels on the Internet. The list now contains over 2220 smileys! The
file size is up to about 108k as an HTML file and something like 122k as a
plain old ASCII file. If you're going to use this list for something other
than a quick look-up, you should be prepared to save it or print it out. I'm
sure that most of these smileys aren't generally used, but they're certainly
fun to look at. :)
If you're interested, I've listed every 100th smiley (assuming I counted
correctly) and some of the update history of the list in this
smiley list info file. This list has won an
award.
Warning: File may contain material that is inappropriate for some readers (particularly younger ones) -- caution and discretion is advised!
Canonical Abbreviation/Acronym List
Another good list, although I don't know how this one compares to others of
its kind. It now has over 1090 of the more common abbreviations and acronyms
that are used on the 'net (like IMHO and BRB) along with some not-so-common
ones that are still amusing. I've tried to keep the file to commonly used
over acronyms and some of the more amusing acronyms and this is naturally a
matter of opinion, so it is possible that you won't find some of your
favorites on the list which is about 48k long. This list has won an
award.
Warning: File may contain material that is inappropriate for some readers (particularly younger ones) -- caution and discretion is advised!
Canonical Astronomy Abbrev/Acro List
This is from a few lists I found containing the more commonly used
abbreviations and acronyms in astronomy. If you've ever wondered what
something meant, here's the place to find out. Check out the over 800
abbrevs/acros in this 42k long list.
By the way, all three of these lists were recognized as canonical lists on the Wrecked Humor Collection page mainted by Derek Cashman, but the site seems to be gone now. Also, if you have any new smileys, abbreviations, acronyms, etc. that you think might be worth adding to my lists, please feel free to e-mail me at dronak@yahoo.com and let me know. If I like it, I'll put it in.
Professor Quotes
This is a list of some of the more memorable quotations my friends and I have
heard from professors here at school. Some of them may be out of context, so
they'll sound strange, but that just makes things more interesting. :) I hope
you like them; there are now over 400 quotes in the list.
50 Fun Things to do to Annoy Your Physics Professor
After seeing quite a few of these style lists, such as things to do in a
computer lab, things to say when ordering pizza, things to do in an elevator,
and probably lots of others, I decided to try my hand at creating a list of
things for my field (physics and astronomy). I got some help from one of my
friends at Villanova in order to complete the list (thanks, Joe!).
Some Astronomy (and Other) Programs
This will lead you to the source codes for a couple of astronomy related
programs I wrote. There's a simple star modeling program as well as some
programs that can be used in binary star work. If you think you might want
copies of the programs, feel free to check them out. Most are in BASIC but
a couple are in C. I've also included the codes for two programs I wrote
for my TI-85/86/89 calculator (in its own particular programming language)
that convert from calendar date to Julian date and vice versa. You might
find some other non-astronomy programs there, too, just because I didn't
want to make a separate page for a couple other programs.
Honor Societies Information Page
This page contains some information about Sigma Pi Sigma, Phi Kappa Phi, and
Phi Beta Kappa, the three honor societies I was inducted into while an
undergraduate at Villanova University. It also contains links to other pages
on the societies; they should go to official pages now which hopefully all
work correctly.
And don't forget to check out my about me page and my interests, hobbies, and links for additional info about myself and for lots more links to some of my favorite places on the web.
VU Astronomy
I went to Villanova University for college, and earned my BS degree there.
This site was created by the class of 1996 (my year!). The department tries
to keep the list of alumni up-to-date, so
e-mail the department any
updates or corrections you have.
VU Physics
The physics department got their site up on their own server before the
astronomy department did and for some time allowed the astronomy pages to
be hosted on it as well. They're now on separate sites, but I'm still
keeping the link to the physics page; astronomy majors take lots of physics
courses anyway, and I did a minor in physics. If you want to check out some
of the physics-specific stuff that goes on at Villanova, this is the place
to look.
NASA and the
Goddard Space
Flight Center
When I was hired by Innovim, they put me on a contract doing work for NASA
GSFC, so that's where I'm currently working. Most of my time is spent on an
Earth science software reuse
project, but I also do some work on the
NPOESS Preparatory Project
(with the Science Data Segment) and the development of a new
Atmospheric Composition web site
(mainly for ozone data and information). In the future, I may also get back
into astronomy work, if the opportunity arises.
American Astronomical Society
The AAS is the major astronomy organization in the US. I've presented a few
posters at their meetings in the past. Having received my PhD, I've received
a promotion to full member in the society.
American Geophysical Union
The AGU is a major Earth science organization in the US. They also cover some
areas of astronomy, mainly in planetary science. With my new job, we've had
some posters at their meetings, so it seemed like a good idea to join this
society.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
The IEEE is another major society, which focuses on the advancement of
technology. Electronics-related fields are obviously a big part of it, but
they cover physical science, computers, engineering, and other similar and
related fields. I also joined them because of my new job, because we've
presented some posters at one of their meetings, too, and have some papers
in the proceedings from those meetings.
American Institute of Physics
The AIP is probably the biggest physics group in the US. I never joined them
directly, but the AIP is the parent organization for the AAS, AGU, and the
Society of Physics Students.
The main reason I wanted to list them individually is because of their great
Physics News Updates service.
The web page is for the archive; it's actually a mailing list that sends out
messages about once a week giving some info on the latest happenings in the
physics and related areas. You might also want to check out the
Physics News Graphics
page which contains figures and stuff related to topics in the updates. It's
a good way to know what's going on. If you're looking for a particular topic,
try searching (or browsing) the archives at
http://newton.ex.ac.uk/aip/
and see if that helps you find the physics news updates you're looking for.
Also, the Elegant Connections in Physics articles in the Society of Physics
Students' newsletter,
The SPS Observer, are pretty good.
LifeHacker.com
Their slogan, "tips and downloads for getting things done", gives you a good
idea of what this site is about. It covers a variety of topics, but much of
it is on the sci/tech side of things, so I think it's a good site to include
here.
Science Centric
Personally, I normally use my smartphone to read their
PDA version of news,
which covers physics, chemistry, geology and palaeontology, biology,
environment, astronomy, health, and technology. The main site includes
other science-related topics and provides images, videos, etc. not found
in the PDA version.
PhysOrg.com
As you can guess from the name, this site focuses on news in physics and
closely related areas. Topics covered include nanotechnology, physics,
space and Earth, electronics, technology, chemistry, biology, and
medicine and health. Since my background is in astronomy and physics,
I sometimes like going to this site to see more news in areas I'm most
familiar with.
Barb's Homepage
Another grad school classmate, she also works at Goddard now like I do
(but we're in different areas). She has some nice astronomy resources,
including a tutorial on X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy.
Google Groups
If you want to access Usenet newsgroups, this is a good place to do it.
I'm sure there are other options, like getting a shell account, but this will
do the job for most people.
Amazon.com
Definitely one of the best online stores. They stock a huge variety of items
in tons of areas. I generally buy books from them, but have purchased other
items as well. I also have a
wish list
set up there so if for any reason you're looking for something to get me,
this is a decent place to start. I have some other items, mainly reprints of
old gamebooks, on my
Amazon.co.uk wish list and
Amazon.ca wish list.
Barnes & Noble
Primarily a book store with some other sections, it has a smaller overall
selection of items than Amazon, but I have seen them beat Amazon's prices on
books now and then, so I always check them when looking for books to buy.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I've been using this site more often recently since it's a good way to get
basic information on just about any subject. However, you should note that
the site uses a system where visitors can edit the pages. This can be either
good or bad, depending on your viewpoint and how people use the feature.
From what I've seen, the site is very good. I'm just mentioning this as
something to keep in mind about the information on the site.
Craig's List: Washington, DC
The Craig's List network of sites has become quite popular from what I've
heard, probably mainly due to its localized nature and wide variety of
services for free (with only a few exceptions). Major cities around the US
and in other countries have their own individual sites and you can find lots
of things there such as an events calendar, personals, job and resume listings,
items for sale, and housing. I originally used this mostly during my job
search, but now I've been exploring the other sections and I like what the
site has to offer. If you're not from the DC area, visit the page anyway
because a major city near you may have a site, too, and those are listed on
the right side of the main page.
Facebook
Social networking seems to be part of the new wave of technologies and
such on the web (the Web 2.0 movement, I guess), and this is one of a
number of sites that helps you connect with friends. Most of the people
I know seem to be on Facebook and use it more often than other sites, which
is why this is my preferred way of keeping in touch with people I know.
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The views expressed on this page, all its subpages located on this site, and all its parent pages located on this site (when applicable) are solely the views of myself, James Marshall, and in no way, neither explicit nor implied, reflect the views of any group, organization, society, etc. of which I am a member. All external sites linked to from my site are the responsibility of their owners. Some pages on my site may have additional disclaimers that apply in addition to this one.