News & Site Information

Feb 13th	Inb most parts of this web site, I have tried to include both Imperial measurements and decimal; for the most part, that means showing both miles and kilometers. In the science section I plan to discontinue this practice. Anyone with even a rudimentary interest in the sciences will, I am sure, understand the decimal system, so I plan only to show distances in kilometers in the future. If this is an issue for you, let me know. If enough people do object, I may reconsider.
Feb 11th	In addition to Charon, Nix and Hydra, Pluto has two newly discovered moons referred to as P4 and P5. There is a web site that allows you to vote for the official names for these two moons, so go and VOTE HERE.
Feb 10th	Finally getting back to maintaining this site. Have had very little time over the last few months, so little has progressed.
Dec 27th	Some reworking of the site is complete, while some temporary pages have been added to keep things moving. This includes the main Home page, which is looking a little sparse just now.
Sep 9th	Some major re-working of the site is in progress, though I will not finish for some time.
Aug 26th	Trip to Vassar College Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY, for their exhibition of Landscape painting. Very good it was too. Also strolled around the other galleries to admire the permanent collection which was quite impressive. Lunch at the EverReady Diner in Hyde Park was pricy but excellent, as usual.
Aug 12th	Back from a brief trip to visit Deborah's mother, and get our hair cut. We had another excellent meal at the Route 69 Steak House.
Aug 3rd	Visited Locust Grove near Poughkeepsie, NY. It was built in 1851 to 1852 for artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse; the inventor of Morse Code, amongst other things. It passed on his death to the Young family, and it is their furnishings we see today. Really interesting place; well worth a visit.
July 28th	After many years of searching, it seems that a Higgs boson has been found. At least, evidence of its decay has been seen, which is the most we can expect. Of course; it will be months before all the data is available prior to the Large Hadron Collider shutting down at the end of the year to prepare for the upgrade to maximum potential of 14 TeV. The big question of why the mass of the boson is, relatively speaking, so low has yet to be resolved, so we need to await the results of the search for supersymmetry and the supersymmetric particles. So a lot more yet to come, and a lot of questions yet to be answered.
July 3rd	Back home from a long vacation, spending several days in Seattle, WA then another two week cruise to Alaska. Had an excellent time in Seattle where we stayed at the Grand Hyatt on Pine Street, which turned out to be one of the best hotels at which I have ever stayed. Cannot praise it enough. The cruise was good, though we encountered just as much rudeness from fellow passengers as on the last trip. There were also an unbelievable number of people who were wheelchair bound. This turned out to be a considerable problem as in two of the stops (icy Strait Point & Sitka) we were tendered to shore, and unless you could get down the stairs to the tender there was no way to get off. At several of the ports the transport provided was in school buses that, again, had no wheelchair facilities, and were a very tight fit for the disabled. This resulted in many complaints!
	Holland-America is not running this cruise in 2013. This is a shame as it visited some incredible, and relatively inaccessible, parts of south-east Alaska like Homer, Kodiak and Sitka. I shall be adding more photographs over the next few weeks as I get a chance to sort them out.
May 21st	Regular visitors may notice some major changes to the content of the site! I have reduced substantially the amount of information available in several sections, particularly those for our house and vacations. This is because I am unable to devote the time necessary to maintain the entire web site. The science sections are not affected, and will continue to expand.
May 14th	Back from a pleasant trip upstate to spend Mother's Day with Deborah's mother. Very nice lunch at the Horned Dorset in Leonardsville, NY.

I started to build this web site in late October 2008, so it is nearly 4 years old. I update it fairly regularly, so do come back to see new content. Apart from the family oriented sections, the content is William's and expresses his views. If you take exception to any of the content, please blame him! You can contact us at: contact@whillyard.com. I designed the site for screen resolutions at least 1280 across as this seems to be a reasonable minimum these days, and I built it using WYSIWYG Web Builder software.

Wherever you see text like this, you can get additional information by hovering your mouse cursor on it. All photographs & external links open in a new window, while most internal page links open in the same window.

Feel free to link to this site, preferably to this home page, but please refer to the Terms of Use for important copyright information. Please note that I am extremely intolerant of hot-linking; if I find hot-linking to our images, I have been known to substitute some "very inappropriate" alternatives! Please report any problems to webmaster@whillyard.com. The site is tested using Firefox (up to Version 15.0.1), Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Opera (up to version 11.52). There are issues with Opera only if you use the Opera Turbo feature, though the slide shows are rather jerky in their presentation.

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