Regular Singular Points

I was reading a back issue of Notre Dame Magazine and came across the name Robert Leader, Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. I hadn’t heard his name in years and I am amazed and delighted that he is still at Notre Dame. Dr. Leader was one of my father’s art professors. He designed, among many other things, the stained-glass windows in the chapel of Keenan Hall and painted the Stations of the Cross mural that spans the entire length of Little Flower Church in South Bend, Indiana. If you see paintings of my father’s from the 1950’s and early 1960’s, you would immediately recognize Dr. Leader’s style in my father’s work. What most people don’t know is that Dr. Leader was a Marine that fought on Iwo Jima when the American Flag was so famously raised on Mt. Suribachi. He was a 20-year-old Corporal at the time and I found a link to his recollections about that day. I have copied and pasted his story here, without permission, in case the link goes away. It’s quite long, but for history buffs, this is some interesting stuff.

The Killing Fields of Sulfur Island

Original Link:

One of these days the chron job and the pop3 account setup will finally sort themselves out and the flood gates will open and release the piles of test messages sitting in the blog e-mail account. I really want to get it working, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

Gregg was saying that when they were out at Metabolex installing our software, Mike “had” to work with an attractive female for most of the time he was there. I said “Yeah, but it’s San Francisco, so she might have been a man”. So Jason says: “Yeah, she might have been packin’ a bat”.

So we’ve nearly completed the first cut of our new pharma licensing/tracking system, BioTrack3. BioTechs love this thing because they can track their licensing deals and assets.

I never thought of myself as a “UI Guy”, but most of the “look” is because of me. This is all .Net C# code (a big “sorry” goes out to my Mac and Linux friends). Anyhoo, it looks great and it’s fast, too. I’ve made it somewhat skinnable in that some of the panels can be semi-transparent with background images. Hey, it’s a serious business application, so the Easter Eggs have been kept to a minimum.

Now, the hard part: we have to find some more people who want to buy it before we go out of business.

Well, we have to begin somewhere, so here we are. I suppose it was more of a curiosity about blogging technology that caused all this. So far, after the first two days of working with PHP and MySQL, cron jobs and perl, things are going very nicely. I’ve already hacked this WordPress software in several places and made some minor usability enhancements to this equiX theme, so I really can’t complain. Still can’t suss the automatic pickup of e-mails in order to post via e-mail.