Daily Archives: March 21, 2009

Blue and Gold Days

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You can always tell when the end of a school year is coming near:  the cub scouts do their annual ‘Blue and Gold’ banquet.  Basically this is the end of the year ceremony where all of the older cub scouts ‘cross over’ into boy scouts, and everyone gets their awards.  Everything that happens at scout meetings after the Blue and Gold are just kind of extra, fun things.  The Blue and Gold happened this last week, and Ben got to particpate.

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Ben worked hard this year, and is no longer a Webelos I scout.  He’s now a Webelos II.  Small distinction, but he only has one year to go before he becomes a boy scout.  During the ceremony they have each boy come up and get their awards announced in front of all of their friends and family:

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He has some camping to look forward to this summer, as the pack sold enough popcorn this year to pay for most of a camping trip for each of them.  I enjoyed camping with them last time, when we brought Madalyn along too – I hope to be the one to go again this summer.

thecookes.org: 8+ years of almost no use

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So I’ve made another go at it, trying to update this site to have some sort of relevant content to our lives.  We after all need somewhere to post information that may be newsworthy for everyone to read.  This website has had quite a sordid past, however..

It’s life began during  the end of December 2000.  I had gotten a job at an international .com and as part of the employment I’d get free use of their website hosting services, which I was supporting.  I chose to register for my free domain name ‘thecookes.org’.  Thus, the site was born.  I gave email accounts to my father, mother, and my wife at the time.

It started out with a quite high tech development package called Microsoft Frontpage, and during these early years I did update the site regularly.

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I say high tech facetiously; the software was atrocious.  I posted things like pictures of me, my wife, our apartment, and also tech information.  I posted certification information, which other people searched and did find useful.  Searching this websites address on archive.org is painful, not because of the memories but rather because of the terrible web design.

I then went and installed my first content management software, called PostNuke.  It’s come to my attention that this software has died and gone to heaven:  http://www.postnuke.com/module-Content-view-pid-6.html

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This was still horrible, but was a small step up from FrontPage.

Eventually, my first wife and I parted ways.  Rather than try to scrub her from the webpage, I just removed it and sent all messages to her email address to the trash.

Then I met Jolene.  Once we got married, we decided that we’d like a central place to upload photos to on the web.  thecookes.org was again repurposed for that reason, and while our intentions were good, not a lot of photos ever found their way to the site.

There it’s sat, faithfully providing an email address to us but not a whole lot else.  So here it is, again, for the third iteration.  This time we’re going to post blog posts, photos, and general updates of any important news items here.  Who knows, maybe sometime we’ll have something important to say!