Archive from July 2026

12:13 PM - The Day the Music Died: new projection mapped museum in Iowa (posted by Allen )
The historic Surf Ballroom is infamous for being the place Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper performed before they died in a plan crash leaving Clear Lake, Iowa. Late last year, the restored ballroom opened up a new facility next door with a projection-mapped immersive virtual museum experience.

Of course, they also have normal displays of guitars and other artifacts from performers who have played there over the years. They have boots from Ace Frehley of KISS, a bass guitar from Gene Simmons, a hat from Slash of Guns and Roses, and lots of other surprising items.

I have added them to my Misc/Other Places gallery:

https://www.disneyfans.com/photos/misc/OtherPlaces/Iowa/ClearLake/index.html

9:40 AM - Over 300,000 photos? Did I do that? (posted by Allen )
I have not been able to (easily) update any content on this website (other than these news posts) in over a decade. (Thank you, Adobe, for making it too costly to use your tools for infrequent updates.) I did manually update some text on this main page to reflect the current photo count -- over 241,000 photos. And, when you add the 62,000 photos from my other site, that means I have passed 300,000 sorted photos online. Yowza. What a long strange trip it's been since I got my first digital camera in 1996...

9:59 AM - Over 10,000 visitors on a good day? Really? (posted by Allen )
Hello, robots. I've seen many days where my recently updated "last 24 hours" counter has shown 10,000-15,000 visitors. One day it was around 4500. I know how this counter script works because I wrote it. It only counts an IP once per 24 hours, and ignores multiple reloads from that same IP address for the 24 hours after it sees it.

Now, I know 'bots are most of the internet now, but ... this is ALOT of bots -- 95% of them viewing my photo gallery.

Am I A.I. training image generators with my galleries, now?