Update Notes

Oct. 14, 2004 -- Early AM -- Uploaded Site

Oct. 14, 2004 -- Later -- Fixed Typos & Broken Links. Added CBS Memo History

Oct. 15, 2004 -- AM -- Fixed More Typos

Oct. 16, 2004 -- Early AM --  Added a Sept. 24 entry to the Memo History: the date when the Pentagon belatedly released more Bush records, including a document that was proportionally spaced! Added a more detailed analysis of the faxed/copied Word document. Fixed some more typos and broken links. Stuck in a subtle insult.

Oct. 16, 2004 -- Later AM -- More minor fixes, including David Hailey's pdf link. Expanded info on fonts. Stuck in another sneaky insult (Hmm, should I stop doing that....? Nah.)

Oct. 17, 2004 -- Added a Quick Index. Fixed some minor typos.

Oct. 18, 2004 -- Fixed more typos. Rewrote the last part of Conclusions. Added White House Q&A session.

Oct. 19, 2004 -- Added a Sep. 15 entry to the Bush's Guard Service Summary, as well as a note at the end about there being no records of Bush's Alabama service with the 187th.

Oct. 22, 2004 -- Fixed a  wrong  link for the August 1 Bush suspension  -- had it pointing towards the CBS memo version and not the Pentagon one as intended. Also I had a reference to the "Not Observed" (performance report) document only point towards page one, so I put both pages into an HTML file and changed the reference accordingly.

Oct. 23, 2004 --  Redid the presentation of the Pentagon-released proportionally printed document to make it more obvious (I hope -- some people....) 

Oct. 24, 2004 -- Added a couple of links supporting Kerry's service record. Added an additional font comparison that was originally in the Teaser. Added a couple of links to the CBS memo sources in the Bush timeline.

Oct. 27, 2004 -- Stupid *&$% Mozilla Composer -- you have to really be careful about where it thinks files are. I just noticed that my "Not Observed" thing I added on the 22nd had broken image links. At this stage, composing a web page should be much, much simpler than it is, but.... Also stuck in a picture of a Vydec word processor. Added Bush's Jan. 6, 1973 dental exam to Bush's timeline. Added a few informational links for CP/M, DOS and WordStar. Added a link to a sheet of more Xerox (Diablo) printwheel samples. The Red Sox win the World Series during a full lunar eclipse -- figures.....

Oct. 28, 2004 -- Fixed another Mozilla image-link special. *&#$@

Oct. 29, 2004 --  Fixed a tiny typo and slightly reworded my Bush-bashing thing at the end. Went to the Red Sox parade. Picked a great spot to see them -- so good that I almost got run over by a motorcycle cop. Then went to see them cruise by on the Charles in the Duck Boats. Cool, very cool. And such an insanely huge and insanely happy crowd. This has nothing to do with the memos or Bush, but it's nice to comment about something....nice. Just nice...

Oct. 31, 2004 -- Added a new introduction in the course of a new test AHeckofa.Com opening page. The Patriots finally lost. Maybe the Red Sox can give them a pep talk...

Nov. 3, 2004 -- 'Tis a sad, sad day for the U.S. -- Bush won, and again via the Red States. All the research I've done only made me despise even more what Bush stands for. Bush's core support came from the least educated and the most poorly informed sections of the population (a good survey of this is at http://www.pipa.org) and whom the Republicans exploited to great success via often over-the-top campaigns of lies and smears. This now well-proven tactic does not bode well for how future elections will be run. I made some minor adjustments otherwise. A very sad day indeed....

Nov. 23, 2004 -- Dan Rather announces that he's retiring this coming March. Of course this brings up the "fake" memos again. I tuned to Fox News for the first time in weeks to see their moronic right wing spin on it and I wasn't disappointed. Oh well, time for an update.... I did some minor revs as well and added a couple of more links to DOD docs and websites.

Dec. 4, 2004 -- I got into some more online debates/insultfests recently, and that gave me ideas to make the forgery argument seem even sillier, especially in regards to the August 1, 1972 memo. So I added that, plus an intro plus a B&W photo of Bush from the DOD records.

Dec. 5, 2004 -- Cleaned up the Introduction section a little bit.

Dec. 10, 2004 -- Grrrr.. I had added some links to the Introduction and accidently linked to a DOD record instead of the Aug. 1, 1972 "forged" document as intended. I also made my "disclaimer" slightly less hostile. Also, I might be getting some more visitors soon, so I tidied up some more and got rid of some more typos.

Dec. 13, 2004 -- Added an attribution to that opening Bush quote. Some sources have it coming from the Houston Chronicle in 1994, but it apparently it actually originated with the Dallas Morning News in 1990 (Thank-you, Mr. Mink)

Jan. 11, 2005 -- The report from that independent panel came out a few days ago. I've been too busy to do a major update yet, but I thought I should at least stick in my first impressions, which aren't very positive. Sloppy, sloppy....

Feb. 17, 2005 -- Ah, dammit -- I started on a major makeover of the web site but couldn't in time for this little thing that's going to take up all my time for the next week. I did leave up a little teaser of sorts with some preliminary interesting stuff....

May 6, 2005 -- Double dammit -- a trip to France and being swamped with work and all of a sudden it's May. I pulled off the Feb. 17 updartes because they were rushed and I had overlooked a typo. I replaced them with still more interim updates, but a bit more carefully gone over. I am so getting tired of creating overlays.... I think the end of this mostly annoying side trip is finally coming up, though. Stay tuned....

May 8, 2005 -- Just some minor add-ons and tweaking.

May 19, 2005 -- Minor adjustments and typo-fixing.

Oct 6, 2006  -- Boy, that was a big gap in the updates. There was little new info until fairly recently, and even then only thanks to some online debates that got me to find and notice things I had missed before despite my thinking I hadn't missed anything. I'm currently in the midst of a debate/battle in the discussion section of the Wikipedia piece on the Killian memos. There are some typographers there I'm trying to enlighten. They support the forgery hypothesis with a line of reasoning that basically goes, "Oh, that's, um, Times New Roman, oh no, wait, that's, uh....Times Roman!. Yeah, that's it. They didn't have anything that could do that in 1972 -- they could barely videotape themselves dune buggying on the moon then. What, the centering doesn't match up with Word, the superscripting makes no sense, the formatting is archaic, and what about the contents? Hey, we're typographers so that other stuff doesn't concern us. It's Miller Lite time, baby!"

Or something like that. In any case, it's been provoking my finding a ton of new info so I'll probably be updating this more regularly in the coming weeks. Today I added a scan of some pages of a book that was typeset on a Diablo 1345A HyType II printer in 1978, plus an addedum to Hailey's work.

Nov 6, 2006 -- A big, BIG ass update, combining info I picked up at the Boston Public Library and the Charles Babbage Institute in Minneapolis, along with more DoD digging, and combining much of what I had argued on the Wikipedia in regards to the memos. What a time suck. Lucky I don't do this stuff even for a thank you.

Nov 8, 2006 -- Fixed some typos, mostly to do with the CYA recreation with the 3 different fonts estimated from the PC Magazine sample.

Nov.12, 2006 -- Added some samples of "ancient" technology from 1972: the HP-35 scientific calulator, a picture of a little dune buggying on the Moon (you look at that and, given NASA's recent history, you realize why so many people today believe all those landings were staged); and an ad for the first home video game, the Magnavox Odyssey. Also added a link to a word processing center. Judging from some recent Usenet debates, people are really, really confused about early 70's tech and often refuse to even deal with evidence refuting their beliefs. I fixed some more typos.

Nov 14, 2006 -- I pulled the letterhead comparisons because of a typo. I'll redo them and bring up the centering issue as well.

April 19, 2007 -- Showed conclusively that the memos could not have been forged under any circumstances. Made myself a really nice vanilla milkshake.

April 20, 2007 -- Fixed a couple of minor but annoying typos. The reaction, what little it's been, has so far been along the lines of "So what -- get a life." Speaking of which....

April 21, 2007 -- Added a "CYA memo" in CG Times Bold (which evidently approximates the proportional spacing on a Diablo-compatible printer) with the line spacing adjusted to match the original (this isn't exactly cheating since all daisywheels had a settable "VMI" -- vertical motion index ). I also started to clean up the older section.

April 22. 2007 -- Added the memorandum section of the Aug. 1st, 1972 memo, which apparently can't be duplicated exactly with a modern word processor, even with Times New Roman or CG Times Bold -- the letters just won't line up the same way vertically no matter how much you screw with things.

April 23, 2007 -- Some minor tidying up for perhaps some new visitors....

April 24, 2007 -- Corrected link to wrong Texas Air National Guard pdf file on Mary Mapes's site; cleaned up reference to the Redactron Redacator.

April 26, 2007 -- Fixed yet another typo and did some minor clean-ups. It appears that the only people who know about all this are the same people who are hoping the mainstream media lives down to its current reputation. We shall see....

April 28, 2007 -- Fixed up the olded section some more, including adding a proportionally printed 1959 "Killian" (in a matter of speaking) memo. I found more, but they are declassified memos, meaning they are from generals and such.

June 9, 2007 --  Added a page of overlay animations of all of the memos as well as samples from a 1966 Selectric Composer and that draft press release for the Redactron Redactor. Tedious as all heck to create, but with veddy, veddy interesting results I do believe.

June 10, 2007 -- Added some more info to the new Animations page, mostly in regards to the process I used to create the animations, and also dealt with typos and more typos throughout the day.

June 11, 2007 -- Cleaned up some awkward wording relating to the "Festival of Animation" link. So far very little commentary about all this -- just one response on Usenet. Disinterest or cognitive dissonance? We shall see....

June 12, 2007 -- A day without typos is like a day without junk mail....

September 23, 2007 -- Dan Rather recently filed a lawsuit against his old bosses at CBS and Viacom over the memos mess, so I'm looking at moving up some planned updates. I finally added a contact link via some newly created Gmail accounts because someone had trouble tracking me down for a blog article proposal. Hmmm....I still wish the friggin regular news media would finally get off their atrophied butts and deal with this stuff instead. Whatever.... I guess I'm stuck being "that guy". I liked it better when I was just a smartalecky Usenet troll spoiling for a good debate/fight/bashing.

November 2, 2008 -- Did a long overdue cleanup and major, major update. Ugh. It's 4am in the morning as I type this, and this is the night after the time change, so it's actually 5am to me physically. I'm sure I will spot a bunch of typos over the next few days.

November 3, 2008 -- Did some cleaning up and I created/added Flash versions of the two parts of the original 60 Minutes II broadcast. There is another video file of Rather's follow up that went into more of what some document experts thought, but the sound stopped working on the file, probably due to some odd corruption.

November 8, 2008 -- Reduced some duplication of the superscript stuff; moved the index up and added the "Summary" to it; added a new section regarding the other supposed evidence for forgery; and made the flash video easier for IE (ugh) users.

November 17, 2008 -- Fixed some very minor formatting issues typos. Later on I added a new subsection about how the White House responded (well...) to direct questions about the memos.  I also added a more obvious link to my ever so delightful Festival of Animation.
 
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