• Don Kenney's Web Site
  • GENERAL STUFF
  • CURRENT NEWS AND SOME PLANS
  • VERSION IDENTIFICATION
  • WEBSITE URLs AND LINKS
  • PALEONTOLOGY SECTION
    • FOSSIL SITE LIST
    • FOSSIL PICTURES
    • SEPKOSKI DATABASE
    • REGIONAL DESCRIPTIONS
• OTHER (MOSTLY COMPUTER) STUFF
  • BLACKHOLE ROUTING
  • CARDFILE.EXE
  • CAUSEWAY ERRORS
  • CLIPBOARD FAQ
  • CTYPES Mini Tutorial
  • FIREFOX on WINDOWS 95
  • INSTALLSHIELD BUG
  • KCRON
  • MISCELLANEOUS FAQ
  • SAMSUNG LASER PRINTERS ON LINUX
  • SPYAXE VIRUS REMOVAL
  • WIN9- SEARCHING
  • WINDOWS 98 SHUTDOWN
  • WEBSITE VALIDATION
  • FLYING CARS
  • PC TECHNICAL ARTICLES GLOSSARY
• FICTION:
  • PUBLISHED
  • UNPUBLISHED
  • PANGLOSS LIVES!
  • DET-ROT STORY
• SITE LINKS
• ADMINISTRATIVE STUFF
  • Plans and History
    • WHAT'S IN THIS VERSION?
    • WHAT'S PLANNED FOR THE NEXT VERSION?
    • HISTORY OF CHANGES

Don Kenney's Web Site

An Early trilobite around 515,000,000 years old. Olenellus fremonti from the Lower Cambrian Latham Shale, Marble Mountains, NE of Chambless Store, San Bernardino County, CA

GENERAL STUFF

Welcome to my website: You'll find several different bunches of stuff here:

• Fossil Stuff A list of over 14000 fossil sites in the US and Canada. Also a copy of the The Sepkoski data base of fossil genera. Some related articles. Someday, I'll add pictures of my fossil collection.

• Some articles on various topics -- mostly computer related. Whenever I have to spend an inordinate amount of time researching something, I try to write up and article in hopes that I can save some effort for others.

• Some fiction

CURRENT NEWS AND SOME PLANS

(Sep 2009) I've had a chance to look much more closely at the location data. And it's not a pretty picture. A sampling of a few hundred locations leads me to believe that quite a few of the locations that I got by automated searches using various web sites are pretty bad. So, I think I will approach this differently than I had planned. For the next version, I will add the traditional 450 sites and do some basic clean up on the fossils found field. Then, commencing in January 2010, I will review each and every entry in the data base, combine duplicate entries and get the locations as correct as I am going to get them. I reckon that will take two or more years. Then, and only then will I come back to the fossils found data.

I did accomplish some things though:

• All the PLSS, DLS, UTM locations have been reviewed and, where possible resolved.
• A bunch of formatting errors in locations have been corrected.
• The format of latitude, longitude is now uniform -- degrees and fractions of a degree up to ten thousandths of a degree depending on the initial accuracy.

Here's a summary of the state of location data as of mid-September 2009:

Approximate accuracy of Longitude for various precision of degrees (Latitude will be 25-50% more accurate)

1. The accuracy of Longitude is roughly the value above multiplied times the cosine of Latitude.

2. Some sources give positions to 5, 6 or more fractional digits. I suspect that the positions encountered in day to day map work without surveying are rarely accurate to four digits.
   A code in the form of GA0 through GA5 is provided with my guess as to the actual accuracy of the positions

Other than the position information, I've added an article on the Triassic Basins of the North American Atlantic margin

For previous plans see PLANS.HTM

For a history of changes see HISTORY.HTM

VERSION IDENTIFICATION

• This is version 91001 of the site contents
• Don Kenney, Essex, VT, Sep 12, 2009

WEBSITE URLs AND LINKS

The primary copy of my site is hosted at http://donaldkenney.110mb.com There is a second copy at http://donaldkenney.freewebsitehosting.com. Three reasons for using the 110mb site instead:

• Freewebsitehosting.com has abundant, truly annoying, popup ads. 110mb.com does not.

• In late 2006, Freewebsitehosting.com started aggressively enforcing a policy of deleting large (1mb or more) files. This results in several files being regularly deleted from my site. So I've had to link internally to the 110mb site to get them

• I have some sort of problem with my ISP (Verizon/Fairpoint) that often prevents me from using the FTP protocol to any site. Freewebsitehosting.com requires FTP for updates. 110mb has an alternative update mechanism using the HTTP protocol that works even when FTP is unavailable.

PALEONTOLOGY SECTION

FOSSIL SITE LIST

This is a list of something over 14000 fossil localities in the United States and Canada. The list has been built up from a variety of sources over about 35 years. A few general comments:

• You have three options to access the list:
  • To access by State/Province(recommended), Click here This will get you fairly small files.

  • To download the entire list in Comma Separated format, Click here. Once you have that downloaded, you should be able to highlight it, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into a spreadsheet or database. Yes, I've tested that. It works for me. Unfortunately, one of the host sites is prone to delete the file. Or you can try downloading the entire file directly in http://donaldkenney.110mb.com/FOSSITE.CSV csv format.

  • If you REALLY want the entire list in one HTML Table, Click here but be warned that this is a very large table and may well bring your web browser to its knees.

• One of the current hosts for this web site caps access at 40Mb total per day -- which should be plenty I should think, but you can minimize the load on the site by using the shorter state/province lists instead of the longer full lists unless you really need the latter.

• There are plenty of errors in the list. Some of the original material was incorrect or ambiguous. I made errors transcribing some of it to index cards decades ago and more errors transcribing that into the computer more recently. It has been spell checked, and checked for plausibility. Some of the hopeless material was deleted. In general, I've kept anything that looked like it might be remotely useful to someone someday.

• Many of the sites are closed to collecting or buried under shopping centers, highways, or housing developments. I've kept them because closed sites are sometimes reopened, and sometimes the same rocks and fossils will turn up 100 yards or 100 miles down the road.

• In general, permission is required from somebody to collect fossil vertebrate material in the US and Canada. An exception is often made in practice for shark teeth and occasionally for disarticulated marine vertebrate bones, but that can't really be counted upon. Always ask. There are limits on the amount of petrified wood than can be collected on public land. Rules for collecting invertebrate and plant material vary widely especially in 'wilderness areas'. Permission is always required to collect on private property. Digging holes where you do not have permission to dig or are unfamiliar with the rules is almost always a bad idea.

• Most of the distances are in kilometers and meters. For practical purposes, a meter is a smidge over 3 feet (a yard) and a kilometer is 5/8 of a mile. I think most of the English measurements -- Miles, Yard, Feet ... have been removed, but I probably missed a few.

• Geologic Periods are listed as 'Period Middle, Upper or Lower' rather than the more conventional form of, for example, "Lower Cambrian" That's so that if the material is in a database or spreadsheet and is sorted, Lower Cambrian will sort out next to Middle Cambrian instead of next to Middle Cretaceous.

• Locations such as SE1/4S32T17WR4N refer to the Public Land Survey System in the US or the similar Dominion Land Survey in Canada. Read that as SouthEast quarter section of Section 32 Township 17W Range 4N. PLSS locations are often way off. Probably in April 2009, I will try to provide Lat Long as well, but that won't help if the original PLSS/DLS position was wrong. See This page for more discussion of locations described using Survey points.

• Fossils at sites are generally listed only by genus. For a long time my software for handling the list had a limit of 255 characters per field, the fossil list for a few sites ends in an ellipses (...) indicating that there were more genera, but the list was truncated.

• Based on my experience, some of the sites listed probably never existed, and others have been developed/reclaimed out of existence. Many of the sites when found will be closed to collecting and of those that are not, many will prove to be only marginally productive. Few of these sites are accessible to large groups without special arrangements.

• Ampersands (&) cause some technical problems related to the way the HTTP protocol underlying the Internet works. I've eliminated most of them replacing them with 'and' or '+' whichever seems to fit better. In a few cases, they are in web site URLs, and can't be eliminated. I've followed the technically correct method of using & even within a preformatted block. My apologies if that doesn't render properly (as an '&') with your browser. Truly not my fault.

• My thanks to Howard Allen of Calgary, Alberta who has been infinitely helpful with Canadian sites and also in working through many of the thousand or two questionable localities, genera, etc in my original list.

• You might think that Counties would be straightforward. And they mostly are in 49 states and 4 provinces. In Alaska, the other 6 provinces and the Canadian Arctic, things are more complex. See this page for more penetrating commentary on this subject and a complete, downloadable list of US and Canadian 'Counties'.

• The formation field is checked against another local database. The formation database is based on the USGS Geologic Name Lexicon GEOLEX http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Geolex/geolex_home.html and its Canadian equivalent http://cgkn1.cgkn.net/weblex/weblex_search_e.pl augmented by Google searching. Problems:
  • GEOLEX and CGKN while excellent are not complete.
  • Formation names are not necessarily unique.
  • Formations sometimes morph over distance changing nomenclature and/or material.
  • The same formation may change its name in different region
  • Some proposed formation names were not taken up by other authors and were used only in a single paper or set of papers.

You can download my formation database in csv format from FORMS.CSV, but I honestly can not imagine why anyone would want to.

• There are now latitude-longitude fields in the database and these will be fairly well populated in the version to be posted in April 2009. In a few cases, these are actual latitude-longitude pairs from the literature, topo maps, or converted from PLSS or DLS coordinates. However, most are obtained by automated screen scraping various web sites that will provide the latitude and longitude of towns and/or geographical features. Think of these latitude-longitudes as locations to put markers if I ever set up a map interface, not as precise locations of the site. Someday, I'll provide codes that indicate where the locations came from.
  My experience so far has been that even when latitude and longitude are given in the literature, they are less helpful than one might hope. I am not sure whether this is due to:
  • errors in mapping
  • differences in Earth models
  • some error on my part
  • something else
  • some of the above
  • all of the above

Anyway if your GPS takes you to a location and there are no fossils there. Read the site description for clues. Then look around. The fossils (if any) may be a ten or twenty minute walk from the latitude-longitude.

FOSSIL PICTURES

A catalog of pictures of part of my small and quite undistinguished fossil collection. If nothing else, it may provide someone with images of some fossils that they can freely reuse without worrying about Copyright and permissions. I plan to add to the catalog over time, and probably to reimage some of the lousier pictures. As of October 2008, there should be a copy of the CATALOG on the website. Their previous repository at http://vtcodger.blogspot.com/ is still there, but it will be converted to a real blog someday.

Ordovician fossils at DAR State Park, Addison County, VT

A few photos of fossils exposed in Middle Ordovician, Glens Falls(?) Limestone at DAR State Park, Addison County, VT

SEPKOSKI DATABASE

The Sepkoski Database A database of about 30000 fossil taxa and their time of first appearance and of disappearance. Download in csv format.

REGIONAL DESCRIPTIONS

The intent is to describe the general geologic and paleontologic setting of regions where similar fossils are found. Roughly, these correspond vaguely to the modern concept of Terranes -- collections of rock sequences that resemble each other closely and do not resemble those of other terranes. The vast interior of North America that stretches from the Hudson River to the Sierra Nevada is basically a single terrane. There, I intend to use the Geolex Areas (e.g. "The Appalachian Basin") and their Canadian analogs instead of terranes. For starters, we have two region descriptions:

• Avalonia: Regions of Precambrian-Devonian sediments West of Cretaceous-Recent Atlantic sediments and East of everything else in Newfoundland, Northern Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New England, and the Carolinas.

• Iapetus Seafloor: Regions of often highly altered and usually sparsely fossiliferous sedimentary rock from the highly compressed seafloor of the early Paleozoic Iapetus Sea. These are found in a strip parallel to the Atlantic Coast of North America mostly just East of the Appalachian Mountains.

• Maritime (Provinces) Cover: Thick regional deposits of Upper Paleozoic and Lower Mesozoic rocks in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island as well as Rhode Island and adjacent Massachusetts.

• Meguma: Cambrian-Devonian sediments in the Southern half of Nova Scotia that were originally deposited in the Rheas Ocean to the East of the microcontinent of Avalonia.

• Triassic: Late Triassic and very Early Jurassic rift valley deposits scattered from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas associated with the opening of the modern Atlantic Ocean.

OTHER (MOSTLY COMPUTER) STUFF

BLACKHOLE ROUTING

Blackhole Routing What is it and do you have it? If your network generally works, but a few functions fail in ways that don't make much sense, you might have a black hole routing problem.

CARDFILE.EXE

A Description of the .CRD File Format used by the Windows 3 CARDFILE.EXE.

CAUSEWAY ERRORS

A few notes on CAUSEWAY errors ... What they are and what to do about them.

CLIPBOARD FAQ

A FAQ on computer clipboards. It's still a draft and needs some work, but I think that it is far enough along to post.

CTYPES Mini Tutorial

A quick tutorial on the Ctypes Module that allows foreign (e.g. C language) library functions to be used by Python code.

FIREFOX on WINDOWS 95

How to install and run Firefox V1.5 (and Mozilla 1.1.7) on WINDOWS 95. Firefox does not officially support Windows 95, but with updates to only three files, it can be installed and used.

INSTALLSHIELD BUG

An (undocumented?) bug in the Installshield program The installer starts but vanishes with no error message if insufficient file handles are configured in Windows.

KCRON

A few notes on the KDE GUI interface -- KCRON -- for task scheduling and why it does not work in Slackware 11.0.

MISCELLANEOUS FAQ

Short notes on various technical problems

• Table of Contents

SAMSUNG LASER PRINTERS ON LINUX

Configuring Samsung CLP-300 Laser Printers in Linux Some notes and suggestions on setting up the CLP-300 and Hewlett Packard HP-IIP printers in Linux.

SPYAXE VIRUS REMOVAL

Notes on removing a viral virus remover How I managed to remove an infestation of malware known as Spyaxe.

WIN9- SEARCHING

Notes on the Windows FIND/SEARCH Command How to run Windows Search from a command line -- optionally with multiple drives selected for search.

WINDOWS 98 SHUTDOWN

Dealing with Windows 98 Shutdown Problems How to fix Windows 98 Shutdown problems if you can, and how to turn off the annoying and largely unnecessary automatic file scan on boot if you can't fix shutdown.

WEBSITE VALIDATION

How to validate a web site image with the W3C HTML validator before uploading it to the site.

FLYING CARS

An analysis of flying cars and Personal Air Vehicles (PAVs). I'm not quite sure why I undertook this as it was quite time consuming and I really don't much care about PAVs one way or the other. I'm not sure that I'd own one even were they widely available and cheap. Anyway, here's the discussion. Bottom Line: There are huge technical problems. Also, broken cars mostly stop. Broken aircraft mostly drop. That leads to very large and quite intractable liability and maintenance issues. PAVs for everyman aren't happening any time soon.

PC TECHNICAL ARTICLES GLOSSARY

Glossary Material: PC Technical Articles Glossary. A collection of several hundred short articles on PC related topics. New articles were posted weekly in the Compuserve PC Hardware Forum for many years. I stopped posting them in April 2005 for several reasons -- the most important being that the Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia has largely replaced any real purpose that they may have served.

FICTION:

I hope to fill this out with more material someday, but for now, here's two short humor pieces and two short unpublished humorous pieces:

PUBLISHED

These are stories that I wrote for Datamation back around 1970. (Note, I'm the author of the pieces, not the copyright holder. I don't think it's likely that whoever holds the copyright nowadays will want them taken down, but they have only to ask ...).

• 'Report from the Psychlab'
• 'The Alabtross Project'

UNPUBLISHED

Here are two unpublished, humor pieces

• 'Ode to a 1995 Dodge Neon'
• 'Cheech and the Bridge'.

PANGLOSS LIVES!

Some fragments of a novel that will never be written. The original plan was to retrace Dante's path to Hell in reverse with lots of hopefully entertaining satire and social commentary. The problem turned out to be that I am a deeply flawed individual who finds Dante to be terminally boring. I'm quite sure that is my fault, not that of Signor Dante or his translators.

What does the working title -- Pangloss Lives! -- have to do with the content of the story? Nothing whatsoever. But it is a really fantastic title, No? (At least for those who have read Candide).

• Liz
• Charon
• Charon2
• Noah
• Finale

DET-ROT STORY

A science fiction juvenile story that's maybe half written. Might finish it someday.

• Det-Rot Story

SITE LINKS

Links to sites I find interesting for one reason or another. Maybe you will also. I have many more, but the list needs to be examined in detail, and I won't have time for that for a while:

• Article about Analyzing web page load time:

• Humorous material re Lucas Engineering. Lucas electronic components were used in a wide variety of British automobiles. They were noted for their questionable reliability resulting in many jokes. e.g. Why do the British drink warm beer? Answer-Lucas Refrigerators- http://www.mez.co.uk/lucas.html.

• The [Introduction] to Lee Iaccoca's book Where Have All The Leaders Gone?.

• The Unix Haters Handbook

• The Rise and Fall of Unix

• The Trouble With Unix http://books.google.com/books?id=UqhjMVwYKJsC&pg=PA259&lpg=PA259&dq=donald+norman+unix&source=web&ots=E5oCeHgCTt&sig=FVSmRp0QDl74egZmyq9cnxTDh6E#PPA249

ADMINISTRATIVE STUFF

Plans and History

Plans and History

WHAT'S IN THIS VERSION?

See Current News

WHAT'S PLANNED FOR THE NEXT VERSION?

See Current News and Plans

HISTORY OF CHANGES

See Change History

Copyright 2006,7,8, Donald Kenney (Donald.Kenney@GMail.com). Unless otherwise stated, permission is hereby granted to use any materials on these pages under the [Creative Commons License V2.5 href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/].

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