Places I've Visited So Far Winter 2025-2026

It's 2026 and I have expanded the places visited, both within the US and Internationally. I've not expanded travel within Canada and Mexico, so I won't include specific maps for those.

Welp, two more states I've visited

I've been able to visit two more states. I've added no countries or Canadian provinces, however.  I hoped to get one other state before this update, but that wasn't meant to be, yet. There's just 7 states remaining.

What it takes to earn Elite rank in Exobiology

It takes a great many scanned lifeforms to earn Elite rank in Exobiology within Elite Dangerous! Check out this slideshow of start to end in a journey around the Galaxy. This three year project is now complete. I'm now working for Elite V, but I'm only going to take a few selfies with the more interesting lifeforms for now on. Enjoy! Oh, and there is additional content in the video throughout, so be sure to watch to the end (I know they always say that).

Response
Frontier Elite Dangerous Forum
Facebook1, Facebook2

New Patent issued

  

Linking views/states of 3d models and propagating updates in same

Japan Patent 7357715

Issued: Sept 28, 2023

Inventors: Felipe Martínez Quiroz and Matthew Lorono

Linking of 3D views within a 3D model, such as saved views and presentation states, into parent and child relationship. Automatically propagate changes to child views and their associated annotations when the orientation and other aspects of the parent view are changed, where the child views change to remain at the same relative orientation to the parent view, and where the annotations of a child view are modified so that their orientations are aligned with changes to the orientation of the associated child view.

[Normally, the US patent is first to be issued (ahead of international patents). However, in this case, the Japanese Patent Office worked faster than the USPTO; so it's the issuance of Japanese Patent that marks this achievement. I like the Japanese patent certificate.]

Patent link

Possible resurrection of the landing page

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In the early days of the internet, landing pages were often little more than menus that website visitors use to navigate to different pages and sites. Software at the time also heavily relied on menu-based interfaces. Even the most expensive applications had very simple menus as their landing page, often called "main menu".

However, for decades, forcing users into a main menu or other landing page has been considered bad user interface design. Menus were moved from the opening screen to the top bar, bottom bar, and even along the sides of the window/screen. For a long time, applications would open directly into the application's workspace, where users would then navigate menus to open files. Similarly, websites commonly started directly on the content page, with navigation moved to the sidebar.

About ten years ago, user interface design started to shift back to special pages for operational activities such as opening documents. Let's call these collectively as "operations pages." Microsoft Office returned to the idea of a special page for operations in recent versions, though these pages are optional. Other applications also now have operations pages that are not optional.  (These are sometimes called splash pages.) The interfaces of these operations pages vary quite a bit from application to application, with many applications (including Office applications) trying to use all the extra real estate to provide some additional functionality.

Linktree

In 2016, Linktree came along and rebranded the old-fashioned landing page. It was created because social media websites don't allow their users to place more than one website in their profile pages. Linktree hosts a page that acts as a personal landing page for all of your various social media profiles. Linktree is a bit fancier than what was used in the 1980s and 1990s, but functionally identical from the perspective of the website visitor. From the perspective of the Linktree's customer, it provides some useful services for a fee (such as tracking visitor data).

There are now other Link in Bio hosting services as well.

WordPress

In 2023, WordPress is finally getting into this game with w.link. WordPress supports the creation of a landing page that looks very similar to Linktree's concept. The advantage of WordPress' solution is that users can self-host their landing page. Even with self-hosting, WordPress still offers some useful services for a fee.

However, for users who are already self-hosting and don't need those additional services, there's no need to use Linktree, WordPress, or any other "Link in Bio" services. You can just make your own landing page with relatively few lines of code in an HTML file.

fcsuper's place

I've literally been using a landing page from day-one on my website fcsuper.com (since mid-aughties).  I'm sure many of my visitors over the years sneered when they arrived upon my original landing page.  My original landing page was ugly, but functional.

After seeing the concept of the landing page undergoing a resurrection, I decided it was time to refresh my own. My new landing page has been active for a few months. It was modernized to be flexible, allowing it to display correctly on both phones and computers. It's still very simple, but it has some previews of content. It has no ads (yet) and no tracking. It's literally just a menu of my personal web across the internet.

However, this has now led me to a new thought. Should I make two landing pages: one for my truly personal activities, and one for my career-related activities? I guess I'll figure that out soon enough.

Update on the countries and states I've visited

 The number of countries I've visited is still scant, but I added a whole new continent to my list in 2019.

Coverage within the US has expanded a little too, as of 2022.

My coverage within Canada last expanded in 2019 too.

My Mexico coverage hasn't expanded in more than a few years.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CvtjSE8OGmx/

New Patent issued

WYSIWYG editor for creating and editing a feature control frame for geometric dimensioning and tolerancing in computer-aided design system

US Patent number: 11,556,234

Issued: Jan 17, 2023

Inventors: Abhijeet Narvenkar and Matthew Lorono

Here's a newly issued patent by Abhijeet Narvenkar and myself for the WYSIWYG GTOL editor now found in SOLIDWORKS that allows for the intuitive and quick creation of geometric tolerance (GD&T/GPS) feature control frames based on a series of connected user choices.

Patent link

Diaeresis? Yup.

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Here is what reddit thought of me in 2022

 

Bitter, there are bitter things or why I don't touch coffee