www.itowler.com

I have always found maps interesting, and since I started working on my genealogy, they have become an important tool.  One of the maps that I have come across in my research is the 1876 Indiana State atlas.  It is a great atlas, but has become hard to find, and if you can find it, it is an expensive book to purchase.  The book was about 290 pages long, and it is bound in half leather black cloth covered boards.  The words "Illustrated Historical Atlas Of The State Of In

Well, I think that I have everything pieced back together again.  itowler.com has been put back together and seems to be working as intended.  I have been able to move the old site over to Drupal, and still keep everything that I wanted.  The "new" Drupal version has the following features:

Great News to Announce!

A Toler book has been published!

A distant cousin Ray Toler, who is a character actor living in Chicago, has written a book that covers the Toler/Towler family.  Mr. Toler's book, Following the River Wide and Deep, is 286 pages long, and starts with Charles Towler of the Virginia Company and works its way forward.  The primary focus of his book deals with the Toler/Towler's of Virginia (from which I descend), but also talks about the North Carolina Toler clan.  The book is well cited, and very well written. 

I won!

As a part of the AMP meeting, researchers have the opportunity to present their work.  The presentations can by either an talk or a poster session, or both.  This year I am presenting my work at a poster session (I did last year as well).  At the poster session, you hang your poster and stand next to it and answer questions from people that come by.  The meeting publishes a brief description of each poster in the meeting book, so most people that come to see your poster have an interest.  Well in addition to just the poster session, I also applied for the Young Investigator Award.  As an applicant of the Young Investigator Award I had to send my finished poster in advance where it was judged before the meeting.  This judging accounted for 40% of my score.  Then while at the meeting, I had judges come and speak with me at my poster during the poster session.  That accounted for 60% of the my score.  I applied for the award, but did not really expect to win.  Well.... I did win, and was named one of the 2008 AMP Young Investigator Awardees.  I am pretty pumped about it. 

I am out of town for the next few days.  I left Baltimore this morning and it was about 40 degrees.  I am now in Texas, and it's sunny and 70.  Its a trip for work, but should be a good trip.  I am attending the annual AMP meeting.  I am presenting a poster and planning on attending some sessions.  The conference is being held at the Gaylord Texan, in Grapevine.  Its a huge building, that has an atrium, and a river, etc.  Should

Well after a few days, I have some of the site put back together.  The main reason for the update to the site was to update the software that the site runs on.  The site used to run on a CMS called Xoops, and I wanted to switch it over to Drupal.  I wanted to make the switch for several reasons, but mostly I am becoming more comfortable with the Drupal way of doing things.  In addition I felt that the Xoops platform was not moving forward with progress. 

So as you may have noticed, things at Itowler.com have changed.  I am in the middle of changing around the software that Itowler.com runs on, and for the next few weeks, things will be changing a lot.  My goal is to get the basic features back up soon, and then play around with the look and feel of the site after that.  Hopefully by the end of the week, the blog posts will all be back, and the a few other things as well.  The picture gallery, I still need to figure out how I want to do that.

I have not been as active as I would like (nothing new there) about keeping this up to date, but such as life.

Book Review:

The name of the book is Imperial Life in the Emerald City : Inside Iraq’s Greenzone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The book was published in 2006, and was a New York Times Book Review, Best Book of the year. The main focus of the book is the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the reconstruction of Iraq. As the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, Chandrasekaran has probably spent more time in U.S.-occupied Iraq than any other American journalist. The book is narrated from Chandrasekaran’s point of view, and it is an interesting one because Chandrasekaran has been in Iraq for such a long period of time, he is able to interact with the local Iraqis and gain their insight about the reconstruction.

I knew I was not doing so great about posting, but WOW I am really behind. I looked today to see how far behind I was, and realized that I had not posted anything for 55 days. Whoops. Things have been busy, but not that busy. I need to get more posted up here, and will try to “Catch up” in the next couple of weeks. I should have written 22 posts by the end of May, and As it stands I have only written 11, So I am a little behind.