Site Introduction
About Sandcastle V.I.
Welcome to the latest version of Sandcastle V.I., which originates in the sunny
United States Virgin Islands and has been in existence since 1996.
This Introduction will tell you a little bit about what's
available on the site and about me, your friendly "web master."
From the Sandcastle
V.I. splash/home page, you can access one of several major subject
areas, which are also easily accessible through the menu frame at the
bottom of the browswer window or the text menu at the bottom of
each page, as follows:
INTRO:
Includes the introduction you're now reading and pages about my
home islands, my job, and my family's first experiences with home
computers. A detailed site map or table of contents, a description
of what's new on the site, site visit statistics, and a list of
site awards received are also available in this section.
VENTURES:
Includes a short history of my favorite musical group, The
Ventures -- which just happens to be universally recognized
as the No. 1 Instrumental Group in the World. This section also
includes a detailed discography with almost 1,000 individual entries,
album reviews and ratings, a virtual photo album, a list of "Top
100" singles and albums, and a very comprehensive directory of
other Ventures web sites and resources. In this section you'll
also find information on the campaign to get the Ventures inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
SEA:
This section has two main sub-sections. First, there's a short
history of the development of the Aircraft Carrier as an integral
part of the world's navies. Second, you'll find almost the entire
manuscript of my yet-to-be-published book about the history of
70 of the more than 200 vessels of sea, air, and space that have
proudly carried the name Enterprise. Here you'll also find
a virtual tour of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise CVN-65.
AIR:
This section includes pages devoted to military aerobatic teams, with special
emphasis on the history of the U.S. Navy Blue Angels and the U.S.
Air Force Thunderbirds, plus a very detailed history of aviation using
the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum
as a backdrop.
SPACE:
This is a directory of every American and Russian manned spaceflight,
from 1961 to the present. For each major space project (Mercury,
Gemini, Apollo, etc.) there is a summary page giving an overview
of the project and a list of all missions within the project.
The summary page also has links to pages with individual flight
details, such as the launch date and flight duration, crew members,
extra-vehicular activities (EVAs), payloads, and a short mission
summary.
SCI-FI:
There are two sub-sections here, one devoted to episode guides
for all of the different Star Trek series and one devoted to
other space-based science fiction series, such as Babylon 5, Battlestar
Galactica, Space: 1999, and others. For want of a better place to
put it, an episode guide to the military drama series J.A.G. is also
included here.
RACING:
Here you'll find short histories of some of my favorite
auto racing teams of the past, including Carroll Shelby's legendary
Cobras and GT-40s, Dan Gurney's Eagles, Jim
Hall's Chaparrals, Enzo Ferrari's Sports Cars and
American Motors' Javelins.
MOVIES:
This is a collection of directories to some of my favorite movies. In addition to a
very detailed history of Walt Disney's Animated Classics, there are pages
devoted to the musicals of Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers and Elvis Presley,
the James Bond thrillers, and classic scifi, air combat, and auto racing films.
ART:
Here are examples of some of the art produced by my daughter, Selene. She's
a web/graphic designer in South Florida, and her iDesign Studios web site showcases more of her web design work.
TRAVEL:
This is another section that has two separate sub-sections. The main one contains virtual
tours of America's tropical islands, such as the U.S. Virgin Islands,
Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, the Northern Marianas, and American Samoa. The second
sub-section is a virtual tour of Walt Disney World based on our past visits.
EXIT:
When you're ready to leave Sandcastle V.I., take this route
for links to some of my favorite sites on the World Wide Web.
Here you'll also find our Guestbook,
where you can read comments from past visitors and add your own.
About the Web Master
If you haven't already guessed from the page footers, my name
is Arnold E. van Beverhoudt, Jr. and I live on St. Thomas,
U.S. Virgin Islands
with my wife, Helena.
We have a daughter, Selene,
who (as I mentioned before) is a web/graphic designer in South Florida.
By profession, I'm a Certified
Public Accountant and an auditor with the U.S. Department of
the Interior's Office of Inspector General. On the personal
side, I've been a life-long space enthusiast and I'm a member
of the National
Space Society, the Planetary
Society, and the Smithsonian
Institution's Air and Space Society. I'm also a first-generation
Star
Trek fan (having been hooked since the first episode aired
in 1966), and a naval history enthusiast and member of the
United
States Naval Institute.
Spurred on by these overlapping
interests, over an 8-year period I researched the history of
vessels named Enterprise and wrote a 180-page book entitled
These Are the Voyages: A History of the Ships, Aircraft, and
Spacecraft Named Enterprise. I haven't had much luck in getting
the book published, but I haven't given up hope of seeing it in
print one of these days. In the meantime, a major portion of the book
is available in the SEA
section of this site.
I got in on the ground floor of the personal computer revolution
in 1979, when I got a Radio
Shack TRS-80, with a whopping 16Kb of RAM, 128x48 B/W graphics,
audio cassette data storage, 150 baud acoustical modem, and Microsoft
BASIC programming language. That now seems like ancient history,
but I must say that sometimes I wish I still had my "TRaSh 80"
(as the Apple II folks used to ridicule the TRS-80). It was FUN
being on the cutting edge!
Some Disclaimers
Although my daughter, Selene, and I have tried to give Sandcastle V.I. a visually
pleasing design, you'll notice that it's also decidedly "low tech" in comparison to many
other web sites. With a few exceptions (like the indulgence of a slow-loading
Flash intro with animation and music), I've avoided using fancy features and
graphics that, although they look nice, slow down the download of pages and
often are just "eye candy" without any real substance behind them. I hope
this compromise helps to make Sandcastle V.I. available to the widest
possible audience. Also notice that there are NO banner, pop-up, or other
ads of any kind. This site is strictly non-commercial, and it will always stay
that way.
A few words of explanation might be appropriate here about my
copyright notice at the bottom of each page. As you explore Sandcastle
V.I., you'll quickly discovery that this web site is very
"information intensive." The site has over 500 individual pages and consumes more
than 50Mb of web server disk space. About half of that space
is devoted to text. It is those words, the result of countless
hours of research and compilation on my part, that are copyrighted.
In the few cases where I have either relied heavily on or directly
quoted material from other sources, I've given notice of the sources,
and (of course) I have no intention of copyrighting the words
of those other authors.
For your convenience, you may save to disk the textual content
of any of my web pages for off-line reading and personal archival
use. However, permission is not granted for the further
distribution or posting of this material to other web sites. Instead,
please either include a link to Sandcastle V.I. on your own page or give your
friends the address for the Sandcastle V.I. hompage, which
is:
www.sandcastlevi.com
The thumbnail graphics that are liberally embedded throughout
the various pages (with the exception of photos/graphics created by
me or borrowed from NASA and other U.S. Government public domain sources)
are the property of and copyrighted by the sources from which I borrowed
them. My use of small copies of those photos is meant to fall
within the "reasonable use" provisions of copyright law. By including
reference bibliographies and other source data as part of the information presented
in my pages, I hope to encourage web surfers to seek out the original
sources for more detailed information. However, if representatives
of any of those sources think otherwise, please email me and I'll
gladly remove the offending thumbnails from the appropriate pages.
With that explanation and legal disclaimer out of the way, I
invite you to explore what I've put together here at Sandcastle
V.I.. Please let me know what you think by sending email to
the address shown at the bottom of every page.
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