This is being cross-posted to both the Toomre Capital Markets website and to Lars Toomre's personal website.

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Earlier this week, Lars Toomre broke up an LT post about Adding Images to Lars Toomre Website. Previously, buried at the bottom of that post, there was a hand-crafted HTML table summarizing what information currently was in Google Image Search for various combinations of site domain restrictions, safe search parameters and some typical search terms. That table is now presented in the LT post Sample Summary of Google Image Search Results and repeated here for easier reference.

The public presentation of these search results has already resulted in several stimulating conversations heading off in numerous different directions. Let me try to summarize some of the issues that have been raised thus far and the broad categories that they might be grouped into. Each of these categories probably will receive additional attention in the coming days. They include:

The Lars Toomre website uses Drupal, an open-source Content Management System ("CMS") system, to dynamically generate the web pages that are served up on this website's visitors. As a part-time technology "geek", Lars is a big fan of the flexibility that this CMS technology offers. That flexibility comes at a cost though. Whereas as some other popular CMS software like WordPress are much easier to use "right out of the box" so to speak, Drupal requires considerable effort in setting various parameters and even some programming to get a website to look and work as desired.

The current version of the Lars Toomre website has remained basically unchanged for the past two plus years. During the summer of 2010, Lars will be making some changes both to address the resolution of some long-known issues and to prepare for a move both to a new version of Drupal (Drupal 7) and the adoption of the HTML5 language. Hence, there may be some temporary hick-ups as these changes are incorporated into the production website.

If there are annoyances about the current presentation and/or operation of this website that bother the reader, please let me know. Lars will try to incorporate such changes before Lars and friends are distracted by the upgrades to HTML5 and Drupal 7 as well as the Fall activities. There may well even be some short blog entries that describe how certain of the outstanding annoyances were resolved. Thanks!!!

Recently, we have been discussing what type of content should appear publicly on the Lars Toomre personal website. Through the wonders of technology, the various content — including many quotes, books, recipes and blog posts — that appear on this website are also then shared with various people who subscribe via RSS feeds or via Twitter. The Twitter content is then passed on in turn only to my 'friends' on the social networking site Facebook. Other content is posted only on Facebook and hence is available to a more limited audience.

Friends and family often are really wonderful people. Although relationships with each person can be influenced or strained by shared experiences, each relationship is also a mirror (sometimes quite convoluted or distorted) back on the individual. Similarly, the individual is also a mirror back on that friend or family member.

Several of these friends in recent weeks have approached me about the content that my website feeds them. For instance, several have commented that while they really enjoy the various quotes, what they would really like to know is what was I thinking or feeling at the time that led me to highlight that particular quote. Where was I so to speak in the moment? Another who particularly values her privacy has suggested that I have a propensity to over-share and thinks such an idea to share more would be a horrible change.

I would like to ask my 'community' for some further feedback on this topic of how much to share publicly and, if so, where. Please feel free to contact me either via comments on this website or in private. Your thoughts are appreciated before I make any changes to my current approach.

During the summer of 2009, Lars Toomre traveled to Europe for the first time since the September 11th terrorist attacks. I had a tremendous time visiting both Spain and the French countryside for the first time.

One of the really amazing places that I discovered in Spain was called Alameda de la Alhambra which was the luscious palace/fort/castle built high in the hills above the town of Granada around 1350 AD for the Moorish Sultan and his family. Through the various ups and downs since, this location has been maintained as one of the true gems of Spain. (The first picture to the left shows the central courtyard of the Summer Palace building.) It truly is a gorgeous place well worth visiting.

Just in front of the Summer Palace area on the La Alhambra is an amazing presentation of vegetation and flowers called the Architect's Garden. The various bushes, hedges, plants and flowers have been cultivated over the years into quite an impressive maze and presentation of floral growth. The picture of Lars (below) was taken that same day on one edge of that wonderful garden area.

When one loves learning and hence reading about a wide variety of subjects, it is always interesting to learn what currently is on someone's bedside table and what books that person either might be immersed in and/or highly recommends. One of Lars Toomre's joys about returning to his boyhood home is discovering what book treasures both of his parents have "hidden" near their respective favorite reading spots. There always seems to be several gems that will require far more time to digest than the hours of this or that visit.

Recently, while at the family gathering in Jackson Wyoming, there were several conversations about what various people currently were reading. Some were reading several French books to better refine their language skills. Others were focusing on books about clean energy vehicles, home renovation, explanations of aircraft accidents and genealogy. (Almost all of the adult Toomre family members also gathered information from the World Wide Web on a daily basis from a very wide variety of web sites, although a bit surprisingly CNN and The New York Times seemed to be near unanimous destinations.)

As part of getting Drupal version 6.3 fully installed, configured and well organized, I will be incorporating more graphic images into this web site and its various postings. This image is the first that I have managed to display in Drupal 6.3 and dates from my time helping Ema in Hempstead, New York.

Welcome to the new version and home of Lars Toomre's personal web site!!

In August 2008, this personal website was moved to the Toomre hosting account where it now runs under the current Drupal version. As noted here, the creation of a custom theme for the new website location is very much a work in progress. Thanks for bearing with me.

As Lars starts to write this note, he is sitting in a restaurant just off the town square in Aspen, Colorado. The day started early in a town called Gunnison at the base of the valley through which one accesses the Crested Butte ski resort. There is a small airport in that town so Lars guesses that many skiers from out of state fly in on a puddle jumper rather than driving from Denver or Colorado Springs. The drive from Denver the previous day via Colorado Route 285 is lovely, but probably is a bit too much to traverse in the winter months.

From Gunnison, Lars drove further west and spent the morning exploring the lakes, gorges and peaks of the Gunnison National Reserve area. The skies were so blue with just a puff cloud dotting the sky here or there. The drive along Colorado Route 92 is really lovely as one slowly climbs the hills on the northern side of the water and gorges. Near the top of one of the rolling mountains is a stand of white Aspen trees through which the sunlight just glittered.

This continues my resolution to more regularly record my various thoughts and reflections. Professional life for me has gotten busy again and I have had less time to write in the past few days. However, I do want to get back to recording and tagging some of the interesting facts, thoughts and other trivia crossing my mind each day. Hence, here are some of my thoughts for this thirteenth day of January:

This is day 6 of Lars' 2008 resolution to note down his various thoughts so that they can be added to a personal cloud tag and they can be linked to the greater collection of trivia, facts, falsehoods and data that make up the modern Internet. Hence, here are some of the thoughts for this first Sunday of January 2008:

• While reading the New York Post on Page Six supermodel Veronica Varekova is stunning. Lars had forgotten how pretty this model was in the 2005 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit calendar.
• Page Six nominates their new trio of Hollywood Bimbos: Hayden Panettiere, Kim Kardashian and Vanessa Hudgens to replace Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Brittney Spears.
• Tom Brady won the AP MVP award for the 2007 NFL season. He very much deserves it as he had a performance for the ages. I am not sure that we ever again will see a football quarterback put up such numbers again. His performance has been simply amazing.

In keeping with his 2008 resolution, Lars has been recording daily the key themes that have caught his attention during that day or the preceding evening. Here thus are some of the thoughts for this first Saturday of January:

In keeping with his 2008 resolution, Lars has been recording daily the key themes that have caught his attention during that day. Here thus are some of the thoughts for this January day:

• Monthly BLS report is out at 8:30 AM today… Consensus is 50,000 new jobs. My suspicion is that it will be a non-event for the markets.
• More MATLAB programming today… Focus on report formats for the intermediate results.

Lars Toomre does not frequently appear in the public press. Hence, it was a pleasant surprise to learn that Lars was quoted in the December 2nd 2007 edition of The Orange County Register in an article written by Jonathan Lansner entitled New Cycle, but The Same Mistakes. The thrust of the article is that few people remember mistakes and lessons learned of the past.

As a result of some threatening letters I recently received from a lawyer representing a person who at present shall remain anonymous, I have spent some time recently focusing on the topic of censoring opinions expressed on weblogs or blogs.

In this particular case, these threatening letters appear to completely disregard the terms of use for LarsToomre web site. Further, while I am not a lawyer, these letters appear to overlook what is known as the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which I understand guarantees the right of American citizens to freely express their opinions.

When I received the first of these letters in very late October 2005, I was faced with the demand that I delete the post (which either the lawyer or his client found objectionable) that contained reference to his client and any other mention of his client from this blog or any other web site, including blocking this information by way of a google-like search on the internet. The second letter states that reference to the post in question can still be found via a Google search over which the owner of this site has absolutely no control. The second letter goes on to state “This is the final request before legal proceedings are commenced to have [Lars Toomre] take all necessary steps to delete this reference from [Google] and any other internet website or link.” To be charitable, these are "interesting" demands and no doubt merit further research. Does anyone out in the blog sphere have suggestions on how to proceed from here?

Until my recent reading this past weekend, I did not realize that the issue of censorship and blogs has become a topic of interest to so many. More information on censorship of blogs can be found at the Media Bloggers Association website and under the dooced category of the personal web site www.dooce.com.

This is a really interesting topic and I suspect that I may be posting far more on this issue: attempted censorship of opinion as expressed on personal websites. Please feel free to add comments to this posting or trackbacks.