I just finished reading “Unbroken“, at the urging of my wife, and it was a great book!  It inspired me to create a Google Earth file that shows all of his adventures, but I was unable to find a simple timeline of his events.

By working back through the book, and using various other online resources, I came up with the following.  If you see anything that is missing or inaccurate, please leave a comment and let me know.

Update: April 26, 2011 — Thanks to David Hale, the list is now much more accurate, including dates for most of the major events.  For a full timeline, you can check out this Google Spreadsheet (or download the Excel file, if you prefer).  Thanks David!

Early Years

• Jan 26, 1917 – Born in Olean, NY — 327 Coleman Street (thanks Alec!)
• 1920 – Moved to Torrance, CA — 2028 Gramercy Avenue
• Aug 26, 1929 – Louie saw the Graf Zeppelin over Torrance, CA
• Jan, 1933 – Louie began tenth grade at Torrance High School
• Feb, 1933 – Louis began competitive running
• Dec, 1935 – Louie graduated from High School
• May 22, 1936 – Track meet in USC Coliseum.  Louie finished second in the 5000.
• July 3, 1936 – Louie left Torrance for the Olympic trials in New York.
• Aug 7, 1936 – Ran in the Berlin Olympics
• 1938 – Attended USC
• Sept 29, 1941 – Louie joined the Army.

Bombardier school

• Nov, 1941 – Houston, TX – Ellington Field
• Aug, 1942 – Midland, TX – Midland Army Flying School

Training

• Aug 19, 1942 – Ephrata, WA
• Oct, 1942 – Sioux City, IA
• Oct, 1942 – Hamilton Field, CA (stopover to Hawaii)
• Nov 2, 1942 – Hawaii — Hickam Field

Missions

• Dec 23, 1942 – Wake Atoll (via Midway Island)
• Feb, 1943 – Canton (to prep for Makin and Tarawa)
• Feb, 1943 – Makin (in the Gilbert Islands)
• Feb, 1943 – Tarawa (in the Gilbert Islands)
• April 17, 1943 – Nauru, then landed in Funafuti
• April 18, 1943 – From Funafuti, via Canton, to Palmyra Atoll
• May 24, 1943 – Stationed at Kualoa Field, Oahu

The Crash

• May 27, 1943 – The plane that they were searching for crashed on the way to Canton from Kualoa
• May 27, 1943 – Heading from Kualoa to Palmyra and crashed, roughly 225 miles north of Palmyra

POW

• July 13, 1943 – Landed at Wotje in the Marshall Islands
• July 16, 1943 – Kwajalein
• Truk Atoll (stopover on the way to Yokohama)
• Sept 15, 1943 – Yokohama, Japan (on the eastern coast of Honshu) to Ofuna
• Sept 31, 1944 – Omori (on an artificial island in Toyko Bay)
• March 2, 1945 – Naoetsu

Going home

• Sept 5, 1945 – From Naoetsu to Yokohama
• Sept 17, 1945 – Okinawa
• Sept 18, 1945 – Laoag, Philippines
• Sept, 1945 – Manila
• Sept, 1945 – Stopover at Kwajalein
• Sept, 1945 – Hawaii
• Oct, 1945 – Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco (Pete came to visit)
• Oct, 1945 – Long Beach airport (reunited with family)

Post-war

• May 25, 1946 – Cynthia and Louie were married.
• Sept, 1949 – Billy Graham came to Los Angeles
• June, 1954 – San Gabriel Mountains, CA – Louie opened the Victory Boys Camp
• 1984 – Louie carried the Olympic torch in Los Angeles
• Jan 22, 1998 – Louie carried the Olympic torch past the Naoetsu POW camp.
• April, 2003 – Wantanabe died

A timeline of Louis Zamperini’s journey is a post from: MickMel

If you’ve got free time and want to make a few bucks, below are sites I could use some help with.  They’re sites that I set up a while ago (most were a few years ago), built up nicely, but haven’t had time to work on them in a while.  I’m looking for people that can write entries on the sites, with the frequency listed for each one.

Once we get them rolling, we’ll split the AdSense revenue 50/50. This will result in somewhere between $1 – $1000 month in revenue.  Most will start near $1, and hopefully climb into the hundreds.  These should grow more quickly than new sites since they’re already well-established.

I’ll continue to host the site, run upgrades, promote it, etc.  You just need to write. Here’s what I’ve got:

Monthly Pageviews shown are from September 25 – October 25, 2009

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Baseball-Umps.com

Description: Similar to my Football and Basketball sites, but I don’t have time for all of them.  Discuss umpire related news, post video of bad calls, etc.
Posting Requirements: 3-5 posts/week during the season, 1-2 posts/week during the off-season
Monthly Pageviews: 129
Twitter Followers: 2313
Pages in Google: 49

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GolfNation.org/blog

Description: The blog for our popular Golf site.  The site is doing well, but we don’t have time to write often enough in the blog. Write about golf related news and new equipment.
Posting Requirement: 1-3 posts/week
Monthly Pageviews: 141
Twitter Followers: 3397
Pages in Google: 125

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Hockey-Refs.com

Description: Similar to the baseball site above, write about NHL referee related news, post videos of bad calls, etc.
Posting Requirement: 3-5 posts/week during the season, 1-2 posts/week during the off-season.
Monthly Pageviews: 376
Twitter Followers: 2244
Pages in Google: 108

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SaturdayFootballFever.com

Description: All about college football, sister of the pro site below.  News, scores, opinion, etc.
Posting Requirement: 3-5 posts/week during the season, 1-2 posts/week during the off-season.
Monthly Pageviews: 79
Twitter Followers: no account yet
Pages in Google: 121

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ScreenDig.com

Description: A site with many mini-blogs about various shows.  Pick a few shows and write.
Posting Requirement: 1-3 posts/week when the show is active, 1 post/week when it’s not.
Monthly Pageviews: 2506
Twitter Followers: 1830
Pages in Google: 161

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SundayFootballFever.com

Description: All about pro football, sister of the college site above.  News, scores, opinion, etc.
Posting Requirement: 3-5 posts/week during the season, 1-2 posts/week during the off-season.
Monthly Pageviews: 147
Twitter Followers: no account yet
Pages in Google: 119

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WorshipSetlists.com

Description: Post weekly setlists from churches with quality contemporary worship.  Intended to be a guide so smaller churches can see what’s popular.
Posting Requirements: 2-6 posts/week.
Monthly Pageviews: 323
Twitter Followers: 1422
Pages in Google: 93

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WPHelpBlog.com

Description: All about WordPress.  Discuss new releases, new cool plug-ins, tips on how to use it better, etc.
Posting Requirements: 1-5 posts/week.
Monthly Pageviews: Unknown. Estimate 150-200
Twitter Followers: 3657
Pages in Google: 20

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If you have a different idea for a new blog that you’d like to start, I’d certainly be willing to discuss it with you.  It’s important to write about something you have a passion for, so maybe starting a new topic would be best.  However, the blogs above will likely grow their traffic much more quickly, since they’re already well-established in Google and on Twitter.  If you’re interested, send me an email — mickmel@gmail.com

Looking for help with a few sites is a post from: MickMel

It’s a tough job market out there, but it might be easier than you think to find a job using Craigslist.  I’ve recently resigned my position at Mt. Bethel to head out on my own, but before I left I helped the church find a replacement for me.  I posted the job on Craigslist and we eventually found a few excellent candidates.  We’re very happy to have found Cliff, who starts in a few days.

However, the road to get there was quite interesting.  I posted a few paragraphs on Craigslist about what we were looking for and closed with:

If you are interested, please send us your resume along with links to live samples of your work and links to any public social media profiles you have (Twitter, etc), if any.

Of the 74 applications that came in, only 5 included the info I was looking for! Five!  I was completely blown away.  In a tough job market, aren’t people supposed to be trying harder?  I guess not.

Beyond that, we had a wide variety of applications:

• 28 companies that could “help us out”, despite the listing clearly stating that this was a “full-time, on site” position.  I consider those to be spam.
• 27 that were ok.  I put them in the “eeh” folder.  They were at least semi-qualified, but most didn’t even include the three basic items I asked for.  It was obvious that most of them were copy/paste submissions.
  • Many were full of typos.  One guy was proud of his “Pearl” experience.  Aside from the fact that we don’t use it at all at the church, it’s spelled “Perl”.  Oops.
  • One Twitter profile’s avatar was a photo of the applicant smoking in front of a shelf full of various kinds of alcohol.  While our denomination (Methodist) doesn’t strictly prohibit smoking or drinking, it sure looks unprofessional.
  • I had a surprising number of submissions from people that had no social media profiles. That’s certainly their prerogative, but the job description clearly asked for it.  One guy was an “expert”, but said that he didn’t actually use any of the popular social networking services.  Another had “never been asked for that information by any employer”.  While we weren’t looking for a super-social user, some experience was certainly required; we have about eight Twitter accounts, a variety of Facebook groups/pages, and two blogs to manage.  I’d hate to have to train someone from step one with that stuff.
• 15 that weren’t even worth responding to.
  • I had a guy send me a blank e-mail with his resume attached. Really?  He’s probably the guy on Facebook that complains about the tough market, and how he sends out 50 resumes/day and gets no response.  Shocking.
  • One guy a sent an email that included a link to his site and nothing else — no other text, no resume, nothing.
• 4 others eventually worked their way to up having an interview.  One of them failed to include all three items I asked for, but they had written a clearly personal message to me about the job, and in our back-and-forth emailing he sent me the information.

It’s really very simple.  Of those that included the three things I was looking for and a simple, personal note, all of them were contacted for further discussion. In fact, of the five people that sent me the three (simple) things I asked for, three came in for interviews!  Wouldn’t you love a 60% chance of being interviewed for a job you’re interested in? The other two were ruled out after emailing with them a bit, but at least they got a pretty close look.

Bottom line: I was amazed at the laziness of most job applicants on Craigslist.  So many of them spend so much time just cutting and pasting as many as they can that they never get anywhere.  For someone that saw this job opening, it would only take about 90 seconds to:

• Create a new e-mail
• Attach your resume
• Tell us why you want the job
• Post links to your social accounts and previous work you’ve done

That’s it!  Do those few things and you’re almost guaranteed to at least start a dialog with the company.  Is it really so hard?  Fortunately for you, it’s apparently too hard for most folks which really opens the door for your chances.

Good luck out there!

How to land a job using Craigslist is a post from: MickMel

Back in 2001, Google co-founder Sergey Brin appeared on the game show “To Tell The Truth”, where the panel had to determine which of the three contestants was the real “Google Guru”.  It’s quite entertaining.  Check it out below:

Funny old video with Sergey Brin is a post from: MickMel

While the title says “non-Diggers”, this really applies to anyone who would visit this blog and say “what’s SEO stand for?”

I find that very smart people are very confused about a wide array of technology-related items.  Here are the 10 I hear most often:

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10 — The Wii Remote needs to see the screen!

In some cases, yes.  In most cases, no.  I’ve had friends try to point the remote at the screen so it’ll accept a button press, and you’ve had friends do it too.

When you’re moving the cursor around on the screen, it needs to be able to see the bar above (or below) your TV.  If you’re in the middle of a game of Mario Kart, it doesn’t care where that little bar is or who is standing in the way.

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9 — The iPhone is the most advanced phone ever!

The iPhone is great.  I have it, I love it.  It’s slick and it works well, but it’s missing a ton of very basic features.  I traded an N95 to get my iPhone.  The iPhone has a much worse camera, no built-in video capture, a worse battery life and no MMS.  Throw in things that it should have (like copy-and-paste) and it looks even worse.

That being said, it’s still the best phone I know for e-mail and browsing, and that’s my main concern, but it’s got serious weaknesses that other phones don’t have.

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8 — The government has a live version of Google Earth.

I spend a lot of time on various Google Earth sites, and I’ve found that many people that wonder if Google Earth imagery is in real-time.  When they find out it isn’t, they’re sure that the govenment has access to it.  No.  Trust me.

While I think that real-time imagery in a product like Google Earth will be here someday, I’m pretty confident that we’ll be in the 2020′s before that happens.

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7 — Sites at the top of Google paid to get there.

They’re not talking about the paid listings; they mean the organic ones.  “You know you can pay Google and they’ll give you a boost, right?”

While there are ways you can pay to possibly move up (paid links), slipping Google some cash under the table won’t do it.  If they were found to be manipulating the organic results for some kick-backs, that could be the end of Google as we know it.

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6 — Macs can’t get viruses

Macs are so much better than PCs because they can’t get viruses, right?  Wrong.  In fact, some studies have shown Macs to be more vulnerable to attacks than Windows machines.  The main issue seems to be a lack of market share, and thus a lack of incentive for evildoers to attack the Macs.

On the other hand, every year we hear that “this year Macs will start to get attacked” because of their growing market share, and yet it never pans out.  Still, people that think Macs are somehow “virus-proof” are idiots.

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5 — “Hits” are the best measure of a website

As soon as a I hear someone tell me how many “hits” they’re getting on their website, I know I can tune them out.  While hits are a technically accurate measure, they don’t mean what most people think they mean.

For example, our church website got over 12 million hits last year.  Amazing!  Not really.  that was only 115,000 visitors and about3 million pageviews.  Certainly nice numbers, but nothing like the 12 million hits.  When you load a page, every element on the page (images, JS calls, external stylesheets, etc) create a “hit” on the server.  Thus, one visitor looking at one page could easily generate a dozen hits on a site.

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4 — I’m “on” the website right now

While this is somewhat beginning to change, it’s still not accurate.  When you pull up CNN, your computer downloads the HTML, images, etc, shows them on your screen and disconnects from the site.  When you click to another page, your computer reconnects, grabs the HTML/images from that page, and then disconnects again.

You’re never “on” a site — you’re just pulling each page to you.

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3 — My identity isn’t safe online

Many people think that just by pulling up a website, your identity can get stolen.  I suppose with the right spyware on your machine it could happen, but it’s unlikely.  The majority of identity thefts occur when people simply give away their info in a phishing scheme.

You can say your identity got “stolen”, but the truth is you gave away to them.

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2 — My computer might catch a virus

Viruses are big news, but really are fairly rare.  Many people think of comptuer viruses like human viruses, in that you can just “catch” one.  You can’t.  You need to download an infected file, open an infected e-mail, or visit an infected site with your unpatched browser.

If you keep your PC up to date and you’re not stupid, the odds of being infected with a virus are close to zero, even with out A/V software installed.

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1 — Google searches the internet

This is the one I hear the most often.  The truth is, Google doesn’t search the internet.  It can’t.  It is impossible for you to search the internet.

Google simply searches a copy of the internet that they store on their servers and update as often as possible.  This creates the illusion of them searching the internet, and it’s a system that works very well.

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What other crazy things do you hear from your semi-technical friends?

10 things that non-Diggers are wrong about is a post from: MickMel

It’s that time of year — time to make sure your little “© 2008″ becomes “© 2009″ on any of your sites that have it.

In my case, only about 1/2 of my sites even show that at the bottom.  Of those, almost all of them are scripted to automatically show the current year.   However, there were a few that had the dates hard-coded in the template and needed to be updated manually.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to make sure yours are all updated, simply for asthetics.  It looks bad to let things like that get way out of date.

Don't forget to update your copyright dates is a post from: MickMel

This is a bit off-topic, but explains my sparce posting on here lately.  I’ve been working on a new resource for church worship leaders, and it’s just about ready to go — Tabs For Worship.

It’s somewhat similar to the other guitar tab sites out there, but with a few key differences:

• Less “stuff”, just music. No CD reviews, no online store, no concert listings, etc.
• A vastly streamlined database structure. So many artists cover the same song that the current structure of tab sites simply doesn’t make sense.  For example, we already show six different artists for “Here I Am To Worship“, and I’m sure there are more out there.  On most sites, you’d have to look under each artist’s section to see what tabs they have for each one, then decide on the best.  With TFW, they all point to the same page, giving you quick access to every version of the song that has been submitted to the site.  More about our database layout can be found here.
• No separation of “praise” music from the main database. On most other sites, there is a “guitar/Christian” section, and then a “praise/worship” section.  Why?  We have it all in one database, with the artists, songs and albums extensively cross-linked so you can browse quickly.
• A clean, fast mobile site. This won’t be of great value on a regular basis, but could be essential in a crunch.  Maybe you can’t remember the bridge to a certain song — just pull up the mobile site, find the song you want, view the tabs, and get on with it.
• No registration required, and certainly no payment required. Many (but not all) sites require you to log-in before you can view the songs, and some even require payment.  Not us.  We want to help you find your information as quickly as possible, and registration is simply a barrier to that.  Of course, if you’d like to stick around we certainly encourage you to register and join our forums, but that’s definately not required.

New source for guitar tabs is a post from: MickMel

Now this is pretty cool.  You can search the web as it existed back in January, 2001 using this nifty page that Google created.

It’s only going to last for a month, so go play with it.  There’s certainly no SEO value in using it, but it’s kind of neat to play with it and see what was first for various terms.

Search the web as it was in 2001 is a post from: MickMel

A few weeks ago, Google introduced a new feature that allows you to set your Gmail account to always use SSL, not just when you’re logging in.

Like most folks, I didn’t think much of it.  However, a new vulnerability has been discovered that can hijack your account if you’re not using full-time SSL.

While this situation is making Gmail look bad, Google is really looking pretty good.  This specific hack is Gmail-only, but a similar hack could be built for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc.  The big difference is that Gmail offers full-time SSL, while the others don’t.

To turn this feature on in Gmail, simply go to [settings], then choose “Always use https” at the bottom of the page (be sure to  [Save Changes]).  It’s quite simple.

The tool to execute this hack will be released in two weeks, though others may be working on it already.  I’d suggest you make that small change to your Gmail settings right now.

Turn on full-time SSL in your Gmail account is a post from: MickMel

Look at that cute haircut!

Trying out the iPhone posting app is a post from: MickMel