The name of this site is derived from the Curassow bird—which, however, never lived on Curaçao island. But the spelling is all off, not at all unusual for the island's name.
With any luck (perseverance, we've plenty of), this simulation will evolve into a more and more realistically detailed site. We had long considered building a maquette of Curaçao island upon discovery in 1499, but it just couldn't be done until digital techniques came along. We propose to grow with them.
These simulations are far from perfect. But they are in real time over the web! And we got sick and tired of having to give out promises. Hence, results - primitive as they may be, for which no apologies are given. Eventually, we hope to make a deal with Google Earth.
We uploaded the first 3-D simulations in September 2001; August 2002, decided to split up into a flat and a stereo section, so we could make realistic info on Curaçao island accessible to any one. A good thing too: In 2006 we tan into severe problems because software supplier Morfit went down the drain.
Over September 2002, we managed to find and present info on two transatlantic crossing records that did not get their due; the steamship Curaçao and the KLM-Fokker FXVIII Snip, the last model in a long range of Fokker Tri-Motors.
As more visitors seem to be attracted by the info provided on Curaçao than by the simulations, we started extending that November 2002. We got so many visitors, falsely attracted by the compass rose, asking questions on how to construct angles with a compass, that we helped them out. But I can't help the guy who asked a search-engine for "typographical maps", a "metric compass rose" or "classical music exploration vespucci". There is no "dakota dc5". There never were "native Indians in the Canary islands", nor a "Nazi Fokker Tri-Motor" and
Boeing Super Constellation. And how I wish I could help you out with a "Curaçao nude photo". Topper, however, till June 2006 is the question
show me the 1950 boeing dc-6 constellation. This, December 2007, was beaten by the question for "spells to attract gays." (Maybe it was our tourist office, grasping for reeds.) Easy to reply to is "Who invented slavery?" - who else but Adam.
Added domain pointer www.curassow.com, December 2002. Lifted face in May, 2004.
Visitor-wise, we went from a mere 4 visitors/day in July 2002 to 46 in January 2003, and just kept growing: December 2004 - 150/day; November 2005: >300/day. Record number of visitors 7 November 2005 (381).
As the site grew bigger and bigger, we started to revamp in January 2006, mainly to make it better navigable.
Re-checked all links, July 2013
amazing how many sites have disappeared, complete with links
and we're still going strong.
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Hate Mail Amazingly, it took over five years before we got our first hate mail (2007-01-30). Without boring you with the, as always, boringly stupid details, here's the guy who sent it—hope he gets lots of spam: [hate mailer]. If you want to send hate mail as well, better send it to him; maybe you'll get a reaction there. |
We started adding advertisements in 2002 via Computer Junction, but end 2004 changed to BidVertiser, hoping we'd have more success. It didn't work either, so we are now trying it out with Google AdSense. Looks good. Try it - you'll like it!
| On Those Ads |
| You may have noticed, we run Google ads to eke out at least some money from these pages. Get rich quick, it ain't... if enough money came in to pay the costs of hosting alone we've had a good year. I received a reminder from Google: Please reconsider your blocking of ads on the following subjects: "Black Magic, Astrology and Esoteric" - "Drugs & Supplements" - "Get Rich Quick". All these are "standard allowable" unless explicity blocked; Which we did. |
August 2006: Got sick of bandwidth thieves - of course mostly Antilleans in Holland!
had to protect page source, and replaced images with this item:
Still later, some forum did the same by hot-linking to a photo on the Blohm und Voss page.
As they did not care to react to gentle requests, I gave them this treatment:
These turned out to come from
StumbleUpon. There have been, and no doubt will be, more.other websites we maintain:
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| movies, photographs, music & books | more virtual reality simulations | stuff that won't fit elsewhere |
e-mail to the web
| original design | thumbnails | editing | shrinking | uploading |
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| Netscape Composer | EZ Thumbs | CSE HTML validator | HTML Shrinker | Ace FPT3 |
| web search engines | link checking |
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