Rossco's WWW Corner
Here you will find a collection of useful links to those hobbies of mine. I hope these pages are helpful to other people who have similar interests to my own. I have been working over the past few months to make the menus easier to navigate, as well as, increasing the amount of content detail.
Japanese Anime
When Neon Genesis Evangelion was on TV, I was engrossed, I wanted to watch more, I wanted more to watch. Having just bought a DVD player I started looking around for where I could get these types of DVDs, having always had excellent service in the past from Amazon.com when I bought books I started there. There are so many movies and series, where do you start? It just said to me, 'It would be so much easier if it was all catalogued and indexed.'. Well, I jumped to the task. Everything is on the Full A-Z Page, both movies and series. However the newest or most popular series are on the primary anime page - click here. Each link displays every DVD in the series and provides a brief outline of the plot of the series. You have to see, Spirited Away, and see why it is the alltime top grossing movie in Japan, and deservedly so. However there is still so much more out there. There are books, music cds, toys, and computer games as well.
What I have done to make finding these Animes easier is to group each anime series together with their associated books, CDs etc. So you will find on each page their corresponding links. There is a brief synopsis of each series and what DVDs are available. I find that buying boxed sets represent so much of a saving $$$ over buying each DVD individually that when I buy, I buy the boxed set as the first priority. (It also cuts down on the 'number of items shipped' cost as well, why buy 6 individual DVDs + 6 item shipping costs when 1 boxed set is 1 item + 1 shipping cost). You can get so many more Anime that way and coupled with Amazon.com's 10-40% discounts, you end up way ahead.
Osprey Books
When I have been gaming, I have found that the books which are published by Osprey have been immensely useful in providing painting guides of period uniforms. They set out quite intricately what regiments there were, their service history and provide their regimental uniform colours. Take for example their Men-at-Arms 141 Napoleon's Line Infantry book, it shows the evolution of the line infantry's uniforms during the Napoleonic era, provides the uniform colour guide for each line regiment, details the soldier's uniforms colours down to jacket, breeches, epaulettes, cuffs, plumes, cords, etc. What is even better is that there are 8 full colour plates by professional artists depicting examples of these officers and soldiers. And that is just the Men-at-Arms series, they have many other series, each with a slightly different focus, but all are directed to being historical guides to the profession of arms and the men that bore them throughout history.
Once again this was something that begged to be catalogued and indexed. So what I have done, because there are 1500+ of these books, is to divide them by series and historical period to make it easier for you to find which books your looking. As well as showing you what others are available in the same period which might also be what you are looking for. In the description field there is a brief description of each book and its contents page to make it easier to assess. For those who know what they are after just go straight to the numerical listings. I have set this up all with Amazon.com because I have always had excellent service from them.
Patent Searching
Most of my job involves patent searching for prior disclosures of inventions everyday. What I found was that with the rapid increase of patent databases on the Internet, I didn't have an easy to use starting point. So I decided to make up one myself. This page here gives a simple listing of quick links to all the patent databases on the Internet. If you want to do a search, you just go to this one page - select which database and entry point you want to use and simply click. As most people don't do this everyday, like I do, I have provided some starter help and information pages. These pages give help on the syntax to use and what each database covers. However like most of the search engines these days, the patent search databases have become fairly easy to use, just type in some of the words of your invention and they will give you similar inventions to look at. I usually start with the United States Patent Office as they have some 2 million patents fully text searchable. I think it is a really good place to begin searching.
Contact Information
If you have any information, details, tips or questions feel free to contact me and I will try to assist you as I can. My details can be found here.
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