Site News Archives - 2001

Sunday, December 17th, 2001

Well, we've taken tons of photos with the new digital camera. By the camera's reckoning, over 330 so far! But how many of those would people actually be interested in seeing? Not many, I'd bet. A select few are on the Newest Stuff page. 

More interesting than just basic photos of the family are the fun tricks we're learning to do with the digital camera. I don't expect many people happen to have 3D glasses lying around, but if you do, check this out. 

Basic fake photos are much easier to do with the digital camera. Here is a preliminary experiment, but I'll have a much better version up soon. 

We've also been experimenting with bluescreen techniques for making fake photos. At first we were using our television with a pure blue picture as the bluescreen, but then we found out that Andrew's bedroom wall is fairly decent for this when we use a little extra lighting. Plus it's way bigger than that 50" TV. We've done just a couple of composite photos so far, but the real fun begins when we start using the bluescreen for video! 

And on a totally unrelated note, I threw together a fun little Java applet to help you really annoy your chat buddies. Click here to visit the Chat-SHOUT page.

Thursday, December 6th, 2001

So... I didn't wait a whole year after all. Maybe I'm not the horrible procrastinator I'm made out to be. Anyway, the real update is just one page. Click here to see new photos of the kids and some test shots from our new digital camera. Also please note that the voting and feedback pages are currently broken. Because of some nasty viruses (Code Red, Nimda, etc), I had turn off some of the web server's features. I'll fix it someday.

OK, while I'm at it, even though a lot of you have already seen these, I should mention something that was added to the site, but never mentioned here. Go to the Videos page to see a couple of videos we made earlier in the year right after we got a digital camcorder. They are big files, but they're on a reasonably fast server for all you broadband users.

Also not previously noted is that the boomerang page moved to its own domain: www.boomsmith.com. That site was on a now defunct Yahoo web ring and got hits from all over the world. Here are some of the domains I got visitors from:

.com (Commercial), .net (Network), .fr (France), .nl (Netherlands), .edu (USA Educational), .br (Brazil), .ar (Argentina), .es (Spain), .ca (Canada), .mil (USA Military), .pf (French Polynesia), .fi (Finland), .si (Slovenia), .org (Non-Profit Organisations), .cz (Czech Republic), .it (Italy), .au (Australia)

Interestingly, those are in order of most visitors to the least. Australia had the least visitors to a boomerang site!

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2001

The Boomerang Page has been totally redesigned. Instead of one giant page with everything I have split it into several sections. There are several new boomerangs scanned in, too. 

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2001

Happy New Year, Everybody!

Wow. Its been a long time since my last update, but I've been on holiday. (Plus my SIDS has been acting up). What's new? Well, for one thing, I've moved my larger video files to a faster site, so if you've never looked at them because they took too long to DL, you can do it now (unless your slow connection is the problem).

In other news, Andrew and I wrote a new game over the holiday break. Perfecto, the Java-powered shape-matching game is available here. Its still under test, so if you find any problems with it, let me know.