Site News Archives - 2002

Now it can be told. Last Thursday, Andrew had an accident at school. The gym class was playing football, but not  in the smartest location on the school grounds, because there happened to be a light-pole along the side of their field. Andrew was running, looking back over his shoulder trying to catch a pass. He turned to face forward right before he smacked into the light-pole and gave himself a pretty gruesome gash on his forehead. It was more of a "rupture" than a "laceration", and judging by his clothes and shoes, it was very bloody. 

Coincidentally, his mom happened to be heading into the school for a conference when she was told, "Don't go into the office. Some kid in there is hurt pretty bad." "Who is it?", she asked, noticing the trail of blood leading to the door. "Some fifth-grader named Andrew." Well, even though there's more than one fifth grader named Andrew, Michelle's worst fears were soon confirmed. An on-campus doctor had gotten him bandaged up well enough to travel to the emergency room. Michelle drove him there and that's where I met up with them. (Thanks for the lift, Joey.) 

Though I've had a history of some pretty bizarre injuries myself, I'm sorry to say that when they unwrapped his forehead, it was the worst looking wound I've ever seen in real life. To preserve Andrew's handsomeness, Michelle asked that a plastic surgeon be brought in at the very beginning, to make sure he got the best stitch-up job possible. The doctor did a great job and Andrew was unbelievably brave. He's only 10, but he never shed a tear at any point during the ordeal. Through the waiting, cleaning, anesthesia injections, stitching, and several bandage changes by us, he has been a real champ. 

Apparently, "never shed a tear" can't be said for several of his friends who saw the accident happen or even just heard about it. Andrew had a few choked up messages waiting for him on the answering machine when he finally got home.

The next day, he stayed home from school, but Michelle did take him in at the end of the day to pick up his homework. It was about the same time of day as the accident had occurred, and his class was again in gym. He went over to say "Hi" and he was immediately swarmed by all his friends wanting to see how he was doing. To hear him describe it, it sounded like a real "Hail the Conquering Hero" moment. Also, all the kids in Holly's class made him "Get Well Soon" cards. Most were very sweet, but a couple were rather morbid. One had a picture of a bleeding head, but my favorite one said "I'M SORRY YOU CRACT YOUR HEAD OPEN."

He has written up his (rather terse) version of events on his website, along with a couple of post-stitch-up photos. Go to www.acesbase.com and look for the Dec. 5th news, or click on the photo above to see what he had to say. 

For his cousin who is jealous of how photogenic Andrew has always been: This is your chance to see possibly the first "bad" photo ever taken of him. (You know who you are.)

New Game: Simon. This time Andrew helped with the programming. We wrote this game in the course of one evening. Sure it's a simple game, but programming anything is almost always more complicated than you expect it to be. This was no exception. But Andrew learned tons of stuff and understood 90% of what the program was doing. Plus it was fun working with him. Click here or on the image at the right to try to beat Andrew's record of making it to Round 25. (My 11-round performance will be easier to beat.) Sorry the sound effects are so annoying right now. We'll try to find some better ones soon.

If you would like a custom version of the applet for your own web page, let me know. If there is enough interest, I may set up a page with instructions on making your own graphics and installing the applet on your own web page.

Kids Fall Studio Photo. This is what they were practicing up for in the photos below. I don't know if my scanner has gotten worse, or if I'm just spoiled by my digital camera, but the photos I've scanned in lately just don't look as good to me as the ones we've taken ourselves. Don't get me wrong; the kids are still super-handsome and/or -cute, but the digital image quality is somewhat disappointing.

DVD Link Update. Added IMDB links to all the DVDs listed in the answer to What DVDs will best show off my great new home theater? on the Advice Page.

I added "Family" pages for Andrew and myself (basically just placeholders for now), and fixed those links in the popup menus (they previously led to nowhere). I've also fixed miscellaneous pages where the menu was being squeezed over onto the main page when viewed at lower resolutions or with smaller browser windows.

New Michelle Page. Michelle was somewhat neglected on this site, so I threw a bunch of pictures of her together and now she has her own page. Click here to see the hodgepodge of photos.

Boomsmith.com Update. Finally, I've done a little work on Boomsmith.com. Check it out.

New DVD Database. Sure, my list is still about 2 years out of date, but it has never looked so good! Mostly as a learning exercise, I have written a new PHP and MySQL -based DVD database system. Check it out here or read more about it here. [Minor update: My DVD list is now up-to-date]

Fall Photo Practice Session. Michelle dressed the kids in their "Fall 2002 Studio Photo" clothes and took some practice shots. After seeing how good a couple of these are, I'm wondering if we even need to go to the studio. Sure we need to hide the electric cords or maybe find another spot altogether, but I really like these photos! Now I just need to buy some 8x10 photo paper for the new printer. As usual, click the small images to see a larger-sized shot.

OU 35, Texas 24 !!!   'Nuff said.

Holly's New Haircut! I hated to see it go, but Holly's long luxurious hair is history. Fed up with tangles and strands falling into bowls of Fruity Pebbles, Michelle finally convinced Holly to get chopped. I personally liked her long hair and would've liked to see her keep it, but as you might have guessed she's still as cute as ever! 

I've been promising some pictures of the new haircut for a couple of weeks now, and finally, here they are! Click here to see the full gallery.

Coming soon: Holly's New Tooth. (Hopefully, someday)

New Printer. After months of procrastination, we finally picked up a new printer (our HP 712C had perished in a nasty fall).  After reading every review I could get my hands on, I had decided on the Canon S750, but after trips and calls to all the stores around town, it turned out that it was last year's model, and I couldn't find it anywhere. I did see that the new Canon models were starting to show up, and even though I hadn't read a single review on the new "i" series, I went ahead and picked up the Canon i550 Color Bubble Jet Printer. (Fry's price: $150)

It was weird throwing my research out the window like that, but I definitely don't regret it. This thing is FAST for text, and borderless 4x6 photos are indistinguishable from anything we've had developed at Eckerd's. I still need to pick up some full-size photo paper to give larger prints a try. One cool feature of the Canons is that the colored ink comes in 3 separate tanks, so if, for example, you run out of blue ink, you only have to replace the blue tank, instead of possibly throwing away a cartridge still partially filled with yellow and magenta.

Maybe it's standard these days for printer drivers, but I've found this one to be especially cool. Not only do you set all the options as to what you're printing and what type of paper you're using, but there are neat options like being able to print several miniaturized pages on one piece of paper (2, 4, 6, 9, or 16). I've saved tons of paper already. You can also do poster, banner, and booklet printing without needing any other special software. It's all built in to the driver. 

Bottom line: 5 stars. Bruce says,  "Check it out."

Updated Advice Page. New table of contents, Q&As about DVDs to show off your system, and software utilities to make your computing life better. [Not worth a new entry, but on Oct 1st, I also added a new Q&A about digital camera reviews and where to buy.]

HTPC Update and new Hardware Page. The HTPC update lists new hardware I've procured since I originally built the system and new software tools I've started using lately. The hardware page is basically a home inventory to supplement a video taped walkthrough of the house for insurance purposes. It includes a list of our computers, home theater components, and miscellaneous electronics.

Even cooler new menu. Did I say I had a cool new menu yesterday? Well forget that low-tech piece of junk. Check out the new beauty on the left of the page. The mouseovers still work for highlighting a menu selection, but now there are popup sub-menus for several of the main menu entries. Setting it up wasn't too difficult as I already had the main button graphics. I just had to decide on foreground and background colors for highlighted and non-highlighted menu selections, and define all the links for the main menu and sub-menu entries. The straight text sub-menus look reasonably good, but I may still make new images for them at some point.

The scripts that do this are freely available by clicking here.

A major site overhaul has taken place. You might not be able to tell at a glance, or even by navigating around the site. I have gotten rid of the "frames", put everything into a more sensible directory hierarchy, and now almost every page is in its own directory and is an index.html file instead of having dozens of pages in the root directory like photoPage.html and the like. I also added the main navigation menu to most all the pages. That way direct links (like www.brucearmstrong.net/htpc) also have the menu instead of appearing to be a standalone page with no navigation back to the main site.

The menu is somewhat cool in that it auto-scrolls to stay visible as you work your way down a page. I hope to make it cooler with smoother animation when I learn a bit more about DHTML programming.

Lastly, I have moved the older "Site News" entries to an archive, so the main page will load faster, and now get to the good stuff quicker by moving the little intro story to a new "About" page.

Lost photos from the Failed Float Trip. They were sitting in the directory, but for some reason, they weren't indexed on the page. The second one may be the funniest of them all. Look at Meek laughing like a nut in the background.

New Server! -- This site should be way faster now. It no longer resides on an old spare PC hooked up to my ADSL full-time. I've moved it to a proper host with a greater-than-T1 connection. Pages will now load faster, but more importantly, those high-res photos and large video files will be quicker too. To see how fast you can DL from the new server, check out this speed test applet. (I guess I should mention that if you are unfortunate enough to still be on dialup, of course you won't see a speed gain.)

Also added a "Top Picks" list at the top of the page.

Digital photography experimentation: Can a cheap camcorder's still-shot mode compete with a proper digital camera? Obviously not, but is it even acceptable? Click here to see my results.

New Stunt Video -- My sister Chris and my nephew Cameron were down for a visit and also went on a trip to the amusement parks in San Antonio with Michelle, Andrew, and Holly.  Though the boys didn't do their usual trip to the skate park, they did do some skating and other antics in the alley, some of which they caught on digital video tape. I took the liberty of editing a few clips together in the style of a certain Johnny Knoxville-hosted TV show. Grab the basic MPEG version here (10MB), or if your computer is powerful enough and you download the proper CODEC from www.divx.com, you can get a much higher quality DivX version here.

Tons of stuff on the site is terribly out of date, and a few people have asked me recently what games should they take a look at. Well, I've been doing some PC gaming (GTA3, THPS3, RTCW, JKII:JO), but most of my gaming time is now going to our new XBox! (Anyone think their logo is a rip-off of this site's color scheme?)  Click here to see our new XBOX gaming page.

The new house ain't happening. After our house hadn't sold by the date of the original contingency contract, we decided not to go for an extension on the Midlothian house. It would've been a great place to live, but with the benefit of several weeks "cooling off" time, we decided that for several reasons, it would be better to wait.

We've signed a contract on a new house in Midlothian. Click here for photos. 

Our Home Theater PC (HTPC) is up and running. Check it out.

SNOW DAY! Not really, but the kids did get to go to school 2 hours later than normal, and yesterday and this evening, got to play in the snow. That's a really rare occurrence for them here in Dallas. We built a snowman this evening with the last of the snow. I nearly broke my back lifting a couple of huge ice blocks up to put the snowman together. Check out photos here.

Northeast Oklahoma Karaoke Party! Tanya shamed me into finally getting these pictures up. Check 'em out here. If anyone wants prints of any of these, let me know.