Bruceville

Category: Photos

  • 2003 USBA National Boomerang Expo in Houston

    Though I flipped and flopped about whether to actually attend this thing, boy am I glad we went! We had planned to merely spectate, take part in workshops, and help out wherever we could, but on the night we arrived, I ran into tournament director Tony Brazelton, and he convinced Andrew, Holly, and me to sign up for the actual competitions. Andrew, or “Ace” as he was known by the other boomerangers, is now the National Champion of the both the Novice and Junior divisions. Holly won several silver medals, and I even managed to score a few medals myself in the Intermediate division. Check back soon for a longer write-up on this super-fun event, but for now enjoy the photo galleries. You may also be interested in these articles from the local Houston papers:

  • Digital Camera Fun

    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.

  • New Photos

    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.

    Holly's First Grade School Photo (2001).jpg (96133 bytes)Andrew's Fourth Grade School Photo (2001).jpg (75010 bytes)Armstrong Kids Halloween 2001.jpg (100981 bytes)Armstrong Kids Portrait 2001.jpg (112778 bytes)

    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!

  • Requests Granted

    I’d like to thank everyone for your valuable feedback. Your Complaints/Praise/Suggestions/Problem Reports are really appreciated.

    I’ve just added a couple more photos of the kids and since someone asked for more photos of Michelle and I, I have added a page of our famous Self-Portraits. Michelle dug around in some old photos and found a bunch of pictures we took of ourselves. I hope you like them, Julie!

    Luckily, she also found some old photos of some of the early works of Digital Boomerang Systems. I scanned some in and added them to the Boomerangs page.

    I’ve added a very preliminary Holly page to the mostly-empty Family page.

    And lastly, I have added a new form on the Contact Us page where you can enter your email address if you want to be kept up-to-date on any changes made to the site. Kind of hokey, but some people are really interested.

    !!!!NEWS FLASH!!!!

    The photo everyone’s been waiting for has arrived! Well, sort of. I couldn’t find the original Bighead1.jpg that caused such a stir in 1994, but I have used my photo doctoring skills to create a pretty good likeness. Actually, there are two choices and I’m letting you, the public, vote on which one is best. Go here to check them out and vote.

  • New School Photos – 2000

    The kids’ new school photos are here!

    I have bought a new scanner so expect the Photos page to grow tons in the coming weeks

  • Photos Page

    I’ve started working on the Photos page, so you can see a few photos there now, with tons more to come later. I’ve got a lot of scanning to do. I also added a hit counter to this page, but it seems to get reset every time I make an update. I’ll look into that soon.