Stuff about Andrew
We all know about Andrew’s straight A’s, his athletic accomplishments, and the fact that he’s an all-around great bunch of guys, but it is nice to see him officially recognized too.
Andrew was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society in October, 2005. There is a gallery available here.
Holly’s starting 5th grade and Andrew’s in 8th. Holly still has to leave before the sun even comes up, and Andrew gets to wait until about an hour later. Though the kids are now used to their new school, the first day is still exciting.
What a busy weekend! Andrew, Cameron, Derek, and I built a fairly sizable skate ramp over the weekend. We’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and since my Mom was visiting, we were able to use her truck to get all the lumber we needed. This was quite a learning experience and took longer than it should have, but with this job under our belt, the next project will go much faster.
After suffering a work stoppage because of a dead battery in our power driver/drill, we finally finished the ramp late in the evening. To our horror, it started to rain right as the last screw was tightened. That didn’t stop the boys from taking some wet, slick rides. They went back out late that night after it had dried up a bit, but the real breaking-in was the next morning when it was sunny again.
They got brave enough to do some proper “drop-ins” from the 3-foot-high top. This project was tons of work, but it should get tons of use and end up being well worth the effort. Click the image to see a gallery of photos.
Our ramp is a slightly modified version of the plans found here: http://www.slapmagazine.com/new_site/woodshop/quarter/index.shtml
Andrew is running track this year, and it turns out he is best at running distance. He has become one of the best milers in the 7th grade at MMS, and the mile was the race he ran in his first track meet. There were 8 schools competing and with events taking place for 7th grade girls, 7th grade boys, 8th grade girls, and 8th grade boys, the meet went well into the night. Andrew’s mile run was the next to the last event, not starting until around 10pm. Since he’d been standing around and goofing off since the meet’s start at around 3pm, he had had quite a wait. After some instructions from the judges, about nineteen 7th grade boys stepped up to the starting line. Andrew says he had butterflies the size of Thanksgiving turkeys in his stomach, but that didn’t last long once the starter’s gun went off. We think he did pretty well for his first race. He came in right in the middle of the pack, but expects to improve rapidly in coming races.
 Getting instructions before the race. (Andrew is on the far left) |
 Lined up at the starting line and waiting for the gun. |
 Andrew streaks past during his third lap. |
(Unfortunately, my camera battery went dead, so I didn’t get photos of the end of the race.)
After over a year of stagnation, Holly has finally updated HollysNotebook.com. Andrew has also done some work on AcesBase.com recently. Check ’em out.
All the kids in Andrew’s school (K-6) were tasked with writing poems for the “DBU Lab School Book of Poetry”. One the styles that they had a choice of using was a “Name Poem”, where you take something you’re interested in, and write a poem using the first letters of that word to begin each line of the poem. There were name poems on “BASEBALL”, “CHEERLEADER”, “SOCCER” and the like, but check out my young son’s entry:
The ball is flying
Really, really fast!!!
A raging battle goes on
Comes down to this…
Blasting the ball
And making it curve.
Life saving shots,
Look at the ball, and how it swerves.
Anyone who has never played the Sport of the 21st Century, or at least seen “Tron”, would probably consider it nonsensical at best, but reading this was one of my proudest moments as a father!
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!
I finally have a releasable version of my Warhol Art Maker program. It is available for download, so you can now easily make your own works of art. Click here to go to that page.
Perhaps bigger news than that is that Andrew has worked on his pages a bit. He started them weeks ago, but he’s only now ready for people to take a look. Who am I kidding? Of course that’s bigger news. I think it deserves a headline:
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ANDREW’S PAGES ARE |
Click here to check them out.
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.
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.
