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Tons of stuff on the site is terribly out of date, and a few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.
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.
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!
