Site News Archives - 2003

Andrew's Wax Museum. This happened way back on May 15th, but I have finally got the newspaper article scanned in and the new web gallery software working, so here you go:

Andrew's 5th grade class (and the 6th grade class) participated in a huge project in which they wrote research papers, prepared a museum exhibit, and finally dressed and performed as a historical figure they admired. It was very impressive and it was easy to see that all the students had put tons of work into it. The kids would stand still as statues (WAX statues) until a patron walked up and touched them. At that point they would "come to life" and give a summary of their life and accomplishments, possibly with a little dramatic acting thrown in.

This was a large enough event that it was written up in the Oak Cliff Tribune. Click here or on the image at the left to see a color photo gallery of the 5th grade kids in character.

Another Whack to the Head. Michelle called me up Saturday afternoon and said in a none-too-enthusiastic voice, "I'll give you two guesses where I am." I missed my first two guesses, but when she hinted that we had just spent some time there in December, my heart sank and I knew she was at the emergency room. She said it was Holly this time, but she quickly assured me that it wasn't nearly as bad an injury this time. Her hope was that instead of stitches, the wound could be closed with glue.

It turns out Holly had been hit in the head with a putter. She was at a birthday party at a miniature golf course, and apparently one of the girls attempted a non-minigolf style tee-off, swinging her putter like a golf club. Holly got hit  pretty much in the middle of her forehead, and luckily it really wasn't as bad as Andrew's horrific wound. After triage and a several-hour wait at the emergency room, it was determined that glue could indeed be used instead of stitches. Strangely, they said to leave the bandage on until it fell off. Now I thought that a wound should be allowed to "breath" some, so leaving the bandage on seemed odd. And I don't know if that was really a contributing factor or not, but unfortunately, by the time she went back to see the doctor a few days later, the wound had become infected. That is likely to make the scarring worse than it might otherwise have been. We'll just have to wait and see.

And for all you morbidly curious folks who want to see pictures: Sorry. There's really nothing to see since there's always been a bandage on it when she's been around a camera. The original wound wasn't spectacular enough that a plastic surgeon would want it for his "memories" book like Andrew's was. You can see in the boomerang shot above exactly where and how large the injury is, but what you're really seeing is the bandage.

<Insert Child Protective Services joke here.> 

Computer-Rebuild Weekend. I finally bit the bullet and bought all the parts needed to rebuild my destroyed computer. The motherboard I got is an excellent Asus model with lots of good stuff built-in to replace various fried components. The CPU is just a bit faster than my previous one (XP 2200+ vs. XP1700+) and I ended up with another brand of video card, but with the same GeForce4 Ti 4200 chipset I had before. I bought two 256MB PC2700 DDR RAM modules. The old ones were PC2100, so there's another slight speedup. I've only bought one 80GB HD so far, but those are getting real cheap and I'll get more storage space soon. Craziest of all, is that I also bought a DVD burner! More on this as I get more experience with it. (I also need to update the hardware page with all these new parts.)

The weekend was spent not only putting my new system together, but also putting both Holly's system and the HTPC into different cases. Previously, in the futile hope that a new power supply was all I would need to get my computer back up and running, I had purchased a new case and power supply from Fry's. The case was a nice-looking bronze case (pictured here) and it had a quiet power supply, so it became the new home of the HTPC. It's not nearly as conspicuous next to the rest of the home theater equipment as the old beige case was (new photos coming soon).

After transferring the guts of the HTPC into this new case, there were still a few jobs left to do. Andrew was at a sleepover with a friend, so it was time for some father-daughter geek-out bonding. Holly was very happy to help in moving the HTPC's old, loud power supply to my PC's case. She enjoyed that screwdriver work so much that we decided it would be a good time to get rid of her junky old PC case and move her PC guts into the old HTPC case. She did all the work of removing her power supply and installing it in the new-to-her case. I had to do the motherboard transfer, but she helped install the hard drives, floppy drive, and CD-ROM. Basically, every screw in her PC, she put in herself. She did an excellent job!

Computer Disaster. There was a power outage yesterday, and the electricity came back on, my computer was destroyed.  Read way more than you want to know about it here.

Updated the Xbox page. Added a Playstation 2 page and a lengthy Grand Theft Auto: Vice City review.