FREE February 2002

FAMILY Ang's Dad's chemo is going well and is almost complete. MomMom had a kidney stone removed. The process was more involved than they first thought it would be and she's recovering much slower than she'd like. Dean's Great Uncle LeBart, MomMom's last living sibling, passed away on Feb 3. He will be missed. Visit his website to learn more about him and his fascinating life. TRAVEL Dean's Mom and Grandma were planning a trip to Washington the first part of March, but due to MomMom's surgery they're going to have to delay their trip until later in the year. SITE NEWS We finally got a CPU upgrade for our PC. The old 400MHz Pentium II just wasn't cutting it anymore. The new CPU is a 1000MHz or 1GHz Pentium III. Wow! What a difference it made! Below are some benchmarks I ran before and after replacing the CPU. It's 3.5 times faster rendering a 3D landscape with Terragen and 4.5 times faster creating a AVI video clip. OLD NEW CPU speed 400MHz 1GHz CPUMark 31.0 85.9 Terragen 1hr 10min 20min AVI 2hrs 13min 29min New Site Address: http://daw.dyns.net As mentioned last month, we signed up with a free dynamic DNS service that links a name to our IP Address. So far there haven't been any problems or hiccups in the service. ARCHIVES Did you miss last month's edition? GAZETTE ARCHIVES

HEADLINES One Month Old Jackson had his one month birthday. He spent the day just lying around being waited on hand and foot. A video of some of his activities that day can be found on the video page. New Truck After finding out how much it was going to cost to fix the brakes on our car, we decided it was time to shop for a new one. It's a 98 Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer Edition. We got a pretty good deal and so far we like it a lot.

EVENTS Birthdays February 20th - Sarah Olympic Game Farm We took another trip to the Olympic Game Farm. This time we took Laura, Sarah and her boyfriend Daryl. Every one had a great time. A video of the fun we had feeding the animals can be found on the video page. HEALTH UPDATE Jackson is doing very well and is gaining weight steadily. He's around 9 pounds now. Dean underwent a barrage of medical tests earlier in the month to determine what was causing him pain in his lower right abdomen. Being used to chronic gastronomic dysfuntion in general, this was a new and troublesome experience. Having two people in the family have their appendix removed in less than a year makes one fearful of pains in odd places. After providing various samples, he was given multiple X-rays, a CaT-Scan and subjected to a colonoscopy. Remarkably, everything seemed to be ok, so they diagnosed him with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. He was given some pills but after all the horrible radioactive things he was pumped full of during testing, his insides have been quiet. Another plus is that we no longer need a night-light because he glows in the dark.