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The contents of this web-site are Copyright © 2000-2024 Bryan Newell, unless otherwise noted.
Archived News
12/15/2023 1814 - Christmas 2023
12/14/2022 1827 - Christmas 2022
12/13/2019 2136 - Christmas 2019
12/18/2018 1933 - Christmas 2018
12/21/2015 2218 - Christmas Awakens
12/20/2014 1454 - Return of the Magi


  • These are not the three wise men you're looking for.
  • Ho Ho Ho Now We Have Blaster Rifles
    		•
    03/14/2012 1949 - Daniel's Book is Out!

    The Immortals: Kama Lotz is now available!

    It's about a forgetful immortal who investigates a series of murders, unaware that he too is being hunted...

    It's available in ePub, Kindle, paperback, or hardcover.
    06/06/2011 1015 - The Map of Dragaera, Release 2

    A new release of the Map of Dragaera is now available.
    05/22/2011 1201 - It's Kind Of Like A Time Machine
    Finally got caught up on photo albums for 2010 and 2011.
    05/02/2008 1412 - Eli Shanks Newell is Born

    It's a boy! Eli Shanks Newell was born on May 2, 2008 at 2:12 PM Eastern. He weighed in at 8 pounds even and was 21 inches long. Click on the image to the left for more photos.
    12/13/2007 1310 - It's a boy!

    Emily and Daniel went in for their ultrasound on December 13 and got the indisputable result: It's a boy! Click on the image to the left for all of the ultrasound pictures.
    07/29/2007 2142 - Eleanor's 1st (Belated) Birthday

    It took three events to fully capture the joy of Ellie's first birthday.
    06/22/2007 1711 - Gramarie and Grandpowie

    My mom (Marie, AKA Gramarie) and step-father (Howard, AKA Grandpowie) just bought a house in North Carolina, and they stopped by Daniel's house for a few days on their way back to California.
    05/20/2007 1200 - Rhys, Ruth, Jason, Abbey, Caleb and Barbara
    05/01/2007 0001 - Eleanor Marie Newell


    New photos of Eleanor available in her picture album!
    03/10/2007 1718 - New Photo Interface
    I've recently redesigned my album viewer. It still shows six thumbnails per page (generally), but now when you click on a thumbnail, instead of loading the full size image into a separate window, it instead switches your view from thumbnails to a medium (800x600) view of the image.

    In this mode, you can click on the picture to advance to the next picture in the album. There is a button at the top to switch back to thumbnail mode if you like.

    On both views, there is a link to load the full size image into a separate window. Most of my older albums were resized to 1024x768 to speed up loading times, so clicking on the Full Size link won't really do you much good, but new albums should be at the original resolution (2592x1944 with my current camera).
    07/21/2006 1722 - Eleanor Marie Newell
    Eleanor Marie NewellEleanor Marie Newell


    Name: Eleanor Marie Newell
    Known Aliases: Ellie
    DOB: 07/21/2006 at 5:22 pm
    Weight: 7 lbs, 5 oz
    Length: 21.5 in
    Favorite Color: TBA
    06/14/2006 0718 - My New House
    My Prospective New HouseAs of 7/10, this became my first house.

    My camera is on the fritz, so the photos of the house are a little... odd.
    03/10/2006 2257 - Redesign, Robot Lamp, and It's a Girl!
    Robot LampMembers now have a new section on the right side of the home page that shows bryann.net content at a glance, including Boggle, the To Do List, and MTG Decks.

    I also cleaned up the main page so that it looks good with any theme, for those who use something besides the default of Phosphorus (DeepWater still has an issue with the bryann.net logo, but all the others look good, I think). There is also a new theme, Neon (which is basically a red version of Phosphorus).

    Also, check out this cool lamp Daniel and Emily got me for my birthday.

    Last but not least, Daniel and Emily are having a girl!
    12/01/2005 1833 - My New Desk
    Daniel and Emily made this cool desk for me as an early Christmas present. You can click on the photo to see an album documenting its creation.

    Note my initials inlaid in front of the monitor, the vented cubbies (that's bryann.net to the left), the hinges that let you swing the doors all the way around, the impressively shallow drawers...

    And yes, I'm pretty sure the 10th Commandment covers desks, too.
    08/14/2005 1545 - New Boggle Stats
    I added a couple of new stats to the Boggle Stats page. On the last tab (Word Stats), it will now show you your best scoring Boggle and Scrabble words.

    I also changed it to show the top 20 instead of the top 10 in each Word Stat category.

    Last but not least, the Vocabulary stat is back. This measures how many of the total words that have appeared in all the games you've played you actually found.
    06/06/2005 1238 - Events
    I added a list of upcoming events of interest to visitors for bryann.net.

    I also reworked Daniel's Haiku News so that it "fits in" with my website better.

    Expect more aesthetic changes over the coming weeks.
    02/28/2005 0005 - Major Performance Increase
    Those of you who play Boggle, especially, should notice a major performance increase on bryann.net.

    Thanks to some tricks I learned at work, I've doubled the performance of the hard drive in most circumstances.

    .
    10/10/2004 2146 - Logic Puzzle Assistant
    I wrote a program to help solve logic problems. It can be found under the Calculator.

    You mark boxes as Os or Xs, and, based on previous relationships you've submitted, it fills in the blanks as much as possible.

    Let me know if you have any questions about it.
    09/24/2004 1118 - Browser Compatability Part 2
    The menus have been tweaked a little bit more.

    The auto resize should be working properly now for most major browsers.

    I finally fixed the cookie bug for non-IE browsers.

    If you have any browser problems on my site, let me know.
    09/16/2004 2349 - Browser Compatability and Menus
    bryann.net has a newer version of the old menu code now; it should work better in more browsers.

    Besides the menu changes, there were a variety of other minor changes to hopefully allow more browsers to work with bryann.net. Mozilla, especially, should work almost as well as IE 6 now, and IE 5.5 should work fairly well also.
    06/27/2004 2037 - Rhys and Abbey's Picture Book: Volume II
    After a six month hiatus, I have finally begun work on Volume II of the Picture Book.

    Click on the photo of Rhys and Abbey above, then click on the Volume II link to view my first handful of photos.

    Now that I've gotten the ball rolling, you should see more frequent updates to the Picture Book.

    Enjoy!
    03/15/2004 0043 - New Content
    In case you haven't noticed, I've added a Steven Brust page to my site. If you're not familiar with his novels, I highly recommend the Dragaera series, which include "Jhereg" and "The Phoenix Guards", to get you started.

    I also added a new image to Size Matters (under the photo of me walking into the Matrix) showing the relative size of the Earth as compared to Jupiter.
    02/09/2004 2029 - Spring Cleaning, a little early
    The biggest change you'll note is that I reworked the menu. I'll be adding some new content over the next few days, and I wanted to make room for it.

    I also added a little note on Browser Compatibility at the bottom of the page. I hope to make Safari 1.2 even more compatible as soon as I get access to it at work (or the next version of Konqueror becomes available for Red Hat 8.0).
    01/10/2004 1922 - New Boggle Stats Tab
    I added a new tab to the Boggle Stats page. It's called "Perfect" (look for the tab with a P), and measures how often you have played "the perfect game".

    There are four types of perfect games as of right now:

    "All Words Found" - A perfect game in this category is one in which you found all the words that were on the board.

    "No Duplicates" - A perfect game in this category is one in which you did not enter any duplicates.

    "No Not Found" - A perfect game in this category is one in which all of your words were found on the board.

    "Perfect Games" - The big enchilada - You entered exactly all of the words that were on the board, no more, no less. No duplicates, no not found. The ultimate Perfect Game.

    Enjoy
    12/28/2003 2232 - Reworked the Photos page
    I removed the direct link to Rhys and Abbey's Picturebook, and replaced it with a Photo that takes you to the Photos page (where you can find the finished Volume I).
    11/28/2003 2048 - Happy Thanksgiving
    I added a Happy Thanksgiving photo in Rhys and Abbey's Picture Book. It's the very last picture on page 3.

    I also added a new page under DVDs. It's called "Movies I've Seen In The Theatre", and that's exactly what it is. Every movie I've ever seen in the Theatre or at a Drive In. All of them!

    Last, but not least, I made a few changes to Boggle (mostly aesthetic):

    1. I added Percentages to the View Game screen, for all three Total scoring methods (Boggle, Scrabble, Words).

    2. The FIRST time you view a game, it is supposed to reload the Play page (so the game you just viewed gets removed from the Updated Played Games list). There was a problem such that if you verified a word, or refreshed the view game page, it would reload the Play page EVERY time. This is now fixed.

    3. I corrected the View Game page to have a hard-coded width of 700 pixels... previously it was trying to determine the width automatically, and not doing a very good job of it in my opinion.

    4. I increased the width of the Lookup page from 800 to 820 so the m-w.com iframe wouldn't have a horizontal scroll bar.
    10/05/2003 2240 - Assorted Boggle Improvements
    These changes have actually been in place for a few weeks now, but I just made them "official."

    I combined My Stats and Stats into a single page. The last tab (Word Stats) will give you access to the old My Stats page.

    I also made a few minor speedups. It takes around 34 seconds to generate the combined Stat page now if you've played all the games.
    08/18/2003 1749 - Boggle Improvements
    I added two new columns to the "My Stats" page: Under Unique, there are now columns for the words that have given you the most boggle points and the most scrabble points.
    08/07/2003 2347 - boggle speedups
    Just a quick note for those of you who play Boggle on bryann.net.

    I increased the speed of the Stats page by 1/3rd tonight. It was taking 45 seconds, now it's taking about 30. Not bad for having to parse almost 900 games...

    The largest portion of this increase was a speed-up in my string matching routines, so almost every page on bryann.net should speed up a little as a result of this.

    I also removed the Combined Stats page. I'm rethinking how a Combined stat would work; expect some fairly radical changes in the Stats and My Stats pages over the next week or so.

    Bryan
    07/27/2003 2303 - More improvements to bryann.net
    The biggest change in the last few days is that popup windows will no longer popup offscreen. If they do, they will automatically move back onscreen.

    I also made the Calculator a folder which contains the Wages Over Time page and a new calculator called the Mate Finder.

    This new addition uses U.S. Census information (and optionally IQ Frequencies) to estimate how many available mates match your criteria, and how many there are in the place you live.

    Other changes include:

    1. For users whose Theme is not Phosphorus, you will now get a rough shadow behind the shelf and books. This will hopefully make the shelf look better on non-black backgrounds.

    2. I added a green down arrow to the shelf that appears under all objects which are folders (sub menus).

    3. I added a Login button to the main page (in the upper right where Logout normally appears) if you are not logged in.

    4. For Boggle players: I added a Pause button while playing games that blanks the screen and turns off the timer.
    07/20/2003 0013 - bryann.net is now almost twice as fast!
    I'm using an ADSL with a max upload speed of 128kbs. This is roughtly twice as fast as a 56K modem. When I began optimizing bryann.net tonight, it was taking 15 seconds to load the main page at that speed.

    Now it's taking between 6 and 9 seconds for the initial load (depending on which program I use to test the speed), and probably around 3 seconds for any subsequent loads (due to the caching change in #2 below).

    I accomplished this in a number of ways that may or may not impact your stay here at bryann.net.

    1. I removed the links menu. It was almost half the size of the page. You can get to the links by going to Home -> Places Worth Visiting. I also validated them, and removed all non-working links.

    2. I turned on caching. This means that once you've downloaded a graphic, it will not be re-downloaded for 24 hours if you have caching enabled (probably already on) in your browser. WARNING: if I change a local javascript file, you will not get that update until either a) 24 hours goes by or b) you hit the Refresh button on your browser. If you notice any strange behaviour, please try Refreshing the page to see if that clears it up.

    3. I resized the Background image from 38K down to 10K. I also resized the Please Wait image from 16K to 5K.

    4. Only the most recent news message is listed on the main page. Archived news is now stored in Home -> Archived News. Click on the Subject line to open/close the news article.

    5. Not sure if this is speeding things up or not, but I increased the memory on bryann.net from 384meg to 512meg. I also reduced the executable+data size from 70meg to 13meg.
    07/17/2003 2328 - Basically finished
    I added The Web (the spiderman statue). It's a menu with links to the
    sub pages.

    I added Haiku News back, but it's just a link to the old page. Sometime later I will convert it to the new format.

    I added Help -> Credits that lists some of the tools I use to create and maintain this site.
    07/14/2003 2119 - The books are back!
    Sure, it's a very tall menu, but the books are back.

    All Themes use the same menu now, so if you're not using Phosphorus, your screen may look a bit strange. I may or may not make custom menus for each Theme (there are, afterall, 35 themes!).

    Only four more things to be moved from the old page to the new page and I'm done with the transition:

    1. Haiku News
    2. The Web
    3. Home -> About
    4. Home -> Credits
    07/12/2003 1858 - Almost done
    Most of the old content can now be found in the new menus. Go to home->old to see what has not been moved yet.

    I'll probably do the rest tomorrow.

    Rhys and Abbey's Picturebook can be found in the Bryan menu.

    Please let me know (phone or email) if you are having any problems with the new site, or any suggestions as to how to make it better.
    07/11/2003 2346 - More work on the menus
    I reworked the main menu as you can see.

    All protected content (i.e., pages that require a login) now have a lock graphic next to them.

    I added bryann.net usage statistics to Apps, and moved the old other.html to Links (and restructured it as well).
    07/10/2003 2148 - Old Content is Back (sort of)
    The Home menu in the upper left now has two options:

    New takes you to this page.

    Old takes you to the old page (sans the login box).

    Most likely I'll spend at least part of this weekend moving content from the old location to the new location.

    Daniel: The old files are exactly where they were before, the only difference is that I renamed index.html to oldindex.html and /cgi-bin/main is now the default starting location.
    07/09/2003 2257 - Major overhaul of bryann.net
    As you have no doubt noticed, bryann.net is undergoing a major overhaul.

    Please be patient while I get everything back up and running; none of the old content is currently available; only the Boggle and DVD pages are working.

    This page does not require a login, but as soon as you try to access any page that does, you will be prompted to login.

    At the top of the page is a menu. This menu will grow as I add more content back. I'm not sure what I'll do about the old book shelf. It may or may not return in the old form. I think the new menus are pretty spiffy myself. :)

    If you login and then leave this page without clicking the Logout button in the upper right, the next time you come back it should remember who you are. By default, it will auto-log you out at midnight. If you want to change this, please pull up your profile and change the Auto-Logout at End of Day option to No on the first page.