w00tness

w00tness.info is a colletion of webpages for some of our hobbies and interests, past and present. Click on the tabs above or on the links to the right to navigate to each page.

QuakeCon

From 2003 through 2014, we attended QuakeCon in Dallas every year. Quakecon used to be a free convention sponsored by id Software (it is now a paid event hosted by Microsoft). It has been held annually in the Dallas, Texas area since 1996. Total attendance grew from 100 people in 1996 to over 7000 people. When we attended, the convention featured a huge LAN for open gaming, a vendor area, one of the best professional tournaments in gaming, a number of smaller competitions and events, and a great Saturday night party with free food and drinks. This page presents the collections of photos we took each year. Included in the photos are the results of the professional tournaments for each year.

FPS

From 2000 through 2010, we played the online first person shooter, Quake III Arena and were heavily involved in the Ufreeze online community. This page is a collection of mods, maps, and official patches for Quake III Arena and Quake 4. The mods include the latest version of the Ufreeze mod, the Ufreeze documentation, the maps used by the Ufreeze community, config files for setting up a Ufreeze server, and client-side scoreboards. Also included are the competition mods OSP and CPMA with additional maps for Duels and Capture the Flag. For Quake 4, there is a collection of dueling maps and the Quake 4 MAX competition mod.

Dark Sky

I have been interested in visual astronomy since I was four years old and I was fortunate to also get my wife hooked on the hobby. This page has a collection of Clear Sky Clocks for selected dark sky locations around Texas, the current solar disk as seen by the SOHO satellite, a daily aurora forecast, and some afocal photographs we took of interesting conjunctions and lunar eclipses.

Car

I fell in love with the S197-style Mustang GT when I saw the initial photos in 2004. In November 2006, I found a 2005 Windveil Blue Saleen S281-SC Mustang on eBay. As luck would have it, a local Ford dealer was selling it. My wife and I visted the dealer to inspect the car and gave it a test drive. All I could say was, "Wow!" The performance and handling of the Saleen was superior to any other Mustang I had test driven. We bought the car that night and I used it as my daily driver until I reluctantly sold it in 2023.