Back in April I posted photos of my 1997 vacation to Kenya, Africa. True to the spirit of this website serving as a library for family media, I’ve downloaded our old VHS footage and put it online for everyone to enjoy. The original VHS is a long 80 minutes of driving through the African bush and coming across just about every animal you can imagine. For the sake of boredom I’ve edited the video down to 15 minutes of highlights. The video can be found in our Videos – Vacations section. Enjoy.

I have recently written two articles in response to common problems with the average home PC. The first article is called Windows PC Tune-Up Guide and discusses nine steps that can be taken to drastically improve Windows performance. With the onslaught of modern day spyware/adware/junkware and viruses, many PCs are plagued and bogged down with infectious software unbeknownst to the user. If you’re looking to clean up your PC and rid yourself of such things, the tune-up guide is a great place to start.

The second article entitled Free Equivalents of Commercial Software discusses the vast library of free software available online whose usefulness and functionality rivals that of the major commercial software. Included is a sample list of common commercial software, and its freeware equivalent.

My younger brother Adam recently finished his three week term in the Missionary Training Center. He arrived this week to his mission: The Utah Salt Lake City Mission. I’m hoping that Adam will send lots of photos and letters for us to share here, much like we do with Makana.

Speaking of Makana and missions. We recently received a DVD of Makana doing a role play during Zone Conference, which I’ve posted in her albums. Enjoy.

We also have two new albums under Tia & Matt Farley. The first is our most recent Mike Farley Family Portraits — taken just before the departure of Adam on his mission.

The second is a whopping 190 photos of the first official Farley Family Reunion since 1991. The reunion was held at a beautiful resort called Asilomar, on the coast near Monterey. If you would like high resolution copies of any of the photos in this album, contact Grandpa or myself, and we’ll be happy to provide.

Lastly, I’ve been doing a lot of programming at work with the new Google Maps API. On the API newsgroups I came across something that looked interesting enough to implement on farleyfamily.net. This page shows a graphical representation of cities/countries from which farleyfamily.net viewers browse to this site. The script identifies users by their IP address and uses the database at www.hostip.info to match user IPs with geographical locations. The end result is an interactive Google Map plotting each city from which a user has browsed our site. Check it out: FarleyFamily.Net Visitor Map (give it a moment to load). Be sure to check out the interactivity: click the plots, drag the map, zoom in/out, etc.