Snakehead Boot, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

I’ve been in Texas 16 years now but, despite seeing about 3 or 4 snakes a year, have never actually come face-to-face with a rattler. Unfortunately, in the last 4 months, both of our dogs have so, when our Fox Terrier, Sugar, got bitten last night, it was time to track the critter down and try to persuade it (terminally) that hunting in our dogs’ yard was a poor decision.

Our quest began with us cutting down all the brush in the yard then looking for anything resembling a hole. A rancher acquaintance told me that the best way to flush out a den of rattlesnakes is to pour a small amount of gasoline in or near their suspected hideout. The smell, apparently, really pisses them off and they bolt out of there as fast as they can. The thought of confronting a band of pissed off, venomous snakes (especially ones that I used to have on a large poster entitled “The Worlds 7 Deadliest Creatures” on my childhood bedroom wall) didn’t appeal but it was less bad than the thought of one of the kids getting bitten so Nikki and I armed ourselves with various garden tools and the remainder of a can of 2-stroke and spent quite some time sprinkling holes and preparing to hit whatever emerged.

In the end, nothing did emerge so we’re left knowing that there is a snake out there somewhere but not knowing where. If there are any rattlesnake hunting experts out there, do leave a comment to let us know how we should go about catching (or, better, dispatching) this critter.

Oh, the photo – I didn’t have any pictures of living, venomous snakes so this is the best I could do. It’s a custom Lucchese cowboy boot made from a cobra skin. Someone obviously had better luck than we did on their snake hunt.

As a teenager, I remember having one of my great (teenage) “Aha Moments” while watching “Cosmos” and realising that a very high percentage of my, personal atoms were once spewed out of a supernova. Wow! Me – the stuff of stars! Since then I’ve had many more such moments, many somewhat more obscure or esoteric but I still love the idea of being the product (albeit rather indirectly) of stellar explosion.

My love of physics took me to university to study it (yes, I’m a physicist by training and a programmer by hobby ) and I still love marveling at the beauty of Maxwell’s Equations (not that I can derive them any more), debating the weirdnesses of Quantum Mechanics (just where is that pesky electron after it passes through one of those slits?) and trying to explain Special Relativity (though, again, the 20 years since my last lecture on the subject leaves me extremely rusty).

So why did all this come to mind today? My 10 year old was downloading some new tracks from iTunes and one of them reminded me of the backing track of a rather clever video containing 2 of my physics superheroes (Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan) that I stumbled upon a while ago. If you are in awe of your starstuff, take a look…

If you enjoy this video, you can find several others at Symphony of Science.

I just took a look at the blog traffic stats and was stunned to see that I’m receiving a huge number of visitors just now! Traffic in the last 24 hours was 20 times my daily average and 4 times higher than the previous daily maximum (which occured a week or so ago when Trey Ratcliff kindly posted a tweet pointing HDR enthusiasts at this post).

I had expected a bit of a bump after Jim Goldstein’s blog posting containing a list of his readers’ “Best of 2009” blog posts since this contained a link to my entry here. Things really took off, however, when Jim reposted the list on Digital Photography School this morning.

I guess this is a pretty pointless meta-post but, hey – it feels good to be welcoming so many visitors. If some of you hang around, I promise to start writing more interesting posts as 2010 moves on

The game for this year’s FIRST Robotics Competition, “Breakaway”, has been announced and it looks like it should be a fun one! Teams now have a frantic 6 weeks to design, build and program their machines for the competition.

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you will know that I highly approve of Dean Kamen’s FIRST organisation. This weekend sees the kick-off for the 2010 FRC competition and the start of the 6 week design and build period leading up to regional competitions in March and April. If you can make it to any of the events, I would encourage you to go along and see just how cool they are. Talking of cool, they even managed to get Neo to do a PSA spot for them this year…

Edit: A more knowledgeable colleague just pointed out that the Keanu PSA was actually prepared for last year’s competition. That answers my question about why it doesn’t contain any footage from the 2009 competition. Oh well…

A Million Points of Light, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Christmas and New Year are behind us but I thought I would take one last chance to post a Christmas image before I put them to bed for another 12 months or so.

This picture was taken at the Pedermales Electric Co-op’s head office in Johnson City, Texas a week or so ago. Johnson City does a great job with its Christmas light display (their courthouse is literally encased in strings of lights) but the PEC display is the one that really draws the crowds. The actual office complex is surrounded by Live Oak trees, each one of which is completely filled with white lights. Visitors can walk among the trees and the effect is quite mesmerising.

Supposedly there are somewhere in the region of one million lights used. By my reckoning (with a bit of help from HowStuffWorks), this display sucks somewhere in the region of 500kW of power but I guess that’s not a problem to the electric company.

I’m glad I’m not paying the bill for the power – PEC charge me around 10.4 cents per kWH. Assuming they have the lights turned on 6 hours a day for the whole of December (I’m guessing since I don’t know when the display starts and whether or not they turn the lights off late at night), this would cost just under $10,000!

With Christmas preparations in full swing, I thought you may find this little video (a Nickelodeon promo, apparently) amusing. The kids loved it. Thanks to Luigi for the pointer.

Kids on a rock, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Guatemala has been much on my mind this week after reading about the terrible drought and resulting failure of the corn crop. Texas has just experienced one of its worst droughts on record but we can be extremely thankful that, even in the midst of such a natural calamity, we don’t generally end up going without dinner.

In the rural areas of Guatemala, where many of the people are subsistence farmers, things are very different. The failure of a corn crop results in no food for the winter months and, given agricultural workers pay, there is no extra money to buy corn from elsewhere.

In an attempt to help at least a little bit, Kathi Thomas, neighbour, friend and fellow Guatemala fundraiser, is organising a benefit concert at Central Presbyterian Church in Austin on November 22nd. It will feature child performers for the first hour and the wonderful Joe McDermott for the second hour. If you have kids and live anywhere in central Texas, you likely know Joe already but, if you don’t, I can tell you that he is definitely worth hearing – he is a children’s entertainer who has the unusual gift of being enjoyed by adults too.

If you’re not in or around Austin, there are other ways to help. Look out for local charities working in Central America and see what you can do to help. A donation of time or money would no doubt be greatly appreciated. If you are at your computer, the organisation I work with is delighted to receive donations and, from personal experience, I know that the money given goes directly to projects that help the neediest people in western Guatemala.

If you would like to see a bit more of what we do, the video below was produced for Sunday Schools to explain one of the programs that our partnership promotes.

Guatemala – Life Change from Dave Wilson on Vimeo.

When I was working in digital settop box software, one of the biggest problems we used to have was ensuring that the audio and video stayed synchronised with one another. Arguably there’s nothing worse in TV playback than having the audio run slightly ahead of the video – even a 10mS audio lead is really noticeable and really messes up your viewing experience. Interestingly enough, if the audio is significantly behind the video (up to 100mS or so), you don’t worry so much since your brain is used to compensating for the delay caused by the speed of sound being so slow. I digress, however…

This morning, my 6 year old son introduced me to some videos on YouTube that give a whole new meaning to audio/video synchronisation. These animations do a superb job of synchronising the animated video content with the soundtrack. They are completely mesmerising. Take a look at this one then head over to YouTube for various others. You can buy DVDs at www.animusic.com.

I just received a rather odd message via Flickr mail. It was from an Italian photographer advertising one of his images. It was also in Italian, a language which is not my best (I barely know how to order beer in Italy let alone carry on a conversation about photography). As I usually do, I headed over to Yahoo Babelfish (or http://babelfish.altavista.com as it used to be – oddly, the “legacy URL” still works nicely) and pasted in the text. The final paragraph of the original message was:

“Flickr è la migliore applicazione per la gestione e la condivisione di foto online. Se sei curioso di sapere per che cosa lo utilizzo, guarda il mio profilo oppure naviga tra il mio album.”

…and the web site translated this as:

“Flickr is the best application for the management and the sharing of photo online. If you are curious of knowing for I use it what, watches my profile or is annoying between my egg whites.”

I do find unsolicited messages like this rather annoying (though I think this was the first example of Flickr spam I have seen) but, in this case, it ended up having great entertainment value and didn’t disturb my egg whites at all.