Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas or, if your traditions differ, a wonderful, safe, healthy and happy New Year! Here’s an amusing little video I found that should help brighten your winter day.

My photos from the recent BEST Robotics Competition Texas/New Mexico regional are now online. You can find the full set here or, if you are interested mainly in pictures of the Dripping Springs Middle School team, you can find these images here.

I’ve been neglecting this blog horribly recently! Lots has been going on both at and away from work and I’m afraid posting here just didn’t bubble high enough on the priority list to get my attention. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with a few posts over the Thanksgiving weekend but, in the meantime, here’s a little video I pulled together using some timelapse sequences I shot last weekend up in Dallas where Cameron and I were attending the BEST Robotics Competition Texas/New Mexico regional final with his school robotics team.

The kids at the Dripping Springs Middle School robotics club passed a huge milestone yesterday evening when they got their first robot up and running! This is a great start – they’ve proven they can build a basic platform, wire up the control system, write, compile and download software, configure the wireless controllers and get the whole thing to work together to make the robot move. There’s still a lot of work ahead before competing in the BEST competition but there were lots of happy kids at DSMS last night.

I came across this interview with Dean Kamen today and reckoned it was worth sharing. If you’re an engineer, scientist or mathematician, get out there and become a role model to some of today’s kids!

I love to hear about people doing wonderful things with our products so I was delighted to read about this project from German robotics designer Festo. They have produced an autonomous, robotic bird that can fly purely by flapping its wings. The bird is controlled by one of our Stellaris microcontrollers (an lm3s811 to be specific).

With an author wife whose first book is scheduled to hit the shelves in August next year, our family attends a lot of book signings and launch parties but tonight was rather different since, for the first time in ages, the boys and I attended a signing without Nikki and for a book aimed at adults.

Local screenwriter and author Ernie Cline (he wrote the screenplay for “Fanboys“. If you haven’t seen it and are even vaguely interested in Star Wars geekdom, you should) was hosting his book launch and signing event for “Ready Player One” at Book People this evening. The book, a dystopian sci-fi, is promoted as a jam-packed geekfest of 1980′s cultural references so the evening started off well when we discovered 80s era video games available for people to play while waiting. Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters were flowing or, for those who don’t like having their brains smashed out with a slice of lemon tied round a large gold brick, Tab and Pepsi (in old-style cans). The mechanical highlight of the evening, however, was definitely Ernie’s DeLorean, complete with flux capacitor, KIT-style oscillating LEDs and Ghostbusters paraphernalia. This cunning tax write-off is to be Ernie’s transport all around the country on his book tour which started yesterday in Houston and continues through Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and California. It was also open for young (and not so young) boys to sit in.

I’m looking forward to getting into the book since I have it on good authority that it’s a great read (thanks Mike).

Wow – has it really been 3 weeks since I last posted something? Sorry about that – vacation and a busy summer have left this blog further down the priority list than I would like. Hopefully, a burst of posts this weekend will make up for the recent silence!

I love Ira Glass’s radio work. If you’ve not listened to “This American Life” you are missing one of the best radio documentary series around. It’s weird, quirky, different and beautifully crafted. Check it out. Given this, I was interested to take a look at a Vimeo clip that someone posted on Facebook today. This is Ira talking about the process of being creative. His context is audio storytelling but it applies perfectly to photography too.

This blog is 8 years old today. I posted my first entry on June 10th, 2003 and have added a total of 548 more since then, averaging one post every 5 and a half days. My posting rate has gone down over the last couple of years as I’ve started concentrating more on my photoblog but this site has become a great vehicle for long-form posts and tutorials that don’t fit well with the photoblog format.

Looking back over the early posts, it’s clear that a great deal of water has passed under the bridge since I started writing. I’ve posted goodbyes to my mother and my wife’s step-father, news of the construction of our home, a job change, first days at school, trips to Guatemala, hints at my first forays into HDR and reports after teaching HDR workshops, pictures at an exhibition, news of our family vacations (and here, and here, and here) and umpteen other unrelated, though interesting or topical, snippets.

Although the focus has definitely shifted very much more towards photography over the last 3 or 4 years, I’ll try to keep the content varied moving forward. The older the blog gets, the more I am delighted I started it all those years ago since, as my memory becomes increasingly unreliably, it’s great to have this continuous stream of family history to look back through and refresh the neurons with.

After two years of very hard work, my beautiful and talented wife has some great news to announce today (though we’ve know about it for several months). I’ll let you read it yourself over on her blog.