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.

One of the wonderful things about living in a rural area, and one thing that I missed when living in the city, is great community spirit. Our local town, Dripping Springs, celebrated its annual Founders’ Day this weekend and you won’t find a better example of community spirit than this event. The fun starts on Friday evening with a parade in which half the town kids ride on floats sponsored by local businesses and organisation, and the other half catch the mountain of candy that is thrown from those floats. The carnival is in town and the parade route goes right through the middle of it, adding to the fun. On Saturday and Sunday, the center of the town is filled with booths set up by local artists, craftspeople and businesses and 100s (literally) of barbecue aficionados – teams from all over the state – determined to win an award for best fajitas, brisket, chicken or a host of other smoked staples. All of this is, obviously, a lot of fun and I’m sure the booth vendors do well at the event but the thing that really sets this apart from the many, many city art shows I’ve attended is the fact that everyone is so incredibly sociable and talkative.

Being a “home town” event, I recognise a fair number of friends and neighbours there but, regardless of whether I’ve met anyone before, everyone is sociable and most are keen on conversation as much as selling their wares or winning the barbecue competition. The atmosphere is wonderful.

As I headed to the car after my first experience of a Founders’ Day 5 years ago, I remember hearing something over the public address that said a great deal about the event. It’s odd but those three words said more about the event than I could manage in this whole post. They were “9th Place Brisket.”

You can see more of my favourite images from the event over on SmugMug.

I’ve just uploaded my photos from the FIRST Robotics Competition New York City Regional. You can find them on SmugMug here. The images are set up for at-cost printing and 1 cent downloads (since SmugMug requires me to set some price before enabling the service). These are free for personal use and for activities promoting FIRST (school newspapers, posters, team publicity, TV, etc). No commercial use is permitted.

If you’re wondering what it’s like to live in the US while having a distinctly different accent, you may like this little video.

Both my kids are great fans of KISS-FM so we spend a fair bit of time in the car listening to current pop. For the first time in about 20 years, I’m actually in a position to know what’s in the charts! Cameron is also a lover of parodies (Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy” has become the anthem for the men in our house) so when he showed me this one, I just had to share it. I suspect this will have to be shown to the Cub Scouts next time we have a meeting.

I don’t often use this blog to rant but I hope you’ll forgive me this post. I’ll get back to the usual fare tomorrow but, today, I wanted to highlight an unpleasant consumer experience that came to a head this evening.

Our home is in a pretty remote area and we use liquid propane for many of our appliances. This is fed from a 500 gallon tank in our back yard that gets filled every so often as required. For the last 6 years, we’ve been using national supplier Ferrellgas with whom I had a “keep full” contract which meant they were supposed to monitor our usage and deliver at appropriate intervals to ensure that we never ran empty.

My relationship with Ferrellgas has not always been rosy. When we initially set up our account, they offered good prices and the salesman made various promises to me including the fact that they would file paperwork for our $800 state propane rebate and that all billing would be handled automatically via a credit card. As it turns out, neither of these proved to be true (or, at least, the rebate that I filled in paperwork for and passed to Ferrellgas never appeared and, by the time I complained, the salesman had left the company and no-one had any record of the forms).

Although this and a couple of late deliveries were annoying, they could be put down to mistakes or a single dishonest employee. The latest debacle, however, has left me with severe doubts about the ethics of the company as a whole and has caused me to cancel my account.

A couple of weeks ago, we woke up on the coldest day of the year so far to discover that we had no propane – no hot water, no ability to cook, a dryer full of wet laundry. I phoned the emergency line and Ferrellgas promised to send a delivery that day. The tanker arrived and pumped 400 gallons then left a delivery slip indicating a price of $3.439 per gallon which was very much higher than any price I had seen in the last 6 years.

I tweeted my discontent running out of fuel despite the fact that our usage was essentially flat over the whole time we had been in the house and shortly thereafter I was contacted by Jim Saladin, the Director of Corporate Communications who offered to look into the problem and see what he could do. I also emailed him a list of my experiences with the company which he passed on to the local Austin office. During this exchange I asked about the price charged. I had checked the Department of Energy’s Residential Propane price table and found that the national average for the week I received my delivery was $2.55 a gallon and another local supplier, AmeriGas, was charging $2.37 on that day. Surely, therefore, $3.439 was a transcription error and the price should have been $2.439? Jim was unable to answer this question but indicated that someone would call to discuss the issue.

The following morning, I received a call from Casey (I think) in the Austin office. He apologised for my experience but, when asked what price was supposed to be charged that day, he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. He promised to call back with clarification. Although this call never materialised, I received my bill today and have been charged the $3.439 rate – 35% above the national average and 45% above the rate offered by a local competitor. I have no idea how Ferrellgas can justify such a huge difference between their price and that charged elsewhere.

On their site, Ferrellgas promise “guaranteed lowest price for tank owners” and that “Ferrellgas takes responsibility for estimating your propane usage based on our advanced computer modeling and schedules a delivery when our system indicates you need a fill. You’ll never have to call us to schedule your service” which leaves me with the distinct impression that I’ve been the victim of some kind of bait-and-switch scheme.

Customers are a valuable asset, all the more so in this economic climate, but it appears Ferrellgas is content to abuse long term relationships and is happy to give customers to their competitors. My account is now cancelled and I will be on the phone to AmeriGas tomorrow to set up a new account with a company who, I hope, shows greater interest in keeping their promises and less inclination to charge exorbitant prices for a commodity product.

Some days, the frailty of life and the general uncertainty of existence gets beaten into you with a large baseball bat. Today was one of those days.

After work, I received a call from Nikki who told me that Alex Wallace, my friend and fellow tenor in the Central Presbyterian Church choir, had been killed in a traffic accident this morning on his way to work. He was 42 years old.

In any tight-knit group, like the CPC choir, there are always people who stand out as the “glue” of the organisation. People who everyone gets on with. People who go out of their way to make newcomers feel welcome. CPC choir had a lot of people like this (which is one of the reasons it’s such a special group and one of the reasons I miss it so much after our church move earlier this year) but, of them all, I’m sure I would not be contradicted if I was to suggest that Alex was the best. Aside from being a great singer, his humour caused uproar during rehearsals and his ability to reach out and make everyone feel so welcome and so part of the group was legendary. Even after we left CPC, his friendship and outreach continued via emails and some of the nicest, most complimentary Facebook posts you will find anywhere. He’ll be sorely missed by a huge number of people.

My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends in Austin and his home town of Kerrville, Texas.

Update 10/25/10:

Alex’s memorial service will be tomorrow (October 26th) at 2pm in First Presbyterian Church, Kerville, Texas. I’ll be there singing with the CPC choir again (though I wish this was under different circumstances).

Saturday and Sunday were the 2nd and 3rd highest traffic days this blog has had in the 7 years it has been around. The only higher traffic day was when a post got linked to an internationally-reknowned photography site at the beginning of this year. I think this gives some indication of how popular Alex was – about 500 people have read this post alone since Friday night.

Today marks the end of an era for me. Despite the fact that I’ve been out of the PC video business for almost 15 years (and out of the video business completely for 3 years), I was still managing a rather popular site documenting PC video codecs. The site, www.fourcc.org was set up after a heated discussion with Microsoft who, at the time, required people to register their video codecs with them but then didn’t actually make registration information available so, if you had a new pixel format to support, you had no idea if there was an existing registration for it or not. The site aimed to cure this problem by providing a place where people could register their codec and pixel format identifiers (Four Character Codes – fourccs) but which would also document what those fourccs actually meant so that developers could reuse them as required.

The site took off rather quickly and today is getting somewhere around 22,000 hits (or 3500 page views) each day. I, however, have been neglecting it horribly for a few years so recently decided to sell it so someone still in the business who has a track record of doing good things with similar sites.

All the best, Bjarne – I hope the site is as good to you as it has been to me over the last decade and a bit.

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