But, for now, an unedited 2.5-hour gift-opening experience this morning compressed into under 2 minutes. If the video below doesn’t show up, you can view it on YouTube here.

Merry Christmas!

• Egg cartons (Carson eats 4 eggs a day for breakfast these days…followed by a couple of waffles; these were easy containers to come by!)
• Sawdust (courtesy of the collection bag on my dust collector)
• Old used/warped candles (courtesy of my parents)
• Dried moose poop (also courtesy of my parents…who stopped on the side of a road in Alaska and collected a large bag once they were told that moose scat was an excellent firestarter)

Growing up, I made firestarters with these same basic ingredients sans the moose poop (not a whole lot of moose wandering around Sour Lake, Texas), but, let’s be honest, dried excrement makes any project more exotic!

We mashed up the poop:

We melted the candles (the initial attempt to line the pan with aluminum foil was not successful, but the pot cleaned up fine with a couple of rounds of boiling soapy water):

We filled the egg cartons with a mix of moose poop and sawdust and then poured in the melted wax:

After cooling for an hour or so, we cut up the cartons and had 3 dozen firestarters!

We used one to start a fire in our firepan in the driveway that evening, and it worked like a charm! We should be set for the winter.

A heavily HDR-enhanced photo down a row of above-ground tombs in Lafayette Cemetery:

A sculpture behind Cafe du Monde:

A house sparrow behind Cafe du Monde:

And…this just made me laugh. It’s a sign on the gate to the police station in the French Quarter. You might be a tourist area if the police department not only sells T-shirts, but advertises that fact:

Julie’s project was more ambitious, as she’d signed up to make a very lonnnnng cushion for the built-ins/window seat I built back in late 2008 (if you clicked over to look, I have long since built and installed the drawers). To sew the cushion required finding the foam, selecting a fabric, ordering a lonnnnnggg zipper, and getting up the gumption to dive in. I’m still a little baffled how she pulls off the sewing projects she undertakes. Alas! She was close to finishing and then hit a technical snag that requires a special machine to work around, so that project has stalled.

And, thus, the boring bookshelves (adjustable) have to drive this entire post (zzzzzzzz…):

I’m getting better at building shelves than I’d like to be, but three kids and a penchant for clutter collection has necessitated the skill. If I had half the skill at staining, I’d be set.

I couldn’t resist seeing if I could get decent pictures at night…

…and as the sun came up:

Not bad, although I decided to hop in the shower while waiting for the sun to come up…and missed the actual sunrise!

It was chilly, but we spent a little time on the upper observation deck for the falls:

Carson picked up a new pair of sunglasses and was perfectly happy to bundle up to stay warm — shown here as we waited for the shuttle to take us down to the falls:

And, always good to ham it up, Carson snagged my hat at the hotel and struck a pose:

On Friday morning, I was up earliest, and Julie then woke up. I was sitting in a chair reading a book, and Julie was lying in bed reading as well. Alana woke up, looked at me, looked at Julie, then reached over to the nightstand and grabbed her book:

Possibly my favorite picture of the whole week. The mist coming up from the falls coats all of the trees, light posts, balustrades, etc. with ice. While waiting for the shuttle bus, I had the kids step inside one of the trees — cute shot, if I do say so myself!

• 3 nights — San Francisco for a conference for work
• 2 nights — Palo Alto at my companies office there
• 3 nights — back in San Francisco with Julie (for fun)
• 1 night — Wadsworth, OH (picking up the kids)
• 2 nights — Ellicottville, NY (skiing)
• 1 night — Niagara Falls, Canada

And, Benton and I are heading out for a long weekend in Austin this coming weekend to catch some Longhorn baseball.

The first week was all work. If, for some odd reason, you’re interested in the work stuff, you can read my summary of the conference over on my other blog.

Julie’s and my stay in San Francisco was a lot of walking around, a good deal of shopping, and a lot of cheese-and-wine interludes. The first full day we were in town, it drizzled constantly, so I only took our little camera out and about with us. The second day, the forecast was for rain all day…and it was sunny all day. So, again, I just took our little camera.

Walking around on the first day, we snapped a few drizzly pictures of the two of us, including this one with Alcatraz in the background:

The shopping included a quest for a jester hat, which resulted in no jester hat, but both Julie and I bought hats. As Julie noted, this will probably be the only time she wears this hat while also wearing a fleece pullover! (My new hat shows up later in this post…)

A Tim-Julie Travel Tradition…

When we’re traveling, and we find bronze statues, we take pictures of Julie with them. A picture from 2003 in Poland and a picture from 2008 in Canada are available here. In San Francisco, opportunities abounded!

Alcatraz

On Sunday, we took a trip out to Alcatraz, which was pretty interesting. We did the self-guided audio tour. Julie took this picture of me (new hat!) just outside the warden’s office with San Francisco in the background:

Looking over the ruins from some of the buildings when Alcatraz was a military prison (before it’s 29-year run as a federal penitentiary):

Looking back up at the cellblock:

Overlooking one of the lower buildings (with a rather flooded flat roof):

Union Square

We stayed at a hotel just off of Union Square. On Monday morning, we wandered around a bit, and I had the good camera with me, so I took this shot looking into Union Square (well, three shots, actually, as I combined them after the fact using some HDR software).

It was an incredibly fun and relaxing trip! From there, we headed back to Ohio to pick up the kids for spring break. Pictures from that tomorrow!

On the day after Christmas, none of our kids were interested in a zoo run, nor was our company, so Julie and I headed out alone! It was cold and breezy, so there were only a handful of visitors (90% of my trips to the zoo occur in moderately inclement weather — it keeps the people away!).

We checked out the polar bears:

And we swung by the brown bears, which were zonked out in their cave, right up against the observation glass. Large. Animals!

It was a fun little outing!

HDR is a technique where you take multiple pictures at different exposures and then combine those pictures to pick up the “best” exposure for each area of the photo. In the world of digital photography, many cameras make it very easy to take the different exposures, and software can be used to do the combining of them.

I got some HDR software for Christmas (Photomatix) from my parents, and I did some really quick experimentation with it by wandering down to Smuirfield — our friendly, neighborhood night golf club. We’ve got plenty of snow, so finding high-contrast shots wasn’t very difficult!

Below are three original pictures — the first one slightly underexposed, the second one at “normal” exposure, and the last one slightly overexposed.

And, then, we’ve got the HDR-combined one — note how the sky, the snow in the foreground, and the trees are all fairly well exposed:

That’s the straight-up application. For fun, I also combined three other shots with a more extreme form of the processing, which gives more of an other-worldly look, but is kinda’ neat.

I’ve got quite a bit to learn with this, but it’s fun to see the results of some initial experimentation.

“Why has all been quiet on the Wilsons’ blog?” you’ve been asking yourself. “Every morning, I jump out of bed and race over to check for another update…and it’s been nothing for almost two weeks!”

We hit something of a perfect storm. For starters, I was out of town Monday-Wednesday for two weeks in a row for work (Cincinnati and then Washington, D.C.). That loaded me up with a handy backlog of work, both in the office and at home.

Then, just as I got back, Benton and a friend spent last Friday evening Googling for ways to jailbreak an iPhone. On Saturday morning, I found that our home laptop had lost all access to its USB ports, was no longer able to connect to our wireless network, AND no longer could connect to our network via hardwire. Suspiciously, the mouse from our desktop computer was sitting next to the laptop (a different room in the house).

Me: “Benton, what were you doing on the computer last night?”

Benton: “[Neighborhood-friend-whose-name-shall-remain-blank-but-we're-going-to-see-John-Prine-this-weekend-with-his-parents-you-know-who-you-are-thank-you-very-much] and I were searching for how to jailbreak an iPhone. It’s weird. None of the USB ports work any more, and we can’t connect to the internet.”

<pause for momentary paternal pride in his diagnosis of the issue>

Me: “As you guys were clicking around, did you have any dialog boxes pop up asking for permission to execute anything, by any chance?”

Benton: “Ummmm… Maybe.” [translation: "Yes"]

Me: “Do you think sites that have information on jailbreaking iPhones might also tend to be sites that have malware on them?”

<silence>

Okay, so our laptop was pretty much toast OS-wise. I have an external hard drive I occasionally back everything up to, but I hadn’t done that in a few months.

The reason I hadn’t backed up to that drive, though, was because I signed up for Carbonite a few months ago. (Spoiler alert: this story has a happy ending.)

Carbonite is a pretty simple tool — it backs your files up to “the cloud” automatically (automagically, really) on an on-going basis. It’s imminently reasonably priced: $55/year (and, if you use the offer code “SLATE”, you get 3 months free when you sign up, lowering the effective monthly cost for the first 15 months to $3.67/month).

I sent Julie off to find the system recovery DVDs for the laptop (it’s over two years old), took a deep breath, and totally wiped the machine and restored it to it’s out-of-the-box configuration. I then got to watch it cycle through 120 Windows updates to bring it into October 2010 software-wise, and then reinstalled MS Office, Picasa, and iTunes (I haven’t tracked down Quicken yet, but we have the data file safely backed up). But, everything worked! It took ~4 days for the data files to then get restored from Carbonite, and I’m almost back in business!

So far, the only thing I’ve identified that we lost were the Picasa .ini files (and I’ve now made the necessary configuration changes so that won’t happen again). That means I’ve got a few months of occasional face recognition re-work to do, but that’s really just metadata for the pictures that I can replace.

Benton felt pretty bad about the whole situation, but I assured him that he and his brother had downloaded and installed so much junk over the past few years that the machine was starting to get flaky, anyway. The fact that the hard drive has ~50 GB more space on it now than it did before it crashed is an indication of just how much such junk had been added! I did go ahead and set up various passwords and parental controls to make it a little harder for reckless installations to happen.

All that is to say that, in the midst of a very busy week work-wise, I’ve spent what spare time I’ve had monitoring the recovery of the laptop. It’s almost back, and I hope to get some updated pictures posted soon!