After devoting a huge amount of 2010 to getting Dallas Makerspace off the ground, I took most of 2011 off from hackerspace managing. I attended meetings and helped out now and then but most of my time and interest went elsewhere.

In late January 2011, I joined a team of Camerpedia editors in saving the website from being assimilated by Wikia. We relaunched it under the new name Camera-Wiki.org. I developed quite an interest in Vivitar history and have been collecting many of the oldest Vivitar lenses; not just to document on Camera-Wiki but also to shoot with. Camera-wiki.org has been a huge success and has attracted lots of new editors. It’s growing at a faster rate than it ever did in it’s previous incarnation and we’re working hard to improve the quality as well as the quantity of the content. Hosting is paid for entirely through donation, so if you appreciate old cameras and lenses, why not help us out by donating a few dollars to our hosting fund!

I’ve continued to pursue photography in other ways. I did several more shoots with models in 2011. I did several paid shoots including a gig as the official photographer for the 2011 Vex World Championships. My photo essays continue to be published in Robot Magazine and Servo Magazine. One of my photographs was displayed in a local art exhibit, meeting another of my goals for the 2011. I hope to be in more exhibits during 2012.

Susan and I attended lots of art exhibits, music performances, and a few lectures. I managed to get to several Pecha Kucha and Spark Club events. Much more of the same for the 2012 I hope!

If you’re not an Advogato or robots.net user, you won’t really care but I finally managed to get the long-awaited libxml2 parser into the mod_virgule code base. It’s still a bit buggy but no more so than the old parser and it provides a good path forward for consolidating and simplifying the code. Whether mod_virgule can remain relevant in the world of Facebook and Google+ is another question. Perhaps 2012 will provide the answer to that one.

2011 was the year I finally created some ornaments for the annual Blue Yule charity auction at the MAC. I also volunteered at the 2011 Art Conspiracy Auction. That took care of two more 2011 goals. I hope to find a few more outlets for my artistic and creative sides in 2012.

As usual, there were goals I didn’t meet in 2011. I didn’t finish the project of scanning all my family photos. This has turned out to be much more material than I’d anticipated. I’ve scanned thousands of old photographs and negatives so far. Hopefully 2012 will see the scanning portion of the project completed.

2012 is an election year but with Obama running for his second term that means there is only going to be a Republican primary this year. I consider myself an independent but still feel compelled to vote in the primaries, which means this year I’ll be voting in the Republican primary regardless of how I vote in the final election.

At present I’m leaning toward Ron Paul for the primary vote. I don’t really like any of the choices but Ron Paul seems the least insane of the bunch and I think may be the only one of them who holds any positions at all that I actually agree with.

So for the next four years, the State of Texas will consider me a Republican despite my claim to be an independent. I’m pondering whether I should start going to my local Republican group meetings and see if I can do anything to reform them or shift them a bit toward the center or at least slow their movement toward the right-wing fringes. Unfortunately, I don’t think reason mixes well with the far right (or the far left for that matter). I’ll report on my experiences if anything interesting happens.

I created a robots.net twitter feed and robots.net facebook page for robots.net this month. So far the facebook page is ahead with over 160 fans while the twitter feed only has about 38 followers so far. To be fair the facebook page went online a couple of weeks earlier so we’ll see if it hangs on to the lead over time.

I’m still struggling to find time to devote to mod_virgule but squeezed in a few more hours of C coding on the new HTML parser. It’s now running on a test server with a subset of Advogato’s database. So far, so good. Blog aggregation and parsing seems to be working, as do local blog posting, article posting, and article comments. The magnitude of the changes makes this update a bit of scarier than usual for robots.net and Advogato. If nothing breaks in the next week or so of testing, though, I’ll cross my fingers and make it live.

I continue to drag my Canon 40D around with me everywhere and since my last blog post, I’ve shot photos of the Funky Finds Spring Fling craft show in Ft. Worth, the Aveda Walk for Water event in Dallas, the aforementioned VEX Robotics World Championship, the Cottonwood Arts Festival in Richardson, the 2009 DFW Dragon Boat Festival in Las Colinas, oh, and a few pics of my friends at Vivanti Group in Deep Ellum. In the retro-photo department, I posted some BW 127 photos shot with a Kodak Brownie Reflex Synchro. Yesterday, a package arrived containing that rarest of things, color 127 film, from a small manufacturer in Canada. I’ll probably run a roll through the Bencini Comet S sometime soon.

We did pretty well. There was a good-sized crowd of people at our booth throughout the faire, handling our robots and playing with the robot arm. Our table won an editor’s choice award from Make magazine. And we’re already talking about how we can do something bigger and more interactive next year.

All the usual crazy stuff was there too; cyclecide with their human powered carnival rides, including one they didn’t have last year called the Melody Maker, in which the rider propels spinning guitars to make music. The Austin Bike Zoo brought a 50 foot human powered rattlesnake that could be seen slithering in and out of the show barn and surrounding areas during the faire.

The Austin Robot Group had the giant ponginator robot, which is probably the biggest, loudest robot to be found in the State of Texas. They had about a dozen tables of smaller projects too. There were also fire-spewing machines, strange vehicles, medieval siege weapons, the Swap-O-Rama, DIY metal forging, liquid nitrogen ice cream, wind generators, linux clusters, pretty girls, (with mohawks), pirates, (and a pirate ship), tesla coil music, and a nice sunset on Saturday night.

The first challenge I’m facing is figuring out how one goes about finding these so-called found objects that artists are always talking about. In my case, I’m particularly interested in steel objects. Susan and I have been going to estate sales on the weekends and I’ve visited numerous thrift shops around town. It seems like the best source would be something like a wrecking yard. There are plenty of them around but very little info about them online. Apparently not all of them let you wander around with tools pulling interesting parts you find. Maybe there are some in the smaller towns surround the Dallas area. I’m surprise there aren’t any web sites that review wrecking yards (at least that I’ve found yet).

We also went to the Dallas House of Blues for the first time to hear They Might be Giants and Oppenheimer play. I’d previously been to the Las Vegas HoB and spent a lot of time in the Foundation Room there hanging out with bizarre local characters. We weren’t lucky enough to know anyone with Foundation Room access here but still had a good time. It’s an interesting place and a pretty good mid-sized music venue. We got the cheap tickets for the standing-only area near the stage but it turned out there are a couple of bars near the back and we managed to snag some bar stools there. It was further away from the stage but the view wasn’t too bad. As is frequently the case, the audio was mixed so that the instruments were 10 times louder than the vocals so you couldn’t make out any words. For some bands that’s not a problem but TMbG’s music is largely about the humor of the lyrics so it was a bit disappointing.

Last weekend, I went to All-Con 2008. The Dallas Personal Robotics Group was invited to display and do some demos so I went along to take photos. This was the first science fiction convention I’ve been to in many years and it was a lot of fun. There were all sorts of robots to be seen. Aaron Douglas (Chief Tyrol of Battlestar Galactica) was one of the guests, and I suppose we can count his character as a robot too. There was a fun demo by the Assassination City roller derby girls, a local group that does flat-track roller derby. I was also surprised to see the Lollie Bombs there. The Lollie Bombs are a Deep Ellum burlesque troop and this was the first time I’d seen them. Also a lot of fun. I met lots of other interesting people and posted a flickr set of All-Con photos. I stayed out way too late and ended up coming down with a cold the following week, probably from some alien bug I caught at All-Con.

The first day of class was spent on the use of a fuelgas welding rig to cut and make holes in metal. Practical lesson #1: sparks fly everywhere and, while they’re harmless if they hit your skin, they have deleterious effects on some types of clothing, like those cheap hoodies you find at Sam’s Club that are covered with a thin later of fuzzy stuff. The sparks create mysterious little craters in the fuzz. Practical lesson #2: if you’re wearing non-leather shoes, watch out for blobs of molten metal falling on your feet.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Pretty bad but better than Spider Man 3. The best actor by far was the Silver Surfer, generated by computer and voiced by Laurence Fishburne. In a bizarre casting anomaly, Jessica Alba was cast as Sue Storm. She was both unconvincing in the role and unattractive as a blonde. Might be worthwhile to see if you’re a comic book fan but wait for it to turn up on TV (shouldn’t take long).

Live Free or Die Hard. Best Die Hard movie since the first one. Much better than the third one. Also, the co-star is Justin Long aka the Hi, I’m a Mac guy. I was surprised the Hi, I’m Windows guy didn’t get a cameo somewhere in the movie. Speaking of cameos, Kevin Smith turned up as a “hacker” (in the Hollywood sense). Like most movies, the computer-related aspects of the movie were pretty silly but not as bad as many movies. Oh yeah, Tim Russ (Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager) has a brief cameo too. There was a lot of violence but it was much less graphic than previous Die Hard movies. Probably worth seeing at the theater. At least you won’t be looking at your watch during this one.

Transformers. About like you’d expect. On the upside it’s slightly better than most of the comic book movies like Spider Man and Fantastic Four. It was reasonably entertaining. On the downside, parts of it were like watching a string of toy commercials interspersed with car commercials. It’s riddled with plot holes, bad directing, confusing editing, inconsistent pacing, and hokey writing.

The action sequences in Transformers are mostly incomprehensible because all you can see are close-ups of flashing metal flying by at high speed while the camera shakes uncontrollably. Presumably they thought this style added realism or minimized the need for high quality CG. Imagine the fight sequences from The Matrix if all you could see were close-up blurred shots of arms and legs with no indication of what was happening, who was winning, or even who was fighting who. Pretty soon, you just lose interest because you have no idea what’s going on.

The special effects guys also seemed to misunderstand the whole point of shape-shifting robots. Rather than robots that were able to disguise themselves externally as Earth vehicles, they rendered the transformers as alien robots constructed from old car parts. So, Optimus Prime in robot form looks like a welded together kinetic art piece made from hubcaps, drive shafts, and chrome wheel rims. Many of the fight scenes between the robots look pretty much like a tornado in a junk yard with random car parts flying all over the place.

Despite all the above complaints, Transformers is intended to sell toys to a 10 year old audience and probably does a pretty good job of it. Besides, it’s a movie full of giant space robots, so have some fun and go see it already!

The Quiet Earth. Okay, this actually came out in 1985. I saw it at the theater back then. It’s a very low budget movie from New Zealand. I was thinking about it a while back and after much searching I managed to rediscover the title and track down a DVD. I’ve been meaning to mention it and what better time than now. The story concerns a man who wakes up one morning to find he’s apparently the last living human on Earth. Nearly everyone else has vanished completely and those who haven’t are dead. He eventually meets two other people and together they discover what happened to the rest of the world, why they survived, and that they have to stop it from happening again or they’ll vanish too. There are no super heroes, computer generated special effects, giant robots, or evil alien entities. It doesn’t move nearly as fast as any of the new movies, so it’s not suitable for the modern movie viewer with a 5 second attention span. But I enjoyed it and recommend to anyone who might happen across the DVD.

There are also loads of non-profit space colonization groups here. I remember 20 years ago at science fiction conventions seeing groups like the L-5 society asking for donations so they could colonize space. I optimisitcally became a member of several groups. Eventually I realized they weren’t really doing anything. After all these years, they still haven’t gotten any further than sitting at tables and telling people about how great it would be to colonize space. The names have changed. Apparently, the L-5 Society is defunct now. In it’s place we have groups like the Mars Foundation and some Moon Society. I talked to the people at a few of these and they seem to have the same strategy of achieving their goal by talking about it endlessly. It’s kind of depressing. They all seem to ignore the basic problem that it’s expensive to get into space to do all this colonizing. If they spent a little time working on that, they might get somewhere.

I’m also trying to squeeze in time to keep up the work on mod_virgule. I’ve made a lot of progress over the last few months, benefiting both robots.net and Advogato. The ToDo list seems endless but next up is some code refactoring and work on the data schemas used for the XML database and HTML entry forms. This work will hopefully allow me to fix a long standing bug in the HTML forms and make the field layouts a little more flexible.

The weather prediction was for rain in the evening, so my plan was to head up to the DPRG immediately after work. Not suprisingly, a last-minute work-related emergency held me up for a couple of hours. By the time I was finally able to leave, a torrential rain had started. When a break in the rain materialized, I ran out to my car; only to get a phone call before I was out of the parking lot. The call was from Susan, who was holed up at home in a bathroom with the three cats because the TV had just announced a tornado was headed her way. She said the tornado watch area extended to the downtown area where I was, so I decided I’d be better off inside the office than in my car until things calmed down.

I ran back through the now heavy rain into the office. As I dried off, I clicked up a few weather radar sites. Sure enough, there were some nasty looking thunderstorms headed my way. They passed over Irving, where Susan was, without any serious damage resulting (it’s now unclear whether the reported tornado really touched down or not). The worst of storms were now north of Dallas in the Garland area, where the DPRG Lab is located. I decided to settle in and do what work I could on the robot at the office. I finally left about 1am by which time the rain had stopped. I was a little annoyed that this series of events had kept me from making it to the DPRG where I could have worked more efficiently.

The next morning, I showed up at the Tanner’s event. The previous night’s storm had brought with it a freak, one-day cold front. Despite the cold, a fair number of humans and robots showed up to participate. But, more interestingly, several people said they’d seen the DPRG’s building in Garland on the news. There were firetrucks in the parking lot. Apparently it was hit by lightning. Eric Sumner, Ed Paradis, and I decided to drive up to Garland and check out the damage.

From what we could tell, the lightning hit the transformer immediately behind the DPRG building. It largely destroyed the power line between the transformer and the building, reducing it to a series of short fragments. The power meter was completely destroyed. The charred metal casing of the meter was still on the wall, surrounded by blackened bricks. The transparent housing and meter electronics, or the remains of them, were found on the ground. The meter had contained several boards with surface mount components. The lightning blast had desoldered all the components and completely vaporized many of them. Inside the building, the main breaker box was also a charred mess but it appears the breakers vaporized so quickly that it limited the damage to the downstream breaker boxes.

By Tuesday power had been restored and we were able to evaluate the damage. Remarkably, the only losses discovered were a single surge protector and one very old dot matrix printer. Aside from those two casualties, test equipment, networking gear, computers, all seemed to have survived no worse for the wear. All thing considered, I’m glad I wasn’t around Friday night when it hit.