Yesterday marked both the completion of Emily’s 15th year and Mother’s Day, one of those Hallmark-manufactured holidays where, unless you’re a Mother, the best you can hope to do is break even.

We started Mother’s Day with a parade of presents — coffee, chocolate, a piece of wood with nails in the shape of a smiley face, pez dispensers, candles, a set of Mexican Train Dominos — and a rather scattered breakfast in bed, featuring a quesadilla, toast, coffee, and a grapefruit. Kathy was pleased both with the breakfast and gifts, and the celebration seemed to fit nicely with our family’s slightly skewed way of celebrating holidays.

Once the feting of the mothers was settling down, we moved on to give Emily her birthday presents, which included some stuffed animals from Maggie and clothes that she’d had a hand in selecting several weeks before. The big surprise, however, was a custom-make electric guitar. With some help from Grant (the proprietor of our friendly neighborhood music store, good friend and bandmate), I had ordered a Saga LC-10 guitar kit a while back. I then did a good deal of reading and consulting with my friends who, unlike me, actually know something about finishing wood and settled on using a Mirage Color Shift Paint Kit to finish it out. Here’s a bit of video of the color shift effect shortly after I finished painting the guitar body:

I had actually intended to do a bit more with the finish — putting Emily’s name on it, adding a Jolly Roger — but it’s remarkable difficult to build a guitar in the same house as a 14-year old without her knowing about it. Here’s a snap of her and her new guitar (tentatively named “Oliver”) moments after delivery:

After church, Emily’s friends began gathering for her birthday party, for which she had decided she wanted to do paintball. We had both cars packed to capacity as we drove out to Tactical Paintball for an afternoon of shooting each other. Kathy, of course, was the star, and managed to perforate 3 of the staff members in the span of one game. Liam had the dubious honor of receiving the nastiest welt where he got plugged in the back from relatively short range. Here’s the assembled birthday team, ready to do their worst:

So, altogether a great day, aside from the fact that we’ve had to reschedule celebrating Mother’s Day with my mother (who, judging by the fact that I couldn’t reach her by phone all day, was either celebrating happily with other segments of the family or drowning her sorrows in pizza and root beer in a disconsolate corner somewhere).

UPDATE: Seth has rightly pointed out that Mother’s Day does not have its genesis in Hallmark and its sentiment-milking ilk, but in a real person. As usual, wikipedia has all the details. Thanks, Seth!

Sorry normal humans — this is one of my infrequent geeky posts. To mitigate your disappointment, I will provide you with a joke before I tear into the technical stuff, courtesy of Steve Lux:

How many ADD kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
I don’t know, how many?
Hey, want to go ride bikes?

So, over the last few days I’ve gone a bit crazy with Microformats. “What are Microformats?” you may well ask. They’re a standard way of creating machine-readable structured data within an XHTML document, which is interesting for a variety of reasons. For example, I’ve embedded my contact information in this page in such a way that it is both meaningful to humans (see the “Who I Am” sidebar) and computers. Thus, when I visit this page now while using Firefox with the excellent Tails plugin installed, an icon lights up at the bottom of my browser window indicating that Firefox found contact information on the page. If I click on that icon, I get the option to add that information to my contact book, send email to me, or get a report on how popular my site is. (For you old-school Apple folks, it’s rather like Apple Data Detectors for the Internet.)

The most interesting microformats to me thus far are hCard, which handles contact information, hCalendar, which provides a framework for calendar data, and XFN, which lets you indicate what kind of a real-world relationship you share with a person you link to. This morning, I took a couple of hours to implement support for hCard and hCalendar in our Content Management System for the University. (Not yet publicly available — I’ll post a link to an example once the next update to our CMS is published on May 25.)

In the meantime, if you want to play along, go grab Tails and see where on the web you can discover Microformats. I’ve embedded a few things here already, and will be adding more as time goes on.

Apple is tackling some of the environmental issues that face computer and electronics companies head on. Good for them.

This evening Kathy and I went to Clear Springs Seafood Restaurant for a special dinner. I had never been, and was fairly taken with the huge barn, the nice site, and the giant baskets of onion rings. Afterward, we went and walked around Landa Park, one of my favorite places in New Braunfels.

While walking along the banks of the Comal River, we happened across a couple of young men who were fooling around by the water with what looked like a small portable generator. My curiosity was piqued, so I kept and eye on them as they reeled out a long cable from the device and fired it up. It turned out to be a winch, and they were using it to haul each other across a couple hundred feet of water with a wakeboard. It looked like great fun, so I took a bit of video. Unfortunately, it turned out that they were in an environmentally sensitive section of the river where it is illegal to swim, and they were soon shut down by the local rhetorical constabulary. (“What are you boys doing?” “Swimming.” “I can see that…”)

A few reflections on the new camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ7K, now that I’ve had nearly a week to fool with it:

I like the image quality, and the 6x zoom is a treat after being used to the 3x of our previous camera. The long shutter settings work well for light painting (though the longest setting is 60 seconds, so it’s probably not well-suited to larger-scale projects). The movie functions are really nice: at the highest image settings one can record up to 20 minutes of continuous 16:9 480p video — more pixels than our dedicated video camera manages to handle. The UI is nice and clean, and a variety of “scene” settings make it easy to compensate for specific conditions. The macro mode works well, and captures a lot of detail. Additionally, the camera registers itself as a bulk storage device when connected via USB, so one doesn’t need any special software to download images and video — just drag and drop the images.

On the less positive side, there’s no audio when you play back video on the camera. This seems slightly ridiculous, since there’s already a speaker in the camera for its various beeps. Fortunately, the audio comes through fine when you play the video on a computer. The tripod mount is set far to the left, rather than in the center of the camera, which is a bit clumsy. Annoyingly, Panasonic seems to have done away with the exposure bracketing between the last revision of the camera and this, so I’ll still have to do HDR photos the hard (and unreliable) way. And finally, it only supports USB 1.1, which makes for painfully slow downloads when you’re using multiple gigabyte memory cards.

But overall, I’m quite happy with the new camera. It’s not the end-all be all of photographic bliss, but a pretty solid little performer for the price. I’ve put up two new images on Flickr already — more should be coming soon. (I expect there will be lots of interest at the Wiener Dog Races in Buda this weekend…)

Lots going on: I took Abigail and Maggie down to the river Saturday morning for the San Marcos River Spring Cleanup. After breakfast tacos, we wandered the banks for about 2.5 hours gathering up debris of various descriptions. Maggie spotted a beautiful hawk, and Abby found an egg that had dropped from a tree but survived intact. We all came home with an assortment of door prizes after lunch. It was a great time, and something I think we’ll turn into a family activity next time it comes around.

I did music for church this weekend, which went well. I think I’m getting over my nervousness about leading music at church; though I still don’t actively enjoy doing it, the dread has mostly abated. We had a new singer who worked out wonderfully, and I got to read pennywhistle music for the first time in a couple of years for the offering.

Finally, I slipped off Saturday night to hear O’Malarkey, San Marcos’ only Irish band. I honestly wasn’t expecting great things, but was very pleasantly surprised by the groups musicianship and polish. One particular highlight was the “Arkansas Bagpipe”, which consisted of two harmonicas duct taped together with a length of surgical tubing leading from one to several huge balloons. When the valve was released, the balloons powered a drone on the lower harmonica while the musician played melodies on the top — a brilliant bit of musical hackery. I also got to enjoy the company of Michael & Nikki, a couple who moved in across the street a few months back and who came out for the show. I enjoyed it a great deal, even though I did feel obliged to brush my teeth when I got home since my dentist plays in the band.

Best quote of the weekend:

“I’ve got a money-pooping llama! I’m going to be a millionaire!” -Abigail

Some of my obsessive fans out there in Internetland may have noticed that the “Recent Photos” sidebar hasn’t been showing anything…well, recent. This has mostly been due to the perfect storm of hardware failures: both my trusty, dusty iMac, where iPhoto lived, and our long-suffering, often-dropped Canon A75 recently shuffled off this mortal coil.

Half of those obstacles should soon be a thing of the past, as I put in an order for a new camera last night. My self-imposed rules for the hunt: 1. I must be able to get it for less than $200 after tax, title, and license 2. It must do as much of the wacky stuff I wanted to try but couldn’t convince the A75 to do as possible.

After a good deal of futzing around on Amazon and the excellent Steve’s Digicams, I finally settled on the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ7K, which I got for a grand total of $188. Stuff I liked about it:

• 6x optical zoom with optical image stabilization. Should be excellent for taking clear shots, even from a distance.
• 7 megapixel for ridiculous enlargements or decent crops.
• A shutter-priority shooting mode with shutter speeds of up to 60 seconds. Should be great for taking pictures of the stars at night (which are big and bright here in the heart of Texas) and for Light Painting, which I’ve been keen to try.
• Automatic exposure bracketing for doing High Dynamic Range photography. With the A75, I had to adjust the exposure manually, which always meant the images were slightly out of alignment from my jostling.
• 16×9 30FPS video capture means I may be able to get away with just carrying this when I’m doing vacation photography, rather than hauling both a still and a video camera around.

I’m quite looking forward to trying out the new camera. I’ll post a follow-up once I’ve had a chance to play with it a fair bit.

The scene: a mother and her 12-ish year old son stand in the toy section, separated by four aisles of space. I’m right between them.

The mother speaks: “Billy, come over here.”

Billy ignores her.

“Billy, please come over here now.”

Billy continues ignoring her.

“Billy, come here right now, or I’m going to start singing.”

Billy looks mortified, dutifully sulks to his mother’s side.

[finis]

That, dear friends…that was a brilliant bit of parenting, and the funniest thing I saw all day. (Though the dwarf hamster getting spun unwillingly upside down around his exercise wheel by a fatter cagemate was a close second.) Kudos, anonymous mother!