Homepage of Bill Wetzel

There is a certain irony that I was an early adopter of web technology at Bell Labs in the mid 1990s yet I failed to build anything more than the most basic of a home page once I retired, despite extensive web development work on other projects in retirement. I finally resolved that in early 2023 with a little cleanup but still none of the gimmicky, distracting elements of modern web design.

Projects

My interests include music, photography, software and hardware hacking, hiking, sailing, woodwork, machining, and old-house repair, many of them going back to childhood. In varying degrees my projects reflect those interests.

The projects here are all relatively recent, covering the period since I retired in 2000. Of course, as a person approaching the end of his eighth decade my idea of relatively recent may be quite different that yours and certainly exceeds the entire lifespan of my grandchildren. I'm working on a list of not-so-recent projects that begins in my childhood and continue through high school, college, and my professional career. I'll add that to a separate page at this site when it is a little further along.

Fakebook Index Search - A tool for searching the Birdland Music Book Index of 82272 total titles, 25810 distinct titles, in 135 indexed music books, including fakebooks, for book and page number. Search by title, also composer and lyricist when that data is available.

Birdland Musician's Assistant - A Linux-based multimedia music viewer and library manager for music books in PDF form including fakebooks. It displays a page of music or a ChordPro song by searching a database of titles and other metadata. Answering the Let's hear how it goes query it also suggests audio files, midi files, and JJazzLab songs from your media library and YouTube links matching the search.

HDTV Test Patterns - A set of 206 images in 16 resolutions plus thubnails for assessing the image quality of HDTV, TV, and computer displays. This is an update made in March, 2023, to a smaller set in just a single resolution of 1920x1080 at my Flickr site.

Bill's Weather Station - A home-brew Raspberry Pi weather station reporting temperature, pressure, humidity, illumination, and gas consumption every five minutes from Little Silver Point. Observations are acquired by the RPi and sent to a cloud-based virtual server.

Bass House - An unorganized and in-progress collection of documents relating to the summer home of Walter A. Bass in Little Silver. Mr. Bass was the original owner of the house and a governor of the New York Stock Exchange. Some of the material is organized into a timeline but it is far from complete.

Osprey Nest on Little Silver Point - A live video camera aimed at an osprey nest on Little Silver Point during the months the osprey are in residence, typically March through September. At other times it shows a view of the Shrewsbury River.
• Website Management Tools - I manage a number of small websites - some are of general interest and linked here, e.g., weather, osprey, and Birdland. Others have a narrow focus and are not further discussed. I've developed several tools to help manange them where I was unable to find existing solutions. These are only for my own use - none are sufficiently general, robust, or polished to be suitable for release. I've included brief descriptions and screenshots only to document the work, not to solicit interest or users.
  
  LoggerBar - I developed this while analyzing an attack on one of my sites. The raw server logs were rich in data impossible to see patterns and trends especially when the attacker is IP-hopping. LoggerBar creates several types of graphs from server logs including ones if the access IP numbers in 3d that can be rotated to see patterns.
  
  db-regis.py - This program manages registrations for one of my sites. It show who registered and when, whom they introduced to the site, and last access by each user.
  
  log-monitor.py - Unlike LoggerBar, which examines historical logs, this program monitors logs in real time to show a snapshot how a site is being used similar to Google Analytics.
  
  Python Data Flow Graph - One of the sites I manage includes a large number of Python programs. I developed a tool based on a Python abstract syntax tree to build a data flow graph for all programs and each individual program to visualize the flow through the entire system of programs and ins and outs of each program.

Tanzer T22 - Commissioning and decommissioning are two of my projects in the spring and fall. Here are several albums of photos at Flickr related to the T22. Someday I hope to consolidate them all on a dedicated web page with commentary. See: Outfitting to my taste, Un-stepping the mast with an A-Frame, Stepping the mast with a guyed gin pole, Transferring to a trailer, launching and hauling with a rope & chain.

Rutgers Marching Band - 1964 to 1966 Marching Band and Wind Ensemble were a big part of my life at Rutgers. Here is an exhibit of my photographs of the Rutgers University Marching Band & Wind Ensemble for the years 1964 to 1966.

InDesign Photo Book Layout Scripts - These tools are Adobe InDesign scripts that build a layout of graphic frames for photo placement. I wrote them because of dissatisfaction with the layout tools offered by the photo book printers including WinkFlash and Blurb.
• Photography - I have been interested in photography ever since childhood when my dad gave me a Kodak Duaflex III camera and later a FR Home Developing and Printing Kit, both of which I still have. Apart from the Rutgers Band and Tanzer collections above here are several other photography projects. Needless to say, with four children and three grand children I also took thousands of family photos. While a few portraits have some artistic value, most family photos tend to be just snapshots. For that reason and that because they are personal photos I'm not including any here.

  
  Studio - I've picked up a bit of studio equipment over the years - strobes, umbrellas, stands, seamless - but raraly have a chance to use them. A senior portrait of the son of friends provided one such opportunity.
  
  Symphony Orchestra - Through a friend I had an opportunity to photograph the Monmouth Symphony Orchestra a couple of times. The above link is of the first set. See also full orchestra, conductor communicating, conductor and sections, and section leaders
  
  Engagement - A young couple we know asked me to take engagement photos.
  
  Presidential - I had an opportunity to photograph President Clinton's Clinton Global Initiative - University conference, Boston, 2017. This is a small subset of all the photos from the event.
  
  Jewelery - The wife of a friend was an artist working in jewelery. She used my photos advertising.
  
  Wedding - I suspect I annoyed the official photographer at the wedding of the son of friends of our family. See also: another wedding, and another wedding.
  
  River Moods - This is one of my few forays into artistic photography. It is a set of photos of the Shrewsbury River over time, shooting east from the same spot, and with consistent framing. See also: shooting north, shooting west, without consideration for framing.
  
  Travel - My travel photography is bimodal - some is purely to document trips, some is an attempt at creative, artistic expression. The link is to an album from Germany, Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia in 2019. See also: Scotland - 2018. London & Paris - 2023.

Water Service Line - Some old-house projects are easy, some are not. The replacement of the water service line from the meter well at the street to my house was just about the limit of something I should have tackled, and that was with the help of my son-in-law with the trenching. But it was quite satisfying.
A Trip Down the Rabbit Hole of Monmouth County Property Tax Records - This paper describes an exploration of Monmouth County property tax records I conducted the Fall of 2012 following a grossly inflated property revaluation. It includes a discussion of the data for Little Silver, NJ, and graphs and tables for Little Silver and the neighboring towns of Rumson, Fair Haven, Oceanport, and the demographically similar Holmdel.
My Wordpress Site - A short collection of writings, mostly obituaries of friends, but also descriptions of a few small projects and a report on Hurricane Sandy.

Contact

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