While our New York and UK offices may not find experiencing snow unusual, our Dallas office has received 6.2" so far today--a pretty unnatural occurrence.

So, members of the team braved falling snowflakes and scraped together a bit of the drift from on top of the cars for an impromptu snowball fight.

Given that it is supposed to ice tonight we've all been advised to take our laptops home in case the roads are bad tomorrow. After all, one of the things a city doesn't have when snow is a rare occurrence is street cleaning equipment. Luckily we live in a digital world, and can all resume a normal business day in front of a fire with an internet connection.

One of the fun parts of being a consulting firm is that you have access to gear. We frequently perform testing of the latest professional audio, video and lighting products under varying conditions to test specific products out for project applications.

This week after hours, our lighting team in Dallas tested several outdoor LED fixtures comparing them to conventional incandescent fixtures. A benefit to LED fixtures is that they typically use far less energy than incandescents, but they still have to perform in the areas of output, maintenance and color temperature.

David Stephens, Jason Foster, and Craig Janssen followed the testing (that's Jason with a light meter to the left) while Dan Schoedel photographed the results.

(The images with the uplighting were particularly amusing since they all looked as if they were telling ghost stories around a campfire. )