For those of you who haven’t yet been sucked in by the temporal black hole that is The Sims, let me describe it for you so that you can keep away and continue to have something resembling a normal life: basically, the premise is that you create a little pretend family on your computer and tend to their needs — bathing, going to the bathroom, getting better jobs — all the while failing to do the same things yourself.

Though usually immune to the insidious draw of computer games, Kathy has fallen victim to the cunning charm of The Sims, and has been enjoying relaxing in the evening with it from time to time. Now, in spite of her enthusiasm for the game, she was unaware that it was possible to create and add new objects to the game. So as a small practical joke, I stayed up after everyone else had gone to bed on Tuesday and created several paintings that you can buy to go in your Sims’ houses featuring photos of our children on them, and then scattered them liberally throughout her Sims’ home.

The unfortunate thing turns out to be that the game is difficult to play when zoomed in all the way, but the pictures are difficult to discern unless you’re looking at the game at its largest size. So instead of being surprised and delighted at finding pictures of our children in the game house, she was vaguely puzzled by the mysterious paintings of unknown children that had appeared while she wasn’t looking. Sigh.

Anyway, if you’re another Sims junkie, and for some strange reason you’d like to have pictures of our kids in your Sims’ home, you can download the set of four right here. Enjoy!

Since coming to work for Electronic Arts, one of the titles I’ve been most excited about seeing brought production is Majestic, an ambitious projects that aims to immerse its players into a conspiracy-theory-driven adventure. The interesting thing about it is not so much the plot as the ways the plot is communicated to the player: by phone calls, faxes, emails, pages, and Instant Messages. There’s an excellent article that gives some idea of the visceral impact of this method here. My favorite part is that you can set the game to not use the phone at all, to put a tag on the messages to make it clear that they’re part of the game, or to just mix them in with your other phone calls so the line between reality and the game starts to blur.

Only a few short months to wait…

My apologies, gentle reader, for the lack of updates here lately. Our family has been embroiled in several projects that have sucked up most of our available time and energy, including working through some post-Christmas financial issues, helping with the church’s first Sunday service, and dealing with some nasty illnesses. (Liam at one point had both pink eye and a viral GI infection that was causing him to expel unpleasant substances from both ends with a great deal of vigor.)

In any case, we have a lull now, as everyone seems to be returning to good health, and extra resposibilities are few for the next couple of weeks. I’m still preparing for a gig in Iowa the weekend after Valentine’s day, but it’s mostly familiar music, so shouldn’t be too taxing.

So, how are you?

I always enjoy the Superbowl — nominally for the football and the opportunity to choose a team at random about which I know nothing and talk schmack to everyone rooting for the other team, but mostly for the ads.

This year featured a reasonably good crop. There was a notable tendency toward fat-man humor, with a significant subset of fat-man-dancing visual jokes. (Budweiser Blow Dryer, Dr. Pepper Hudson River Dance, etc.) The Budweiser What Are You Doing, E*Trade Dot Com Graveyard, and EDS Running with the Squirrels were also personal favorites. I also took a personal pleasure in booing the Accenture ads, because I have to maintain their foul code at work.

Visit Adcritic’s Superbowl Site to see all of the ads for yourself.

Not here, unfortunately. Though the design at The McMains Chronicles is long enough in the tooth to earn it scorn at a Bucktoothed Anonymous meeting, I still haven’t gotten around to updating it. I have, however, worked over the in-progress site for Three Rivers Community Church. (Yes, the template is plagarized.) If you users of sundry browsers could take a look and let me know if it looks ok from where you sit, I’d appreciate it!

I mucked about with the Points of Interest. (Over there in the sidebar. No, down a bit. There you go!) Now, when you’re in most of the site, you only see links to the strictly family oriented stuff. When you hit the Ruminations page, however, a passel of new links appear for the Sean-only sections.

So, does this make it less overwhelming for the people who think my kids are cute, but say about me “he will ramble on, won’t he?” Or is it just annoying not to be able to go straight to the amazingly insightful essays on topics that only 8 people in the entire world care about? Let me know what you think.

I’ve been wanting to create a centralized home for things musical for a while, and finally got around to it today. You can download several MP3s from the Music page, including a new simple piano piece called “Their Faces Now Are Old”. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of downloading T-Racks mastering software and trying it out with some of my tracks, and now I’m not happy with the way any of them sound anymore. 🙂

If you’re interested in the gear, you might also enjoy the Instruments page, to which I’ll be adding photos and additional text soon.

I don’t know why exactly, but it gives me a warm glow to know that you really can get anything you want on the Internet, including a 1/6 scale action figure of yourself, someone you love, or your favorite stalking victim (if you’ve taken enough pictures with that telephoto lens). Details are here.

As anyone who cares probably already knows, Apple announced a lot of interesting stuff today. The item I covet most would be a tie between the new Powerbook G4, which is sassy simply for it’s own sake, and the high-end G4 tower, which comes with DVD-authoring software. If inducing techno-lust is a measure of the product’s success, then this morning was a winner, as suddenly I feel a burning need to make my own DVDs.

I’ve also downloaded iTunes, and am enjoying playing with it. Good timing too, as I’d been considering buying Soundjam MP, upon which it’s evidently based. I’ve got 3GB set aside for music, and am cramming CDs into the machine as fast as it will take them.

But the best news got less fanfare than any of these. Jobs showed off the latest version of OS X, and it’s evident from what he said and what had changed that Apple has actually been paying attention to the people who have been beta testing OS X, and have made usability improvements and fleshed-out functionality that will make the OS more of a pleasure to use. Jobs is a bit notorious for pushing his vision to production even when it’s not a good one, so it’s a pleasant thing to see his company have the humility to actually listen and take user’s ideas. Continuing to apply that kind of attitude could once again make Apple the computer for the rest of us.

I recently finished Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, the definitive novel of the Beat Generation. In a way, it’s a shame to be reading it at this late date, for it has suffered a bit from the Citizen Kane effect — it does some new and startling things, which are less new and startling now that lots of other people have borrowed from the vocubulary these works originated.

In any case, this sprawling novel centers on the road trips the narrator takes across the continent with friends and the adventures en route. Alternately frenetic, sad, funny, and fevered, it drags you through much of the varied experience of the Beat lifestyle. The most unsatisfying aspect for me was the ending, as Dean Moriarty degenerates and eventually fades from Sal’s life altogether without much explanation — it’s the sadness of parting unexplained.

But overall, the book is worth having under one’s belt as a touchstone of a generation, and is quite enjoyable in its own right.