Our inimitable Emily, a long time Homestar Runner fan, decided to make a birdhouse for her aunt for Christmas. At the risk of ruining the surprise, I thought the fruits of her labor wonderful enough to post here.

I’m so proud! (Sniff.)

While setting up the new iMac, I’ve been able to establish dynamically-assigned network addresses on an 802.11 wireless network, integrate its networking with both the Macs and Windows machines at our home, install specialized drivers to integrate with a third-party outboard USB audio interface, and use a third-party USB/Serial adapter to provide backward-compatibility with my old GPS unit.

One question remained, however, which Apple has now thoughtfully answered for me. Thanks, Apple!

Last weekend Dad McMains spent a couple of days with us while Lana was off at a church retreat. He and I and the kids spent five or six hours playing Lazer Tag, running all around the yard, through (and on) the house, waging epic, sweaty battle. The new gear is fully as much fun as I’d hoped, and the time with Dad was great — hopefully we’ll be able to do that a bit more often, now that both of our schedules are a bit less demanding than they had been.

I’ve nearly wrapped up my first DVD project with Final Cut Express and the new iMac, and am generally pretty happy with the way things are coming out. I’ve got a little more tweaking to do, but it was exciting to be able to pop a near-finished product into the DVD player last night and see it on the big screen. (The project is a pseudo-documentary of the recent trip to Santa Fe. It came out, once edited, to about 13.5 minutes — a little longer than last year’s Chicago video, which surprised me, as I didn’t think I had as much material to work with this time around.)

I stumbled across another article about Christians Making Videogames this morning. (See What Would Jesus Play? for some earlier thoughts on the subject.) It’s especially interesting to me that most of us Christians who make videogames, or indeed most forms of art, insist on very explicit communication of an unambiguous message. One game mentioned explores the Egyptian plagues, another encourages you to bring the Bible to a cultural group which has lost access to it; in another the player battles demons and searches for a missing pastor.

Contrast this with the way Jesus taught: in parables, often opaque even to his disciples. It seems, however, that we’re uncomfortable with ambiguity, with letting those hear who have ears to do so. Certainly some of this is borne of a sincere desire to have people understand the good news of the Gospel. However, I suspect that if Jesus had a marketing department, they wouldn’t have let him get away with parables. Videogames tend to entertain less when one tries to saddle them with a message; so also is the gospel made weaker when it’s recast as a diversion, especially one that tries to be a commercial success. And Jesus, whom we purport to serve, had a thing or two to say about serving two masters.

My email’s been down since Wednesday due to a minor configuration error. If you sent me anything interesting between then and Friday at about 8:00pm, it would be great if you could resend it. Sorry for the inconvenience!

There’s rather too much going on around here for a proper post; here are a few highlights:

• Went with Daniel down to see a Chris Taylor show a couple weekends back. Chris is an old friend from high school who writes some dynamite stuff, is a great performer, and has enjoyed some measure of success with his music (including a Dove Award nomination for Best Rock Album for his Worthless Pursuit of Things on the Earth album, which is available in its entirety in MP3 format at the linked page). It was great to see Chris again, and always a treat to enjoy his music in person.
• I took all the kids for a day at the Texas Renaissance Festival last weekend. Though it rained on us the whole way there and for an hour after our arrival, we had a great time tromping around, watching the shows, buying authentic renaissance pretzels, and befriending the craftsmen. While parts of the festival were a bit cheesy, fireworks set to live bagpipe music cover a multitude of sins in my book.
• It’s Maggie’s fourth birthday this weekend. She shares her birthday weekend with Lana and my Uncle Bill. Happy birthday to all of you!
• We had a good show down at Cheatham Street Warehouse last weekend, and are playing for a Hays Country Sheriff “Brown Santa” benefit this weekend. Should be fun.
• I got ahold of some of the new Lazer Tag gear, and will likely be putting it through its paces with the help of the young ones this weekend.

Just enjoyed a super lunch with Jason, who was gracious to drive down from Pflugerville for a tour of some of the niftier stuff around campus, a trip to El Charro (one of my favorite local taquerias), and a visit to the house to say hello to Kathy and Maggie. I met Jason for the first time online many years ago, back when I was messing about with home automation. We bumped into each other on the XTension mailing lists, and he became a regular reader of Brain Sausage, a now-defunct collaborative weblog I edited with Chris Morris and Robert Leahey. (The system running Brain Sausage was my Perl-learning exercise.) Later, we discovered we had a friend in common in the person of Barry, and finally got to meet in Real Life™ when he brought us over to Jason’s house one night.

Jason’s a fascinating guy, who writes, produces, and performs music for a living, is a space nut (hooray SpaceShipOne!), leads wilderness camping and rafting excursions, and is a super-nice guy to boot. I highly recommend a lunch with him if you ever have the chance.

Update: Jason just posted a long, wonderful piece on his love for aviation and excitement for SpaceShipOne’s accomplishments.