Author Archives: admin

Liam's First Video Game

May 27, 2007 – 2:37 am

Back when I was a young geek, I spent endless hours at a TRS-80, and later an Apple ][e, entering BASIC games from books, tweaking them to better understand how they worked, and eventually creating my own. This was a great way to learn computers and to bring the joy of creation to the process [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Portland: Part the Second

May 24, 2007 – 2:40 am

The Oregon Convention Center is a super-cool place. Its most obvious feature from the outside, and indeed anywhere around downtown, is two jutting glass spires that claw at the Portland sky. The interior is spacious, nicely appointed, and features a giant Foucault Pendulum, apparently there to remind you that the world is still out there [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Portland: Part the First

May 18, 2007 – 10:01 pm

The University was gracious enough to send me out this year to Portland for RailsConf, the big gathering of Ruby on Rails developers and users. The best part about it for me has been the opportunity to finally meet in person several people I’ve only known via the Internet until now: Seth, for whom I [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

New Toy

May 18, 2007 – 5:55 am

My nerdy obsession of the hour: iStalkr, an RSS compiler that grabs feeds from various services you specify and plots the data therefrom on a timeline. I’ve got mine set up currently to combine the books I’ve finished reading, posts I make to my weblog, twitter messages I post, bookmarks I plop onto del.icio.us, photos [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

More Silliness at RailsConf

May 18, 2007 – 5:46 am

We were treated to a Ukelele/Accordion duet this evening:

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Cool Fountain

May 17, 2007 – 9:19 pm

I like the water fountains here in Portland. They’re handsomely crafted and run continuously — a surprising sight for someone who comes from a place as water-bound as Central Texas:

UPDATE: You can also zoom out on this photo here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Kathy Gets a Scholarship

May 17, 2007 – 3:50 am

This just in:

Please join us in congratulating Kathy McMains and Julie Henry, recipients of the 2007 IT Scholarships. Kathy and Julie will receive $500 scholarships through the Office of Student Financial Aid this Fall.
Kathy McMains, a sophomore working toward a Bachelor of Recreational Administration degree, is the wife of Sean McMains, Senior Programmer Analyst [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Congratulations!

May 15, 2007 – 12:54 am

Congratulations are in order:

In spite of carrying an 18 hour load and being home in time (almost) every day for the kids when they finished school, Kathy concluded her semester with a 4.0 GPA. Nice work, sweetieschnoockumsface!
Maggie has mastered riding a bike without training wheels — another in the list of “last times” as our [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Mother's Day, Emily Turns 15

May 13, 2007 – 8:31 pm

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 [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Mad About Microformats

May 10, 2007 – 9:14 pm

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 [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)