Author Archives: SeanMcTex

Tweeku Launches

March 9, 2010 – 9:34 am

Congratulations to my friend Greg Pierce, who launched Tweeku today, a super-nifty iPhone app he wrote for composing Twitter messages and other short-form texts (including haiku)! I’ve been testing it off and on for a few weeks, and am really impressed with what he’s done with it. Here’s the company line:
Tweeku is a twitter writing [...]

Posted in Computers, Friends | Comments (0)

My Favorite 40th Birthday Party Ever

March 8, 2010 – 3:03 pm

Over the weekend I celebrated my 40th birthday along with a pile of family and friends. The party was terrific — everything I had hoped that it would be and more. Thanks to all who attended and helped to make it such a delightful, memorable time!
I had a magnificent surprise shortly after the party got [...]

Posted in Family, Friends | Comments (0)

You Have Unlocked an Achievement: Prognostication

February 24, 2010 – 2:09 pm

A while back, I wrote a post on Workplace Motivation and Game Mechanics, where I speculated on the efficacy of using game systems, like achievements, awarding points, high score lists, etc., to help motivate people in the workplace.
Last week at the DICE Summit, Carnegie-Mellon Assistant Professor of Education and Technology Jesse Schell gave a terrific [...]

Posted in Computers, Games, Politics | Comments (0)

Will o’ the Wisp

February 1, 2010 – 8:41 am

Now that I’ve found and started to get the hang of MuseScore, I’m catching up on a bit of music stuff that’s been lurking at the back of my to-do list for a while. Next up is Will o’ the Wisp, a little Irish Jig I wrote a couple of years back. It’s a trifle, [...]

Posted in Music | Comments (1)

VoiceBand for the iPhone

January 29, 2010 – 9:52 am

And while I’m rambling on about music software, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long while:

VoiceBand is software for the iPhone that lets you do multi-track recording using your voice as a controller for various instruments. Very clever indeed.

Posted in Computers, Music, Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Pretending to be Jason

January 29, 2010 – 9:33 am

My excellent friend Jason Young is deep into the part of his year where he writes and transcribes hundreds of pages of sheet music for Baylor University’s annual Sing event. Since he recently harassed me for not having posted anything to the weblog lately, I thought I’d take a stab at pretending to be him [...]

Posted in Music, Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Ghost Killer

November 26, 2009 – 12:04 pm

Liam has continued to show interest in creating computer games. His latest effort is Ghost Killer, a straightforward game where your sole job is to avoid the bullets descending from the top of the screen. He created it (with a little help, though much less than for Cat Maze) in Scratch, MIT’s terrific graphic programming [...]

Posted in Family, Games | Comments (1)

Pop Music and Vocal Range

October 27, 2009 – 8:55 am

This morning while walking the kids to school, I had Simon & Garfunkel’s “Only Living Boy in New York” running through my head and, since I have no filter between them, out of my mouth. As I reached for the low note at the end of a phrase, it occurred to me that the range [...]

Posted in Games, Music | Comments (3)

Magnolia Conference 2009 Report

September 24, 2009 – 11:18 am

This is a lightly tweaked version of the report I submitted to the University after returning from Magnolia’s first-ever conference, in Basel, Switzerland. I realize I need to write up a more general-interest trip report, but have been dreadfully short on time since our return. I have, however, recounted our adventures often enough now that [...]

Posted in Computers, Travel | Comments (0)

Honor Roll

September 15, 2009 – 2:36 pm

Kathy and I are just back from a 10 day trip to Switzerland which was alternately the most amazing and the most harrowing experience of our recent lives. I’ll write more on the trip itself later, but wanted to post immediately about the extraordinary kindness and care we were shown by a variety of people [...]

Posted in Friends, Travel | Comments (4)