Author Archives: SeanMcTex

Injuries, Reunions, and New Braunfels

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Hello all! It’s the start of the academic year, and our family has been crazy busy. There are currently seven people living under our roof, and I’m the only one who didn’t return to school this week. Kathy has been very excited to resume her University work, and the kids have been bidding summer farewell with varying degrees of enthusiasm and disappointment. I, of course, have been delighted to once again be able to say in my most loving and supportive voice, “You have homework and I don’t. Neener, neener!”

Saturday was the date for the First Annual McMains All-Family River Float. Becky, Chris, Ken and Mom McMains all came up from San Antonio to enjoy lunch together and a float down the San Marcos river. It was a nice afternoon for it, and a fitting way to ring out the summer. Chris and I particularly enjoyed going through the rapids sans tube, though the low water levels caused us to get a little more banged up than usual, and in my case, made people wonder how a whale got beached so far from the sea.

This past weekend was also my High School’s official 20th reunion. (Go Brahmas!) The combination of the high price and a noisy, crowded venue was enough to scare me off from the official festivities, but I did invite Alex, Serenity and her family, and William — a few friends who were in from out of town for the occassion — to come over on Sunday for a visit. It was a pleasure to see how much this cadre still got along and enjoyed each other; we had a great afternoon of food, conversation, music, and reminiscing.

Sean, Alex, Serenity and William together for the first time since High School

Sean, Alex, Serenity and William together for the first time since High School.

Liam chose to celebrate the return to school in an entirely appropriate way for a 9 year old boy: he broke his right arm. He was buzzing around the neighborhood on his new Heelies (sneakers with roller skates built in, for those of you not in the know), got a rock stuck in the wheel, took a fall, and earned himself the right to wear a cast for the first six weeks of third grade — a masterful move in the eternal homework-avoidance arms race.

In an attempt to foster some family togetherness, we have been doing a weekly Family Dinner followed by Forced Family Fun Time. (This was a designation that my brother and I coined when we were the unwilling recipients of “quality time”, rather than its perpetrators.) It’s hard work to pull off family time like that with all the homework, movies, video games, and other things that compete for our time, but has been a qualified success, and I’m glad we’re doing it. On Thursday, I set the challenge before the group to build the tallest tower possible using mini marshmallows and toothpicks. While we broke no new ground in engineering, it was a fun challenge that got everybody working together:

Kathy, Emily, and Abby won with this mighty contstruct

Kathy, Emily, and Abby won with this mighty contstruct. Frank Gehry stopped by later to take notes.

Since the kids started school on Monday, but Kathy didn’t begin until two days later, I decided to take her  for a day on the town. I’m normally a meticulous planner, but we decided to keep the day completely spontaneous and see how it went. We started out by watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf — not a terrifically auspicious way for a married couple to begin a day! (I did, however, get to do Richard Burton impressions all day. “Martha!”) We then started for the River House Tea Room for lunch, but were diverted by the inescapable lure of good Tex-Mex on the way and ended up at Adobe Verde instead. After enjoying a delicious meal, we wandered around Gruene for a bit, stopping in the various shops, taking photos, and enjoying the languor of the afternoon. It didn’t take much of that, however, before we were hot and sweaty, so we went to see if the Landa Park pool was open. No luck. Rats!

As we were leaving Landa Park, however, we saw several people tubing on the Comal river and decided to find a place to do the same. Landa Falls was the first place we stumbled across, and since it boasted the longest float on the river, we put our $13 on the barrel head, grabbed a tube, and jumped into the water. It had been years since I had been on the Comal, and it was fascinating to see how it had changed over the years: the erstwhile Stinky Falls is now owned by the city, and Camp Warnecke has been subsumed by Schlitterbahn and a condo development. (The latter were rampant along the river — apparently they breed like rabbits that have been fed Viagra kibble and who have access to Bugs Bunny’s sexy outfits.)

After tubing, we wandered around New Braunfels a little more, stopping in at Bryan Duckworth’s (former fiddle player for Robert Earl Keen) violin shop to have my cello bow rehaired (it was nearly as bald as I am) and at the Uptown Piano Bar, an intimate dimly lit cellar bar that Kathy especially liked in spite of the nekkid lady paintings on the walls. As we were walking around the square, we (nearly literally) bumped into our friend Kris Bolstad as he was riding his scooter past, and stopped to chat with him for several minutes. We rounded off the day with a quick trip to Target and then to watch Kung Fu Panda, which was great fun, at the cheap theater in San Marcos.

Weekend To-Do: Postmortem

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  • Jump in river. Forget to take wallet out of pocket. Learn nothing from the experience. Repeat next day.
  • Attend Irish Music Jam Session. Narrowly avoid putting out own eye with bodhrán beater.
  • Reiterate conviction that we have quite enough pets around the house already, thank you.
  • Drive 12 year old with big eyes and remarkable persistence to pick up kitten.
  • Go sailing with friends. Demonstrate sailing prowess. Thank God for outboard motors.

Aging Kids on the Block

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This morning, the iTunes store brought me the news that New Kids on the Block have a new album coming out. I was surprised to hear that they were still around, so clicked on through. To my horror, I found that while they now look like 37 year old chain smokers, they are still singing the same preadolescent, overengineered bubblegum pop. I mentioned the album to Jimmy, one of my coworkers, and he suggested that we should help them out by coming up with some new song titles better suited to their current station in life. A few moment’s brainstorming yielded the following titles:

  • “Girl, Can I Light Your Cigarette?”
  • “Your Biological Clock is Ticking”
  • “I’ve Got Some Candy in my Pocket”
  • “You Can’t Go Back to Middle School”
  • “(I’ve Got The) Peter Pan Syndrome”
  • “Sugar Daddy”
  • “Let Me Love You ’til My Hip Gives Out”

Want to play along? Post your own in the comments! You could win a copy of our home game just for posting! (Disclaimer: that was a lie.) And New Kids? Feel free to use any of these you like.

What My Friends Are Up To

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One of the best things about being me is that I’m blessed with some amazing, creative, interesting friends. Here are a few things that they’ve been up to lately:

  • David Barnard has started an iPhone software company called AppCubby, and has just released their first product, TripCubby, the sine qua non of mileage tracking for the iPhone. David has worked extraordinarily hard to get this venture off the ground, and that effort shows in the quality of the work that AppCubby is doing. (I’m also excited about this because I did some of the copy writing for David — one of my first professional jobs writing prose instead of software.)
  • Misty Jones has released a song called Gasoline on iTunes. Misty’s musicianship has impressed me all the way back to high school, and I really dig this latest effort. You can check out 30 seconds for free, or get the whole thing (DRM-free, even!) for a mere $0.99. She plans to finish out the album on which this song will go soon.
  • Ross Richie continues to helm Boom Studios, an increasingly successful comic book publishing venture. One of their bolder efforts of late has been releasing some of their books for free viewing online. They’ve recently added RSS feeds, which makes it super-easy to follow the books as they’re released page-by-page. There’s some very high-quality work in their stable, so if you’re in to the medium at all, go check their stuff out!

OLPC, Microsoft, and Intel

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The Times Online has a really interesting article up on the One Laptop Per Child initiative and Microsoft’s and Intel’s responses to it. It’s a great read, and provides an interesting window into some of the skulduggery that the corporations engaged in when threatened by the vision of a cheap laptop for the developing world.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2005, Nicholas Negroponte, supreme prophet of digital connectivity, revealed a strange tent-like object. It was designed to change the world and to cost $100. It was a solar-powered laptop. Millions would be distributed to children in the developing world, bringing them connection, education, enlightenment and freedom of information. The great, the good, the rich and the technocrats nodded in solemn approval.

And then some of them tried to kill it.

Kindle Impressions

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I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with an Amazon Kindle over the past week. The Kindle is Amazon’s attempt to bring book reading and distribution into the 21st century. It’s essentially a small, purpose-built, handheld computer that incorporates several interesting technologies to create a compelling experience for the book lover.

The first distinctive thing about it is the display. Rather than using the LCD or OLED screens that are common on laptops and cell phones, the Kindle uses electronic paper, a display made up of thousands of tiny capsules filled with black and white particles that can be dragged to the top or to the bottom electronically. It functions (and looks) a bit like a high-resolution Magna Doodle.

This screen provides a couple of advantages: first, it gives the kindle a distinctive, book-like appearance. Though the 800×600 display isn’t quite as high-resolution as print, it looks very good, and the four gray scales allow for some basic graphics and diagrams to be included (and some lovely screen savers). One might reasonably wish the background color were a purer white, rather than a light grey, but the constrast ratio is still very high, close to that of a newsprint. Second, the electronic paper display is extremely power-efficient. Because it only draws power when it is changed, the Kindle can run for up to a week on a single charge — something unheard of with emissive displays. Third, because it is reflective, it can be read in all the same conditions one could normally read a book — bright sunlight presents no problems. (The ironic flip side of this advantage is that you need a book light to read it in a dark room.)

The second distinctive thing about the Kindle is that it has a built-in wireless data connection that runs over Amazon’s Whispernet service. Amazon subsidizes the service through device and electronic book sales — it doesn’t cost anything to use. It’s built on the cellular phone network, and therefore has excellent coverage, though the bandwidth is fairly limited. However since it’s used primarily as a delivery mechanism for textual content, that’s rarely a concern. One can use the device to grab a sample of a book from the Kindle store nearly instantly, and can download an entire purchased book within about a minute.

According to the hackers, the software that runs the whole show is largely Java on top of Linux. However, as a user, you’ll never be aware of the fact. The system is controlled with an easy-to-use system of menus which are almost entirely accessed through a little scroll wheel. I gave Kathy (who will be the first to admit that she’s no big fan of technology) 20 seconds of instructions on how to use the scroll wheel while we were driving to San Antonio last week, and she, without further help, kept herself entertained for the two hour car ride downloading sample books, reading, and exploring the device — an impressive testament to its ease-of-use.

There is currently no SDK for the device, so one is limited to running the applications that Amazon ships with it. Amazon has hinted that they might consider creating an SDK in the future, but hasn’t made any official announcements yet. Even so, the Kindle is quite functional. One can, of course, buy and download books from Amazon’s library at rates substantially lower than what one would pay for a hardcover edition. Amazon also has a conversion service where you can send a variety of document types to a special email address and have them converted into a format viewable on the Kindle. It costs $0.10 to have the document sent to your Kindle over Whispernet, but is free if you use the included USB cable to put it on the Kindle yourself. Since the Kindle registers itself as a standard mass storage device, you can transfer files to it easily using a computer with Mac OS, Windows, or Linux with no additional drivers.

Amazon also includes several experimental applications, including a music player, a human-backed question answering service, and, most interesting, a basic web browser. While the browser doesn’t support a lot of advanced features, it works well for browsing well-formatted content, and is even quite usable for some web applications. I’ve been able to update my Twitter while walking home, though haven’t yet convinced it to display my RSS feeds in Google reader. Though the browser isn’t as good as Mobile Safari, its reliance on the cellular network means that I can use it in many more places than the iPod Touch, which relies on having a wireless access point nearby.

While the Kindle has a lot to recommend it, it’s not perfect. The display takes about 3/4 of a second to refresh when you move from page to page. It’s very easy to hit the Next Page and Previous Page buttons by accident. It’s rather homely. Purchased books are wrapped up in DRM. And it’s expensive.

However, by taking advantage of its unique place in the book selling market, Amazon has managed to create the most viable electronic book yet. For the traveler, the reader, or the person who needs convenient access to a reference library, it’s a very compelling product — and a lot of fun.

Bees Have Nothing On Us

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We’ve had a ton of stuff going on lately:

  • Last Wednesday, I took Abigail for her day out on the town. We went kayaking at Zilker park, padding around under the bridges, checking out the secret art that some mysterious painter had emblazoned across the insides of the support struts, scaring turtles, and generally having a grand time. We then visited a vegetarian cafe, spent some time wandering about the mall, watched Journey to the Center of the Earth, and visited Wake The Dead Coffee House, where I converted her to the view that Everything bagels are far and away the best sort.
  • On Thursday, The Patio Boys played in the park for San Marcos’ summer concert series. We in the band had a great time, and the audience seemed to enjoy it a good deal too (especially the cheerful inebriate who brought his own guitar to play along from the audience). Performing outdoors with the energy a crowd brings is always a treat, even when it’s 172° and sunny.
  • On Friday, we celebrated birthdays with Becky, my sister-in-law, and Tanya, my cousin. We ate lots of Greek food, disrupted the restaurant’s table arrangement, and made ourselves as obstreperous as possible. The staff were great sports about it all, and we had a superb time.
  • Saturday was Abigail’s 12th birthday party, which we celebrated at the house. As usual, we had pretty much no idea how many people were coming, and ended up with about 40 at peak. Since it was far too hot to spend much time outdoors, we all ended up crammed in together in three rooms, enjoying a wonderful spread of different foods that people had brought, spirited conversation, and (in the kids case) a great deal of Mario Kart and Rock Band. Abigail reported having a great time, so Mission Accomplished. Thanks to all who helped her celebrate!
  • On Sunday, The Patio Boys played again, this time at Cheatham Street Warehouse. We were all pretty bushed, so we just pulled out some songs we hadn’t done for a while, did unspeakable things to them, and wrapped up early.

Robocars!

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I’ve been intrigued by Personal Rapid Transit since 2002. I’ve gone so far as to do some software modeling and simulation of a PRT system for San Marcos (with a station right by my house, natch), and those of you unfortunate enough to live near me have probably been regaled by my excited blathering on the subject from time to time. (“Good goshamighty, why won’t he be quiet? Shut up! SHUT UP! He won’t stop. Ok, I’m going to my happy place now. Thinking about unicorns and cheesecake. Mmmmmm…cheesecake.”)

But as of today, I’m no longer a fan.

The reason? Not any particular deficiency on PRT’s part. It’s still quicker, more efficient, and generally much more desirable than private cars or other public transit options.

But today, I discovered Robocars.

What are Robocars? Cars that can drive themselves. DARPA’s Grand Challenge in 2004 and 2005 showed that autonomous vehicles were a technological possibility. The 2007 Urban Challenge demonstrated that they could function on normal roadways, dealing with traffic laws, other vehicles, and pedestrians along the way.

Once you have vehicles that can drive themselves, a fleet of them (run by, say, a taxi company) offers nearly all of PRT’s advantages without its drawbacks. Consider these improvements on the PRT concept:

  • Robocars operate on existing roadways. There’s no need for a dedicated infrastructure like PRT’s.
  • If a Robocar breaks down, it can easily be moved out of the way like a car. It wouldn’t block an entire monorail line like a failed PRT tram would.
  • Implementation of Robocars would not need a huge initial investment from a central government, but can be introduced one at a time, just like automobiles. It can therefore happen as gradually or rapidly as the market dictates.
  • By communicating with traffic lights and ensuring optimum travel speeds, Robocars could be nearly as efficient as a PRT system.
  • One can have personal ownership of a Robocar if one wishes.
  • Robocars remain useful as you move out of urban areas.

Robocars, like PRT, offer even more advantages over traditional cars and transit systems: fuel efficiency, convenience, safety, flexibility, and the ability to both enjoy a private space and to do other things while in transit.

See Brad Templeton’s Introduction to the idea for an overview of what it’s all about, or for a glimpse into the possibilities, read his fictional account of what a week with Robocars might look like.

Schlitterbahn with Maggie

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Last Wednesday was Maggie’s day out on the town. After loading up my backpack with snacks from the grocery, we lit off for New Braunfels. Though we were there about 30 minutes before the official opening time, we were able to immediately get our wristbands and join the queue. Once the gates swung wide, we headed immediately for The Dragon’s Revenge, an update to the Dragon Blaster ride. Though the “multimedia extravaganze” turned out to be a bit overplayed, this turned out to be a smart move, as the line for the ride was crazy long for the rest of the day.

I especially enjoyed this trip, as Maggie is now enjoying some of the more exciting rides, including the excellent tube chutes that are, to my mind, the heart of Schlitterbahn. Though they’ve rerouted those chutes a bit since my teenage years, Raging River is still a particular favorite, largely due to the fact that it can take about 40 minutes to go through the whole thing. Maggie also really liked the Whitewater chute with all of its vertiginous drops.

Though Schlitterbahn is fairly expensive, you get good value for your money and aren’t hit with additional unexpected costs through the day. Parking is free, and you can bring in a cooler or backpack with food. Lockers are available, but we’ve never had any trouble just leaving on stuff on one of the numerous picnic tables or lounge chairs that are scattered liberally throughout the place. The park is well-maintained and well-staffed, and remains a great destination even as it has grown over the years.

After a full day of watery fun, we stopped at Freddy’s Frozen Custard for some chicken strips and their awesomely addictive french fries, and then headed on home, happily and completely tuckered out.

Happy Vignettes

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A few enjoyable bits from this weekend:

  • Friday night, I attended a small gathering of guys to celebrate my friend Craig’s birthday by playing Axis & Allies and Acquire until late in the night. Craig’s wife graciously organized the evening for him starting two months in advance, and then scampered off to allow the testosterone to course freely and without inhibition through the house. I took a drubbing at both games, but still had a grand time.
  • We enjoyed a delightful lunch with the Barnards and the Hulls on Sunday afternoon, with great conversation, much hilarity, good food, and several intense rounds of Speed Scrabble, which I enjoy much more (and at which I’m much better) than normal Scrabble. Thanks for a great time, y’all!