Author Archives: SeanMcTex

Gambling More Reliable Than Voting

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Over at his weblog, my friend Jim Roepcke posts an interesting comparison of the regulations governing slot machines and those over electronic voting machines. It’s pretty sobering, and makes The Onion’s story on the election results being released in advance look alarmingly plausible.

It’s absolutely ridiculous that software that does something as straightforward as polling should be a trade secret. As a software engineer who has worked extensively with both software that is kept a closely guarded secret and that which has its source code open and available for anybody to look at, I would certainly be much more comfortable with the latter being used in a process that needs to be open and accountable. There is an army of interested geeks who would be combing through the voting machine code, making sure everything worked properly and was secure, if only they were able.

Sundries

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A few goings-on of late that bear mentioning:

  • Liam has started playing Little League baseball. It’s a load of fun, and significantly more action-packed than Major League, since stealing bases is allowed and the boys aren’t so hot at catching the ball. During the last game, which due to time limits was only 4 innings long, the final score was 13-15. I got drafted to do scorekeeping, so got to learn what those little sheets that my friend Robert Leahey used to have around the house are actually for. The worst moment in the recent game, however, was when a stray foul ball from an adjacent field abruptly appeared and whacked Liam in the face. He was OK after a 15 minute sit-down and some ice, and his enthusiasm for the game continues unabated.
  • Daniel Priest and I got together for a visit this weekend. After much dithering over what we would do, we eventually decided to watch Nick Cage’s movie Next. Not, mind you, because it looked particularly good, but because it was one of the titles for which there was a download available on RiffTrax. “What,” I (for rhetorical purposes) hear you asking, “are RiffTrax?” Well, consider that Mike Nelson, who spearheads the site, was the host of Mystery Science Theater 3000 for many a year, and you can take a pretty good guess. They’re basically MP3s you can buy to play along with a movie and thereby provide a steady stream of jokes at the movie’s expense. I hadn’t tried one before, but found it great fun. Mike still has a razor wit, and is complemented nicely by different foils for various movies. (Weird Al Yankovic is a guest for Jurassic Park.) Great fun, and heartily recommended.

Waving Hands

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Last night, Kathy and I went to see Keith Wann, a stand-up comic, at the Texas State student center. The interesting thing about Keith is that, though he himself is able to hear, he was born to deaf parents and has lived a fair portion of his life in deaf culture. He performs using American Sign Language with his wife providing a spoken translation for those in the audience who aren’t fluent in that form of communication.

It was fascinating to watch how this played out for this crowd. They greeted him by holding their hands up and shaking them — the applause of the deaf community. He then went on for 90 energetic minutes, running around the stage, recounting stories of his childhood with deaf parents, his straddling of the hearing and deaf world, and making affectionate fun of ASL students. It was great to see how he blended together the signed and brief spoken bits of his monologue and how both the deaf and hearing portions of the audience responded to him. Here’s a representative bit that gives a good idea of his schtick:

The show was lots of fun; I do recommend going to see him if you happen to have an opportunity.

Goings-On

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“I’ve been one poor correspondent, I’ve been too too hard to find…”

Sorry about the scant posting of late, my little chickadees. Lots of life going on, and the A Photo A Day project was sucking up a bit of time in February, even though I didn’t manage to totally complete the challenge I set myself.

Here are a few of the things that have been going on:

  • I accidentally found myself at the Barack Obama rally when he was in town. (Was at a recital with friends, and they decided to stop by on the way home.) Excellent speaker, and I like a lot of his policy ideas. I’m not yet sure how he plans to fund all of those potentially expensive ideas, but generally like what I’ve seen of him thus far.
  • Went to Baylor’s All-University Sing, for which Jason Young did the music for 14 of the 16 acts this year and where Barry Brake played in the pit band. It was, as always, a great show, and a wonderful time to hang out at Taco Cabana afterward, talking about the various acts and causing mischief with a liberated chunk of dry ice. (We didn’t manage to get kicked out this year, though.)
  • Played a fun show at Cheatham Street last weekend. My favorite part was when, without warning, a guy who none of us had ever seen before leaped onto the stage with a trumpet in the middle of a song and played a scorching solo. It turned out that his name was Robert Ortiz, and he was so good we had him up for another song! I love the unpredictability of live shows — one gets to see some great stuff at times. (I once saw a 5 foot nothing female bartender chase several inebriated bikers out of a bar because they were being so noisy that other patrons couldn’t hear the music.)
  • Enjoyed a thoroughly delightful birthday lunch with much of the nearby extended family on Saturday. It was great to get to catch up with some of these dear people with whom we don’t get to visit as often as we’d like.

My New Favorite Book

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Last week, Liam brought home a small book that he had created in school. I thought it was great, so am posting its entire text verbatim here. Enjoy!

Playdate with my dad pg 1

“OOOOOOH” this is going to be fun I said gleefuly on an early summer morning.  I am going on a very long play date with my dad. “It is going to be so fun” I said. First we went to a place called Peter Pan’s Mini Golf. I got a black putter with shiny new ornge ball. My dad got an ornge putter with a Shiny yellow ball. I got almost every hole a hole in one but two of them got hole in twos and one hole in three. one of the holes had a hill and I got a hole it two on that one. It was so fun at the mini golf place. Next we went to a very fun place called kid town. they have more mini golf, basketball, three playgrounds and a singing area (which you know I did not go on). First I played basket-ball. It made me so tird that I had to drink almost a gallon of water. Then I went back and played some more. Next I went and played on the playground for a very long time. my dad look lots of pictures of me.

Playdate with my dad pg 2

Next we went to a resaruant called the Alamo Steak house. I found a gum-ball machine and if you got a black gum ball you got a free meal and guess what!? I got one of the black ball’s so we got a free meal and I chose the all you can eat buffett. I nearly barfed because I ate so many fries! Next we went to go swim in the San marcos river. I was collecting rocks for my collection. I found a heart Shaped one and gave it to my dad. Next we played with water guns and water balloons up in the grass. I acidentaly knocked my dads glasses of his head but luckily he found them in the tall green grass. next we went to mr. gatties and ate pizzia. It tasted very good. Next we went to the game Room. I had one hundred tokens and i bet you can’t guest how many tickets I got!? four thousand eight hundred thirty seven. i got a pool table, lava lamp, glow in the dark things, a pretend samiri sord and too-tsie Rolls. Next we went home wathch pirates of the caribean and went to bed.

Two Heroes

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Two people that I have found myself looking up to lately:

  • There’s an 91 year old woman who volunteers at the Hays County Food Bank. While I will likely consider it a fairly major accomplishment to keep my nose hair well groomed and those darn kids off my lawn when I’m that age, she’s out there mixing it up with college-aged volunteers, schlepping around 30 pound boxes of food with the best of them. I am in awe of this beautiful, leathery lady.
  • Yahoo posted a piece on Jonathan Coulton, who quit his job as a software engineer at age 36 to write and perform music. I already loved his songs, and now I love his story, though I’d best be careful not to read too many articles of this sort lest I be tempted to go do something downright irresponsible. Be sure to catch the video.

Thanks for the inspiration, folks.

Birthday Sculpture

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For her friend Michael’s birthday, Emily made these casts of her hand spelling out “LOVE”, mounted them on a board, and gave them individual paint jobs. It has now assumed a place of honor in his room next to the audio-animatronic Gene Simmons action figure.

Spectacular work, Em!

Guitar Rising

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This is super-cool. The lads at GameTank recently unveiled Guitar Rising, an upcoming game for Mac and PC that’s modeled on Guitar Hero’s gameplay, but which requires you to play actually guitar parts on a real guitar. You’ll be able to use the guitar of your choice, as long as it has a pickup or a microphone that can be plugged in to the audio inputs on your computer.

I’m frankly surprised that someone hasn’t done this for keyboards first, since the MIDI interface most modern keyboards use makes it easy to detect what notes people are actually playing. With guitars, one has to have the computer process the incoming audio signal and figure out what note is being played, a prospect made even dicier when one introduces polyphony and/or the sorts of effects that make a rock guitar sound like a rock guitar.

However, judging by the warm reception Guitar Rising has received, they’ve got a decent handle on the technical challenges, and are working on licensing a bunch of music to have available in the first release of the game later this year. Should be fun, and a great way to improve your guitar chops.

A Photo A Day Kicks Off Today

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Well, a couple of my fun and camera-loving friends have decided to play along, so have created a dedicated page for the A Photo A Day adventure.

If anybody else is interested in joining in the frivolity, all you have to do is post a photo to Flickr  for each day in February, tagging each with aphotoaday08. I’ll add you to the list of participants once I see you on the RSS feed.

I’ve uploaded my first shot to kick things off — more will be coming soon! (I won’t post any more about this here until it’s over, though, so subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to watch them coming in.)