Author Archives: SeanMcTex

In the Land of Teenage Girls

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Wednesday night, I found myself at a place I would never have expected to end up as a 37-year old man: in the middle of a screaming crowd of enraptured teenage girls at a Fall Out Boy concert.

How did this strange circumstance come to pass? It all starts with having a teenage daughter. Emily is a big fan of the band, and I had been casting about for something to do with her for our summer day out. (Each summer, I take a day off of work to spend individually with each of the kids, and try to arrange something that will be fun and memorable to do together.) I stumbled across the concert on the Internet, and quickly booked tickets from the usurious Ticketmaster, thinking it would be an ideal thing to do together. Judging by Emily’s post on her MySpace blog, it was a good choice:

SQWEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! (x50)

Current mood: bouncy

OMYGAWDIMGUNNAGOTOTHEFALLOUTBOYCONSERT!!!! *gasp* I Found The Tickets In My Dads Bag! We Have Seat 50 And 49 Out On The Lawn! BUTIMGUNNASEEPATRICKANDPETE!!!! *gasp* I Was Right!! ^_^

We started off the day with a trip to Half-Price Books to pick out a few volumes for Emily’s summer reading: To Kill a Mockingbird and Orson Scott Card’s Seventh Son, which I hoped would fit the bill of a “coming-of-age story” — her only guidance for selecting a second tome in addition to the mandatory Harper Lee novel. (We also looked for To Kill a Mockingbird II: Mockingbird’s Revenge, but they were all out.)

We then went on to have a Chinese buffet for lunch, where Emily tried sushi for the first time, decided she liked it, and smuggled a couple pieces out to bring to her friend Aranda. (Yes, I’m aware that Sushi isn’t Chinese, but it seemed a less egregious violation of the federal culinary genre regulations than the enchiladas that also inexplicably graced the buffet.) From there, we visited PetSmart, admired the critters for a bit, and then proceeded on to the local movie theater to see Surf’s Up, which turned out to be better than I’d expected.

At last we drove down to Verizon Wireless Amphitheater for the show. After navigating the backroads of Selma and the parking lot attendants who were initially strangely reluctant to actually let people park, we made it in and assumed our seats. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, though we had paid for lawn tickets, we actually got to sit under cover and in chairs. The show included a whole slew of opening bands:

  • Cobra Starship: Energetic rock with some synth thrown in for fun. Lively front man, decent music, Emily’s second-favorite of the evening. Used the F-Bomb instead of commas, which I thought an odd grammatical affectation.
  • Paul Wall: Houston rapper who was not doing anything that hadn’t been done first and better by others.
  • The Academy Is: These guys were my favorite. Driving music, interesting arrangements.
  • +44: Some blink-182 expats. Decent music, good lighting design for their portion of the show.

And then finally Fall Out Boy were launched on stage. They had a really kinetic, entertaining show, with lots of video, pyrotechnics, lighting wizardry, and craziness. I didn’t know much of their music, and what few songs were familiar were actually musically better in their studio versions, but they were still solid musically, with Patrick Stump doing an especially credible job with the vocals — not always a strong point in live performances. Emily screamed herself hoarse and danced herself silly and generally enjoyed the heck out of it.

I had a great time running around with Emily for the day, and am thoroughly grateful that our life allows for this sort of fun break from our daily routines.

Father’s Day at Mo Ranch

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We spent this past weekend at Mo Ranch with First Presbyterian Church of San Antonio, which Dad McMains and Lana attend. The church hosts an annual Father’s Day Weekend retreat, which Kathy and Emily and I first joined in very shortly after our wedding. That was exciting for me, as I had grown up attending various church camps at the ranch, and it has long been one of my favorite places on earth. Thus, the prospect of the trip itself was exciting, but was made even more so by the chance to introduce the younger kids to a site that is both so beautiful and personally meaningful.

The trip was great, and too full to really detail right now, but here are some of the highlights:

  • Getting to spend time and celebrate Father’s Day with a fairly broad swath of the extended family, all of whom we enjoy a great deal and none of whom we get to spend enough time with routinely. The kids all picked out nifty little succulents for me from the greenhouse as gifts to supplement my fledgling cactus garden, and Emily gave me an awesome Sam & Max lap board she had created in art class this year. We also presented Dad McMains with a rooster sculpture for their front yard renovation project, the smuggling of which involved a good deal of legerdemain and hijinx.
  • We took a direct route across the hill country, rather than sticking to the highway, and enjoyed lots of beautiful terrain along the way as well as a visit to Stonehenge II, a delightfully eccentric, typically Texan project wherein the English Stonehenge was reproduced at about half scale. While it was privately financed and remains on private property, it’s open to the public for visits. There are also two reproductions of Easter Island statues on the site. When they sighted them, the kids, who had recently watched Night at the Museum, delightedly shrieked “Dum Dum! It’s Dum Dum!”
  • Late night talk, music, and slightly-illicit wine while watching lightning and/or the stars. (Which, as advertised, are big and bright [clap clap clap clap] deep in the heart of Texas.)
  • Getting to do a rendition of Will the Circle be Unbroken with Lana, Tim (Meara‘s significant other who plays string bass) and new friend Margaret for the Talent/Variety Show. It went over quite well, though given that much of the rest of the show was kids lip-syncing and doing cartwheels, that’s probably somewhat faint endorsement. Chris apparently received several compliments for his (non-existent) part in the performance, which I told him was fine because I routinely take credit for ENT surgeries as well.
  • Showing the kids one of my favorite little science experiments: smuggling a cup of milk out of the cafeteria to the catwalk that spans a gorge, and then pouring drops of milk out to fall to the ground below. Because of the Bernoulli effect, the pressure on the sides of the droplets decreases as their velocity increases, causing them to “explode” fairly spectacularly about halfway through their fall.
  • I took a couple of early morning walks before the rest of the family was awake, enjoying the opportunity to explore the bits that have been added to the Ranch since I had visited, to reacquaint myself with the more venerable sections, and to see the various fauna that was out foraging for their own breakfasts.
  • Walking a labrynth for the first time. With Maggie and Liam along, it wasn’t a totally contemplative time, but interesting none the less.
  • Playing in the river with the family. The slide and the “rapids” — a shallow, limestone-bottomed section of the river where the water has carved a variety of beautiful channels and pools — were among the best parts. I especially enjoyed showing the girls how, if you sit very still in one of the pools for a few minutes, the minnows and small fish will come up and start nibbling on your arms and legs, eliciting delighted giggles.

It was a wonderful time, and one I hope we can reprise annually. Thanks to the Mo Ranch and First Pres folks for putting it all together!

Kiva

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I’ve added a new item to the “Do Some Good” sidebar this morning: “Fund a Microloan”, which leads to Kiva, a brilliant organization that brings together donors directly with poor business owners who are in need of very small loans for their businesses.

The gist is this: you can browse the site to find a business owner you’d be interested in giving a loan to. Here’s a sample:

Once you’ve decided to help fund a business, you submit money via PayPal. You can then opt to receive updates on the business via email or RSS. When the business owner repays the loan (and the vast majority do — the default rate is an amazing 0.29%), you can either withdraw your money or choose to reinvest in another business.

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of microloans for a while, and think this is a spectacular idea. I plan to give each of the kids some money to put into this so that they can have a hand in helping out some industrious folks who lack means elsewhere and hopefully gain a little insight into the world beyond the United States.

It’s great to see Kiva using the Internet to give people a personal way to help people out and to invest in other economies. Thanks, guys!

Boring RSS Housekeeping

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Hi folks,

For those of you subscribed to this weblog via RSS, please update your readers to the new feed address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mcmains/ruminations

The old address will continue to work for the time being, but may break at some point in the future. Thanks!

UPDATE: For some reason, this particular post attracts comment spammers like moths to a flamethrower. Thus, I’m turning comments off for this page. Sorry about that, real humans!

Doggie To-Do

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Two days ago, I got the e-mail we’d been dreading since posting our found dog ad on Craig’s List:

We have been missing a black & white border collie female.

Her name is Daisy and she is very friendly.

Hope this is her,we are at xxxxx@xxxxxxx.net

Uh oh. We exchanged a few more emails, and it sounded like this was legitimately the writer’s dog — after all, how many female border collies could be wandering the Texas hill country near San Marcos? We arranged for her to come by and pick up the hound, and then everybody sat around the living room, despondently throwing the ball around the house for the dog to retrieve. One. Last. Time.

The doorbell rang at last, and the woman and her son came in. They played with the dog for a bit, looked her up and down, and after about 30 seconds announced “This isn’t Daisy.”

As you can imagine, there was much rejoicing among the family members who had grown attached to the wee beast over the past few weeks. We made a game attempt to be sympathetic to the owner who had not, in fact, found her dog, but I think it came off a trifle hollow.

So it looks like the provisional addition to our family may be a permanent one. (And yes, {Stephanie Woodward}, I realize that I still owe you a photo of the dog. I posted one, but my weblog software ate it and started throwing errors. I suspect that it was jealous.)

Bioshock and Ayn Rand

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In another world, Ken Levine might have been a novelist, and his team at Irrational his writers group, meeting around a dusty table in a Parisian cafe. Like Ayn Rand, he might have written a 1,000 page opus on power, free will, and human fallibility.

Instead he’s making BioShock.

One of the games I’m most looking forward to this year is Bioshock. My anticipation was further heightened by reading this article, in which the story that Ken Levine, the game’s designer, is crafting is examined. It’s exciting to me that he’s approaching the project primarily as a way to tell this story, with the game elements pressed into service to further that goal — a shift in priorities that I think will have to happen before games will be thought of as an artistic medium on par with music, theater, and cinema. Very interesting read.

Weekend To-Do: Post-Mortem

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Minor Tweaks, one of my favorite people-I’ve-never-met weblogs, runs a regular feature called “Weekend To Do List: Post-Portem”. Believing fervently that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, I’m adopting the practice here. Enjoy!

  • Take wife to Fredericksburg for anniversary getaway. Marvel at, contribute to, economy fueled entirely by souvenirs.
  • Try Mad Dog hot sauce on a cracker. Realize belatedly that 600,000 scoville units is 90x hotter than Tabasco. Sweat and moan.
  • Watch “The Holiday”. Wonder why we didn’t get famous neighbors when we did a home exchange in England.
  • Find dog by side of road. Adopt against better judgement.
  • Accidentally set Dance Dance Revolution machine to “ultra-hard”. Flail gamely to the amusement and consternation of Chuck E. Cheese visitors. (“Hide your eyes, children!”) Thank the heavens wife doesn’t know how to use YouTube.
  • Install ceiling fan acquired 9 months ago.

Weekend To-Do: Post-Mortem

Posted on by

Minor Tweaks, one of my favorite people-I’ve-never-met weblogs, runs a regular feature called “Weekend To Do List: Post-Portem”. Believing fervently that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, I’m adopting the practice here. Enjoy!

  • Take wife to Fredericksburg for anniversary getaway. Marvel at, contribute to, economy fueled entirely by souvenirs.
  • Try Mad Dog hot sauce on a cracker. Realize belatedly that 600,000 scoville units is 90x hotter than Tabasco. Sweat and moan.
  • Watch “The Holiday”. Wonder why we didn’t get famous neighbors when we did a home exchange in England.
  • Find dog by side of road. Adopt against better judgement.
  • Accidentally set Dance Dance Revolution machine to “ultra-hard”. Flail gamely to the amusement and consternation of Chuck E. Cheese visitors. (“Hide your eyes, children!”) Thank the heavens wife doesn’t know how to use YouTube.
  • Install ceiling fan acquired 9 months ago.

Liam's First Video Game

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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 of learning how they worked.

I’ve been looking for a while for a way to replicate this for my own kids. They certainly won’t have the patience to sit and type in endless lines of BASIC code, nor should they have to. Our computers are far to capable and powerful for anybody to have to suffer through that sort of thing any more. But how can one learn the sort of logical thinking necessary for writing software without necessarily having to deal with all that fussy syntax and unrewarding rote copying?

MIT has an excellent answer to these questions in the form of Scratch, a visual programming environment cum social web site. The free download makes it easy for people to create multimedia projects, games, interactive art pieces, and the like, and then to post and share them for other people to see. The development environment looks like this:

The key innovation here is the visual language; it allows programmers to create pretty complicated logic in a very intuitive, visually obvious way. Liam and Abigail both picked it up very rapidly, and with a bit of coaching for the trickier bits, Liam had knocked together a very passable maze game within an hour or so. Better yet, because Scratch includes a website as in integral part of the system, he was able to upload his new game and get comments from other people using the system immediately. And here it is:

You can try his game out right here. If you have a young one you’d like to get some programming experience, or you’re just looking for a fun and easy prototyping tool, I heartily recommend Scratch. Thanks, MIT!

Portland: Part the Second

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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 and turning. Additionally, the facility has taken strides to be one of the premiere sustainable conference centers in the country, with an emphasis on recycling all the waste the conference visitors generate, capturing and filtering rainwater through gardens before returning it to the Columbia river, and use of natural light and energy efficient materials.



Wednesday morning I met up with Seth in person for the first time outside of the hotel, where we tromped on over to the conference center with Mary, my coworker from the University who also came out for the conference. It was great fun to finally get to spend time with someone who I have known for seven years now, but never met face-to-face. We were joined shortly thereafter by Jim, another veteran of the glory days of Macrobyte Resources. In spite of the fact that none of us had spent time in person before, it was a meeting of old friends; the shared meals, conversations, and photo/mischief excursions were among the highlights of the trip for me.

Since my circadians do not turn on a dime, I found myself popping unwillingly out of bed each morning shortly after 5:00am — my normal time to wake up minus the two timezones I was away from my accustomed place. I was initially a bit at a loss what to do with that time, but since it was getting light very early and the metro rail was free to ride in the downtown area, I took to exploring the city a bit. I especially enjoyed a stroll through Portland State University’s campus, which has a nice central park area, some cool trompe l’oeil murals on the buildings, and an abundance of the rhododendrons that were so enthusiastically blooming around the city.


The conference itself was one of the most odd and entertaining I’ve been to. In addition the previously posted ukulele/accordion cover of Radiohead, we also were treated to a performance of the Extra Action Marching Band, which is exactly the sort of band you’d expect to be leading a parade through the Castro district in San Francisco, and an over-hour-long exploration of next-generation participatory media from the always-entertaining Ze Frank. His presentation revealed depths of thinking about this stuff that his 3-minute The Show appearances wouldn’t have belied; he’s an incisive and insightful guy. Even the corporate representatives got in on the fun with photoshopped Dick Cheneys inserted into Battlefield Earth shots. Fun and funny all around.

In the middle of all the shenanigans, there was a lot of good technical information as well. Some of my favorite bits included details on integrating Rails apps with Interactive Voice Response systems, discussions of refactoring code for readibility and elegance, a framework for data warehouse reports, javascript AJAX frameworks, and running rails in a Java VM. Overall, it was an excellent conference, and I’m glad, both personally and professionally, that I was able to go.