Hurricane Rita is headed for the Texas coast, and our state is in a bit of turmoil. People coming out of Houston last night took about 12 hours to get to our neck of the woods, rather than the usual 3, as mandatory evacuations started to go into effect in the region. Our local groceries are selling out of bottled water and flashlights, and friends’ houses are beginning to fill up with people who have left the coastal towns to be further inland.

For those who have expressed concern, we’re in a pretty good spot to ride it out. Our house is in one of the highest parts of San Marcos, so we should be safe from flooding, and we’re stocking up a bit on non-perishables, gas, etc. in case services get disrupted. We may be welcoming in friends of friends over the next couple of days as coastal populations move inland, but don’t expect things to get too wild. We’ll post further as events warrant.

For those of you who don’t know, yesterday was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I began the observance early, greeting the kids at the table with “Avast, me wee buccaneers! I see ye be eatin’ your fine Cheerios and sea-tack already!” Curiously, instead of the usual chorus of “You’re wierd, Dad!” I instead got two separate cries of “Stop it, Dad!” Grumpy kids. They must not have had their coffee yet.

In other news, I’d been feeling very slightly smug even since Daniel had his bike accident back in April, as I’d been riding for a while without incident. My smugness evaporated this morning, as while I was taking a left turn from RR12 onto Holland Street (in front of Jive Turkey), my wheels, dampened from a slog through dew-moistened grass, went completely out from under me. I landed on hip and helmet, pretty well shredding my slacks. While I certainly felt the impact, my head was pretty well undamaged, thanks to the helmet doing exactly what helmets are designed to do. My forearm was a bit torn up as well, though I was fortunately in good enough shape to hastily get myself and my bike out of the road.

A quick trip home, a new pair of pants, some antibiotic ointment, and I was back on the road again, making it into the office the second time without incident. Huzzah.

Nintendo’s next-gen console, slated to more-or-less compete against the XBox 360 (lauching in November), and the PS3 (planned for 2006 sometime), is called the Revolution. While Nintendo’s let some info about the Revolution out, they’ve been very cagy about the controller. Until now.

At the Tokyo Game Show, they rolled this trailer for the controller. It can apparently be used to point at a specific location on the screen (Duck Hunt 3000, anyone?), but also tracks motion gyroscopically, and can be used like a baseball (or cricket) bat, sword, drumstick, flashlight, dentist’s drill, etc. As the DS has enabled some interesting sorts of games that nobody else is doing, so also should the Revolution open up some new possibilities. It’s great to see Nintendo carving out their own niche amid the clash of the titans that is console gaming these days.

UPDATE: It appears that the motion tracking may not be gyroscopic, but infrared that relies on an array of sensors around the screen. All things considered, that probably makes more sense, as gyroscopes would need calibration from time to time, and would draw more power from the batteries of the wireless remote. Having a separate sensor array also means that there wouldn’t have to be any of the screen flash you get with Duck Hunt or similar games.

UPDATE 2: Tilt-sensitive? Ok, maybe there are gyroscopes in the dang thing. Who knows. I’m sure someone will take one apart as soon as they’re in the public’s hands.

Sorry for the dearth of updates lately. I was sick for a fair portion of last week, and have been generally in a creative slump, so haven’t been turning out anything in the way of interesting writing or photography. A few items of note:

• Kathy and I enjoyed a great birthday party this past weekend for Jason Young. Thanks for inviting us to be part of the fun, Erin!
• I’m signed up for a Kayaking class on September 24-25, and am pretty excited about it.
• I pitched some of my nascent ideas about exploring games in education to one of the managers in my office, and he thought it a good enough idea to spring for my registration for the Serious Games Summit. So, I’ll be in D.C. on halloween, enjoying discussions of the pedagogical applications of interactive play. (No repeat of The Screaming Electric Pumpkin this year, I’m afraid!) I’m pretty excited about this one too.
• We went to Nava, Mexico over labor day for a friend’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It was a good experience overall. We enjoyed raiding the excellent bakery at the a supermarket there, visiting candy and pinata shops, and being pretty well befuddled by a celebratory mass in Spanish.
• Emily went to her first school dance recently and, in spite of (or, as we like to flatter ourselves, because of) parental worry, had a great time.

We’ve all seen the photos, stories, and video streaming out of the devastated regions in the southern United States. I don’t have anything to add to those stories, other than a plea to help. How does one continue to live when not only has one’s home been washed away, but one’s job and the paychecks it brings are all underwater as well, and you find yourself in a place where you don’t know anybody? It’s too much — unfathomable for us comfortable suburbanites, I fear. One is reduced to quoting Blanche Dubois: “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

But we can help out. (I’m sure many of you have done so already.) There are a bunch of relief organizations that are lending a hand, and which make it very easy to contribute to their efforts. Mercy Corps is one of my favorites, but you can, of course, support whatever group you like.

Just do help somehow. (Liam decided to kick in the couple bucks he had saved to the relief effort last night, you’re not going to let a six year old show you up, are you?)

Go and give. Be generous.

Thanks.

Last Friday, I took Liam to see Tim Walsh perform a laser show at the Price Senior Center. Liam had seen a flyer advertising the event a month and a half ago at the library, and had been keen to go ever since. Having a certain enthusiasm for such things myself, I decided that would be a great thing for us to do together.

Due to a scheduling mixup, we ended up arriving an hour before the show started and decided to take a walk up to 7-Eleven and get hopped up on Hawaiian Punch before things began. After we had a sufficient sugar buzz, we stashed the remaining drink in the car and took a seat in the welcome coolness of the Senior Center’s main auditorium. The last time I’d seen this room, it was still being renovated, so I was pleased to see that it was now complete, and had been beautifully finished.

The lights dimmed and Mr. Walsh introduced his show, explaining some of what we’d be seeing. The first bit was an introductory sequence that explained how laser shows work, followed quickly by some nice sequences of imagery projected onto a screen above the stage. While there was nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary about the projection of these images, I was glad to see that the state of the art in the software that drives the projection has come along, allowing Mr. Walsh to move the “camera” through three dimensional spaces, and for objects in the foreground to occlude objects in the background. He then moved on to a few more presentations that demonstrated the aurora borealis effect one gets when shining a laser through a piece of shaped glass, and the various beams, sheets, and waves that one can create by projecting lasers through the air.

After these fairly standard (though well done) presentations, Mr. Walsh launched into some new territory. He explained that he had long been interested in merging the music and the images the laser show creates, and that he had finally discovered a way of merging the two that he’s exploring that he believes has considerable promise. By taking the electrical signals that move the mirrors to aim the lasers and feeding that signal into the speakers, he’s able to use the same waveforms to create both the images and the sound. He went on to play a piece for us called “Sidewinder” which used this technique. It had a very electronic, syncopated feel to it which, while harsh at times, was quite compelling, especially when one observed the synchronicity between the aural and visual aspects of the piece. He went on to demonstrate the technique in several other pieces, including an interesting one based on variations of Taps. One of the central musical motifs of that piece was a slide up and down the overtone series, generated by a spiral on screen slowly coiling and uncoiling itself.

The show wrapped up with a few more traditional patriotic pieces, including a rendition of Deep in the Heart of Texas, for which the assembled audience spontaneously provided the series of four claps at the appropriate spots. (I guess Pee Wee Herman was right about that.) I’d have loved to have gotten to stay and visit with Mr. Walsh a bit, but evening was coming on and we needed to get home. Liam loudly proclaimed the show “the coolest thing ever” on the way home, so I considered it a night well-spent.

See the Laser Spectacles website for more information on the sorts of laser-based shenanigans Mr. Walsh & Co. are up to. Be sure to see the Laser Harp and read about the world’s largest video game (Asteroids, as it turns out).

In A Book-Lover’s Idyll, I waxed rhapsodic on libraries and told of a mysterious book that helped to spark my love for them. A few months ago, I was rooting through the racks at Half Price Books and stumbled across the mystery book, apparently in the same edition as the long-lost one I started to read two and a half decades ago, as I immediately recognized the cover art. It was Thrice Upon a Time, by James Hogan. I’d read some of James Hogan’s other books over the years and enjoyed them, so was anxious to finally bring closure to that my long-standing Quixotic quest and finish the book.

You know what? It wasn’t bad. Certainly not the majestic opus my memory had built it into, but an enjoyable read nonetheless. But far better than the reading was, of course, the discovery, the chance to read the last page of the book I’d started 25 years ago — definitely the longest it’s ever taken me to finish reading a story!

I’ve finally finished up the England Travelogue, filling in the days that I didn’t have time to write about while actually on the trip. If you were following along while we were over there, the new bits are Days 15 & 16, Days 12 & 13, The Wedding Day, and Day 5.

Google has released a new instant messaging/voice chat system, built on Jabber, an open-source standard for such things. I’m fiddling about with it this morning; my username on gmail is SeanMcTex, if anyone feels like saying hello.

This morning on The Big Think, I found a link to the partial text of the new Iraqi Constitution. From the preable:

We the people of Iraq, newly arisen from our disasters and looking with confidence to the future through a democratic, federal, republican system, are determined — men and women, old and young — to respect the rule of law, reject the policy of aggression, pay attention to women and their rights, the elderly and their cares, the children and their affairs, spread the culture of diversity and defuse terrorism.

We are the people of Iraq, who in all our forms and groupings undertake to establish our union freely and by choice, to learn yesterday’s lessons for tomorrow, and to write down this permanent constitution from the high values and ideals of the heavenly messages and the developments of science and human civilization, and to adhere to this constitution, which shall preserve for Iraq its free union of people, land and sovereignty.

Wow. Strong, beautiful stuff. A few more thoughts while reading the document over:

• Islam is recognized as the state religion, though the more fanatical sects (especially the Saddamist Baath party) are specifically opposed. The multifaith nature of their society is, however, acknowledged and supported.
• Women’s right to participate in public life (including running for office) are upheld.
• Interesting that several rights are limited not only by the rights of others and public order, as in the American system, but also by “the general morality.” The right to privacy and the right to free speech are those that are curtailed in this way.
• The rule of law (Lex Rex) is emphasized strongly — something one would expect to see in the wake of despotic dictators.
• The structure of the federal government looks similar to the American model — an executive, judicial, and legislative branch, the latter with two houses.

This is fascinating reading. I personally find it quite heartening, principally because of the differences from the American model. It would appear from this document that Iraq is indeed beginning to chart its own course — not becoming a little America, but its own entity. Though there’s still a terrifically long way to go, if the promise of this fledgling constitution is realized, then there may well be hope for Iraq to stand on its own feet and that our people might come home.