This Friday, Emily left for a four week stint with our relatives in New York. Her absence leaves a noticeable void in our family — not only because we have to remember to count to three instead of four when we’re tallying little heads (we’ve actually taken to borrowing a kid from a friend so as to make this easier for us), but also because of her unique gifts and contributions to the texture of our family life.

On Tuesday I took her for a day-long trip to Fiesta Texas, the Six Flags theme park in San Antonio. We had planned on a Tuesday so that crowds would be light, and the weather cooperated as well; though we got rained on a bit in the morning, the sky was generally more menacing than it was actually stormy. As a result, we never spent more than 10 minutes in line for anything, and several of the ride operators offered us the chance to stay on rides once our first go-round was complete.

Unfortunately, the trip has made it abundantly clear to me that I have become that most sad of creatures: a former roller coaster fan. Though I still have a tremendous appreciation of the engineering and design that goes into these enormous thrill rides, I find actually riding them to be less and less appealing as time goes on. My stomach has gotten weaker over time, and I find myself more often tottering off of the trains trying to regain my equilibrium than exulting in the fantastic experience.

Emily, however, has picked up the slack for me. She rode every one of the big coasters in the park (with the exception of the Rattler, which was closed when we got to the head of the line for lightning — imaginary as far as we could tell) and loved them without fail. She also got a big kick out of the spinny carnival rides which nauseated me simply to watch. (The thing that finally did me in Tuesday was The Frisbee: a giant spinning disk that swings on the end of a huge arm, providing for its riders all the fun I would imagine a Martini enjoys as it’s being mixed.)

So the torch is passed to another generation, and I’m sitting with my laptop, enjoying the vicarious thrill of Roller Coaster Tycoon.

I’m referring, of course, to Terminator 3. I went and watched it last night with a couple of guys from a Bible study. (Savor the irony of that for a moment. Aaaah.)

One expects a certain level of mindless mayhem where Terminator movies are concerned, and this one delivered that in spades. However, I never really cared enough about the characters to make the mayhem feel as threatening as it should have. Plus, the pacing was peculiar. One rather expects the biggest explosions and most impressive set pieces to cap off the film. Not in this case — it just petered out rather abruptly, and left me thinking “Where’s the climactic final battle?” Also disappointing was the fact that the way Arnold finished off the new Terminator — especially given that the Terminator from T2 could easily have escaped that situation. But, of course, I tend to think too much in films like these.

Anyway, a reasonably fun romp, but it left me rather dissatisfied.

Today I took the kids up to Austin for a noon showing of Captain Blood, the movie that catapulted Errol Flynn to stardom, at the Alamo Drafthouse. Harry Knowles has conspired with the owners of the Drafthouse to put on a Saturday Morning Film Club — a monthly event with free admission for kids and adults accompanied by a member of the junior set.

I was rather interested to see what Harry was like in person, since his writing seems to embody the best and worst of an individual whose emotional development stopped around middle school. While taking an unseemly interest in scatological and base humor, he also maintains a boyish enthusiasm for film that seems to resonate with fans and visitors to his heavily trafficked website.

The movie was superb. I hadn’t seen much of Errol in action before, and quite enjoyed the panache with which he played his role. The near-Shakespearian repartee among the characters drew hoots of laughter from the audience, and the furtive pleasure of scarfing down a sandwich during a film completed the experience. (The Drafthouse serves food during shows, so it’s actually an entirely licit treat.)

Harry was on good behavior for the kids, which made his introduction to the film, while a bit long for the young ones in the audience, altogether enjoyable for those of us with an interest in cinema. All in all, it was a great time, and we’re hoping to get back for these monthly events with some regularity.

We went to our company picnic on Saturday. The kids, as usual, had a great time playing in the water, interfering with volleyball games, and eating themselves silly. Two especially noteworthy aspects of this year’s picnic:

1. The kids swept the limbo competition! They were, of their own accord, practicing Friday night, and got 1st (Abigail), 2nd (Emily), and 3rd (Liam) in the contest. Their combined winnings: $60 of gift certificates for Toys R’ Us!
2. Emily befriended the lads from Amy’s Ice Cream who were there serving the stuff. (Incidentally, Amy’s is about my least favorite ice cream — it taste like licking a big scoop of sugared butter to me. Bleah. Kathy loves it.) Emily soon impressed them with her mad ice-cream catching skills — over the shoulder, over the sister, at a distance — whatever they’d pitch, she’d catch. (See the video.)

I just had my first voice chat via Apple’s new iChat AV with Steve. One of my biggest complaints with cellular phones over the years (aside from the fact that they’re phones, which I hate to begin with) has been lag, which makes it tough to talk without stepping all over each others’ words. iChat seemed to be subject to the same problems, to a degree presumably dependent on the speed of the connection between Steve’s and my computers. However, if you can get used to talking in slightly larger blocks, it’s quite managable, and a nice alternative to actually paying for long distance. Bonus feature: it pauses iTunes automatically when you connect to an audio or video conference, and unpauses when you’re done.

Update: I just tried it with video, and oddly enough, the lag seemed less. Either that, or I was just too amused to notice.

Thanks for bearing with the interruptions, Steve. 😉

I just picked up a copy of Cubase SL over on eBay, and am very excited about it. I’ve been looking for some good, affordable digital audio software for Mac OS X for quite a while, and while this is still more expensive than the entry-level stuff for OS 9 was, it’s also a good deal more capable.

The first project planned is recording some of Emily’s favorite songs with her, after which I’d like to do some whistle tunes, a few 1920’s songs, some sacred instrumental music, and eventually a Christmas album to send out this year. I’d also like to talk the guys in the Grant Mazak Band into committing some of the great local songwriters’ tunes to CD. Should be fun!

A bit of computer-related rambling here. Feel free to skip it if it’s not interesting to you.

Lately, a spate of web browsers have started including a feature called “Tabbed Browsing.” The way tabbed browsing works is that each window can have an arbitrary number of tabs, each of which is a different web page. The better implementations of this feature also allow you to bookmark tab sets, which is an enormous time saver.

For example, I have about 10 websites that I read daily. In a browser without this feature, I’d have each of those sites bookmarked, and would select each of the bookmarks sequentially, which of course requires me to wait for each page to load. In Mozilla, I’ve created a tab set bookmark called “Dailies.” When I’m ready to do a bit of reading, I just choose that bookmark, and Mozilla loads all ten sites simultaneously. As I finish reading a site, I simply close its tab, and the next site is ready to be read instantly.

There are a number of other situations where tabbed browsing is immensely useful: copying information from one page into a weblog page, clicking a hyperlink and having it load on another tab in the background so it doesn’t disturb the flow of what you’re reading, etc.

So after using tabbed browsers for several months and enjoying the utility and economy of screen space, I had an idea: why not extend tabs to other kinds of applications than web browsers? A tabbed terminal application comes immediately to mind, and news readers and email programs could probably benefit. Eclipse, a wonderful open-source IDE for Java development, already includes tabbed text editing in its bag of tricks. Even word processing, image editing, and other tasks might be made a bit more intuitive this way, as its often easier to manage multiple documents by clicking among tabs than by moving from window to window.

This would, of course, disrupt some long-used conventions, especially on the Mac, where there’s no equivalent of Multiple Document Interface — a convention many Windows programs already use and to which tabbed navigation would be infinitely superior from a usability standpoint. But the speed with which tabbed browsing has been adopted in web browsers makes me think that it would be easy for most people to grasp, and would offer significant benefits.

Equilibrium is one of my favorite movies of recent memory. The story centers around a Brave New World society where citizens are required to take regular doses of “Prozium” to rid themselves of emotion. The police force is responsible for enforcing the medication, and also tracks down and eliminates “sense offenders” who skip their medication and seek out art and literature that inflames the emotions.

The reason for the prohibition on feeling is that after the last war, society as a whole decided that it was worth suspending this portion of their human nature if it would prevent the kind of horror they saw in that struggle. Of course, our hero misses a dose of his medication, starts to feel once more, and things play out from there.

Add a good premise to a fair bit of impressive action and martial arts work, and you have a combination that’s a bit reminincent of The Matrix, but wholly more enjoyable than the recent sequel.

Within the last week, my team at work has been split in two and pointed in different directions. Further, my boss is a lame duck, having given his two weeks notice prior to starting at an enviable new job where he’ll be a founding member of a new team creating a new online game. Not only that, but his boss has taken a different opportunity, and has a week or so left as well. So I started making friendly with the team lead of my new team, only to discover yesterday that he, too, is joining up with the new game team. And our single remaining DBA will probably be gone at the end of July due to visa issues. Turmoil! Upheaval! Stress!

The bad: obviously, there’s a certain feeling of instability at the moment, and there’s lots of work to be done to effect this transition and ensure it works well.

The good: it looks like there’s a good chance that I’ll actually be getting to do some programming directly on the game eventually, which should be a fun new challenge. (Up to now, I’ve spent all my time on various support systems, notably the account management/billing system.)

I’m honored to have been invited to participate in the overeducated ramblings over at Socrates’ Front Porch, a weblog aptly described thusly by its perpetrators: “A law school student and a philosophy major discuss whatever comes to mind, sip on iced tea and throw rocks at passing cars.”

The philosophy major in question is my friend Daniel Priest, who also lives in San Marcos, is one of the most interesting people to talk with that I know, and who writes some wonderful poetry. I’m delighted to be in such august and irreverent company.