For you technical and musical types: Greg’s working on a way to represent chords on fretted instruments in XML. There have been one or two other attempts at this that I found out on the net, but Greg’s implementation looks to be the most complete and most flexible at this point. Cool stuff.

One of the preeminent ways that spammers get ahold of email addresses is by sending automated programs out to websites to search for email addresses thereon. If your email address appears on a website, it’s a good bet that your Inbox will soon be filled with dubious offers for herbal anatomy enlargers, Norton Systemworks, and business offers from Nigeria.

Since my spam count is now larger than my legitimate email count, I’ve been looking for ways to help fix that problem. Apple’s Mail.app has good filtering, but those spammers are devious, and keep figuring out ways around it. So, I took the step today of changing up the templates on this site so that the addresses of the people who leave messages will no longer be displayed. This will probably make the biggest difference for my inbox, since I post the majority of the messages here, but it will also help keep the spammers away from the other people who participate in discussions here as well.

Thanks to Steve for his help tracking down the right templates, and to Seth and the other Conversant developers for the ability to change thousands of web pages with a few clicks.

I took Emily down to the arcade this past Saturday where we blew through a moderate amount of cash between us. Though I’d watched Dance Dance Revolution machines with some amusement before, this marked my first attempt at actually trying the thing for myself. I once again confirmed the fact that I’d a big, ungainly white guy who has no business doing anything that involves rhythm in any way.

Another crowd favorite as determined by how silly you look when you play was Beachhead 2002 on a VR Vortek system. The VR Vortek features a big, yellow pivoting display that goes over your eyes which provides two critical advantages over a traditional display: 1. By rotating and looking up and down, you can interact with a full 360 degree environment. 2. It makes you look like a big, ungainly white guy whose head has been bitten off and replaced by that of a giant plastic mantis. Fun!

Some highlights from the Chicago Trip:

• Hanging out with the lads: Great fun to see the usual suspects, plus Ben’s friend Ryan, Chris’ medical school roomie Gary, and some of Chris’ friends from his Navy days at Duke, Terry & Megan (and Claire, their lovely daughter).
• The Art Institute of Chicago: American Gothic! A Sunday on La Grande Jatte! The Old Guitarist! Holy cow, it was great art overload.
• Shoreline Sightseeing’s Architectural tour by boat: not only was our guide a veritable wellspring of knowledge and a living window into Chicago’s history, but in the last five minutes of the tour he whipped out a harmonica and sang the blues for us. Who says a degree in humanities can’t get you a job?
• Evil Dead: The Musical!: based on Sam Raimi’s cult low-budget horror film, the Boxer Rebellion Theater adds a variety of music to the original story. Very silly, quite fun, and featured a Q&A with some of the actors and crew from the original film afterwards.
• Pizzaria Uno: the original Chicago deep-dish pizza pie. Heart-stoppingly good.
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home & Studio: Great tour of the home & studio, plus the surrounding neighborhood, which features another 15 or so Wright-designed homes. A marvel.
• A Cubs Game: The Cubs conquered the Pirates, 4 to 3, accompanied by rabid fans, Old Style, and Hebrew National dogs slathered in mustard, onions, tomatoes, banana peppers, and other yumminess.

Today I’ve switched Ruminations over to the new version of Conversant’s weblog plugin. The new system has a bunch of neat new features which I’ll hopefully be doing interesting things with eventually. For now, the only thing to be aware of is that the official RSS feed now lives at https://www.mcmains.net/ruminations/rss for those of you that care about such things.

Friday night I took Kathy to see Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at Southwest Texas. One of my favorite things about living in a University town is the availability of high-quality cultural events on the cheap. This production further cemented that opinion.

Hosted at the Glade Outdoor Theater, a wonderful theater space in one of the little valleys on campus of whose existence I’d previously been unaware, the show was a delightful experience. The cast, though a bit difficult to hear at times, did a superb job with the material, and I found myself laughing heartily once past the mandatory 10-minute adjustment-to-Elizabethan-English period.

The play itself is a curious mixture of tragedy and comedy, and features a few especially memorable characters, Paulina foremost among them. Thanks to the SWT crew for the all-around great job they did with the show.

I burned my first video DVD last night using Apple’s iDVD software. For a test run, I was quite pleased with how it turned out. iDVD created chapter selection screens automatically, based on the chapter markers I’d set up in iMovie. All of the transition and photo pans that stuttered and balked when trying to play on the fly were buttery smooth once crammed together into a continuous video stream. The predefined themes make it pretty easy to create something that looks good, even for one with as little graphic design skill as me. It seems that this will be a superb way to distribute family movies to the parts of the family that are far away.

A couple sticking points: video production takes a lot of time. I’ve spent several hours on the video from our beach trip, and am still not completely done with it. Also, because our video at the beach was shot under overcast conditions, I’ve become acutely aware of the challenge of color correction. iMovie would benefit enormously from a one-button “Enhance” feature, which does one-click color/brightness/contrast correction, as iPhoto now has. Finally, burning DVD’s takes a lot of time. There may be some facility for saving an image of a disc so that you can reproduce it more quickly, but if so, I haven’t yet discovered it.

I’m just back from a great trip to Chicago with Chris, Ross, Ben and several other friends. (More about this later.) While we were there, we went to see the Cubs trounce the Pirates at Wrigley field. I decided to put Chris’ new digital camera to the test and see what I could do with a panorama of the ballpark. This morning, I fed the 6 images that comprised the shot into Photoshop Elements (one of the best $50 I’ve ever spent, by the way), and was delighted with the results:

Click on the image to get the high-resolution version of this beautiful ballpark. Best appreciated on a large monitor.

We went on Saturday to Law Enforcement Appreciation Day where Emily would receive her bike, along with about 50 other kids. After she identified the bike she liked best, she found out that it was indeed the one assigned to her. Since it was windy and cold, we then went indoors until the bike parade began.

Unfortunately, in a rather odd bit of irony, when we came back, someone had swiped the bike. We ended up with a pink bicycle that was much less to her liking and a promise that we could trade it in at Wal-Mart on the bike of her choice. Of course, since we’ve never in our lives had a positive experience at Wal-Mart, when Kathy brought Emily in, they gave her all sorts of difficulty about trading the bike. Kathy finally got fed up with the whole thing, and Emily instead ended up with a Wal-Mart gift card worth the $76 the bike evidently would have cost, which she’s keeping in reserve for when she visits Kathy’s parents this summer.

So, to reiterate: a theft at Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, Wal-Mart is evil, and Emily is a fine artist.

For all you visual learners out there, I’ve finally got a new batch of photos up. These span the last several months, and include a mix of Christmas, road trips, and general family silliness. Visit March 2003 Photos and enjoy!