The New Yorker is making some of the stories they publish available online. A recent one by George Saunders, entitled Jon, is a poignant and affecting coming-of-age tale. Recommended reading!

Kathy has instructed me to take March 6 and 7 off from work, and hinted that it has something to do with my birthday, which is on the 10th. (I was due to be born on St. Patrick’s day, but was a week early, for probably the only time in my first two decades of life.) She has also been hitting the web rather heavily and insisting that I not look at the browser history afterwards. Today she was talking with another friend of hers on the phone, and when I came in to get a drink, furtively slunk into another room, later mentioning that it had to do with birthday goings-on as well.

My curiosity is piqued!

Steve has been after me for a while to get some photos of the arcade project posted. Witness the glory of the Arcade Project Photos page!

We’ve still got some work to do, but progress has been slow of late. This is partially because we needed a bit of a break to remind our Significant Others that yes, indeed, we do still love them, and partially due to the fact that instead of working on it, we can play Galaga! And Robotron! And Centipede! And Pole Position! And Moon Patrol! And Defender! And Blasteroids! And 1943! And Mr. Do! And Donkey Kong! And Pac Man! And Joust! And Battle Zone! And…

So, I’m doing my taxes. I sold a bunch of stock this year at a loss, as you might expect. Ameritrade dutifully sends out the appropriate form showing the sales, but doesn’t include any information on how much I paid for the stocks originally — information which I need for my tax return. I check their online archives, but they don’t go back far enough to show the original purchase. The only recourse I have there is evidently to shell out $5 a pop for copies of the trade confirmations. Grrr.

Time to go rooting through the last couple years of financial records, trying to find the stupid records that they should have online, or better, have included with the tax form. I think I’ll take my accounts back to eTrade — they’re much better about this sort of thing.

Though I seldom talk about technical stuff here, I’ve recently found a neat tool that merits a look if you happen to be running Mac OS X. It’s called Konfabulator, and is basically a mini-platform for programming utilities. It uses JavaScript and XML to allow you to create nifty little “widgets” that can do whatever you like. Hooks to the command-line UNIX interface and into AppleScript give it even more capability, and support for Quartz blending and alpha channels help make it easy to make lovely, semi-transparent interfaces with a minimum of fuss.

Of the widgets included, I’m using a picture frame that updates every few minutes with a different photo of my family, an iTunes remote, a stock price monitor, and a weather monitor. I’ve been browsing the developer docs intermittently over the last couple of days, and when faced with a balky server today, was able to easily whip up a little widget of my own that will monitor a URL and report on how long it takes to load that page. Even better, others are posting their widgets to the site at the rate of several per day, so if a particular tool you want isn’t available yet, it very well might be soon. I’ll probably clean up my SiteWatcher widget and make it available once I have a bit of time.

While watching an episode of Reading Rainbow recently, Liam decided that we needed to go bowling for our next “Daddy Date.” The show featured both a visit to a bowling alley, where Levar Burton was showing off his mad bizowling skillz, and a trip to the ball manufacturing plant, which was a lot more interesting than you might expect. (Incidentally, it still rather surprises me every time I see Levar Burton without a hairband over his eyes.)

So last night, Liam and I hit the bowling alley together. Since it was Liam’s first time, we put up the bumpers which, instead of letting your ball fall into the gutter as it otherwise might, bounces it back into the lane. I’d like to say that the bumpers were entirely for Liam’s benefit, but I must admit that my score was a bit higher than it would have been without them. The alley had some extra-light balls for children, which were startling to pick up. There was a family with two little girls, one smaller than Liam, next to us, so there was no shortage of entertainment for the adults.

After taking a few frames to warm to it, Liam really enjoyed himself, and was disappointed when our two games were done. He got a 75 the first game and an 89 the second, even bowling a couple of spares. (No strikes yet, though I’m sure he’ll get there eventually.)

Among the last things he said about it when we were putting our shoes back on: “Daddy, I want to be a bowler when I grow up!”

This crazy old state of Texas in a fun place to live: snowmen one day, balmy 70° weather the next. Here are Emily’s previously-mentioned snow constructs, along with the proud artist. Kathy’s suggested caption: “Not everything is bigger in Texas!”

I’ve decided to break my arcade project out into a separate weblog. The reasons for this are twofold:

1. I’m writing about it in smaller, more frequent chunks than I generally write on this log, and don’t want the important stuff to be lost amid my feverish project ramblings.
2. I’ve been meaning to spend some more time testing the newer version of Conversant’s web logging system, and this gives me a good excuse without messing with Ruminations.

If you’d like to follow along, you can do so here, or alternately use the RSS feed which is here. I’m afraid, however, that those of you who read via email are stuck getting everything.

Alright, “Great Blizzard” is an overstatement, but when you live in central Texas, you take what you can get in the snow department. We had a bit of accumulated snow this morning upon waking — not enough to actually build anything significant, but certainly enough to cause the children to burst into our bedroom before we were awake, shouting their excitement at the meager dusting.

Emily proceeded to gather all the snow from the backyard that she could find and collect it in a bucket. After scouring the trampoline and the back deck, she had just about filled the container, but the cold drove her back inside before she completed her snowman-building plans. She’s still planning to continue, but it’s 34° and rising now, so her window of opportunity is limited.

This past Saturday, Emily’s friend Christopher McGinnis had a birthday party at the local Laser Tag emporium. I went with her to provide another large, ungainly target for the children to shoot. While at the arcade, I noticed that they had several old arcade solitaire machines in the window, each marked with a $25 price tag. Since I grew up in the golden age of arcades, and still have a fascination with (and employment because of) the electronic entertainment industry, I’ve longed to be able to share some of that experience with my own kids. One way that I’ve always thought would be nice would be to have a couple of arcade games around the house. However, working arcade games are expensive, somewhat hard to come by, and not much fun to maintain.

One alternative that addresses most of these problems is putting a PC into an arcade cabinet. Looking at those $25 cabinets, I felt the call of destiny (or perhaps it was the voice of immaturity — I wasn’t discriminating much). I grabbed two of the cabinets, one for me and one for Grant, my next-door neighbor and partner in crime for various musical and gaming endeavors. We were delighted when we pulled open one of the cabinets and found that the innards were basically a ‘386 PC with two custom boards that held the game software and interface to the coin slots. Further, the trackballs were apparently in working order and connected to a trackball to serial interface — parts that would have cost $110 if we’d had to buy them. This looks like it’ll be even better than we’d thought!

I’ve designed our control panels and ordered the joysticks, pushbuttons, and interface circuitry to connect it all together, so we should be making more progress on this project in the next week or two. We’re also considering putting a big hard drive in so we can use the boxes as MP3 jukeboxes as well. Photos and more info to come as the project progresses. Thanks to Arcade Controls for a ton of useful information and to Kathy for not killing me when I showed up with two arcade cabinets.