I just sadly posted this to Bibliofile, the reading log application I’ve had up for several years now:

Well, folks, it’s time for some sad news. Bibliofile is going away on April 4, 2009.

The reasons for this are various. I created Bibliofile because I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails. Rails, however, has advanced at a dramatic clip, and updating this app to work with the current version would take more time and effort than I can spare. Since my web hosting company is moving me to a new host that doesn’t support the old version of rails any longer, I’m afraid it’s time to shut the doors.

There are several good services out there that have already implemented many of the features that I wanted to add here, but could never find the time. Notably, Goodreads and weRead do all of what Bibliofile does, and add a bevy of other nice features as well.

What about your data? A good question! You can already grab it in XML form from the RSS feeds that bibliofile provides. (See the “Share” section.) If you’d like a comma-delimited version to import into Goodreads, let me know — I’ll be happy to arrange to export your data in that format for you.

This is a hard decision for me, but given how limited my time is, I feel that it’s the right one. Thanks for your enthusiasm and support over the past few years! Seeing other people use and enjoy Bibliofile has been, by far, the best part of this little adventure. Godspeed to you all, and keep reading!

Sean

We’ve had a pretty quiet spring break. I’ve been working half days, since the University doesn’t give us proper time off, and have been enjoying the extra time with the family. The big event of the week was a trip to Sea World. (The best time to go in Texas is probably right now, as it’s warm, but not yet blazing hot.)

Here’s a bit of video from the trip:

Last year, I read 35 books, totalling 9,744 pages. This is the most books I’ve read in a year since I’ve started keeping track, but not, by any means, the largest number of pages. (No Atlas Shrugged, War and Peace or anything else of the epic sort this year, apparently.)

A few personal highlights from my reading:

• Me Talk Pretty One Day: I’ve been hearing David Sedaris on This American Life for ages, but finally read some of his work for the first time this year. He is as delightfully droll in print as on the radio, though his comic timing still makes the audio versions a special delight.
• The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism: My first exposure to Tim Keller, this is a terrific work of Christian apologetics written for the lay person. Keller does a creditable job of laying out the intellectual objections to faith and addressing them clearly and well.
• The 21 Balloons: I had fond memories of a book about Krakatoa and hot air balloons that a teacher  read to our elementary school class. I’d never been able to remember what the book was until, lo and behold, Liam started telling me about the same book his teacher was reading to him! I immediately recognized it, and was delighted to get to go back and read this one over again. Great fun!
• Wisdom & Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton: My good friend and brother in law Jeff Adams recommended this. I’m no particular fan of biographies, so the fact that I enjoyed this a great deal is some measure of how good it is. (Temper that with the fact that I am a big fan of Chesterton, however.)
• Soon I Will Be Invincible: A fun and novel (!) take on the superhero genre. All the standard tropes are there, but recast in such a way as to make the characters human, three-dimensional and plausible. A most enjoyable romp.
• Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, So B. It, Hoot: Abigail has been reading voraciously this year, and recommended several books to me. Fortunately, she has good taste in young people’s literature, so it was a joy to get to read some of the things she had enjoyed and share those pleasures with her.
• Longitude: A well-written account of the history of navigation and the major figures therein. The details of John Harrison’s work on various timepieces were made especially enjoyable for me by the fact that we had seen several of them at Greenwich back in 2005.
• Little Brother: Cory Doctorow’s latest fiction, a novel for young people that revolves around a protagonist who discovers serious governmental abuse of power and goes about exposing it. A good, 1984-esque cautionary tale for our time.
• The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical: Fascinating and moving book. Equal part reflections and anecdotes on what it means to live according to the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
• Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians: Wonderfully entertaining start to a new series of fantasy novels for young people. Highly recommended if you’ve run out of Harry Potter books to read. I’m waiting eagerly for the next installment.

If you’ve read anything especially wonderful this year, I’d love to hear about it!

Several months back, I wrote a little post called Two Heroes. The San Marcos paper recently saw fit to publish an excellent article on one of the people I mentioned, who definitely deserves the accolade.

We’ve made it safely to Staunton, Virginia, where we will be spending the next week and a bit with Kathy’s sister Karen, her husband (and my college buddy) Jeff, and their passel of delightful young ones.

The trip up was much more pleasant than I’d feared. On Saturday we made it from San Marcos to New Orleans, an 8 hour trip we somehow managed to squeeze into a mere twelve hours. Our slow progress was due in part to holiday traffic (apparently tailgating and cutting people off is just another way of saying “Happy Holidays” in certain parts of the country — who knew?), and in part to the fact that I had loaded up the GPS with a database of Offbeat Tourist Attractions before we left, which resulted in a small detour in Beaumont, Texas to see the third largest fire hydrant in the world. Right next to it was a surprisingly excellent Fire Museum of Texas, which is not open on weekends, but which we managed to tour anyway by dint of inadvertently crashing a child’s birthday party.

We spent an enjoyable day in New Orleans, poking our heads into various shops, riding the streetcars, visiting an art fair, listening to a few street musicians and other buskers, avoiding the seamier bits of Bourbon Street, and of course having some beignets at Cafe du Monde and creole food for dinner.

After everyone else had tuckered out and decided to head back to the hotel, I walked back to Jackson Square to participate in the annual Carol Sing, which happened to be going on that night. I joined about 8,000 others thronging into the fenced square to sing a mix of carols led, as far as I could tell, by Ethel Merman and David Sedaris. As the gathered attendees struggled to keep their candles alight in the frigid gusts, I was struck by what an quintessentially New Orleans event this never-wholly reverent, jazzed up collaborative mix of cooperation, inebriation, brassiness, flamboyance, music, and religion was. It was a classic Big Easy experience.

The next morning we were on the road at 6:00am, and rolled into Staunton just after 10:00pm, with Kathy and I taking alternating two-hour shifts at the wheel. The kids did a spectacularly good job weathering the trip (made perhaps easier by the borrowed van with the television in the back), and we are looking forward a great deal to our next week here!

BONUS TRACK: Please enjoy my brother Chris (who is an accomplished surgeon) singing There’s No One as Irish as Barack Obama, originially by the band with the best name in the history of all music, Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys.

Monday night I headed up to Austin to drop in to the Heatwave Interactive/AGDC party at the Sky Lounge up in Austin. Heatwave is helmed by Anthony Castoro, one of my old bosses from Origin, so I thought it would be a nice opportunity to catch up with some of that crew. I had an even better time than I expected, participating (badly) in a Rock Band 2 tournament, and catching up with Joshua, Anthony, Edgar, Tim, Brit, Steve, Doug, Cody, and probably more whom I’ve forgotten. (And given some of their states at the time, some have probably forgotten seeing me as well.) Thanks for the great time, all!

Also, I want to give a bit of Google juice to Stack Overflow, a new site that’s designed for asking an answering programming questions. They’ve built some nice tools to ensure that good information rises to the top over time, and I’ve been very impressed with the quality and quantity of information there. Well worth a visit if you’re a programmer.

We’ve had a ton of stuff going on lately:

• Last Wednesday, I took Abigail for her day out on the town. We went kayaking at Zilker park, padding around under the bridges, checking out the secret art that some mysterious painter had emblazoned across the insides of the support struts, scaring turtles, and generally having a grand time. We then visited a vegetarian cafe, spent some time wandering about the mall, watched Journey to the Center of the Earth, and visited Wake The Dead Coffee House, where I converted her to the view that Everything bagels are far and away the best sort.
• On Thursday, The Patio Boys played in the park for San Marcos’ summer concert series. We in the band had a great time, and the audience seemed to enjoy it a good deal too (especially the cheerful inebriate who brought his own guitar to play along from the audience). Performing outdoors with the energy a crowd brings is always a treat, even when it’s 172° and sunny.
• On Friday, we celebrated birthdays with Becky, my sister-in-law, and Tanya, my cousin. We ate lots of Greek food, disrupted the restaurant’s table arrangement, and made ourselves as obstreperous as possible. The staff were great sports about it all, and we had a superb time.
• Saturday was Abigail’s 12th birthday party, which we celebrated at the house. As usual, we had pretty much no idea how many people were coming, and ended up with about 40 at peak. Since it was far too hot to spend much time outdoors, we all ended up crammed in together in three rooms, enjoying a wonderful spread of different foods that people had brought, spirited conversation, and (in the kids case) a great deal of Mario Kart and Rock Band. Abigail reported having a great time, so Mission Accomplished. Thanks to all who helped her celebrate!
• On Sunday, The Patio Boys played again, this time at Cheatham Street Warehouse. We were all pretty bushed, so we just pulled out some songs we hadn’t done for a while, did unspeakable things to them, and wrapped up early.

A few enjoyable bits from this weekend:

• Friday night, I attended a small gathering of guys to celebrate my friend Craig’s birthday by playing Axis & Allies and Acquire until late in the night. Craig’s wife graciously organized the evening for him starting two months in advance, and then scampered off to allow the testosterone to course freely and without inhibition through the house. I took a drubbing at both games, but still had a grand time.
• We enjoyed a delightful lunch with the Barnards and the Hulls on Sunday afternoon, with great conversation, much hilarity, good food, and several intense rounds of Speed Scrabble, which I enjoy much more (and at which I’m much better) than normal Scrabble. Thanks for a great time, y’all!

A melancholy post this morning:

• Abigail left this morning for a week at a church camp up near Waco. Though she’ll be with one of her close friends there, this is the first time she has spent any significant time away from home, and she has been simultaneously hugely excited and quite nervous at the prospect. I’m both proud of her bravery and sad that she’s one step closer to growing up. With her there and Emily in New York, it will doubtless seem strange to be a two-child family for the week.
• I got news this morning that our neighbor, John Morrisett, died last night. John was an ex-marine in his seventies, and was one of my favorite people in our neighborhood. He had been bedridden for a few months, and increasingly frail for a year or two beforehand. Beth, his wife, said that it came as a relief, since his quality of life had been so poor toward the end. Until the last year or so, John had kept very busy, always involved in some volunteer work or another with a more active schedule than I think I could manage at half his age. He always had a kind or wise word whenever we saw him, and I’m sorry to see him go.
• I won’t go into any detail on this one, but a friend of mine has had his life pretty much collapse around him over the past couple of weeks. While some of it is a pretty direct result of some terrible choices he made, it’s still heartrending to see, and I pray that good may ultimately come of a miserable situation.

Emily has been after me to set up a stop-motion rig for a while. I finally got around to it yesterday and turned her loose, with impressive results:

I had also been thinking some about what I could organize over the holiday weekend to get the whole family involved. (Finding something that both a 16 year old and a 7 year old can enjoyable participate in is a notorious challenge.) I finally hit upon the idea of that old summer camp standby, a shaving cream war. I stopped by the grocery on Friday afternoon to pick up the cheapest cans of shaving cream I could find ($1.07 each), and turned everyone loose in the front yard around 5:00pm yesterday. Chaos ensued: