Finally, justification for my natural tendency to gravitate toward the hammock when free time presents itself. (An all-too-rare occurance, these days.)

Viva, slugs! I’d start a revolution, but I feel a nap coming on.

If you’ve never visited, set aside 30 minutes sometime to explore Virtual Parks, a beautiful collection of Quicktime VR panoramas of many of the most beautiful places in the western United States. It’s an amazing collection of work, marrying Adams’ love of nature with a new medium.

Since the new church started, I’ve been putting together the lyrics for the music in PowerPoint so that the congragation can read them and sing along. However, PowerPoint is definitely not designed with that job in mind, and while it can do it, it does so clumsily and with a fair bit of effort.

So, as a programmer, what’s the natural thing to do? Write a new software package, of course! I’ve been working on Oratorio for a month or two now, and finally pressed it into service this past Sunday, when it worked like a champ. It’s still not ready to be turned loose on the world at large, but it is getting to the point where it’s useful, and having a few more eyes on it would be welcome. So, if any of you are interested in testing it out, let me know what kind of system you’d be using it on, and I’ll let you know where to download a beta. I’m building it for both Macintosh and Windows, with interoperability in mind, and would welcome feedback from either side of the fence.

This past weekend was a nice one, not least of all because I got to do some catching up with a couple of old friends from the high school era. My friend Rebecca Keffer (formerly Scott), her husband Chuck, and their handsome boxer dogs joined us for a thoroughly enjoyable lunch on Sunday after church. We talked pretty much nonstop for the entire afternoon, alternating between the dining room, living room, and the backyard. The kids enjoyed the dogs immensely, who, though they outweighed the children by a fair bit, were remarkably gentle and pleasant with them.

On Saturday, I also got to see my friend Chris Taylor do a show at the local outlet mall. He’s been performing as long as I’ve known him, and has in recent years started to get a fair bit of critical acclaim. Since we hadn’t seen each other for the better part of a decade, it was great to get back in touch and catch up a bit on what each of us has been up to, both personally and musically.

Does anyone out there have any experience with Grand Chess? A 10×10 board, two new pieces — the Marshall and the Cardinal, optional pawn promotion, no castling. Yikes! Makes my feeble noggin ache.

I’ve just stuck up two new galleries of photos: April 2001 Family Photos is pretty much what it sounds like, and Kite Festival has some shots from the annual San Marcos kite festival. Fun stuff.

After a couple days of down time, The McMains Chronicles is back. Apparently the folks at Dotster with whom we’d registered our domain don’t send an email when a domain is up for renewal, but instead hijack it and send it to their servers. In any case, all is now worked out, though if you’ve sent me anything important over the last few days, it may need resending.

When we moved from Denton to San Marcos, we left behind a number of very dear friends we’d made in the area, and whom we have missed frightfully since. Among our closest companions up in Denton were the Davenports, a family we’d met in a parenting class at church, and who had similarly aged children who loved our kids, and vice versa. Yesterday Lynn brought the children down to San Marcos, where they’ll be staying with us until Friday. It’s great to get to see them again and catch up on visiting, family news, and play time for the wee ones. Regrettably, Chad wasn’t able to make it down, as his job anchored him to the DFW metroplex for the week, but we’re sure grateful to him for sharing his family with us. What a treat!

As many of you know, I work at Origin Systems, one of the pioneers of the computer gaming industry. I remember playing their first ground-breaking game, Ultima, back in middle school, and being delighted throughout high school and college with each new product they created. Their games were a part of my (arguably misspent) childhood, and it was a delightful denouement to my decade-and-a-half love affair with the company to come to work there 6 months ago.

When I came on, I started playing Ultima Online, Origin’s 3 year old Internet game, for the first time. (They no longer make their games for the Macintosh, so this was the first time I’d been able to play.) The sense of community and involvement among the game’s 220,000 or so subscribers is a remarkable thing to behold, and quickly sold me on the power of this kind of game — Persistent State Worlds, as they’re called in the industry.

Even more exciting than UO to me, however, was two more PSW’s that were in production: Ultima Online 2, which was going to take Ultima into a beatiful, fully 3D world, and the unannounced but widely-known Harry Potter Online, based on J.K. Rowling’s books chronicling the adventures of the yound wizard. UO2, though late and over-budget, was among the most widely-anticipated games for 2001, and Harry Potter Online could hardly help to be a hit with Harry Potter mania at such a fever pitch.

Yesterday so very much changed.

After doing an audit of all the Persistent State Worlds that Electronic Arts (Origin’s parent company) had under development, the decision came down that UO2 and Harry Potter would both be cancelled — UO2 because it was way over budget and still a long way from completion, and Harry Potter because the decision-makers were afraid that they would have missed the peak of Pottermania by the time the game actually hit production. In addition, most of the UO2 and Harry Potter staff would be released, since their wouldn’t be any work for them to do.

In fairness, it looks as though EA is really trying hard to make this a minimally disruptive transition for the people losing their jobs. The terms are the most generous I’ve seen in a situation like this. The artists and world-builders are being given help getting their portfolios updated with the work they’ve already done for UO2, HR has brought in people to help the displaced find new positions, and the range of job opening at other EA sites is being made available to these folks. Kudos to EA for the way they’re handling that part of things.

But that doesn’t make things any less sad. While making these announcements, Jack Heistand’s voice broke more than once. The artists who had invested an enormous amount of their creative energies into the cancelled products looked on in disbelief as the wolves of financial pressures ripped their children to pieces before their stunned eyes. There was a steady stream of people leaving the meeting room after the announcement was made, even before the Q&A had wrapped up.

So, today Origin is a sad place to be, even for those of us staying. The people who will be leaving the company are in their offices until Friday, gathering their personal effects and finishing a few things out. The news has broken across the Internet, where there’s bile, ambivalence, and sadness. (And lot’s not forget saddened ambivalent bile.)

And me? I’m still here. But the halls of Origin no longer seem the magical place they did 24 hours ago. With these departing artists and visionaries goes a lot of what makes Origin a special place to be. Farewell, folks, and best wishes.

One of my co-conspirators at work, Tim Keating, just got in the Powerbook G4 he’d ordered a while back. A long-term Windows/Linux guy, he’s been laughing a bit at himself over the weeks he’s been waiting, saying “If I actually went out and bought a Macintosh, it’s a strong testament to their product engineering.” He brought the box and some Krispy Kremes by this morning for the great opening ceremony, and I think the thing has lived up to and perhaps surpassed his expectations so far. The photos of the unit that I’d seen on the web up to now don’t really do it justice. You have to see it in person to really appreciate the diminutiveness of the unit and the expansiveness of the screen. A remarkably nicely engineered product, I’m looking forward to seeing how it performs over the next couple months. We’ll be installing OS X on it next week.