This weekend, Steve, Travis and I played a 5 hour gig at The Coffee Pot, here in San Marcos. Though we took a few breaks and invited several other musicians up to play, it was still a pretty grueling session. I haven’t been brave enough to whip out the hammered dulcimer for performance yet, but did get to play cello with a couple of people I hadn’t worked with before. Some friends from Denton were in attendence as well, and we had them jump in for a few tunes too.

After several years of secrecy, the people at Groove have released the fruits of their labors. Groove is a collaboration tool that allows people to use shared workspaces to coordinate the activities or information of a group of people. In some ways, it competes with Conversant, the platform I run this website from and which I helped build. Unfortunately, there’s no Mac version in sight, though it should be reasonably easy to build a version for Mac OS X once they’ve completed their Linux version. In any case, if you’d like to try it out with me, my user ID is SeanMcTex.

Those of you who have been keeping up with my flights of imaginative fancy for a while know that I had a lot of fun creating laser displays for a bit. (See The Cheap Laser Show for all the details.) You will also be aware that I’m a bit of a computer game junkie. Now there’s a project that combines both of these interests into one wacky project: LaserMAME. (It’s swamped at the moment, thanks to Slashdot.) The software allows you to play old vector graphics games like Tempest and Battle Zone using a laser controller to display the images, which can then be projected against a wall, a building, or the clouds if you’ve a powerful enough laser and don’t mind the FAA throwing you in jail. Neat.

As Steve, Travis and I have been playing more in coffee shops and for church, we’ve decided that we really like the variety that using a bunch of different instruments introduces into the performance. To that end, I recently ordered a Masterworks 15/14 Hammered Dulcimer, which arrived yesterday. I’m having a ton of fun with it already, though it requires a kind of percussionist’s dexterity that I’m still a long way from having down. I’m getting the hang of where the notes lie quickly, though, and really like the tone of the beautifully crafted instrument. It’s going to be a lot of fun to work it into performances in a month or two! (If you’re curious about the tuning, you can see a chart here.)

We had our first official, open meeting of Three Rivers Church last night. Kathy and I were honored to be able to open our home for the meeting, though we’re already aware that we’ll shortly be needing larger accomodations. We discussed what the Bible has to say about what a church should be as well as what everyone present hoped to see in the group. There were a number of people there who weren’t part of the initial crew, including one couple who it was our pleasure to meet for the first time who had done mission work with orphanages in Russia.

It’s exciting to see things finally coming together in a tangible way, to have reached this milestone in the church planting process. Though we don’t plan on being up and going with regular Sunday meetings until Easter, these Wednesday night meetings will help to build our little community until then.

The Perfect Storm is reminiscent of Melville’s great Moby Dick, not only in that it centers on the sea and the people who live and work there, but also in the sheer number of details and tangents and the breadth it covers. Ranging from meteorology to fishing techniques to aircraft designs to rescue training to marine engineering, the book is a compelling account of an enormous storm and its effects on many people’s lives. I have yet to see the movie, but it seems like it would be a difficult book to translate to that medium while preserving the book’s flavor, since there’s so much background material included to flesh out the story. Another one for the “to-read” list.

David Brin is currently among my favorite authors. Up until now, I’ve read only his novels, including The Postman, Earth, and the excellent Startide Rising, which is in the process of being turned into a film. The River of Time is a collection of his short stories, chock-full of interesting ideas, theories, and characters. It made me consider whether I like the novel or the short story better as a form. My conclusion was wishy-washy enough to be worthy of Charlie Brown: I like ’em both! In the same way that I enjoy a huge Thanksgiving dinner, but I’m also glad that Cool Ranch Doritos exist, I’m glad we’ve got both the big works and the more bite-size peeks into the minds of authors.

Anyway, back to the book. It’s good. If you like Brin, read it.

We thought Liam was handling Maggie’s arrival just fine, and would continue to be the utterly charming little boy that he has been up to now. But shortly after her arrival, he discovered the power of the word “No,” which, of course, he doesn’t deliver that way, but in all uppercase with exclamation points: “NO!!” In addition, he’s getting more ornery and obeying instructions less readily, so it looks like we may be in for some increased parenting challenges for a while. He is, fortunately, still unfailingly kind to his new little sister; we’re not sure whether this was brought on by her arrival or whether he’s just reached that point in his development. In either case, he’s spending more time in solitary confinement in his room, where he pushes the screen out of his window and drops his blocks out onto the dirt below where the neighbors retrieve them for us.

A while back, I started using Blink to keep track of my bookmarks. I was moving among machines and locations so often that the small extra overhead of maintaining my bookmarks on-line was well worth it. One of Blink’s neat features is that it allows one to make a subset of one’s bookmarks public, which I’ve gone ahead and done. If you’d like to see what tawdry corners of the Internet I haunt, you can click in the Bookmarks link on the sidebar or right here.

If you’re looking for unusual folk or Celtic instruments, I have only one suggestion: Song of the Sea, a husband-and-wife owned shop in Maine. Though there are a few other Internet vendors with a broader selection, these guys have consistently provided spectacularly good service and excellent prices. By way of example, here’s a recent exchange I had with them:

Hi Song of the Sea folks,

I’m in the market for a hammered dulcimer. I’ve
ordered things from you guys in the past and have been
very pleased, so was planning on ordering from you
again.

I’d really like to go ahead and get a 3 octave
instrument. I haven’t played the hammered dulcimer
before, but have done a fair bit of other folk and
acoustic music and am hoping to perform with it
eventually. The two instruments that I have my eye on
are the Whippoorwill and the Masterworks 15/14. With
that in mind, a couple of questions for you:

1. I assume that the Masterworks instrument is of a
higher quality, based on the relative prices and the
comments on your site. How much difference do you see
between the instruments? Is it worth the extra money
for someone who will be playing fairly heavily?

2. How much more is it? Your site says to call for the
price on the Masterworks. Consider this my call! I do
like the appearance of the Masterworks instrument
better, so would be inclined to consider it, depending
on the price difference.

3. Anything else I ought to know? 😉

Thanks in advance for your help!
Sean McMains

I got a personal response from Anne Damm, the co-owner of the shop, detailing prices and options with some very helpful advice within 2 hours of sending my message.