Remember Zork? You know, “Go north. Get sword. Kill troll with sword.” Zork was among the best known of a genre of games known as text adventures. Though for the vast majority of people, technically more elaborate games have replaced these prose-intensive efforts, there is still an active community of people on the Internet developing them. The highlight of the year for this group is the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, which anybody can be a part of by playing and judging the games, and which starts today. There are 53 entrants this year, a new record for the competition, and while there are bound to be some stinkers, there are also invariably several gems among the lot. This quirky art/entertainment form is especially intriguing to me because it is one of the few forms of interactive entertainment that can be completely conceived and realized by a single person, which makes for some very interesting results at times.

Since moving to San Marcos, Steve Johnson and I have been playing in the coffee shops pretty regularly. We have been calling ourselves “The Outlanders,” which was the name of Steve’s band in Denton. However, the band there has carried on in his absence, and has asked to retain the name, so we’re trying to figure out what to call ourselves. Travis Schrank has now joined us on percussion, so we’re now a three piece ensemble featuring guitar, mountain dulcimer, pennywhistles, bodhran, banjo, cello, congas, and soon hammered dulcimer. We do celtic, folk, bluegrass, alternative, and whatever else catches our fancy at the moment. So, if you have any good ideas, let us know by replying to this entry.

Our friends Camilo and Barbra Ardila today had their second boy, Micah Denton Ardila. Both he and mom are doing fine; apparently the delivery was straightforward. We’re planning to go visit them in a few hours, once Barbra gets a little bit of time to rest. Congratulations, Ardilas! Camilo is the Assistant Pastor of the new church, by the way, so between their efforts and our own, we’ll be boosting church attendence a fair percentage before we even begin to meet.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I have the best wife in the
free world. I took the kids out for a bit yesterday morning, while Kathy went
garage sale shopping. When we returned, she said “Ok, everyone stand in
front of the car; I’ve got a surprise for you!” We all dutifully lined up,
and then she lifted the garage door to reveal a great 4’x8′ HO scale model
train layout. I’ve had a couple-decade-long sporadic love affair with model
railroads, but have never gotten past the initial phase of building one.
Kathy found this one at a garage sale and talked them down to half their
asking price, which was probably about a quarter of what it was worth. It
came with a power pack, two locomotives, a bunch of cars, and the layout
itself, which has two main loops and a number of turnouts. What a woman!

Kathy and I had a date scheduled last Friday. I asked her on the phone that afternoon if she was interested in going to catch X-Men at the $2 theater in town. “Well, I had planned a little surprise, actually. I hope you like it.” I reassured her that I was sure I would, hung up, and proceeded to wonder what she had in mind. After I got home, we turned over the kids to Rene Johnson, who had evidently coengineered the surprise, and Kathy started driving us toward Canyon Lake. We traversed The Devils Backbone on the way, a section of state highway that winds along the top of a beautiful ridge of hills northwest of San Marcos, and which is home to a succession of seedy bars and BBQ joints I kept telling Kathy I thought she was taking me to.

We ended up at Hill Country Resort, a complex overlooking where my mom has a timeshare which overlooks the lake. “I thought we could eat at the snack bar, play some miniature golf, and go swimming,” Kathy said. Unfortunately, the snack bar had closed, so Kathy asked me to get our suits from the car while she double-checked the membership number in the office. “They’re in the suitcase!” she shouted after me as I headed to the car. I opened the trunk, found the suitcase, noticed the snacks, Doonesbury book, and changes of clothes that were therein, wondered briefly about their presence, resigned myself to the fact that I never know where things are or why they’re there, and headed back with the suits.

When I got back, Kathy was still in line, and said “Well, if you haven’t guessed yet, we’re staying the night.” My first thought was “No, we’re not,” but then I realized that was the surprise she had in mind, and the suitcase abruptly made sense. She assumed I had figured it out by that point, but I was, of course, still completely without a clue.

A highlight of the evening was going to visit the Louisiana Grill, which had opened nearby two weeks previously. When we walked in, nobody paid any attention to us for several minutes until an 8 year old boy materialized and said he’d go try to find us some menus. Another woman then wandered by and showed us to a seat, followed shortly thereafter by the 8 year old who had come up with a pair of mismatched menus. As we were looking at the dining options, a big, boisterous man came out from the back shouting “Who wants wine?!?!” with an iced tea pitcher full of the red liquid. “It’s free!” he went on, and began to distribute it to the interested parties. “Actually,” I heard him say from across the room to another patron, “it’s not really wine — it’s grape juice with Everclear in it! I’ll get the good stuff for you all next week.” Well, it turned out that the big guy was Keith, that he owned the place, and that 3 of his waitstaff hadn’t bothered to turn up that evening, which is why he was shorthanded. But the food was good, the view of the lake and sunset were great, and we thoroughly enjoyed our dinner and our last big outing before little Maggie arrives.

I listened to The Bridges of Madison County this past weekend, and was left with very mixed emotions. On one hand, it’s a nice, well-paced, evocatively written piece of fiction with some wonderful characters. It’s a treat to get to know Richard Kincaid and Francesca Johnson, and to see their strengths and weaknesses as individuals. On the other hand, the portrayal of marriage as something less meaningful than being swept off one’s feet by a brief, passionate encounter grows tiresome when it’s so oft repeated. Just for a change of pace I’d like to read of a soul-expanding delightful romance between a husband and wife. (Baroness Orczy did a wonderful job of this in The Scarlet Pimpernel, and threw in some great swashbuckling too. Gotta love the classics.)

Need a nice laptop? I’ve put my hopped-up iBook on the auction block. You can watch the auction or bid on it here. It’s a great little machine, and I’m going to miss it — at least until my G4 arrives.

I just placed an order for a dual-processor 450MHz Power Macintosh G4 with a Radeon card. It’s going to replace the G3 that’s currently on my desk. I’ll also be selling the iBook, which will be supplanted by the Dell laptop I’ll be using for work. (I suppose I’ll switch back to Eudora, since Outlook Express for Windows seems markedly inferior to Outlook Express for Mac, which I quite like.) Anyway, the G4 will set me up well to be able to do some pretty serious video work, both for church and for The McMains Chronicles. The only challenge is getting one of these stupid Internet vendors to actually ship me a camera. Shop4Digital is the latest in the doghouse, as they advertised stock on their website and then took a week after the order was placed to get back to me with the news that they didn’t have the camera I’d ordered. Schmucks.

This weekend we had the pleasure of a visit from Kathy’s cousin, Heather
Price. Heather has spent the last half decade over in France and Italy
pursuing a modeling career, and has now decided to begin a shopping service
there for visiting women. It had been a long time since Kathy had seen
Heather, and this was the first time I’d met her, so we pretty much crammed
our time with conversation, interrupted only for wrestling with the kiddos.
Liam especially seemed to take a shine to her, and she assured us that his
pronounciation of her name was superior to that of most Europeans.

In order to administer websites of any complexity, it’s vital to have
software designed for the task to help out. I have a number of tools in my
kit, but the one that I’d be most loathe to part with is Conversant, the super-powerful
software that runs on the server where this website sits and provides great
administrative tools, a built-in stylesheet editor, a discussion group,
content management tools, email and newsreader access to the site, and much
more. Now, because Conversant is actually a very well-thought-out groupware
platform, the good folks at Macrobyte
Resources can add great features with wild abandon. The latest example
of their hard work and Conversant’s flexibility is the group
calendar they’ve just added to all the Conversant sites. It interfaces
seamlessly Conversant’s other features, and is one of the
more powerful implementations of web-based-calendaring that’s out there.
Kudos to all at Macrobyte for their excellent work. (Full disclosure: I used
to work for Macrobyte, though I think I’d still feel the same way about
Conversant if I hadn’t.)