Author Archives: SeanMcTex

Facebook and the Coming Zombie Apocalypse

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My good friend Daniel Priest recently posted the following to his Facebook profile:

Daniel Priest is a tree climbing fool

I thought that it was important that the conversation that ensued be available for posterity outside of Facebook’s domain, so here it is. When the undead rise up, you’ll thank me.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 8

Fanny, apparently you’ve married a monkey. I bet he looks cute in a ten-gallon hat.

Jonathan Hunter, May 9

Trees are pretty.

Sean McMains, May 10

It’s good to know that when the zombie uprising comes and I need someone to hoist me into the upper branches of a magnificent magnolia to escape the zombies’ brain lust, you’ll be around.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

Wow, I just learned that zombies can’t climb trees.

Sean McMains, May 10

Have you ever seen a zombie perched in a tree? Well, there you go.

Jonathan Hunter, May 10

Matthew, Sean may have learned this from Shaun of the Dead. One of the characters, Diane, is able to escape the zombies by hanging out in a tree until she is rescued by the British Army.

Sean McMains, May 10

(Of course, I’m discounting the rare South American Arboreal Zombie here…)

Daniel Priest, May 10

The zombie lore on display here is sadly lacking. Zombies may not climb trees, but they do climb other zombies. And when the moaning, staggering pile of mindless undead under the tree reaches high enough…

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

The only thing I have ever heard of zombies being able to ‘climb’ is stairs. You would have to have a zombie staircase. That would pretty much never happen, since zombies are not capable of cooperating intelligently.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

Zombies might be able to pull themselves out of their graves by using the bodies of other zombies if they were buried in mass graves, but to accept the possibility of anything beyond that I would have to see an example.

Jonathan Hunter, May 10

I think Matthew is onto something here. In order to make plans and such, one has to be conscious. But zombies aren’t conscious, so they can’t make plans. It’s logic.

The only way, then, that a zombie could get someone from a tree would be if it just so happened that a bunch of bodies and other artifacts were piled up in a a certain way and that zombie just so happened to make its way up that pile. But, as Matthew said, that would pretty much never happen.

Sean McMains, May 10

Jonathan: I call shenanigans on your logic here. How can you possible assert that zombies aren’t conscious? Certainly it takes consciousness to shamble and to cry “brains! BRAAAAIIIINS!”

I think you’re just a closed-minded lifeist.

Daniel Priest, May 10

Big sigh.

Let me spell it out here, since the bunch of you have evidently watched a total of about 25 minutes worth of zombie movie material. Zombies smell living human flesh up in the tree. The first zombies start moaning and clawing at the tree. Additional zombies are drawn by the moaning of the first zombies. As the mob grows, zombies at the middle of the pile are trampled, piled upon, etc. Over the course of the night this zombie mound gets higher and higher.

Y’all are the meat snacks in the film who climb the tree at the beginning of the night, look down at the zombies, and say something like “Alright, I think we’ll be safe here,” before being awakened in the middle of the night by a cold hand gripping your ankle, dragging you down to immediate dismemberment.

It’s when you think you’re safe that you’re in the most danger. When you think you’re in danger, well, you’re in danger then too. You’re never safe. Remember that.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

Daniel,

It’s not the herd instinct that I question. It’s the sheer physics. I don’t believe everything I see in movies. Movies are unreal scenarios as we all know well.

Any movie maker who scripted the scene you’re describing would have to be ignorant of the problem. As soon as your hypothetical mound reaches the height of a human being, unless it is the width of a football field with a gradual grade, zombies have to climb. Zombies don’t climb. They walk.

By the time enough zombies have pooled to create a nice pleasant hillside stroll to the top of my tree, the US Marines have arrived and helicoptered me out of the joint because it has been three days.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

I never said zombies weren’t conscious, for the record. I don’t care if they’re conscious. They’re not capable of cooperating intelligently.

Ross Richie, May 10

SIGH.

Okay, everyone take notes. THIS IS HOW IT REALLY WORKS (points to Priest for trying):

ROMERO ZOMBIES: are mindless. Priest’s example is true there.

RUSSO ZOMBIES: are smart, capable of thought, can wield tools, etc., and can talk to you, crying out for brains. Those zombies will climb that tree, no problem, and this is NSFW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPc7c4W6btY&feature=related

Or, as you can see in this clip, they have the ability to try to talk to you and smash through the trap door in the attic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD8_GFEO-HY&feature=related

For those taking notes at home: Russo and Romero collaborated and created the genre in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, got into a Lennon and McCartney-esque squabble, split up, and individually created competing zombie franchises, hence creating seemingly conflicting rules to how the zombie mythology works.

Ross Richie, May 10

Amateurs. I love you guys.

Jonathan Hunter, May 10

I was going to let Daniel have the last word, but I can’t let this go.

Romero zombies wouldn’t be able to climb trees, as Matthew has demonstrated. And if we’re talking about Russo zombies, then you wouldn’t be silly enough to climb a tree. So, it doesn’t matter what kind of zombie we’re dealing with. They wouldn’t be able to pluck you out of a tree.

Ross Richie, May 10

HOOO-KAY. Didn’t wanna play this card, but looks like I’ll have to.

Everyone that’s published (i.e. poured 10s of thousands of dollars into) a series called ZOMBIE TALES that is a signature part of your corporate identity, raise your hands.

Now that we’ve gotten that outta the way… (HARSH!)

Romero zombies will get you in exactly the way Daniel laid out. They’re a swarm monster, and the swarm will pile up and attain height….

RE: climbing a tree in a Russo flick, if you’re willing to hide in an attic, you’ll hide in a tree. And they’ll climb it, while crowing about the need to snack on your brains.

LOVE YOU JONATHAN, MEAN IT!!!

Jonathan Hunter, May 10

I feel like I’m in crazy town and Ross is the mayor.

Everyone that had a normal childhood (i.e. played outside with other children instead of rotting away in front of the television box while eating pork rinds) that is a signature part of your personal identity, raise your hands.

Romero zombies COULD get you in that way, but they don’t swarm fast enough. The Marines would rescue you first.

I wouldn’t hide in the attic, so I also wouldn’t hide in a tree.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 11

Pouring 10s of thousands of dollars into zombie literature doesn’t automatically make you right. In fact, it might make you stupid. Oh snap.

I am grateful for this broadening lesson, however.

I know very little about zombies, but I do not accept statements merely on the basis of varying and respectively unquestionable zombie traditions. I am trying to learn by questioning everything and using careful reasoning. In this way I hope to one day truly be a philosopher.

Daniel Priest, May 11

Ross–thanks for the input. What did you think of World War Z?

Jonathan–I think you’re right. You aren’t the sort to hide in an attic or tree. I think you might be the zombie imitation sort, try to make your way into the countryside by walking, moaning, etc. like a zombie, thereby escaping notice. Good luck with that.

Matthew–Physics of zombie accumulation. We assume a maximum slope of 45 degrees and a cone height of 40 feet. Sean specified the upper branches of a magnificent magnolia. In the thin alkaline soils of central Texas <i>Magnolia grandiflora</i> will attain a height of no more than 50 feet, so if we’re in the very upper branches the zombies would need to be approximately 40 feet high to be in ankle grabbing distance. This is an absurdly generous estimate of both tree height and sturdiness of upper branches, btw. But I’m a generous guy.

The zombie cone will have a volume of approximately 67000 cubic feet. Assuming an average zombie volume of 10 cubic feet, you’ll need 6700 zombies to arrive during the night. If zombies shamble at 4 miles an hour every zombie within 32 miles could conceivably arrive within the course of the night. And there’s a hell of a lot more recently dead and/or soon to be bitten and infected people within 32 miles of San Marcos, Texas.

If only 3 zombies spot us initially, and each of them with their moaning alerts only 3 additional zombies, each of whom alert 3 more, etc, and each of them does so within 30 minutes (again, very generous–in an urban setting far more zombies are likely to hear, and much more quickly), then we could conceivably have 20,000 zombies at the tree within 5 hours.

Not that they’re all going to come for us–there are presumably other equally tasty people in other trees–but I think the plausibility of the scenario has now been pretty well established.

Jonathan Hunter, May 11

Daniel, I thought you would know me better than that. I’m not the imitating type. I’m the joining type. I wouldn’t hide in a tree or attic because I would rather become a zombie and come after all of you myself. I’ll admit that I don’t understand how the conversion process works, but that would be optimal.

Ross Richie, May 11

MCMAINS!!!! MCMAINS!!!! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT, MCMAINS!!!!

Sean McMains, May 11

Ross,

If my studies in Zombie Lit. have taught me anything, it’s that the person who sets himself up as a pompous authority figure will be among the first to be devoured by the ravenous hordes.

Thus, by erecting yourself as an authority figure — a verb I here find particularly apt, given your apparent desire to turn this into an exercise in comparative phallic metrics — you have thrust yourself — verb, ditto — into the head — noun, ditto — of the line of victims.

Sean

P.S. New personal best for oblique naughty jokes in one sentence! YES!

Sean McMains, May 11

Daniel,

While I’m loathe to give offense to the very person on whom I will be relying to save me from the apocalypse, I do find a few of your premises troubling:

1. A 45° slope seems singularly optimistic, especially with modern, low-friction synthetic clothing. Perhaps this would be reasonable if the zombies weren’t wearing much (not unreasonable in San Marcos), or were wearing clothing with natural fibers that would have a higher coefficient of friction. I would hold that a figure closer to 30° is likely. That would give us a radius for the cone of 69′, and therefore a volume of 199,427 cubic feet.

2. 10 cubic feet is an absurdly large figure. Consider that human bodies are approximately as dense as fresh water, as shown by the fact that many of us can sink or float in a pool depending on how deeply we breathe in. Water weighs 62.4 pounds/cubic foot. American men average around 180 pounds, women around 140. Thus, a 160 pound “average person” would have a volume of around 2.56 cubic feet. (Alternately, think about how many foot-square boxes Steve Buscemi would fill at the end of Fargo.)

Thus, with the new figures, we’d need 77,901 zombies to build a sufficient pile.

3. Your zombie-alert figures presuppose that zombies’ communication is at least sophisticated enough to convey bearing and distance over miles. I’m not sure how much nuance one can pack into the word “Braaaaiins…”, but my tentative experiments this morning with my coworkers aren’t promising.

Alternatively, perhaps zombies work like ants do, and leave a pheromone trail to food sources. This bears further investigation.

Ross Richie, May 11

McMains — the new popular variant in horror is that they can SMELL the living.

Doesn’t make a whole lotta sense to me, but characters in THE WALKING DEAD smear themselves with zombie smell and sneak past the zoms undetected. The horror community’s glommed onto that and adopted it.

Of course, all this goes out the window if you are loyal to Romero, who established the zoms are getting smarter in LAND OF THE DEAD, where they begin to use tools. LAND OF THE DEAD zoms would be able to scale that tree, no problem. Hell, they’d prolly grab some power tools and just cut it down…

In the trailer here, you’ll see they reference “they’re thinking, they’re communicating” and there’s a brief clip of them using a machine gun, so maybe it’s all moot, they’d just SHOOTCHA OUTTA THE TREE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atXJB9luiko

Emily’s Birthday List

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Emily’s birthday is coming up, and true to her artistic nature, she has created a pictorial gift-giving guide:

Workplace Motivation and Game Mechanics

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I manage a crew of about 5 programmers at work. During our performance reviews this year, I asked each of them how I could do my job as a manager better. One of them, in a bit of much-appreciated candor, said that motivation was one of his biggest challenges, and that he would be grateful for anything I could do to help.

This guy — let’s call him Ivan — is a capable programmer, and does good work, but (like all of us) sometimes has a tough time overcoming inertia and focusing on the task at hand. Interestingly, Ivan is also a World of Warcraft player. (World of Warcraft is an online Role Playing Game where hundreds of thousands of people play together in a shared, computer-based fantasy world.) One of the interesting characteristics of  online RPG’s like World of Warcraft is that they often require one to do a lot of repetetive,  mundane tasks to gain in-game experience and thereby increase your character’s prowess. This is referred to as “level grinding”.

When one is “grinding,” one isn’t doing it for the satisfaction of the task being performed, but for an extrinsic reward of some kind that keeps players at it. In the case of online RPG’s, the reward is an improved character (with a higher level or improved skills), better equipment, the chance to participate in more challenging gameplay, or bragging rights among one’s game-playing peers. Ultima Online, the RPG on which I used to work, would allow the player to link to a web page that showed off her character with her honorifics and arrayed in all her finery.

This sense of accomplishment is one of the things that makes computer games so compelling for many people. In the early days of arcades, the chance to put one’s initials on the High Score list on Tempest was often as big a draw as the gameplay itself. We liked the sense of competition and achievement that list of scores brought with it. More recently, Microsoft did something very clever when they introduced the XBox 360: every game for the system has “Accomplishments” that earn “Gamer Points”. People who play for fun will inevitably rack up a certain number of these, but in order to maximize one’s Gamer Score, one has to again do things that aren’t inherently enjoyable: search out every pigeon in a vast virtual city (and shoot them all), get through a level without firing a gun once, or breed 200 worm-shaped piñatas. One can then put a “Gamer Badge” on one’s website or on Facebook to show the world what you have accomplished as an XBox player. This system has been so successful that Sony has recently copied it for the Playstation 3, introducing a “Trophy” system to the platform with their most recent software update.

So as I looked at all these different mechanisms that games use to take gameplay that might otherwise be uninteresting and make it appealing, I wondered if something similar could be applied to work. After all, try as we might to make the office interesting and enjoyable place to be, the fact remains: if we have to pay somebody to do something, it’s probably not inherently much fun. (There are a lot more musicians who will perform gratis than there are accountants who will do your taxes for no charge.) As I mulled this over, several possible systems came to mind:

  1. Keeping Score: the simplest approach is that of the arcade games of yore: you get points when you do something good, and try to get the highest score within a given period, say a week or a month. (“Something good” for work purposes might be completing one’s timesheet, successfully fixing a bug, dealing with a support call, or presenting at a conference. Each would have a different point value based on its value to the business and degree of difficulty.) This system has the advantage that it provides pretty quick feedback, and that new folks and people who have worked at a job for a while are on a fairly level playing field. The biggest failing of this approach is that a single score doesn’t tell anything about what things one is doing to rack up the points, so one has less motivation to expand one’s skills than to simply concentrate on areas where one already has facility.
  2. Classes & Levels: As with the Keeping Score approach, one is awarded “Experience Points” for doing something good. These points are tallied and, when one has accumulated enough, redeemed for “levels” in various classes. For example, after completing a performance review and a month of development work, I might be a “Programmer Level 3; Bureaucrat Level 2”. Levels generally become geometrically more difficult to attain as they get higher, so a new employee would “Level Up” more often than someone who had been working at a given job for a long while. This provides a more nuanced view of what sort of work someone is doing and maps more directly to a traditional RPG mechanic.
  3. Achievements: With this approach, one has a list of specific tasks to accomplish. For programmers, this might include things like “fix your first bug”, “check in 10 changes to our source control system”, or “get a patch accepted by one of the open-source projects we use.” One accumulates achievements over time, and can see a list of which ones have been accomplished, and which ones are still out there waiting for further efforts. (The requirements for a given achievement can also be kept secret until it’s unlocked.) The advantage with this approach is that one is encouraged to stretch one’s wings and try new sorts of tasks. Unfortunately, it lacks any kind of aggregate view of one’s progress.

At this point, I’m thinking that a hybrid of and #3 might be the best for an office. Each person would have an overall score — perhaps cumulative, or perhaps reset monthly — which would be increased accordingly whenever one did something constructive. In addition, one could unlock achievements by doing specific things. Those achivements would then go on one’s record, and would also provide an extra boost to one’s score.

Whatever system we used would need to have a few specific features:

  1. As much of it as possible would have to be automatic. Nobody wants to spend all day tallying scores, so it would be important to tie much of this to our existing systems and have them add points without human involvement. Some things, like points for helping a coworker, will inevitably require human tallying, but these should ideally be the exception.
  2. Part of the fun of accomplishment is being able to show off what you’ve done. We would need to be able to publish the information on scores and accomplishments various ways: website badges, added to our Twitter Status Board, screen savers, etc.

I’d really like to hear from people on what they think of this idea. Is it something you would enjoy having around your office? Do you think it would help with motivation? Do you think any particular mechanic would be a more effective motivator than another? I’m still brainstorming on all of this at the moment, so would welcome any diverse input folks might have on the subject. Thanks for anything you can contribute!

UPDATE: As I’ve been giving this more thought, another mechanic came to mind that I think would be worthwhile. In the game Team Fortress 2, each player is given a score for the match. The points, however, are earned in various categories, and those categories tracked individually. This results in a lot more affirmation, as even if one had a relatively poor game, it might still be your best performance as a sniper, or the most points you’ve earned by healing other players. Being able to lump work points into various categories could easily result in similar kinds of encouragement when they are tallied: “You earned 625 points this month, which is lower than your personal monthly best of 1027. However, you earned 400 points for helping coworkers, eclipsing your previous best of 150 points!”

Tabletop Roleplaying: The Nerdiest Post of the Year

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A few weeks back, Liam and I were up in Austin to bring a sick iMac in to the Apple store. After having spent an hour driving up and facing a similar return trip, it seemed silly not to poke around town a bit more before returning. I thought for a bit about what was inexpensive, close by, and would be fun for both of us, and hit upon The Dragon’s Lair, a wonderful games & comics shop that I enjoyed visiting periodically during the time I worked in Austin. The store had moved to a new location since I was there last, but my GPS was fortunately more up-to-date than I was, and brought us directly to the new front door.

Having never been to a store like this, Liam’s eyes bugged out as he surveyed the wealth of comics, games, books, toys and miniatures. He immediately latched on to an immense Heroscape setup, created with the combined parts from several hundred dollars worth of kits, and peppered the players with questions about how the game worked. As Liam learned the intricacies of plastic figure combat on plastic tessellated hex terrain, I wandered over to the section of Role Playing Game books.

Role Playing Games are (for those of you who actually had dates in high school) essentially games where you take on an alter ego and proceed through a series of adventures as this in-game persona. The games are run by a “Game Master” who is responsible for describing the game world and what’s going on therein, while the players tell the GM what they want their characters to do.  There’s often a lot of rolling of funny-shaped dice and consulting of tables of numbers approximately seven times more complicated than those used to get Apollo 11 to the moon. There are a truly astounding number of these game systems, specializing in every sort of adventure from time travel to exploring dungeons to being a spy to werewolf vs. vampire battles. The most popular, however, are Dungeons & Dragons and GURPS.

I had recently read Wil Wheaton’s series of posts about running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for his teenage son and his friends. (Wil Wheaton, for those of you who don’t know a Dalek from a dilithium crystal, played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and has subsequently grown into a fine writer.) Wil waxes eloquent about the fun that they had together playing the game, working together to essentially tell an adventure story together. (Note to grammarians: yes, I split the infinitive. Bite me.) Since I’m always looking for ways to engage with the kids, I thought that one of these Role Playing Games might be worth learning about and trying out together.

After spending a happy 90 minutes poking around the store, watching various games-in-progress, and (inevitably) buying a bit of candy, we headed back home. En route, I asked Liam if he’d be interested in playing an RPG together, to which he responded with an enthusiastic affirmative. I did some searching around on the Internet and asked a few friends for their input, and eventually decided to try running a game using GURPS. While it’s a bit more rules-heavy than D&D, it had two advantages that were compelling: 1. It can be used to run adventures of any sort, not just the swords, orcs, and dragons stuff that D&D focuses on. 2. There’s a “GURPS Lite” book that has enough information to run a basic game and which can be downloaded for free — an important consideration since I wasn’t yet sure what level of appeal this would have for my crew.

I had hoped that there might be a decent premade adventure that I could use for our introductory session, but I had no luck finding something that really fit the bill. Instead, I spent a couple hours designing a small dungeon crawl that would provide opportunities for exploration, combat, a bit of acrobatics, and some diplomacy, and which was small enough in scale that we could complete it in one session. I also found an invaluable tool called GURPS Character Sheet which streamlines character creation by doing most of the number-crunching for you.

Since I knew from my preadolescent time with D&D that these sorts of games are more fun with more people, I enlisted my oft-times partner-in-crime Jason Young to come down and play with us. Maggie and Abigail  jumped in as well, so Saturday morning found the five of us gathered around our big table with two laptops, a pile of paper and post-its, and an improvised Game Master’s screen made from scrap cardboard I pulled from the recycling bin and cut up.

Liam created a big, dumb stalwart fighter character with a terrible temper and impulse control problems named Spiritman. Abigail’s character was Esme, a nimble archer. With a bit of help, Maggie created Zoey, a Barbie-pretty sword-wielding elf. And Jason created Gront, a gruff but loyal dwarf he roleplayed with relish.

The adventurers began by stocking up on supplies at the local general store. Because Abigail had chosen a “fear of crowds” disadvantage for her character, I told her that she had to stay at the edge of the town and wouldn’t let her talk while the other players bought the gear. (Disadvantages such as these allow one to improve your characters in other ways, but can be awfully inconvenient at times!) They then ventured into a nearby cave the mayor of the town had comissioned them to explore as part of a land survey.

The cave, as they eventually discovered, was the mostly-abandoned lair of a group of bandits that had operated out of the area in years previous. I had spent a fair bit of time thinking about how such a place would be laid out, so was quite gratified when, as they explored the corridors, Jason/Gront wondered aloud “What is this place? It’s obviously not just a cave. It seems to be designed to be very defensible.”

As they made their way through the darkened halls (lit by a throwing axe wrapped up in branches from a bush and set aflame, since they had forgotten to buy torches), the party tripped over traps, discovered secret corridors, and fought with a brace of rats that had taken up residence in the abandoned Great Hall, stopping only for the occasional real-life bathroom or homemade pizza break.

The interesting thing to me about tabletop RPGs, and the reason that people still play them in the era of World of Warcraft and its ilk, is the unparalleled flexibility one has with a human being running the game. At one point, several of the players’ characters had fallen into a pit that was just a bit too tall for them to climb out of. Having forgotten to put rope on their shopping list, they resorted to stripping the leather pants from one of their characters and using them to extend their reaches and help each other up. It was a very clever solution which wouldn’t have been possible in a computer game, but which I was able to handle on the fly without difficulty. (The dwarf lost his grip and fell, getting a bit banged up when he crashed to the floor below, but everyone else managed the ascent without difficulty.)

After making their way through much of the redoubt, the players came upon the former leader of the cutpurses that used to operate there, now an old recluse who rarely ventured out from his dusty underground domain. Because of his extreme loneliness, he forbade their leaving unless they agreed to come live there and keep him company. The party had the opportunity to fight him, to lie and say they would return, or to agree to move in and make that their base of operations for future adventures. Somewhat to my surprise, they overcame their enthusiasm for battle and agreed to report back to the mayor with a fabricated story about the dangers of the cave and to return to live there.

After misleading the mayor, we wrapped up for the day, six hours after we started. Maggie wandered off a few hours into the session, but Liam, Abigail and Jason all had a great time (as did I). Getting to do something that involved with the kids was delightful, and I was really pleased to see that it held their interest so well while putting their creative thinking (and occasionally their math skills) to the test. They are both enthusiastic about playing some more; Liam especially has already been asking me to put together another adventure for them. So, from a parenting point of view, I count it a solid success.

As a gamer, I did find GURPS a little bit cumbersome, but not too bad given the degree of flexibility it provides. For our next go-round, I think I will go ahead and purchase the basic books and a GM screen, which provides ready access to many of the tables and calculations one uses in play. I’m a bit torn on whether to create more adventures from scratch, or whether to try to repurpose something from a D&D module or another source. (Converting such things to the GURPS ruleset is a bit of work, but not generally too bad.)

And as people who like to build stuff, Jason and I are both intrigued by the possibilities of casting our own miniature characters and dungeon pieces from plaster and lead. (We used post-it notes and graph paper for this first session — functional, but not the height of gaming panache.) The one thing that gives me pause here is that this has the potential to be a terrifically time-consuming hobby. But if I can be spending that time happily and productively engaged with my family, I’d say it’s well worth the investment, even if it does mean I add yet another chapter to the already overlong tome of my nerdiness.

Bibliofile Going Gentle Into That Good Night

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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

Spring Break 2009

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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:

Wire Tree Prototype

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Several months ago I was out in Wimberley, visiting my favorite hill country art gallery, and stumbled upon a huge, lovely tree sculpture made of wire. I was so impressed with the piece that I immediately decided to learn to make something similar myself. So yesterday, I picked up a dollar worth of florist’s wire and found this article. Thus armed, I embarked on my first attempt to prove Joyce Kilmer wrong.

An hour of fooling around with wire and my leatherman in the front yard yielded this:

Tree and Me

Lone Tree

Altogether, a credible first attempt, I think. A few things I learned along the way:

  • Green wire makes everything look like a cactus.
  • While tree roots are, in fact, as extensive as the branch systems, they’re usually below ground. Thus, using only 1/3 of the length for roots makes more sense than 1/2.
  • Modeling the upper branches is hard once the lower ones are done. Next time I’ll experiment with working from the top down instead of the bottom up.
  • Leatherman tools are awesome.
Posted in Art

From the Mixed Up Files of Mr. John Rogers

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This earned a tea-snort from me this morning:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Thanks, Kung Fu Monkey.

Situational Awareness

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I’ve long been fascinated by the prospect of wearable computing devices. Having ubiquitous access to information — movie times, news stories, restaurant reviews, product information, word definitions, novels, friends’ locations — seems like such a compelling idea that any talk of such things rivets me. As cellular phones have become more powerful and capable, they’ve become the de facto way for lots of people to access that information. I’m not much of a cell phone fan, but do feel like a comparative dullard when I don’t have an iPod Touch in my pocket.

Thus, MIT’s “Sixth Sense” system seems to me the most drool-worthy bit of technology I’ve seen in a long time. By combining a camera, a cell phone, and a small projector, they’re creating a smart system that watches what’s going on around you and spontaneously provides contextual information. Hold up a plane ticket, and it projects the flight’s status right on the ticket. Walk up to someone, and it recognizes the person’s face and provides name cues and information on that person’s interests. Hold up your fingers in the shape of a frame and it snaps a photo. It’s fascinating stuff, and is nicely demonstrated in this presentation from the 2009 TED conference, which makes me want to move to Boston and apply for admission at MIT.

The Man Who Makes Sing…Awesome

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A couple weeks ago, Kathy and I went up to Baylor University in Waco for their annual Sing event, a four-hour long song and dance revue. The show was, as always, terrific. The best part for me, however, is the post-performance debrief with my friends Jason Young and Barry Brake, who are integral parts of the event, having long been key figures in selecting, arranging, and performing (in the pit band) the music that makes up the show. This year, the Baylor newspaper published an excellent article on Jason that captures nicely what a labor of love the show is for him. (They did omit the fact that he also builds a number of large-scale props for the various acts.)

It’s great to see these guys doing something they so clearly love, and to be able to so directly enjoy the fruits of their labors.

UPDATE: for those of you wondering about Sing, here’s a good overview of this year’s acts and a nice photo gallery.