Author Archives: SeanMcTex

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.

New Gig: O’Malarkey

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The Patio Boys, the band with which I’ve been playing for several years, has gone on hiatus for the moment, leaving a big eighth-note shaped hole in my life. I have, however, been sitting in on an Irish Session at a nearby coffee shop for a couple of months, which has led to an invitation to join up with O’Malarkey, a local group that I’ve enjoyed listening to for a number of years.

O’Malarkey focuses on Irish music and plays various places around the San Marcos/Austin/Wimberley area. The shows are high-energy and a lot of fun, and I’m delighted to get to be a part of the musical goings-on. In order to make it easy for folks to keep up with the band, I’ve registered www.omalarkey.com and pointed it to a Facebook page I’ve created. (I plan to get something more comprehensive up eventually, but this seemed a good start.)

Here are a few of the upcoming public shows. Stop on by for one (or all)!

  • San Marcos Public Library, March 10, 7:00pm-8:00pm
  • St. Patrick’s Day Concert & Potluck, 7A Resort, Wimberley, March 14, 7:00pm-9:00pm (times tentative)
  • Fiddler’s Hearth, Austin, April 4, 9:00pm-11:00pm (I won’t be able to be at this one, as the family already had plans for that night. I hope we play there again, as it looks like a great venue.)

Attack of the Meme: 25 Things

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Over on Facebook, there’s a rash of “25 Things About Me” posts going around. While I’m usually reluctant to wax that narcissistic, I do secretly love to pollute the air with self-centered ramblings as much as the next guy. (Plus, several people have now tagged me in their 25 Things lists.) So, if you’ll indulge me for a few minutes, here are “25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about [me].”

  1. I’m not a particularly good musician. My sole gift is that I have a good ear, which makes it pretty easy to pick up new instruments and to play along with other people. I have not, however, ever been disciplined enough to get excellent at anything musical.
  2. I have eaten rattlesnake, squirrel, cactus, beaver, alligator and elk. All on a single pizza. The part about the pizza is a lie.
  3. My favorite toy when I was young was the paper feed mechanism from a Xerox machine I had pulled out of a dumpster behind my Mom’s office.
  4. I once sang for a crowd of hundreds of people wearing only a towel. (Well, with boxers underneath.)
  5. There is a spot on my head that doesn’t grow hair because of a fight my brother and I once had. (He is now among my closest friends.)
  6. I often struggle with my faith, and have a measure of envy for my friends to whom it comes easily.
  7. I have worked variously as a house cleaner, a cellist, a driver, a math tutor, a writer, an ice cream cone maker, a bass player, an actor, a computer game programmer, a singer, a recording engineer, and a theater lighting tech.
  8. I have a tremendously smart and talented bunch of friends of whom I am often in considerable awe. Some of those friendships are now numbered in decades — a fact that brings me no end of pleasure.
  9. I’m occasionally tempted to get Leviticus 19:28 tattooed on my arm. (You’ll have to look it up.)
  10. The time in my life I was the most viscerally frightened was when standing on top of a telephone pole, getting ready to leap to a trapeze on a ropes course. Even with all the safety gear, I find heights utterly unnerving.
  11. There is no doubt in my mind that marriage has made me a better person.
  12. I don’t have an ideal job, because there are too many things I’m interested in and would love to spend time doing: photography, writing, humanitarian work, music, building kinetic sculptures, being a Mythbuster, and even a bit of computer work (which is what pays the bills now).
  13. I am profoundly grateful that I don’t always get what I deserve.
  14. I have a (sometimes annoying) habit of trying to turn nearly everything I touch into a musical instrument in some way.
  15. I think it’s so fascinating to see how each of our kids turns out that I have a hard time understanding parents who drive their children to succeed in one specific way.
  16. I’m unusually sensitive to noise, and often shut down after about 10 minutes in a noisy place.
  17. I love physics, and have read textbooks on the subject for fun. The dance of creation is a thing of amazing, baffling, hypnotic beauty to me.
  18. I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time when I was about 10. It was a great story, but I found it hard enough going that I was secretly disappointed that my dad didn’t throw a party for me when I finished the first volume.
  19. I have a terrible memory for personal details, dates, names, etc. As a result, I completely forgot my own birthday one year.
  20. When I was 9 years old, I believed that everyone around me was an alien and that, as the only human, I was the subject of an elaborate experiment. (Self-important little blighter, wasn’t I?)
  21. In spite of various friends’ efforts, I’ve never developed an appreciation for distilled spirits. They all taste like cough medicine to me.
  22. I currently have over 15 kinds of hot pepper sauce in my kitchen, some of which stand a good chance of killing you if tasted undiluted. (Blair’s Sudden Death Sauce: 500,000 scoville units. Compare to Tabasco’s 2,500.)
  23. I’m disappointed that Esperanto never caught on.
  24. I fractured my coccyx about 15 years ago while sliding down a hillside on a piece of cardboard and encountering a sprinkler head. Because the break healed oddly, I can’t comfortably sit in one position for more than about 10 minutes.
  25. I believe that 80’s music is not only the best music in human history, but it’s also the best music that it’s theoretically possible to produce in our space-time continuum. (Though when the LHC comes online again, all of that may change.)

2008 In Books

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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!

The African Children’s Choir

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Last night, Kathy and I took the kiddos to see a performance of the African Children’s Choir. As a big fan of African choral music, I was really excited to get to hear this group, even though I didn’t know much more about them than their name. I was not disappointed.

The 30-strong choir, made up of kids aged seven to eleven years, charged enthusiastically on to the stage amid drumming, whoops and ululations, tearing right into a number of well-choreographed songs. The musical arrangements were straightforward, but the kids’ enthusiasm, dancing and excellent singing made for an absolutely terrific time.

It turns out the Choir isn’t primarily about these performances, but is in fact a Christian aid organization which uses the musical tours to raise funds for their work back in Africa. Most of the children performing had lost one or both parents to war or disease and were terribly vulnerable before the African Children’s Choir took them in. While the choir we saw was comparatively small, there are hundreds of kids in Uganda,  Sudan, Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa that the organization supports and cares for.

Midway through the program, each of the children said hello to the crowd and said a little about what he or she wanted to be on reaching adulthood. Aspirations ranged from bus driver to singer to President (a goal that got a predictably warm response from the crowd a day after President Obama’s inauguration). This recitation of dreams was especially poignant given that for most, simply living to adulthood would have been unexpected if it weren’t for the work of the choir. (We compared notes among our group afterward, and there was barely a dry eye during this section of the program.)

The Choir received three standing ovations by the time they wrapped up for the evening with one of the more rousing renderings of “This Little Light of Mine” that I’ve ever heard. So go see them if you can (they’re bouncing between San Antonio and Austin for the next few days), or support them in some other way. You won’t regret it.

The Heist

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During my junior year at The King’s College (1991), I was a Resident Assistant and thus had a room to myself. One of the ways I took advantage of that situation was by launching a string of practical jokes, most of which were directed at Steve Everhart, my boss and the Resident Director of the dorm. The culmination of the series was what I’ve come to call “The Heist.”

At that time, my college was in the process of planning a move to a new campus. As part of this process, they had commissioned one of those nifty models that shows what a building site will look like once the buildings are constructed and the site is landscaped. This particular one was about 3’x5′, had rolling Styrofoam hills, several structures, roads, a lake, and a number of little automobiles on it. It was also surrounded by a Plexiglas case screwed on to the base so that passers-by wouldn’t poke it or pilfer the little automobiles.

One day I decided that the model, which was displayed in the library, needed to disappear. So that night, Glenn Gonzalez and I snuck into the library through an adjacent office to which I had a key. Since walking through the halls of the school with this large model in tow would of course attract attention, we instead snuck it out of the building through the door that falsely claimed that it was a fire door and an alarm would sound if you opened it. (We had previously verified this in reconnaissance missions.)

We then brought the model around the school to the back stairwell, which another friend had opened for us, and up to the second floor of the dormitory. Waiting until the coast was clear, we finally got it to my room without having been seen. Since I had two beds in my room, I simply replaced the mattress on the top bunk with the model, put sheets and a bedspread on it, and made it up to look just like another mattress. Stage one was complete!

Over the next few days, I showed it to several friends, including Ross Prinzo, who had given me the idea originally. Among the select individuals who got to see it was a certain David Granniss, who laughed hysterically for a full minute, and then stopped abruptly with a look of inspiration on his face. “What is it, Dave?” I asked. “There ought to be army men in it!”

Well, of course he was right. I leaped into Oslo the Land Shark, my trusty Italian-manufactured steed of the time, and made a beeline to the toy store. Unfortunately, upon examining the army men available there for purchase, I determined that given the difference in scale, they would tower over the buildings in a Godzilla-like fashion. Rather than army men, I ended up purchasing a selection of Micro-Machines, which were more suited to this application. Among them were tanks, missile launchers, and helicopters.

After unscrewing and removing the Plexiglas case, we deployed the missile launchers across one of the higher ridges overlooking the campus. The tanks rolled among the buildings, and we used cotton to create smoke both at the muzzles of their weapons, and at the married student housing, which they were bombarding. (I was bitter about not having a girlfriend at the time, a circumstance whose reasons are perhaps, in retrospect, rather obvious.) The Apache-style helicopters were suspended from the Plexiglas case with fishing line, swooping into the site in formation from one of the corners of the display. By the time we finished, we had an impressive looking war diorama, set in the beautifully landscaped Silver Lake campus.

Upon completing our improvements to the model and reinstalling its case, we determined to sneak it back into the library and replace it where it had previously been. This took a bit more planning, as some of the doors we had used had crash-bars, and would only open from one side. We eventually sent an operative into the library before we retraced our previous steps. The model made it back to its display table without further incident.

The next day, we kept our distance from the library to avoid drawing suspicion to ourselves, and thus only heard secondhand about the discovery of our modifications. Apparently the president of the college, fulfilling some of his fundraising duties, had VIPs from off-campus on a tour. As he described in glowing detail the plans the college had for its new location and showed the model off, he suddenly noticed that all was not as he expected. Needless to say, maintenance was soon there restoring the display to its former, mundane state.

Our triumph lasted only a day, but still causes me to stop every once in a while and laugh to myself. And then to go cause more mischief.

(Note: if this story is familiar, it’s because it’s a repost from an old version of the website. One of my friends requested that I get it back online, so here it is again.)

Hooray for Google!

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This afternoon, I noticed that one of my Google Calendars had utterly vanished. I tried all the troubleshooting steps available in their help forum, but it was still gone. I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get any real help, based on some of the posts in the forum, but I sent them a note anyway:

I had a calendar named TRCC that is for my church. Today I was logged into
to Google Calendars, and was unable to enter events. I logged out and in
(and cleared cache and cookies), and when I logged back in, the calendar
had vanished altogether. It’s no longer displayed in my Google Calendar
interface, and the page where it is embedded throws an error too:
http://3riv.org/calendar (“Invalid calendar id:
5nuaouifu4j7ndhiunae5mmu3s@group.calendar.google.com“)

It’s showing every sign of being gone altogether, though I certainly didn’t
delete it. 🙁

By the time I made it home, this was waiting in my inbox:

Hi Sean,

Thank you for your note. We’re sorry to hear that you’ve experienced the loss of your calendar’s data. We have reviewed your account, and noted that the calendar ‘TRCC’ had been deleted. Please be assured that we will never delete your calendar data. Your calendar may have been deleted by someone else who had ownership access to this calendar.

We have gone ahead and restored this calendar, and it should now appear in your calendar list. Please keep in mind that you can keep a backup of your events by exporting your calendar data. To do so, follow the instructions at http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=37111

Regards,
The Google Team

Sure enough, the Calendar is back intact. Thank you, Google Folk! You have impressed me once again.

Mistletoe Furlough Redux

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We’ve made it home safely from our grand Christmas roadtrip, and are enjoying the comfort of sleeping in our own beds once more. I don’t have the time or skill to do the trip justice, but here are a few of the highlights that stick out in my memory:

  • A wonderful extended time of visiting with the Adams family. Though we unfortunately never were able to visit them in Uganda while they were doing teaching and mission work there, having a full week with them was a good bit of make-up. It was terrific to get to enjoy long talks, trips to the park, ice cream, Carcassonne games, etc. without the time pressure that often characterizes our visits with family and friends.
  • Visiting the Frontier Culture Museum. This historical park recreates farms from the homelands of the various people groups that settled in the area by transporting buildings piece-by-piece from their land of origin and training guides to explain life at that time in character. It’s a fascinating place with  sound educational value.
  • A mini college reunion. My old college friends Jonathan and Nadja were kind enough to put us up for two nights in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. To my surprise, they also coordinated with Steve and Debbie and Bob and Sonia to bring together a wonderful dinner of old college chums. It had been a decade since I’d seen most of these folks, and I was struck with how much I still enjoy their company and the richness of their friendship.
  • Laughing about the “5 kid tour”. Three of the families we visited with over the course of our trip had 5 children in their family. For the first time ever, I felt like a bit of a procreative underachiever!
  • Going snow tubing at Ski Roundtop. We had hoped to do a day of snowboarding at some point on the trip, but weather and schedules conspired to make that an impossibility. Two hours sliding down a snow-packed hill on tubes was a decent substitute, good enough that Liam declared it his favorite part of the trip.
  • Visiting the museums and zoo in Washington DC. I was particularly thrilled to see Spaceship One, as well as a giant piece by Andy Goldsworthy at the National Gallery. (If you haven’t seen Rivers and Tides, the documentary on Andy’s work, it’s well worth renting.) We also got to see the Giant Pandas at the zoo feeding and quite enjoyed the bird displays.
  • Staying with Rob and Kim and Glenn and Michelle in Nashville. Glenn and Rob were among my closest college friends, and it was an absolute pleasure to get to catch up with each of them and their families. I only wish we had been able to linger — the visits both seemed far too brief!

To my surprise, the kids did really well with the long car rides, which topped out at about 14 hours in a single day. They were, however, pretty gleeful to see the end of their time trapped in the back of the vehicle, rolling around on the ground and squealing with glee when we returned home at last.

Thanks to all who contributed to the success of the trip. We enjoyed it a great deal, and are very glad to be home safely!