Author Archives: SeanMcTex

High Ed Web 2008

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I’m currently at the High Ed Web 2008 conference in Springfield, MO. The conference is geared to web professionals in Higher Education, and is an interesting combination of marketers, technical folk, and the occasional vendor. There’s lots of good information to be had (as well as an immense amount of equally good food — who suspected that “travel is broadening” should be taken literally?), and all of us who are attending are getting a lot out of it.

Yesterday afternoon, James, Jeff and I did our planned presentation: University-Wide CMS Implementation: Failure, then Success. We had a lot of fun with it, taking a pretty irreverent approach to the history of our CMS project, and using some cool 3D timeline software to present our information in an interesting way.

Conference attendees have been using Twitter to communicate about the conference pretty extensively, so I told people at the start of our presentation that I wanted them to help me make all the people in other sessions feel as bad as possible for missing ours. Toward that end, I encouraged them to post the most outrageous lies about our presentation they could think of. Here’s the Twitter chatter that was posted during our presentation:

  • jesseclark: I have recieved more temp tattos in the past two days than the last 10 years!
  • tonydunn: live mexican wrestling in SAC4 session! AWESOME!!
  • stomer: Admiring the wrestling masks at SAC4
  • carlenek: SAC4, CMS Failure then success. They just gave each of us $5!!
  • stomer: In unison “politics”
  • stomer: “Uploading images has more steps than AA”
  • tonydunn: massive EPIC FAIL… what a story! if you ain’t in SAC4 ur missing it
  • tonydunn: @pberry blackops meetings… sounds like us 🙂
  • stomer: Another plug for adding content best practices along with CMS training
  • tonydunn: ‘brand the service, not the product’ – excellent advice!

I’m having a great time getting to enjoy some of my work friends in a more social setting than usual, as well as meeting people from other Universities and Colleges around the country, getting to see Springfield, and taking photos with team members in luchador masks in front of local landmarks. We have another day and a half of conference to go, after which I’m looking forward to the chance to meet up with my Uncle Rick and some old friends who also live in the area.

Sidenote: before leaving for the trip, I told the kids that I was going to Springfield for a conference. “Cool!” said Liam. “You’ll get to meet the Simpsons!” I launched into an explanation of the fact that one of the running gags on the show is that they don’t ever let on where Springfield actually is, and how in the movie Ned Flanders points to the four adjacent states, Ohio, Nevada, Maine and Kentucky, which are of couse widely spread. Thus I wouldn’t actually get to meet the Simpsons, because the Springfield they live in is a fictional construct, not the one in Missouri.

Ten minutes later it occurred to me that I would also not get to meet them because they’re cartoons.

Yep, I’m a dork.

QA Engineer Needed

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Hi all! Hideo, our superb QA guy up at work, is heading back to Japan at the end of this month, and we need to find someone to fill his shoes. If you’re interested in web application development and/or software quality assurance, please check out the listing I’ve posted on Craig’s List. Thanks!

Fun With Code and Coders

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Monday night I headed up to Austin to drop in to the Heatwave Interactive/AGDC party at the Sky Lounge up in Austin. Heatwave is helmed by Anthony Castoro, one of my old bosses from Origin, so I thought it would be a nice opportunity to catch up with some of that crew. I had an even better time than I expected, participating (badly) in a Rock Band 2 tournament, and catching up with Joshua, Anthony, Edgar, Tim, Brit, Steve, Doug, Cody, and probably more whom I’ve forgotten. (And given some of their states at the time, some have probably forgotten seeing me as well.) Thanks for the great time, all!

Also, I want to give a bit of Google juice to Stack Overflow, a new site that’s designed for asking an answering programming questions. They’ve built some nice tools to ensure that good information rises to the top over time, and I’ve been very impressed with the quality and quantity of information there. Well worth a visit if you’re a programmer.

Of Teddy Bears and Farting Dogs

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My friend Amy Boyd has, over the time that she has worked at Texas State University, acquired a fairly impressive collection of stuffed animals. This was not because she bought them herself, or even because she’s particularly fond of them, but because someone gave her the first one as a joke. Other people got it into their heads that she collected them, and have given them to her as gifts until her desk was awash in them.

Among these unsolicited stuffed critters was one Walter the Farting Dog, a stuffed canine apparently based on a children’s book series of the same name. Walter is a scruffy-looking beast who, when squeezed, emits a distinctive flatulent sound. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), his batteries were eventually exhausted, and his noisome and noisy gastric distress came to an end.

I thought that Walter deserved a second lease on life, but that it would be much funnier and more surreal for Walter to do something entirely different when resuscitated. While on an outing with Abigail, we happened across a Build A Bear workshop, where I noticed a good selection of voice boxes for their bears — just the thing for Walter! I explained to Abby what I had in mind, and we rooted through their selection of sounds until we finally settled on this. The woman at the desk was a little baffled that I only wanted the voice box without a bear around it, but happily obliged me when I started waving around the Lincolns.

A couple of weeks later, I divulged the plan to Jeff Snider, and we kidnapped Walter early one morning to do the necessary surgery on him. Putting his old scouting skills to good use, Jeff deftly snipped Walter’s belly stitches, extracted the old sound box, slipped in the new one, and with a surgeon’s precision, sewed him back together so neatly that one would never know by looking that Walter had been through trauma. (Photo gallery is here.) We thought about neutering him while we had him sedated, but decided that with the romantic hurdles he already faced, it was probably unnecessary.

Walter in the Operating Room.

Walter in the Operating Room.

We discreetly replaced the dog on Amy’s desk, and then began the most difficult part of the whole process: waiting for someone to discover Walter’s new personality. Neither of us could go squeeze him ourselves, as we would give ourselves away all too quickly. But nobody who was already familiar with Walter had any inclination to squeeze him any longer, as his batteries had died long before.

Fortunately, we were rescued from our purgatory about a week and a half later, when Whitten picked Walter up and gave him a good squeeze.

“Let’s go shopping!” chirped Walter.

“What the h***?” responded Amy promptly.

A few more squeezes elicited more of Walter’s new vocabulary, all delivered in a cloying preadolescent whine:

“Hey, Girlfriend!”

“It’s great to have a new friend like you!”

“You look great!”

“You are too cool!”

All of this happened while I was at lunch, alas. After our earlier Cuckoo Clock prank, Jeff and I were immediate suspects, and since I lack the ability to lie well, all the details quickly spilled out. Amy thought it was hilarious, and has now demanded that we install the flatulence voicebox into her stuffed spider.

Injuries, Reunions, and New Braunfels

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Hello all! It’s the start of the academic year, and our family has been crazy busy. There are currently seven people living under our roof, and I’m the only one who didn’t return to school this week. Kathy has been very excited to resume her University work, and the kids have been bidding summer farewell with varying degrees of enthusiasm and disappointment. I, of course, have been delighted to once again be able to say in my most loving and supportive voice, “You have homework and I don’t. Neener, neener!”

Saturday was the date for the First Annual McMains All-Family River Float. Becky, Chris, Ken and Mom McMains all came up from San Antonio to enjoy lunch together and a float down the San Marcos river. It was a nice afternoon for it, and a fitting way to ring out the summer. Chris and I particularly enjoyed going through the rapids sans tube, though the low water levels caused us to get a little more banged up than usual, and in my case, made people wonder how a whale got beached so far from the sea.

This past weekend was also my High School’s official 20th reunion. (Go Brahmas!) The combination of the high price and a noisy, crowded venue was enough to scare me off from the official festivities, but I did invite Alex, Serenity and her family, and William — a few friends who were in from out of town for the occassion — to come over on Sunday for a visit. It was a pleasure to see how much this cadre still got along and enjoyed each other; we had a great afternoon of food, conversation, music, and reminiscing.

Sean, Alex, Serenity and William together for the first time since High School

Sean, Alex, Serenity and William together for the first time since High School.

Liam chose to celebrate the return to school in an entirely appropriate way for a 9 year old boy: he broke his right arm. He was buzzing around the neighborhood on his new Heelies (sneakers with roller skates built in, for those of you not in the know), got a rock stuck in the wheel, took a fall, and earned himself the right to wear a cast for the first six weeks of third grade — a masterful move in the eternal homework-avoidance arms race.

In an attempt to foster some family togetherness, we have been doing a weekly Family Dinner followed by Forced Family Fun Time. (This was a designation that my brother and I coined when we were the unwilling recipients of “quality time”, rather than its perpetrators.) It’s hard work to pull off family time like that with all the homework, movies, video games, and other things that compete for our time, but has been a qualified success, and I’m glad we’re doing it. On Thursday, I set the challenge before the group to build the tallest tower possible using mini marshmallows and toothpicks. While we broke no new ground in engineering, it was a fun challenge that got everybody working together:

Kathy, Emily, and Abby won with this mighty contstruct

Kathy, Emily, and Abby won with this mighty contstruct. Frank Gehry stopped by later to take notes.

Since the kids started school on Monday, but Kathy didn’t begin until two days later, I decided to take her  for a day on the town. I’m normally a meticulous planner, but we decided to keep the day completely spontaneous and see how it went. We started out by watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf — not a terrifically auspicious way for a married couple to begin a day! (I did, however, get to do Richard Burton impressions all day. “Martha!”) We then started for the River House Tea Room for lunch, but were diverted by the inescapable lure of good Tex-Mex on the way and ended up at Adobe Verde instead. After enjoying a delicious meal, we wandered around Gruene for a bit, stopping in the various shops, taking photos, and enjoying the languor of the afternoon. It didn’t take much of that, however, before we were hot and sweaty, so we went to see if the Landa Park pool was open. No luck. Rats!

As we were leaving Landa Park, however, we saw several people tubing on the Comal river and decided to find a place to do the same. Landa Falls was the first place we stumbled across, and since it boasted the longest float on the river, we put our $13 on the barrel head, grabbed a tube, and jumped into the water. It had been years since I had been on the Comal, and it was fascinating to see how it had changed over the years: the erstwhile Stinky Falls is now owned by the city, and Camp Warnecke has been subsumed by Schlitterbahn and a condo development. (The latter were rampant along the river — apparently they breed like rabbits that have been fed Viagra kibble and who have access to Bugs Bunny’s sexy outfits.)

After tubing, we wandered around New Braunfels a little more, stopping in at Bryan Duckworth’s (former fiddle player for Robert Earl Keen) violin shop to have my cello bow rehaired (it was nearly as bald as I am) and at the Uptown Piano Bar, an intimate dimly lit cellar bar that Kathy especially liked in spite of the nekkid lady paintings on the walls. As we were walking around the square, we (nearly literally) bumped into our friend Kris Bolstad as he was riding his scooter past, and stopped to chat with him for several minutes. We rounded off the day with a quick trip to Target and then to watch Kung Fu Panda, which was great fun, at the cheap theater in San Marcos.

Weekend To-Do: Postmortem

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  • Jump in river. Forget to take wallet out of pocket. Learn nothing from the experience. Repeat next day.
  • Attend Irish Music Jam Session. Narrowly avoid putting out own eye with bodhrán beater.
  • Reiterate conviction that we have quite enough pets around the house already, thank you.
  • Drive 12 year old with big eyes and remarkable persistence to pick up kitten.
  • Go sailing with friends. Demonstrate sailing prowess. Thank God for outboard motors.

Aging Kids on the Block

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This morning, the iTunes store brought me the news that New Kids on the Block have a new album coming out. I was surprised to hear that they were still around, so clicked on through. To my horror, I found that while they now look like 37 year old chain smokers, they are still singing the same preadolescent, overengineered bubblegum pop. I mentioned the album to Jimmy, one of my coworkers, and he suggested that we should help them out by coming up with some new song titles better suited to their current station in life. A few moment’s brainstorming yielded the following titles:

  • “Girl, Can I Light Your Cigarette?”
  • “Your Biological Clock is Ticking”
  • “I’ve Got Some Candy in my Pocket”
  • “You Can’t Go Back to Middle School”
  • “(I’ve Got The) Peter Pan Syndrome”
  • “Sugar Daddy”
  • “Let Me Love You ’til My Hip Gives Out”

Want to play along? Post your own in the comments! You could win a copy of our home game just for posting! (Disclaimer: that was a lie.) And New Kids? Feel free to use any of these you like.

What My Friends Are Up To

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One of the best things about being me is that I’m blessed with some amazing, creative, interesting friends. Here are a few things that they’ve been up to lately:

  • David Barnard has started an iPhone software company called AppCubby, and has just released their first product, TripCubby, the sine qua non of mileage tracking for the iPhone. David has worked extraordinarily hard to get this venture off the ground, and that effort shows in the quality of the work that AppCubby is doing. (I’m also excited about this because I did some of the copy writing for David — one of my first professional jobs writing prose instead of software.)
  • Misty Jones has released a song called Gasoline on iTunes. Misty’s musicianship has impressed me all the way back to high school, and I really dig this latest effort. You can check out 30 seconds for free, or get the whole thing (DRM-free, even!) for a mere $0.99. She plans to finish out the album on which this song will go soon.
  • Ross Richie continues to helm Boom Studios, an increasingly successful comic book publishing venture. One of their bolder efforts of late has been releasing some of their books for free viewing online. They’ve recently added RSS feeds, which makes it super-easy to follow the books as they’re released page-by-page. There’s some very high-quality work in their stable, so if you’re in to the medium at all, go check their stuff out!

OLPC, Microsoft, and Intel

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The Times Online has a really interesting article up on the One Laptop Per Child initiative and Microsoft’s and Intel’s responses to it. It’s a great read, and provides an interesting window into some of the skulduggery that the corporations engaged in when threatened by the vision of a cheap laptop for the developing world.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2005, Nicholas Negroponte, supreme prophet of digital connectivity, revealed a strange tent-like object. It was designed to change the world and to cost $100. It was a solar-powered laptop. Millions would be distributed to children in the developing world, bringing them connection, education, enlightenment and freedom of information. The great, the good, the rich and the technocrats nodded in solemn approval.

And then some of them tried to kill it.

Kindle Impressions

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I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with an Amazon Kindle over the past week. The Kindle is Amazon’s attempt to bring book reading and distribution into the 21st century. It’s essentially a small, purpose-built, handheld computer that incorporates several interesting technologies to create a compelling experience for the book lover.

The first distinctive thing about it is the display. Rather than using the LCD or OLED screens that are common on laptops and cell phones, the Kindle uses electronic paper, a display made up of thousands of tiny capsules filled with black and white particles that can be dragged to the top or to the bottom electronically. It functions (and looks) a bit like a high-resolution Magna Doodle.

This screen provides a couple of advantages: first, it gives the kindle a distinctive, book-like appearance. Though the 800×600 display isn’t quite as high-resolution as print, it looks very good, and the four gray scales allow for some basic graphics and diagrams to be included (and some lovely screen savers). One might reasonably wish the background color were a purer white, rather than a light grey, but the constrast ratio is still very high, close to that of a newsprint. Second, the electronic paper display is extremely power-efficient. Because it only draws power when it is changed, the Kindle can run for up to a week on a single charge — something unheard of with emissive displays. Third, because it is reflective, it can be read in all the same conditions one could normally read a book — bright sunlight presents no problems. (The ironic flip side of this advantage is that you need a book light to read it in a dark room.)

The second distinctive thing about the Kindle is that it has a built-in wireless data connection that runs over Amazon’s Whispernet service. Amazon subsidizes the service through device and electronic book sales — it doesn’t cost anything to use. It’s built on the cellular phone network, and therefore has excellent coverage, though the bandwidth is fairly limited. However since it’s used primarily as a delivery mechanism for textual content, that’s rarely a concern. One can use the device to grab a sample of a book from the Kindle store nearly instantly, and can download an entire purchased book within about a minute.

According to the hackers, the software that runs the whole show is largely Java on top of Linux. However, as a user, you’ll never be aware of the fact. The system is controlled with an easy-to-use system of menus which are almost entirely accessed through a little scroll wheel. I gave Kathy (who will be the first to admit that she’s no big fan of technology) 20 seconds of instructions on how to use the scroll wheel while we were driving to San Antonio last week, and she, without further help, kept herself entertained for the two hour car ride downloading sample books, reading, and exploring the device — an impressive testament to its ease-of-use.

There is currently no SDK for the device, so one is limited to running the applications that Amazon ships with it. Amazon has hinted that they might consider creating an SDK in the future, but hasn’t made any official announcements yet. Even so, the Kindle is quite functional. One can, of course, buy and download books from Amazon’s library at rates substantially lower than what one would pay for a hardcover edition. Amazon also has a conversion service where you can send a variety of document types to a special email address and have them converted into a format viewable on the Kindle. It costs $0.10 to have the document sent to your Kindle over Whispernet, but is free if you use the included USB cable to put it on the Kindle yourself. Since the Kindle registers itself as a standard mass storage device, you can transfer files to it easily using a computer with Mac OS, Windows, or Linux with no additional drivers.

Amazon also includes several experimental applications, including a music player, a human-backed question answering service, and, most interesting, a basic web browser. While the browser doesn’t support a lot of advanced features, it works well for browsing well-formatted content, and is even quite usable for some web applications. I’ve been able to update my Twitter while walking home, though haven’t yet convinced it to display my RSS feeds in Google reader. Though the browser isn’t as good as Mobile Safari, its reliance on the cellular network means that I can use it in many more places than the iPod Touch, which relies on having a wireless access point nearby.

While the Kindle has a lot to recommend it, it’s not perfect. The display takes about 3/4 of a second to refresh when you move from page to page. It’s very easy to hit the Next Page and Previous Page buttons by accident. It’s rather homely. Purchased books are wrapped up in DRM. And it’s expensive.

However, by taking advantage of its unique place in the book selling market, Amazon has managed to create the most viable electronic book yet. For the traveler, the reader, or the person who needs convenient access to a reference library, it’s a very compelling product — and a lot of fun.