Author Archives: SeanMcTex

A Grand Day Out With Liam

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Yesterday was the second of the days this summer I took off to spend with one of our kids. Liam and I, after some deliberation, decided on a visit to San Antonio. (The other contender was to take Amtrak up to Austin and spend the day visiting Barton Springs, Peter Pan Mini Golf, and an Alamo Drafthouse theater, all of which are within walking distance of the station.) We started off at the Witte Museum, a fantastic, hands-on, kid-friendly place to which Liam has been keen to make a return visit. It featured an exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci with functioning models of many of his mechanical innovations which were great fun to pump, crank, and climb on. Those that particularly caught my eye were a bridge that could be assembled without any nails or other fasteners, an elaborate wood cutting apparatus, and an early military tank. We also bumped into and had a nice chat with Becky, my brother’s delightful bride, who has been volunteering there at the museum for a couple of months and enjoying it a great deal. The Science Treehouse portion of the museum is also a great favorite, as there are lots of cool things to fool with there, several of which, like the pneumatic rockets and air cannon, mirrored some of the things Jason Young and I have built together.

After a lunch at IHOP, we buzzed back up the highway a bit to Splashtown, a San Antonio water park that has been around since I was young. We flitted from one thing to another, enjoying the short lines brought on by a combination of an overcast, threatening sky and the fact that it was the middle of the week. Since nearly all the rides require you to climb to the tops of towers to launch yourself headlong down the chutes, I ended up climbing the equivalent of a 35 story building over the course of the day, and Liam did around 60. Unsurprisingly, I was terrifically sore the next day. (And the next. And the one after that.) Though he never worked up to the biggest slide at the park, an orange monstrosity we used to call “The Wedgie”, Liam grew increasingly bold over the course of the afternoon, finally settling in to some fairly significant tube chutes with lots of twists and turns (that dumped him out of his tube as often as not) as his favorite thing of the afternoon.

It was a fine day out and, as always, I was glad to seize some extra time with one of the kiddos.

Blasted Nonsense From The Past

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Back when dinosaurs roamed the Internet and you could get a cup of coffee and a shoeshine for a nickel, before the kids all had their newfangled “Mybook” and “Facespaces” and the blink tag still seemed a pretty nifty idea, there was Brain Sausage.

Brain Sausage was an early proto-weblog, created before such things actually existed. I wrote the software for it because I wanted to learn Perl, and enlisted the aid of Robert Leahey and Chris Morris to help populate it with interesting links and a liberal dose of snarkiness. Chris also wrote a super-cool little ticker for Windows that would alert interested parties when there were new posts.

While most of it has been lost to history at this point, I was amused/delighted/horrified to discover that the good folks at archive.org had actually preserved a few pages. The logo, sadly, appears to be lost, either by the vagaries of the program that collected the information or by the good judgement of a censor somewhere. But here are a few bits that historians, masochists, and the easily amused might enjoy having a look at:

A few other horrors I pulled from the archive:

Fiesta Texas, or How I Got Robbed By Porky Pig

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This summer, I’m taking each of the kids out individually for a day on the town. The first of these trips was with Emily. We went to Fiesta Texas, the San Antonio theme park, on (of course) the hottest day of the week.

Spending time with Emily was the best part of the trip. We talked about friends and the drama thereof, favorite places to eat, what’s required to become a licensed tattoo artist, the efficacy of motion-sickness pills, travel, siblings, and more. It was fun to see the shows and ride the rides, though I’m afraid I’m getting to the point in my life where the lavishly choreographed brass and percussion show has more appeal than the vertiginous fighter-jet coaster rides. I particularly enjoyed getting a photo with Pepé le Pew, my long-time favorite of the Looney Tunes gang. Unfortunately, Porky Pig kept trying to horn in on the picture, which prompted me to tell him I was going to Photoshop him out. Since characters in costume aren’t allowed to speak, his only recourse was to smack me, which he readily did.

Unfortunately, Fiesta Texas itself left a bad taste in my mouth, largely due to constant attempts to wring more money out of us. When I bought the tickets for $30/each, I thought it a reasonable price for a full day’s entertainment. But as soon as we arrived, we had to pay another $15 for parking. When we went to our very first ride, we were told we weren’t allowed to bring our backpacks on, but had to put them in a locker, which cost only $1, but which had prominent signs promising that our backpacks would be thrown away if we didn’t retrieve them within 120 minutes. (It’s a good thing lines were fairly short on Wednesdays!) Bringing food or drinks into the park was prohibited, leaving you with little choice but to buy food at their usurious prices: $6 for a slice of pizza was typical of the fare on offer. And even after shelling out all of this money beyond the ticket cost, we were still subjected to advertisements at every corner and on the in-line monitors that used to show cartoons.

While I understand that making money is what businesses exist for, this sort of bait and switch, nickel and dime approach is awfully short sighted. When people leave the park, you want them to be thinking “Wow, what a great time I had!” Instead, I was left with “Holy rhubarb, in spite of careful planning and self control, I was railroaded into spending $40 more than I expected!”

And given that sour note, I don’t think I’ll be going back.

Polemics

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A couple of good articles I’ve stumbled across recently on various current events:

  • Barry Brake rejoices at the restoration of habeus corpus by the US Supreme Court. But sweet betty boop, how is it that this is even contentious? Certainly the cost of arranging hearings for these folks would be the merest fraction of the cost of sending our army overseas, and failing to do so only breeds further resentment of our nation and its policies. While the Constitution does allow for suspension of this right during wartime, it’s difficult to see when this period of wartime might end when one’s enemy is something so nebulous as “terror”.
  • Tim Berners Lee comments on Net Neutrality (via Jim). Tim is widely recognized as the inventor of the World Wide Web, and therefore has some ground to stand on when he comments on issues related to the Internet. And here’s an interesting counterpoint from Richard Bennett, who has worked in Network Engineering for several decades and contributed to many of the protocols that underlie the Internet.

Make Software? Make Money? Help Cure Cancer

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My friend and occasional boss Seth Dillingham is gearing up again for the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, an annual bicycle ride fund raiser that benefits the Dana-Farber Institute, a research organization that battles cancer.

Part of Seth’s fund raising each year includes a big Macintosh software auction, for which he’s now collecting donations. If you make Mac software and wouldn’t mind donating a few licenses to a very worthy cause, give him a hand! If you don’t create software, you can still support his efforts in other ways. Please do what you can to help!

The World’s Ugliest Coffee House

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A few days ago, I twittered that the world’s ugliest coffee shop had opened down the street from us. My friends Ron and Heather asked for more information and challenged the shop’s honorific, so I hereby offer these two photos, snapped hastily this morning on my way to work so that the proprietor wouldn’t know that her establishment was being surveilled by the aesthetics police:

 

The color palette in the first photo was the first thing that tipped us off that the transgression to the eye might surpass mere quotidian ugliness and burst through to something extraordinary.  The Dia de los Muertos meets The Nightmare Before Christmas sculpture below is 8 feet tall, the centerpiece of the courtyard, and quite visually arresting as well. Taking these things together, I think the title of “World’s Ugliest Coffeeshop” is a lock.

That said, I believe that ugly was the goal. It is an artful, calculated awfulness, very much in keeping with the name of the place: Wake The Dead Coffee House. And I must say, the place is great. It’s the second coffee shop in San Marcos (after Tantra) that has really embraced the full English Pub suite of amenities, with nice indoor and outdoor areas, a good selection of beers in addition to the coffees and teas, a ping pong table (plywood, sadly), a projector set up for watching movies, and a music room in development. Where Tantra, however, has a hippie vibe, this one has a bit more of a punk/goth thing going (though neither are too aggressive about it). I’m delighted to have a place within walking distance (about 5 blocks) where I can bring a guitar and have a tea. (Hibiscus mint, one of my favorites, was on offer when we stopped by.) If you live in San Marcos, come check it out!

Stupid Guy Trip VI

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I’m just back from the sixth Stupid Guy Trip, an annualish gathering of my brother, me, and a few of our oldest and dearest. This year Chris McMains, Daniel Priest, Mike Brack, Ben Mengden, Ross Richie, Jason Young, and Jonathan Hunter made up the roster. More than ever this year, it was an experience I can’t really do justice to in a weblog post. A few of the highlights, however, were these:

  • A visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Great collection housed in amazing architecture. Most notable was the giant, bird-wing shaped sunscreen that opened and closed over the solarium several times a day, but the rest of the space was fantastic as well.
  • Nearly getting into a fight with some people vying for a parking space near the mob scene that was RiverSplash. They noticed the license plates on the rental car, and shouted repeatedly at us “Go back to Idaho, you potato-*****,” which was a wholly novel epithet for us.
  • Touring the Lakefront Brewery. Our guide was funny and personable, the beer was good, and the company excellent.
  • The Safe House, a spy-themed bar. To gain entry, one has to know the password or perform an embarrassing act in front of the video cameras that pipe your image into the bar ahead of you. Once cleared, a bookcase swings aside and admits you to the establishment proper, which features all sorts of cold war/James Bond/spy memorabilia, as well as a “secret passage” that locks behind you as you go through it. (I ended up having to exit the bar altogether and lobby the doorkeeper for re-admittance.)
  • Seeing a Brewers game. Miller Park is beautifully constructed, and we had a great view of the ball field from our relatively-cheap seats. It was especially enjoyable to see how seriously fans there take their tailgating; we could see the smoke rising from all the grills from half a mile away, and actually getting in required dodging a number of thrown beanbags from an inexplicably popular game that was played throughout the parking lot. Plus, it’s the only ball park I’ve been to with a slide, though it was sadly not open to the public.
  • Trocadero, a European-style cafe where we enjoyed a fantastic brunch twice. The service was great and the food amazing. (I got to try ratatouille: yum!)
  • Playing full-contact whiffle ball in a park near Jonathan’s apartment. We attracted a fair number of spectators, a couple of injuries, and innumerable grass stains.
  • The biggest highlight for me, however, is always the company and conversations. I count many of these friendships in decades now, have been through a ton with these guys, and am very grateful indeed to be able to carve time out of our lives to nurture those relationships. (Though from the outside, it may be hard to distinguish “nurturing relationships” from “insulting each other’s mothers”.)

A special thanks to Jonathan for hosting our octet of malodorous males in his efficiency apartment.

Two Videos

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Emily has been after me to set up a stop-motion rig for a while. I finally got around to it yesterday and turned her loose, with impressive results:

 

I had also been thinking some about what I could organize over the holiday weekend to get the whole family involved. (Finding something that both a 16 year old and a 7 year old can enjoyable participate in is a notorious challenge.) I finally hit upon the idea of that old summer camp standby, a shaving cream war. I stopped by the grocery on Friday afternoon to pick up the cheapest cans of shaving cream I could find ($1.07 each), and turned everyone loose in the front yard around 5:00pm yesterday. Chaos ensued:

 

Theists and Atheists, Sitting in a Tree

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Matt wrote up a really good article on the hostility in public discourse between theists and atheists, calling special attention to the “new atheists” such as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. His premise is that one can and should engage the other side respectfully and without the use of straw men and ad hominem attacks, recognizing that brilliant people exist on both sides of the philosophical divide and that we should have the humility to be ready to learn from them.

Thanks for the good food for thought, Matt. I appreciate your clarity of thought, your respectfulness and humility.

XO Laptop 2.0

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Nicholas Negroponte announced the next revision of the XO Laptop, the low-cost laptop designed by the One Laptop Per Child initiative for developing countries. The upcoming version eschews the typical laptop form factor, instead taking cues from the iPhone and the Nintendo DS to create a unit that opens like a book, has touch screens that can serve as keyboards, and work either in a laptop configuration or wide open as a big display. Here are a couple prototype images:

 

Laptop Configuration

Book Configuration

More information is available at the BBC and on YouTube.