I’ve added a couple new items to the “Do Some Good” sidebar:

• The Fight Aids link goes to the World Community Grid, a distributed computing effort that allows you to donate your unused computer time to a couple of giant research projects, among them an effort to find more effective protease inhibitors to deal with HIV. (Windows and Linux only so far, unfortunately.) Best of all, it doesn’t cost you a dime.
• Help Bill Help Nehemiah Project goes to the fundraising page of Bill Cunliffe. Bill is my sister-in-law’s brother who lives in London and is running in the London Marathon on April 23 to benefit the Nehemiah project, an organization that helps people with a variety of addictions and other issues to overcome them by living in close-knit community. Great work. Bill needs a few hundred pounds more to reach his fundraising goal, so go chip in! (You can use a US credit card — the bank will do the currency conversion for you automatically.)
• Give a Cow links to Mercy Corps’ “Cow Kit”, which allows you to fund the gift of a cow for an economically marginal agrarian family. It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving.
• UPDATE: Seth is riding in the PMC again this year, so go Help Seth Fight Cancer!

• Back when Abigail was still of the appropriate age to sit in a high chair, we had stopped at El Chico on the way from Denton to San Antonio. As a red-blooded Mexican food loving Texan, I was delighted when I looked over to see Abigail diligently dipping her chips in salsa before wolfing them down. She still falls down as often as she manages to walk, but by golly, she knows what to do with a tortilla chip!

  My pride swelled to epic proportions a few minutes later when I looked over and found that she had abandoned the tortilla chips altogether and had upended the salsa tub, sucked it dry, and was now licking the last dregs from the bowl. That’s my girl!

• Once, while working at Motorola, I was standing next to a guy at the row of urinals when he glanced over and said thoughtfully “that’s a pretty short one you’ve got there.” It took me 5 seconds of flummoxed silence to realize that he was referring to the fact that I was using the urinal that was at the appropriate height for kids, and not insulting my manhood.

After Kathy left for her sinus surgery this morning, the kids and I left for the University with a pile of orange paper in hand. We found the highest places we could get to and made and launched paper airplanes and helicopters for about 90 minutes.

Upon our return, we got a call from the ENT who was responsible for the surgery. He said everything went fine, and we should expect to hear from the surgery center in about two hours when Kathy comes out of the anaesthesia and is ready for picking up.

So, apparently all went well. Thanks for your prayers and pies! I’ll post again once Kathy is home and settled in.

Kathy’s home and sleeping fairly comfortably now. We’ve got some antibiotics and pain meds for her, and the surgery center staff warned me that any documents she signs in the next 24 hours aren’t legally binding — another nefarious scheme foiled!

Thanks to Mary, Chris, John, Lori, Ginger, Debbie, Pam, and all the other folks who have been helping with food, juvenile herding, etc.

I’m overdue to do an update, but since this is officially Spring Break — though the University doesn’t see fit to actually give us any off time, instead asking us politely “won’t you please take some vacation time so that we can turn the lights off and save some electricity?” — I’m not at my most motivated. So, it’s bullet point update time!

• Liam managed, a few weekends ago, to knock out two teeth within about a 45 minute span. Fortunately, these were teeth that were overdue to come out anyway, but I still thought it funny and appropriate to his character that he managed to accidentally bash out each independently of the other in such a short span.
• I enjoyed a very nice birthday party this past weekend with a good deal of the extended family. (March 10 marked the end of my 36th year.) We went to Landa Park, cooked and ate a great deal, attempted to hijack one of the flatcars from the park’s miniature railway, and played Horse Balls, a great game originated by one of my coworkers. Thanks to all who attended!
• I played at my church on Sunday, and Grant’s church on Wednesday. Both went enjoyably for us musicians, and hopefully for the congregants as well. I am amused to discover than I’m having a sort of anti-puberty as time goes on, and my vocal range continues to gradually climb back up from where it fell in my teens.
• Kathy goes in tomorrow for sinus surgery, in hopes that straightening out her septum and clearing out her sinus cavities will help prevent the recurrent sinus infections to which she’s prone. If you’re of a praying mind, keep her in your prayers. If not, send us a pie. It won’t help the sinus issues, obviously, but we really like pie.
• I had some good visits this weekend with folks I don’t often get to see. Jonathan and his honeypiesugarbearsnookums Christine stopped in on Monday night for a visit, some looking at photos, and a trip to Valentino’s for the best pizza in the free world. Greg came through town and stayed with us last night. We played a bit of music together, enjoyed a few beers, and dropped by Cheatham Street Warehouse to listen to the participants in songwriter night. I enjoyed both visits a great deal, and Liam was thrilled to get to camp out on the couch for the night.

Fellow Stupid Guy Daniel has his chapbook Dead Man available for preorders. (A chapbook is “a short book of not much more than 20-25 pages, generally poetry, printed in short runs,” according to Daniel.)

While I generally have little patience for poetry, especially the maudlin self-indulgent sort of pap I write, Daniel’s stuff is lucid, meaty, and quite rewarding. You can preorder his tome at Rather Small Press for the bargain price of $6.50 Canadian (which is about $0.23 USD).

Also, while I’m on the subject of Daniel, be sure to enjoy Saint Daniel of the Ferris Wheel.

This past weekend marked Stupid Guy Trip IV, the latest in an ongoing series of male bonding excursions started in 2001 with a trip to Las Vegas. This year’s destination: Seattle. In attendance were Mike Brack, Chris, Daniel, Ben, Ross and me.

The trip was too full and fun to really do justice without writing more pages than the Internet has room for, but a few of the highlights for me included:

• Architecture: Saw my first Frank Gehry in person (the Experience Music Project building), toured and adored the Seattle Public Library, and visited the beautiful Chapel of St. Ignatius at Seattle University, a beautiful sacred space for which the architecture firm that employs Mike was responsible.
• Food: Since gluttony is my favorite deadly sin, I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to temporarily ignore my cardiologist’s dietary advice and sample a variety of interesting goodies. New things I like: borscht, pieroshkies, dried fruit logs, and salmon sausage. Old stuff I like even more: clam chowder, pistachios, fish & chips, hamburgers, and beer.
• The Pacific Northwest: As we were flying into Seattle, I was awed to see Mt. Ranier, whose immense bulk actually loomed above our plane as we flew a couple of miles to its east. While in Seattle, it was always a bit startling to this flatlander to see mountains looming at the end of city streets and huge gulls wheeling among the skyscrapers. Our time in Deception Pass State Park was also super — a chilly ramble on the beach, some good photo opportunities, the world’s best sand, stickball with frequently broken driftwood bats, and repeatedly throwing our frisbee into the water combined to make that one of the highlights of the trip.
• Reactions: People often aren’t quite sure what to make of our merry band of scruffy men. A few favorite moments: three blocks from our hotel was the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library. I thought that sounded intensely interesting, so dragged the mob by for a look. The attendant at the front took a suspicious look at me and asked “Can I help you?” making it clear from his tone of voice that he had serious doubts that he could. I explained that we had seen the place as we passed and were interesting in having a look around. His voice dripping scorn, he asked “You do know that this is a library for the blind?” I assured him that I did, and he eventually acquiesced to letting us look around two shelves he very specifically pointed out. “You do know that this is [insert noun] for the blind?” of course instantly became one of our catch phrases for the weekend.

  Another great bit was when we were visiting the Seattle library. Ross was pretty tired from all the unaccustomed walking around, and fell asleep leaning on one of the tables, only to be rousted a few minutes later by a security guard who, seeing his unshaven form gently snoozing, assumed he was a homeless guy who had wandered in to take shelter from the cold. “Come on, wake up!” she ordered in stentorian tones while slapping the table next to his head. “You have to get on out of here!” To groggy to argue, Ross staggered to his feet and spent the rest of the time in the library wandering about, staying manfully awake while steering clear of the security guards.

• Geeky pleasures: Seattle seemed to be a bit of a mecca for old-school arcade games. I found working Defender, Joust and Burgertime machines in the course of our peregrinations, and we enjoyed a small Harley Davidson pinball tournament one evening. The best of the nerd fun, however, was had at the Science Fiction Museum, which housed an impressive (and impressively dense) collection of memorabilia, props, and other goodies from the world of Scifi. It was great fun to see so much great stuff laid out together, to add several volumes to my Reading List, and to act as tour guide for those not as immersed in the genre.
• The guys: the combination of some of my favorite people in the world and the chance to have a break from one’s day-to-day life always make these trips a delight. It’s remarkable to be in the company of a group whose conversation veers wildly from art theory to The Simpsons to theology to sex to comic books to opera to counseling to mom jokes to science to poetry to hermeneutics to literature to video games to reality shows to effective relational communication to poker betting strategies. Better conversation and better friends are rare indeed.

Many, many thanks to my dear wife for holding the fort so that I could enjoy this expedition!

If Barry and David can do odd things with their hair, them by golly, so can I.

I’m not in a writing mood this morning, but I’d be remiss not to mention our weekend adventures in Waco. Kathy and I went up Saturday afternoon for the Baylor All-University Sing, a 19 act song & dance extravaganza that the school puts on every year. Jason and Barry are heavily involved in a variety of roles: orchestrating, playing in the pit, directing, prop-building, and more, so we figured that it was our duty as friends to get up there to see the thing. It was a super time: there were great acts, Jason gave us a backstage tour, the music was spectacularly well done, and we were in the company of some good folks.

After the show finished up, we retired to Taco Cabana for a little bit of late night dinner. Barry and I had both grabbed great hunks of dry ice that had been thrown out after the show, so we merrily played with them on the table, creating great clouds of smoke, freezing Dr. Pepper and salsa into little munchable chips, and generally having a grand ol’ time until the Taco Cabana lady came over and said that the police at a nearby table said that we’d need to stop or they’d have to ask us to leave. (I think she was fibbing: if the Police had a problem with it, I’m sure they’d have let us know directly.)

Anyway, by that time, the roads were iced over and I-35 was laced with wrecks, so we decided to stay overnight. Christina and Steven, who were keeping the kids, graciously agreed to keep them wrangled for a bit longer with help from Lori. After enjoying Barry’s conversation, Italian soda, and chocolate for a bit longer, we crashed in another friends house, though he didn’t know it, since he was elsewhere that night. (Thanks, Joe!)

Come morning, I was getting restless, so took a long walk around the Baylor campus, which I’d never had occasion to explore before. It’s a really nice place, with a delightfully civilized collection of porch swings, fountains, walks along water, and huge live oak scattered about. The architecture is a motley assortment, ranging from marble-and-stained-glass shrines to learning to ultra-utilitarian brick cubes. (Ironically, the Fine Arts building was one of the most architecturally spare places I saw.)

Come noon, we started south, stopping only in Temple to eat at what instantly became my new favorite Taqueria. Not only did they have nopalito (cactus) tacos on the menu (which were quite delicious), but they also bring chips, two kinds of salsa (fresh and cooked) and queso to the table when you sit down. The food was outstanding and the prices reasonable.

• Thanks to my work on Bibliofile, one of my old college friends who majored in Psychology looked me up and enquired about setting up a website to do “virtual therapy” over the Internet. It has been a treat to be in touch with him regularly again and to work through the details of how to create this service which is pretty cutting-edge in psychological circles. Expect more details on this in a few months, and a live site by fall if all goes well.
• Speaking of Bibliofile, I’ve been adding some new features lately, the most significant of which is tagging, which allows you to group your books in all kind of interesting ways. Ruby on Rails continues to impress me — I was able to implement an announcements feature from initial programming to deployment to production in about two hours yesterday night after the younger kiddos went to bed and Emily and I finished watching The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (which was great). You’ll see the new announcements feature if you already have an account and log in today.
• One super-cool Firefox plugin I stumbled over yesterday that everyone doing web development should have in their toolkit: View Rendered Source Chart. It takes the HTML in a page and creates a really nice diagram of its structure. Extraordinarily useful for sorting out HTML.
• Finally, from the QA department, creating acceptance tests for web applications has always been a bit of a trick, especially if you want to make sure everything works across browsers. The inimitable Zach Thomas yesterday turned me on to Selenium, an extremely interesting framework for developing automated acceptance tests that run within web browsers using a clever combination of Javascript and IFRAMES (generally a bane, but actually very useful in this context). Zach got it set up and some basic tests running yesterday, and I’m pretty excited about the help this will give us making sure that the work we produce is the best quality possible. Neat stuff for software engineering geeks.