My two weeks of time off comes to an end this morning as I dig back into work. The break was great — we got lots of good family time, saw some good movies, visited with dear friends, played some good games, and had some excellent hikes. The pleasure and flexibility a block of employment-free time brings makes me envy the european vacation schedule; after some time off, four weeks of vacation a year seems downright civilized!

A few items of note:

• The application I’ve been building in Ruby as a learning project is coming along reasonably well. I’ve showed bits to various folks, and will be opening it up a bit wider for more people to fiddle with once I’ve got a few things cleaned up and a particularly vexing bug resolved. (Can any of you brilliant technical minds tell me why http://seanmctex.homeip.net:3000/book/search?searchTerm=dragon will load beautifully in any browser but Firefox, but Firefox takes a look at it and then pretends I didn’t ask for it? Yes, it’s fragmentary HTML — it’s part of an AJAX call. Thanks, geniuses!)
• San Marcos, the lovely city in which we live, recently discovered that the Rio Vista Dam is in danger of collapsing. The dam is one of the major recreational structures along the river, and contributes to the smooth waters that residents enjoy as the river winds its way through town. When the discovery was made that the dam had major structural issues, the immediate reaction was to restore it to its traditional state. Our friend Tom Goynes, however, championed the idea of replacing the single large dam with a series of artificial rapids down the length of the river. The city government has proven enthusiastic and has given the go-ahead for the project, so our beloved river will likely have a markedly different character by May 29, the deadline for the project’s completion. I’m pretty excited about this change, and look forward to seeing how this ambitious project turns out.
• The kids go back to school Wednesday. It’s going to be a challenge getting their circadian cycles adjusted from the “stay up for New Year’s Eve” schedule to the “wake up for school” schedule.

After high school, I made a leap from Texas to attend The King’s College, a small private school in Briarcliff Manor, New York. The experience was an excellent one in many ways, not the least of which was the chance to enjoy the beautiful old building the college occupied and the surrounding splendor of the Hudson River Valley. The building was nearly 100 years old when I was there, and showed its heritage as a luxury hotel; ornate woodwork, byzantine corridors, marble stairways combined to create much more character than nearly any other “Institution of Higher Learning” I’ve seen (to use Dr. Radandt’s oft-quoted phrase).

A bit on the history of the place from Half Moon Press:

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were hosted at Briarcliff Lodge, as were Tallulah Bankhead, Johnny Weissmuller, Jimmy Walker, Babe Ruth and other luminaries. Opera diva Madame Lillian Nordica sang in the ballroom in 1911 to an audience including John D. and Laura Spelman Rockefeller, Frank A. and Narcissa Cox Vanderlip and Chauncey M. and May Palmer Depew.

Alas, the building burned to the ground several years back. The College had moved out several years previous when they closed their doors, and the structure had sat abandoned while developers and city officials wrangled over what would become of the wonderful old place.

Though the building is no more, Rob Yasinsac has stepped to the plate and released Briarcliff Lodge (Images of America), a wonderful book chronicling the history of the place from its construction to its immolation. It’s a great piece of work for anybody who spent any degree of time at Briarcliff Lodge, but was especially meaningful for me, as it has a letter some old friends of mine (Heidi Krihak, nee Grovatt, and Sherry Hvizdak, nee Young) left in their dorm room, as well as a picture of the Homecoming Court of 1990 (which happened to include yours truly).

So, thanks to Kathy for the gift. Fellow alumni, get thee to a bookstore — this one’s well worth picking up.

It’s been a busy holiday around chez McMains. Thursday night, Kathy and I headed down to San Antonio to visit with Ross and his newly-minted fiance Johanna who were in town for a visit with his family. We ate enchiladas and talked the night away, excitedly discussing Johanna’s latest writing projects, the success of Boom! Studios, the engagement, and what our old mutual friends are up to. As always, it was great to see them, and especially wonderful to see the decade-old decision to move to Los Angeles paying off handsomely for Ross, both in business and personally.

On Friday the whole family helped (or, in the case of some of the kids, “helped”) Chris and Becky as they moved into their new home, a really neat little Tudor cum Texan house a few blocks away from where they had been living. It went surprisingly quickly and painlessly, due in large part to Chris’ prudent hiring of both a U-Haul and a couple of guys who were flinging furniture around with an aplomb that put the rest of us to shame. We toured the new digs, found and admired giant acorns, enjoyed a first meal in the house, and had a little house blessing and an inaugural game of hide-and-seek. It should be a great place for the two of them; I look forward to seeing it all put into order and being lived in and enjoyed.

On the way home, we stopped in Wimberley for the Trail of Lights and the Emily Ann Theater. We enjoyed the various displays that community organizations had put together up and down the side of the hill that the theater includes, and huddled around a bonfire with some friends we bumped into for roasting of marshmallows and hot dogs and singing of Christmas Carols, manfully led acapella by a singer whose guitarists had abandoned him.

On Christmas Eve, we spent a good portion of the day fiddling about the house, making cornbread, chili, and cookies for the guests we would be hosting for Christmas. My cousin Tanya and her husband Ken, who are great favorites with the children, stopped by for a nice visit in the afternoon. As evening approached, Chris and Becky showed up. We all milled and visited about the house for a while until time came for “midnight” mass (which started at 10:15pm) at St. Mark’s. We enjoyed singing carols and participating in the service (admittedly in a somewhat disjointed fashion, since we’d not gotten a copy of the program with the responsive readings), and were joined there by Mom McMains and her housemate Julia.

Christmas morning dawned bright, clear, and warm. We had worn the kids out enough with the late night that they didn’t spring out of bed until a decent hour — a surprising change of pace from the usual Christmas morning experience. The neatly wrapped pile of presents quickly became a whirlwind of wrapping paper, laughter, packing material, shrieks, and toys. I was pleased this year to receive an absolute minimum of practical gifts. Chris got me a Lazer Tag Master Blaster, which he, Dad McMains and I put to good use later in the day. Kathy conspired with Grant and absolutely floored me with a Babkcz Identity Guitar. Grant has been playing one of these for a couple of months, and I’d been really impressed with his. Kathy was excited about her gift of a new iPod, especially once she realized that it would hold not only our entire music collection, but also all 13,000 photos in our family photo library.

After a good deal of eating, a few walks, some Lazer Tag, a spritied game of RoboRally, our guests began to wander home. Once we’d cleaned up and straightening the house a bit, the whole family gathered around the advent wreath for the last time this year, at long last getting to light all of the candles. We then put the capper on our Christmas with a viewing of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Christmas break is upon us, and what does that mean? Another chance for silly projects!

My good friend Jason Young mentioned at a party a while back that he wanted to build a trebuchet. We’ve bandied the idea about a bit since then, and finally decided that this would be the week. Emily, Liam and I descended on Chez Young Monday afternoon and stayed until Tuesday evening, alternately playing video games, eating pizza, and working with power tools. The results of our labor? An 11 foot tall trebuchet that threw potatoes over 100 feet. (We think we could have gotten a good deal more distance out of it with some adjustments, but night was coming on fast, and we were pretty happy with our initial effort.)

For all the details, see Jason’s excellent and extensive post on the subject or enjoy the video:

Or “Tyre”, for you continental types.

I’ve been riding my bike to work for the last year and a half. Since I’m doing it more for the transportation and the exercise than for the fun of it, the mechanics of dinking around with the bike to keep it going have little appeal to me. Our local bike shop, Pedal Power, is manned by a great bunch of folks who do a wonderful job of relieving me of most of the boring maintenance work. They have, however, refused to send out a representative to my house once a week to check on my bike’s tire pressure for me. (Well, no, I didn’t actually ask them. There’s a point when the embarrassment about being a lazy slug actually outweighs the laziness itself.)

So I had an idea: a valve stem that would capture some of the kinetic energy from the tire’s motion and use it to keep the tire inflated at an optimum pressure. Lo, behold: someone’s beaten me to making something of the sort (which should come as no surprise: see my earlier point on being lazy). Nakano Iron Works has built a hub that does essentially what I wanted. It’s a bit more involved to install than a valve stem would be, but I have hopes that it will start coming preinstalled on bikes in the future.

WARNING: Technical post ahead. If you come just for the latest funny stories about the kids, it’s safe to skip this.

Chrismo always seems to be bellwether for my professional programming efforts. He flopped over to doing Java work a while before I did, ranted about Extreme Programming a year or two before it gained momentum, and has been great for conversations on programming (as well as “meaning of life” and “how to live as a believing musician who pays the bills with computers”) topics.

Thus, when he began rumbling about Ruby a while back, I was intrigued, but had lots of other things going on, so didn’t really follow up. Since then, the language has gained considerable momentum and built up a sizable community. After some conversations with Greg and with the drop-dead sexiness of Ruby on Rails (and its super-easy AJAX support), I’ve decided it is time to dig in. (Seth points out that AJAX is also easy to implement in Conversant, the CMS on which this website runs!)

I’m starting with “Programming Ruby (Second Edition)” because it was in the library here, and will move onto Rails-specific stuff once I’ve digested the fundamentals of the language. So far, it’s interesting stuff — the highly-dynamic nature of the language is a bit unsettling after being in Java-land for so long, but it seems well thought-out, flexible, and extensible in very interesting ways. Eventually, inspired a bit by Jason’s speculative reading statistics, I hope to build out at least part of a “what I’m reading” Web 2.0-style application that Zach and I have talked about (and which he actually did some work on for a programming contest a few months back). Should be fun!

Last Christmas, I purchased a few games from Looney Labs for Kathy. Yesterday, we received an envelope from them in the mail. Inside was not only a Christmas card, but also three new cards for FLUXX, one of the games we bought!

That sort of thing definitely makes me want to continue to support this band of merry game makers and their fine work. So go buy something!

Last night, I started home from work a bit early, as there was a winter weather advisory in effect and Buda, a few miles north of San Marcos, was already getting sleet. This was fine with me, as I had ordered a Roomba a while back, and it was due for delivery. Since the thing is supposed to be charged for 3 hours before use, I figured I could get home, plug it in, we could go for our Wednesday night Bible study, and have a chance to try it out by the kids’ bedtime. It was also a great motivator — “Who wants to try it in their room first? [Evil paternal laugh] Well, you have to pick up your toys from the floor!”

(Sidenote: why can’t companies that manufacture products with rechargable batteries ship them charged? Don’t they know we want to play with our toys when we get them, not plug them into the wall and stare at the charge indicator for hours? Apple learned this lesson a while back, and now ships iPods and laptops with a charge so that they can be used out of the box.)

The Roomba arrived more or less on schedule, and we popped down the street for our evening of spaghetti and scripture. I cut out with the kids a bit early so that they could get their bedtime chores done and get ready for school, after which we turned the Roomba loose in Liam’s room. It was absolutely hilarious to watch the kids dance out of its way, shove little piles of dirt in front of it, and shout “Come on, Roomba! over here!” as it ground its unpredictable way around the floor. We took it down to Abby’s room and repeated the drill there until it decided it didn’t have the power to continue any longer.

The temperature was continuing to drop, and I was looking forward to finishing up Jade Empire, so I got the kids bundled up, and was about to send them off to their beds when the lights dimmed and then went out altogether. The children were understandably a bit startled and concerned to find themselves plunged abruptly into darkness, but we called out each other and managed to find each other by touch in the hallway. Once linked up, we went on a blind quest for matches and candles, both of which we eventually found, though not without several stubbed toes and comical flailings. (“Why not flashlights?” you may be wondering. Have you ever tried to keep flashlights around in a house full of kids? I can’t remember the last time I saw a working flashlight around our house, in spite of many, many purchases.)

We set up Liam’s room as our campground with extra blankets and a small array of candles on a shelf by the window. After getting everybody settled in, we read Chapter 11 of The Chronicles of Narnia: A Horse and His Boy, wherein Shasta meets Aslan face to face for the first time, interrupted from time to time by abortive attempts by the power company to get things running again. (“[click] Hey, the lights are on. Awwwww! Now we have to blow out the…[click] Yaaaay!”)

The power finally came back on to stay around 9:45; the kids slipped back to their appropriate bedrooms, and we snuggled under our covers, drifting off to the sound of the winter wind as it rattled around outside.

Watch in wonder and pleasure as Tom Bartlett gently tweaks the nose of corporate America. For some reason I find this sort of thing very, very amusing.

Microsoft announced today that they’re closing Digital Anvil, their Austin game studio. It’s a shame to see another Austin studio go the way of Origin, though in retrospect, it makes me glad that I didn’t get the job when I interviewed there. They seemed a good bunch, though, and it sounds like Microsoft is making an effort at least to accomodate those folks who want to move to Redmond. Good luck, guys!