My friend Barry has a phenomenally active and sharp mind. While he composes and plays a variety of music for a living, he enjoys forays into nearly every other field of intellectual and artistic endeavor as well. We once whiled away a happy hour together playing with a program called Graphing Calculator which used to ship with every Macintosh computer. The program is a mathematical playground, which allows you to enter equations, drag the elements of the equations around while the computer does all the rebalancing for you, and, best of all, to create wondrous two and three dimensional graphs of nearly any equation you can come up with. You can even grab the three dimensional surfaces with the mouse, fling them around an axis, and watch them spin.

A recent post on his web journal touches on some of this intellectual play, and features one of my favorite passages in the Bible: St. Paul’s proclamation that “[he] will pray with the spirit, and…will pray with the understanding also: [he] will sing with the spirit, and…will sing with the understanding also.” Well worth a read.

I thought I’d largely shaken my gaming bug for a while after leaving Origin, but the fact that I’ve asked my dear, long-suffering family for a Sony PSP for my upcoming birthday may indicate that I’m relapsing. Since one of my primary metrics for the utility of any piece of electronic gear is “Will it allow me to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000?” I’ve been spending some time reading up on video encoding tools for the unit.

Fortunately, it looks like there is some good software available on the Mac: ffmpegX wraps up a bunch of command-line encoding tools into a straightforward graphical interface, and will reencode existing video files of all sorts into the format the PSP likes. (It even has a preset for the PSP’s video format.) Additionally , Mac the Ripper will allow me to rip the DVDs that we own to a file so that we’ll be able to take our DVD movies on the road with us that way as well. [Update: It looks as though iPSP may provide some good functionality as well, including things like iTunes playlist support and iPhoto album management.]

It looks as though one should be able to store about 6 hours of video on a 1GB memory stick, and the battery should last a bit longer than that when viewing video that way. I expect this, combined with the units game-playing prowess, will be a nice way to help keep the kids entertained on trips.

Today at work we launched the new Texas State University website. While the site looks pretty nice, you can’t really see a good number of the interesting bits I’ve worked on. Here are a few highlights of the new site:

• Events are automatically rendered both to the home page and to vCal files. This makes it possible to click on a link to download the event into iCal or Outlook.
• We integrated results from the faculty/staff/student directory with the web search. You can see how that works if you search for mcmains on the new site.
  
• Because our existing search engine is a bit on the stinky side, I wrote a set of classes to abstract the communication with the search engine from the actual presentation of the results. This will make it easy to throw out the existing search engine and replace it with something better while insulating visitors from the change.
• Contact data is also rendered into vCard format, allowing you to download contacts to Address Book or Outlook.
• Jeff Snider wrote a super-sweet apache caching module, which not only keeps serving content if the backend servers fail, but also maintains a complete chronological record of our web content. As a result, if things break in the afternoon, we can easily roll back to the version of the site that was being displayed in the morning.
• It’s all being served out of a Vignette content management system, with a lot of industrial-strength infrastructure. I’m still not altogether convinced that Vignette adds a ton of value over what the University already had in place, but we’re pretty well committed to it for the moment. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot of complexity to this system.

It’s nice to have finally reached this milestone, and to be able to start thinking about other things. (Though we’re not out of the woods yet — I’ve already gotten two bug reports since we launched at noon.)

This Valentine’s Day, my friend Daniel earned himself a place high on my list of people to knock off violently and painfully. His offense? Setting the romance bar so ludicrously high that we — every single male on earth — looks boorish and unfeeling by comparison. You can read about it on Fanny’s weblog here, and add him to your list as well. (If you’re a woman, and you currently enjoy a satisfactory relationship, I strongly advise against reading Fanny’s account.)

Friday’s court date went, for the most part, without incident. Of the three lawyers required for the process — one to represent me, one for Emily, and one for Emily’s biological father — one was apparently supposed to be selected from a list that the court maintains. Nobody was aware of the fact in advance, so we forged on ahead with the lawyers had handy, hoping that everything will go through anyway. (Though our judge was generally pretty no-nonsense, even she joked about “the right to be represented by an incompetent court-appointed attorney.”)

The most engaging part of the process was watching the lawyer who represented Emily. A 70 year old woman from Buda, she had the flamboyance and brassiness of a person who has been practicing her profession for decades, is retiring in a few months and doesn’t care much what anyone thinks of her. In addition, she had the largest jewelry I have ever seen on a human being. The combined effect of her attitude and aspect enlivened the proceedings immensely. All that now remains is to finish paying everyone, get the receipts, and file for reimbursement with my former employer.

The current round of illness around our home has mostly abated, though I’m still entertaining my coworkers with a variety of nasal and pulmonary sound effects. We finished up with our tax return on Monday night, and Liam and Kathy both seem to be settling in to their home school schedule without too much difficulty.

Even though our schedule is beginning to ease, my creative juices are still pretty much dry. So, in lieu of something interesting I made myself, I’ll point you today to a couple of giant musical instruments. The first of these is the “Symphonic House,” a collaboration between a musician and architect, wherein an entire home on the shores of Lake Michigan is turned into a resonating chamber for enormous stringed instruments built into the architecture itself, played by plucking or pinching between the fingers of a rosin-soaked cotton glove. The videos are interesting, and well worth watching.

The second is the “Long String Instrument“, built by Composer Ellen Fullman. (You can download one of her compositions for the LSI here.) The Large String Instrument is similar in scale and playing technique to the Symphonic House, but produces much different results, as Fullman’s compositions are languid, tonally complex and full of the rich overtones that the enormously long strings provide. (Most every sound has a wealth of overtones that are harmonics above the “fundamental”, or main pitch of the sound. The lower a fundamental, the more of the overtones are still in the range of human hearing; thus, big instruments with low fundamentals, like a pipe organ, a grand piano, or this Long String Instrument, can create rich and complex sounds. A pennywhistle or a mandolin, however, is perceived to have a simpler sound, because many of the higher overtones are above the frequencies that humans can discern.)

An interesting technical detail: both instruments are unusual not only in their scale, but also in the mode of vibration they use. A violin string vibrates from side to side, whereas when a finger is dragged along the LSI, the strings compress along their length, like the air in an organ’s pipe. As a result, the attached sounding boards, which amplify the vibrations in the string, have to be perpendicular to the strings, rather than parallel (as on a guitar or violin).

I’m afraid I’ve once again let my posting lapse, due to fairly overwhelming demands from real life. A few of the things competing for time:

• Our family has, over the past week, been playing host to the Streptococcal Follies. Liam is the only one who has made it through the last 7 days unscathed by illness. I’m on my third day away from work, and am finally beginning to feel the effects of the antibiotics.
• When Kathy and I got married, Emily had just turned three years old. I had never gotten around to formally adopting her, but finally resolved almost a year ago that it was time. The adoption process has been an amazingly frustrating and convoluted one, and has included hiring a lawyer, firing her months later because she wasn’t doing the job, hiring a new lawyer, discovering two weeks ago that we needed to hire a social worker to do a home study, getting fingerprints and criminal history checks done on me and Dan (Kathy’s brother-in-law who’s living here currently), finding a notary to witness our signing of child abuse history request forms, and on and on.

  The ironic thing about this whole process is that nothing about Emily’s life will change a bit as a result of the adoption. She’ll still be living in the same place, with the same people, with no day-to-day difference in her life. But if all goes well, come Friday, it will all be done. (Emily has decided that she really likes “Kuusisto” as a surname, so will be “Emily Joy Kuusisto-McMains” once the process is complete.)

• Liam has continued to have difficulty finding academic challenge in school. Kathy has gone several rounds with the administration there to see what they could come up with in the way of a more appropriate academic setting for him, but nothing seemed to really fit the bill well. After a good deal of discussion and consideration, we finally decided over the past weekend to go ahead and pull him out of school for now and teach him at home for the remainder of the year. He seems enthusiastic about the change, and told me yesterday that he really likes doing school at home. He continues to do very well with his work; I’ve enjoyed getting to be home to help a bit with this as a result of my illness this week.
• We’ve started making plans for Chris and Becky’s wedding, slated for late July in Bath, England. The most wonderfully serendipitous part of our planning so far has been that my cousin, Mary, put us in touch with a fellow in London who was looking to swap houses with someone in the United States for his vacation. We swapped a few emails, and are now slated to stay in their home for three weeks this summer while they stay in ours. In order to rack up this much leave time by then, however, I’m having to work through lunches with some frequency and generally keep my nose to the grindstone in the interim. I’ve also been assembling everything needed to get passports for all six of us, a process complicated by the ongoing adoption.
• Income Taxes. Bleah. This is the one time of year that I’m not so glad to have had stock options at Electronic Arts.
• The other lads in The Grant Mazak Band decided that they were ready to start rehearsing more regularly with the ultimate goal of getting to play more shows in different places. Though it’s been fun to get some more music under our collective belt and to spend a bit more time with those guys, that has sucked up another night of the week.

Sadly, while all of this is necessary or important, when combined with the daily demands of life in a family of 6, it has left little time or energy for writing, taking pictures, hiking, or much else. The next few weeks should see things slack off again, and should allow me to return to a more normal schedule.

Kathy and I went to Open Screen Night at the Alamo Drafthouse up in Austin for our date night the week before last. Open Screen Night is a two-hour show where anybody who wants to can bring a short film, up to 8 minutes in length, and have it played for the audience. It was, predictably, a very mixed bag, but the time spent on the stinkers were kept to a minimum by liberal application of a gong to cut the worst segments short. Our favorite film was Masa y Sangre (Flour and Blood), a parody of the tortured barrio film, done by a local Latino comedy troupe. Funny stuff, though probably more so if you’ve grown up at least peripherally acquainted with Mexican culture.

It was quite a fun night, especially since we combined the theater with a long stop at Book People, the largest bookstore in Texas, earlier in the evening. A passerby was taking her miniature ponies, which I stopped to pet, for a walk outside the bookstore. One begins to understand why one of the most popular bumper stickers around town is “Keep Austin Weird!”

As of January 12, we have a new nephew. His name is John Paul Adams, and he was born to his folks Jeff and Karen in Uganda, where they’re doing mission work. Here’s my favorite passage from the announcement Jeff sent out:

Our many friends here have shown us many great kindnesses; we can’t thank
them enough. And our Ugandan friends, in particular, are very pleased that
we decided to have our baby here, among them. I told the news to a student
this morning and he, like most Ugandans, assumed that Karen had gone home to
have the baby, like most mzungu [white people -ed.]. He very surprised and pleased that we had
chosen to have our baby here.

One of the sweetest exchanges came at the petrol station, of all places.
Most of the attendants are women and girls, and they have gotten to know us
over the last months. (A white family in a big white Land Rover is pretty
conspicuous.) One said to Karen, “still here?” By which she meant: haven’t
you gone back to wherever you come from to have the baby? When Karen told
her she had given birth that very night in Kampala, and pointed to John Paul
in his car seat, she shrieked for joy. She gathered all the other
attendants together so they could admire the “white Ugandan”. Again, there
was a bond created by the fact that we were willing to be with them, even in
the giving birth of our child.

Between the photos from Uganda Jeff keeps sending, and his nefarious nephew-having scheme, I’m more and more convinced that I need to get over there for a visit someday.

Kathy found a recipe for beer bread a while back that has rapidly become a family favorite. It’s easy to make, and always gets rave reviews. Here it is, for your dining pleasure:

3 Cups Self-Rising Flour
2 Tbsp Sugar
1 Shiner Bock (or your beer of choice — experimenting is fun!)

Bake at 350° for 30 minutes
Drizzle 1/2 stick melted butter over the top
Bake 10-15 minutes additional
Enjoy while hot!