Today is my 35th birthday, and dear friends have been sending wishes throughout the day. While Chris deserves an honorable mention for sending along a delightful photo of Liam with his finger rammed up his (Liam’s) nose to the third joint, my favorite bit of birthday prose so far comes from Fanny:

Rumour has it, dear sir, that today be your birthday. Daniel suggested I send you a “congratulatory message.” Here it goes:

First off, I want to congratulate you on having decided, one day way back when, to be born. This shows not only good judgement on your part, but also that you know how to have a good time. I mean, this Earth place is pretty swell, ain’t it? Give or take a little sorrow here, a little loneliness there, and those times in the middle of the night when you stub your toe on a piece of furniture…

Secondly, I want to congratulate you on your chosen date of birth. This really shows remarkable wisdom and discerment. March is a fine month, what with the onset of spring and all, and folks are now reasonably recovered from the holidays to start hankerin’ for a little partyin’. And here you swoop right in to give us a reason to. I mean, wow. Plus, the 10th is definitely a most worthy date, vastly superior to the 9th or the 11th. Ten is such a nice number–it’s so easy to multiply and divide things by ten. (Though I have much regard for this date of March 10th, still I must say that March 12th is finer in all regards. Sorry.)

Finally, I want to congratulate you on having maintained, year after year for I don’t know how long, this habit of being alive, which demontrates admirable stick-to-it-iveness and get-up-and-go-ness. Also, again, it shows that you know when you’re having a good time, which is more than can be said for most people.

As you have amply proven yourself to be a guy who knows how to enjoy himself, I hope and pray you will do so today, as you most certainly deserve it, and that the people around you will help facilitate the good times. Who knows? maybe someday I’ll be around to share a celebratory brew on some such occasion. Stranger things have happened.

Happy Birthday, Sean!

Sincerely,
Fanny

Thanks for the delightful wishes, Fanny! I’ll look forward to hoisting a pint with you whenever you find yourself down Texas way.

There’s a very interesting post over on Wonderland. It’s a loose trascription of Raph Koster’s keynote at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference, and covers such ground as the continuity between entertainment and art, the value (and peril) of interactivity, and what makes things fun. The latter was of special interest for me: while I like games a fair bit, I also often get tired of a game before I’ve reached the end. Raph points out that much of the fun of a game comes in mastering something new — when a game stops giving you new things to learn or mechanics to master, it quickly pales.

Anyway, there’s enough good stuff in the keynote that I’ve added Raph Koster’s book to my list of things to read.

My buddy Ross has a new venture: Boom Studios, a comic book publishing company that promises great things. Ross is very much an advocate of the creative folks involved in the comic-making process, and was having good success with Atomeka, his previous venture. He’s also been teaching himself how to create web sites as part of this process, and is getting to be pretty capable!

I’m so proud! (Sniff.)

Today I was rooting around in the shed and noticed The Amazing Pneumatic Cannon leaning up against the wall. I’ve not had it out since we moved to San Marcos, and when I determined that Liam had no memory of it whatsoever, decided that the time to exhume it had come.

I was a bit concerned that after years of neglect, the sprinkler valve might have given out altogether. I tried pressurizing it with no ammunition, and was disappointed to find that the air didn’t come out all in a rush, but leaked out slowly like a 3 liter of Sprite that was just barely open. “Sorry, kids. I don’t think it’s going to work.” I tried one more time driving the pressure up a little higher, and was delighted this time to here the distinctive reverberating tone the canon generates as it pushes high pressure air down its length. “WOO! We’re in business!”

We started out at about 50PSI, shooting a Beanie Baby about halfway down the street. We tried several different items, culminating in a potato at 75PSI. (Though the valve is rated for 100PSI, and the pipe for 230PSI, I wasn’t sure I trusted the PVC welds after all of that time in storage.) Remarkably, the potato flew more than a block, ending in a moist splatter on the driveway of a nearby elementary school. The kids were 3/4 of the way down the street to catch it, and watched it sail far over their heads — probably a good thing, given the force with which it evidently landed.

I’d forgotten how much fun that thing is, and was delighted to find it working well after all this time. We’re looking forward to having it out again for some more fun with our homemade artillery.

One of the most dramatic bits of flora in the Texas springtime is the redbud tree. While a there are a wide variety of plants that break forth into profligate bloom around this time of year, warming up with scales sung in pale green and eventually bursting full voice into florid arias of blue, purple, crimson, and orange, the redbud takes a different approach. It bides its time through the winter as all its leaves fall off, leaving only a skeletal disordered collection of sticks, looking for all the world as though you could break them down into kindling with a single swift kick or swipe of your fist.

When spring comes, the redbud doesn’t succumb to the pressure of its peers and sprout green. Rather, it skips photosynthesis altogether and bursts directly into extravagant bloom, its namesake buds festooning all the upper branches, shooting up, down, sideways. Because even amid all of this growth there’s still not a single leaf to be seen, it looks more like some kind of delightfully overenthusiastic elementary school project — crepe paper glued onto a badly-tied bundle of sticks your four-year-old child found on the playground — than it does a real tree.

These trees put me in mind of the Old Testament story about the sprouting of Aaron’s staff. When some of the Israelites were questioning Moses and Aaron’s leadership, God had each of the tribes bring a staff to the tent where they worshipped and leave them there overnight, telling the people that the staff of the man God chose to lead would sprout during the night. When morning came, Aaron’s rod had not only sprouted, but, as if to drive the point home, had also put forth buds, flowered, and produced ripe almonds. (This staff, along with the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed and a jar of manna, were later kept in the Ark of the Covenant.)

Thus, while all the glory of spring is a delightful affirmation of life, the sprouting of the redbud’s blossoms from these apparently dead bundles of sticks reminds me even more specifically of God’s involvement with and favor for his people. Selah.

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.)