Emily’s 20th birthday is coming up, and she has, with her usual creative zeal, crafted a lovely and entertaining wish list:
Author Archives: SeanMcTex
Kids’ Day Out: 2011(ish) Edition
Each Summer, while the kids are out of school, I arrange a full day out with each of them. Sometimes that means taking a day off of work; on other occasions we squeeze it in on a Saturday. Regardless of when it is, it’s one of the things I look forward to a ton each year (and seems to be a highlight for the young people too).
This year, the first adventure was with Liam. Thanks to Kevin Huffaker, a friend of mine from the university who is not only an amazing polymath but also a tremendously generous guy, we were able to start our day with a SCUBA primer. Neither Liam nor I had ever been before. We both love being in the water, and found the experience utterly delightful. While the river was running low and water conditions turned cloudy pretty quickly as people upstream swam around, we had a great time learning how to control our buoyancy and seeing a bit of the river from a new vantage point.
From there, we treated Kevin to lunch at Valentino’s, Liam’s favorite pizza place in San Marcos, and then caught the then-current Harry Potter movie. A trip to the Blazer Tag center up in Austin was next, where he and I emerged 1st and 2nd in our game with 30 other people. (All those video games do pay off!) The center in Austin is one of the best arenas I’ve been to, and was a ton of fun. We finished off the day with a visit to the Nazi Pirate at Peter Pan mini golf, where I was able to salvage a bit of my honor after the thumping Liam gave me at laser tag.
Next up was my day out with Maggie. She loves nothing more than to be in the water, so Schlitterbahn has been the natural destination for us for many years. Repeatedly voted best waterpark in the country, it’s only 20 minutes away from our house, and is a much more agreeable experience than many amusement parks these days. (Free parking, bring your own picnic, and new stuff every year.) We were a bit disappointed to see that Family Blaster, a ride that uses high-powered jets of water to shoot a raft containing up to 6 people up a hill, had been retired, but we did spend a delightful day climbing on floating crocodiles, navigating our tubes down 20-minute long tube chutes, and slipping down slides. We even invented a word game while we were waiting in line that’s become a standard in-car activity for our family.
I took Abigail out next. Our first stop was Tacodeli, a vegetarian-friendly taco joint that’s both delicious and a quintessentially Austin experience. After that, we wandered Barton Creek mall for a bit, and then went to see Cowboys & Aliens, which I’d been looking forward to since seeing the first preview. Our next stop was Mozart’s, a wonderful coffee shop on the banks of Town Lake. We got tasty beverages, I introduced Abby to cannoli (one of my favorite treats), and we both pulled out guitars and played and sang together down by the water while the turtles looked on appreciatively. When our fingers tired, we moved on to Pinballz (the best arcade I’ve ever visited) and played Addams Family, Twilight Zone, and other pinball classics. Our last stop for the day was at the Alamo Drafthouse for Abby’s first Master Pancake Theater show: Twilight! She was a fan of the books, and had been disappointed by the first movie, so I figured a lampooning would be the ideal way to enjoy the second. She agreed.
In addition to the goal of simply having a grand time, I also set Abby and I the task of both taking lots of photos along the way, and picking out our favorites along the way to edit and post on Facebook as a record of our day together. Here are the 8 shots we deemed best.
Unfortunately, I had a dreadful time coordinating Emily’s and my calendars, but in March of the next year, we finally managed to find a day we both had open. After hearing of Liam’s mini-adventure, Emily was keen to try SCUBA as well, so we rounded up Kevin again and my friend Jason and set off for a larger-scale run: near the headwaters of the San Marcos River down to the whitewater course at the other end of town. Since we’d finally had some rain after a tremendous drought, the water was running clear and fast, and we had beautiful visibility as we swam under waterfalls, through valleys of endangered Texas Wild Rice, and past a variety of water creatures. Emily filled a bag with treasures she found in the water, and I reveled in the opportunity to see the river as we never had before.
After our swim, we regrouped at the house while eating big Subway sandwiches, and then Emily and I went north for her first Master Pancake Theater show: Back to the Future. The lads did a terrific job with it, and we had a great time eating, drinking, and laughing our heads off. We even got the surprise treat of getting to overhear some of a Young the Giant show as we walked past — a favorite of Emily’s that she hadn’t even known was playing that night.
I had a terrific time getting to enjoy each of our kiddos individually, and treat them to some unique experiences they all enjoyed. Thanks, squirrels, for the great time. Now, let’s get cracking and plan this year’s adventures!
Grafik Intervention
Last night, Kathy and I stopped by a neighborhood in downtown San Marcos to see this:
The project was done by a typography class at Texas State University, and included this historical home, a neighborhood church, and an old jail. Students had researched the history of each of the structures, and then devised projected sequences that told about the history of and future plans for each structure. It was a surprisingly engaging way to learn a bit more about our fair city.
Read more details about the project here.
Hero Revisited
A while back, I wrote a bit about Two Heroes of mine. Now, the San Marcos paper has a story about Thrine Soto, one of the people I wrote about. She’s a 93 year old woman who volunteers regularly at the food bank, and has been doing so for 30 years. Enjoy!
Family Update: February 2012
My friend Jason is continually after me to update my weblog. Acting on the assumption that a sample size of one is statistically valid, I’m going to assume that the rest of the world is just as interested and post a family update, cribbing liberally from a recent letter to my dear sister-in-law. (Martha, you are excused from reading this post.)
Kathy has begun an internship at Criss Cole rehab center for the blind up in Austin, and is enjoying it quite a bit (aside from the commute). Her first two weeks there were spent with a blindfold on as she went through many of the experiences that the clients there would have, including wood shop. (I’ll pause for a moment while you connect the dots and make the requisite astonished face.) She came home with some nice pieces of work and all of her fingers, so I count it a success.
I’m well into my new job at Mutual Mobile, a company that makes apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android phones. It’s a lot of fun. I’m surrounded by a ton of super-smart, very engaged folks there, and am learning a ton. Taking the bus up to Austin daily has been an interesting experience. Although the on-board Internet seems to work only about 60% of the time, I’m still generally able to make good use of the time reading books, listening to podcasts, or catching up on some reading and writing.
Emily has recently started a couple of college classes at Austin Community College, and seems to be both enjoying them and doing really well. She’s continuing to work at Rue 21 at the nearby outlet mall, as well as exercising her formidable art skills on her own time. Though we don’t see as much of her since she moved out to the garage apartment, she’s still a help around the house, and we’re glad to still have her close.
Abigail recently performed for her first open mic night, and did a great job. She sang and played guitar for Hey Jude (Beatles), On and On (Stephen Bishop), and a song she wrote herself. She’s keen to try another one soon. She’s also in a production of The Crucible at her High School, with the first performance tonight. It’s great fun to see her exploring these various artistic avenues and enjoying them so much!
Liam is doing a bang-up job in band, where he plays French Horn, following in his mother, aunt’s, and sister’s footsteps. Though he’s in 7th grade, he also gets to play with the 8th grade band, and sits first chair in his section. In addition, he’s been playing tennis this year, and is enjoying it a fair bit, though I’ve had no luck getting him out on the court with me lately. (I may be too little challenge for him these days.) He recently turned 13, and has been enjoying the increased freedom that comes with that advanced age.
Maggie is a particular favorite of her teachers, and has developed a good deal of enthusiasm for reading. She enjoys dabbling in all kinds of creative pursuits, including cooking, drawing, writing stories, playing pennywhistle, and building fairy houses. She’s a particular friend to animals, built an impressive fort out of scrap from our old deck in the backyard the other day, and is almost always the first to offer help when someone needs it.
While Kathy’s internship schedule has made it tough for her and I to have as much time together as we prefer, I’ve really been enjoying the evenings I have with the kiddos, and am struck again by what a joy it is to watch them growing into distinct, fascinating human beings. I love being around these folks. If families were chosen, rather than determined by a fascinating mix of genetics, mine would look no different.
My Standoff with the Police
Last Saturday, I took three hostages.
I had gone to the apartment where my ex-girlfriend lives with her parents to find her and get her back. After four months of living together, she had moved out a couple of weeks earlier, and I was desperate to find her. Unfortunately, she wasn’t there, and as things got heated with her parents, her dad stepped up on me, so I shot him in the shoulder. Shortly thereafter, the police showed up. I guess I should have expected that, but it took me by surprise.
The police had a negotiating team with them who called me to try to sort the situation out. They kept trying to get me to release her dad. I probably should have let him go, but I was scared, and felt like I’d lose my leverage without him there. Besides, they kept promising me things and then going back on their word, so I wasn’t too inclined to cooperate with them. About four hours into the standoff, my girlfriend’s sister escaped out a window, and I panicked for a while, boarding up the apartment and trying to make sure that nobody could get in the same way she got out. But I guess I knew at that point that it was only a matter of time. After repeated requests, they finally put my lawyer on the phone, and after talking with him for a while, I decided to surrender. I stepped out of the apartment with my hands above my head about 6 hours after the whole ordeal began, and was immediately arrested. I’ll be going to trial in a few weeks.
None of this, of course, actually happened.
This was all part of a training exercise for various police negotiating teams, and I was only playing the role of a hostage-taker. My dad is an expert in such matters — he literally wrote the book on crisis management– and helped to organize this training exercise. When he was looking for participants, he sent me and my brother a note saying “I need actors to play emotionally unstable, biploar, hostage-takers on the 10th of December (Saturday). Of course, you two came to mind, immediately.”
While I wasn’t actually holed up in an apartment, I did spend about 6 hours on a phone, talking with various negotiators from the New Braunfels team and giving them a chance to exercise their skills. It was fun, but exhausting, to play the role of a frightened, intransigent, irrational man-boy for that long. The negotiating team did a great job, maintaining their cool while I was being quite bellicose and disagreeable at times, and working hard to establish rapport and empathy without validating the destructive actions my character had taken. I was nasty enough that I felt the need to, once the exercise was done, apologize to them all and individually shake their hands. To their credit, none of them took advantage of the opportunity to shoot me — a homicide that, under Texas law, I’m pretty sure would have been considered justified at that point.
Thanks to Dad for the opportunity to be a part of the shenanigans, and to the whole crew involved for putting together such an interesting day. It seemed like the teams got something good out of it, and my siblings and I certainly got a fun story to tell. And delicious breakfast tacos. (Ironically, feeding me tacos is just about the best way to keep me from taking hostages in real life, so the crisis would have been pretty short-lived in reality.)
Going Mobile
On January 2, I”ll be going to work for Mutual Mobile, an Austin-based company that specializes in application development for iOS, Android and Blackberry devices.
“But Sean!” I hear you, Rhetorically Convenient Reader, cry. “You just started working for Magnolia back in March! Why are you moving on again so soon?” That’s a good question. It doesn’t have anything to do with Magnolia: it’s a terrific company, filled with great people that I am glad to call coworkers and friends. That fact made this decision especially hard, as I knew I’d be seeing less of these people I quite like (and would, honestly, be making their lives tougher in the short term with my departure).
But as much as I like Magnolia, the nature of their business means that my work there revolved around two things: Java and Sales. Java is an industry standard for creating software of various stripes, but it’s a very buttoned-down, staid environment to work in. It lacks the creative energy and — is it silly to say this? — joy that I see in the communities that exist around some of the more dynamic, less-widely used languages like Ruby and Python and Lisp (for you AI wonks out there). I can get work done in it just fine, but the number of times a spontaneous “Awesome!” escapes my lips while doing so is vanishingly small.
The other focus of my last 9 months has been selling Magnolia to various companies. I think the software is a phenomenal piece of work, and really well-suited to a whole variety of Web Content Management scenarios. But while I can do an effective job helping to demonstrate and sell it, there’s no frisson associated with doing so for me.
I like technology for what it can do for people. I like creating it because doing so is much like fashioning a beautiful, intricate bit of clockwork, or a complex bit of musical counterpoint. There is immense satisfaction in creating something that works elegantly and beautifully. Unfortunately, telling people about how terrific other people’s work is provides very little of the satisfaction that actually doing that creative work oneself. If I’m going to be in the technology world, I want to make cool stuff for normal people, not to sell cool technology to corporations.
So, Mutual Mobile. I’ll be starting there as an iOS Manager, which means that not only will I be getting to work directly on creating some great stuff for their impressive list of clients, but I’ll also be getting to help figure out the best way to help the other developers there do their best work as well. I’ll be hanging around a bunch of really smart folks, and will doubtless be learning tons about iPhone development and other mobile disciplines. The company seems like a marvelous place to hang one’s professional hat — a vibrant company culture, entirely self-funded with no investor money involved, just named by Forbes as one of America’s most promising companies, and has its company meetings at the Alamo Drafthouse, one of my favorite places in Austin. And the downside of facing a commute again is largely ameliorated by the fact that Texas State University runs a shuttle bus from San Marcos with wireless Internet to a park 4 blocks away from the office. Sweet!
I’m excited about this next adventure, and will be posting more about it once I’ve got my feet under me. Wish me luck!
Halloween Costume
This year for halloween, I decided that I wanted to do something that I had never seen anybody else do. After mulling it over a bit, I hit upon an idea I loved: I would be a stick figure.
Now, those of you who know me will recognize that I am far from a natural stick figure. How could I bring this off? Inspired both by Blue Man Group’s Utne Wire Man and by Lady Ada’s Tron Bag, I decided to use electroluminescent wire to create the effect I wanted.
Now, EL wire is something of a hassle to solder, due to its dual-core nature. If there was a way to avoid that, I wanted to know about it! A bit of strategic googling brought me to Glowire, a vendor that not only has reasonable prices on the wire, but also sells preassembled kits that included the driver electronics, battery holder, and all of the necessary fittings. I found 6′ lengths, which I figured would be perfect to do the head and torso, arms, and legs, and promptly placed an order.
Once I got the wire in, I ransacked my closet to find a long-sleeve shirt and long pants that I could make a mess of. I then got a beefy needle and sewed the wire in place using fishing line, which would it in place without obstructing its light. (Thanks to Liam and Abby for their help with the sewing.) While my needlecraft was a bit shabby, and I managed to secure one of the wires to the side of a pants leg rather than the front, I finally got it all put together and excitedly turned on the switches and turned out the lights to see how it came out:
Heck yeah!
While it wasn’t perfect, I was very happy with the effect. I went out through the neighborhood with Liam and his friend Charles to keep them company while they worked the front doors, and was delighted with the enthusiastic responses I got, ranging from “Hey, cool costume!” to “Mom, it’s the glowing man!” Excellent.
So, if I had it to do all over again, I’d do the sewing on a mannequin or have somebody wear the clothes to ensure that we were sewing on the right part of the clothes. I’d also love to figure out some way to make the lines straighter. But even with the imperfections, I think the project was a terrific success. Excelsior!
Humanities and Technology
Yesterday the kids were off from school for teacher conferences. We started off with 10 young people under the roof, thanks to sleepovers, with the remainder of the day continuing in the same busy, wild vein.
And then, on the way to pick up a collection of teenagers from the river, I heard on NPR that Steve Jobs had died.
I had never met the man, and was surprised to realize how sad the news of his death made me. As I’ve mulled over various tributes and retrospectives, I’ve come to a better understanding of why that is.
The products and technology he brought about have, of course, been a large part of my personal and professional life. His commitment to excellence has been inspirational, and his drive to achieve great things stirring. His charisma and capability as a leader were instructive.
But the most interesting, distinctive thing about his career and success is this: its humanism. While the rest of the industry has often been content to make computers do what computers do better, Mr. Jobs had an unwavering focus on using technology to help people do people things.
What do people do? We communicate. The iPhone, Facetime, and iChat spring from this desire. We make and enjoy art. iMovie, Garage Band, iPhoto, and the iPod all have their roots there. We enjoy relationships with other people. Thus, integration with all sorts of social media, facial recognition technologies, etc. We tell stories. Pixar does some of the most brilliant storytelling of our generation. (“Up” made me misty-eyed in record time, and “The Incredibles” remains one of my favorite films ever.)
For many technologists, the instinctive thing to do is to span the gap between people and technology by having the explorers build a precarious rope bridge which will allow the tenacious to, with a good deal of effort, make it to the other side. Steve’s unique genius was that, having made it across, he then turned his fellow explorers right back around and had them build a sturdy, capacious, beautiful bridge for the rest of the world to follow the explorers.
Indeed, he made technology “for the rest of us” — not so that we could have better gadgets, but so that we could ultimately have better, richer, more fully human lives. Thanks, Steve.
My Wife, The Bag Lady
Today I want to brag on my wife a bit.
Kathy is great at trying to meet the needs of people she meets. One group which has always tugged at her heartstrings is the homeless. Austin has a large homeless population, and we’re up that way often enough that we encounter them regularly. On our anniversary weekend, we spent Sunday morning at the Church Under the Bridge, a worship service cosponsored by a group of local churches for the benefit of the street people of that city.
The most common encounter we have with these folks is at traffic lights, where one will often be holding up a cardboard sign, ranging from the plaintive (“On the road, my dog needs food”) to the tongue-in-cheek (“Why lie? I need a beer.”). Of course, we have all of the usual concerns about handing out cash to people we don’t know. We have done so at times, but it’s always been with a measure of unease, not knowing whether that money will help or ultimately fuel some destructive downward spiral.
It was with these concerns in mind that Kathy hit on a brilliant idea: why not have the essentials for life packed up and ready to go whenever someone asks? She brainstormed, planned, visited the dollar store, talked with others, and soon had her first batch of large plastic bags filled with water bottles, nonperishable foods, shampoo, washcloths, hand sanitizer, soap, and often a small New Testament. We stashed these in the van, ready for our next stoplight encounter.
Now, when we come to a halt and spot someone in need, there’s a mad scramble to find a bag and to hand it over before the light turns green. The recipients have been almost universally excited to receive the bundles, and it’s been great fun to actually be able to help in such a tangible, immediate way.
As time has gone on, she’s started making larger batches of these bags, not only for us to carry around, but also for other interested people to have available. She’s distributed them to others in our church, to family members, and to a variety of friends. She’s had a couple of bag-making parties at the house, where the attendees will work together to assemble 100 bags in a couple hours. And she’s assembled and organized donations from a variety of sources, as well as found the cheapest and best places to get all of these essentials.
And now she has discovered Bags of Grace, an organization up in Austin with a similar mission, run by a dynamic woman named Rita with whom she shared a lunch and great conversation recently. I expect they’ll be meeting up more in the future to share strategies and combine efforts.
So if you’re interested in supporting some of “the least of these” in our society and want to help assemble or distribute these bags, give Kathy a call. She’ll be glad you did, and so will some people you’ve only ever met at a stoplight.