Today I’ve switched Ruminations over to the new version of Conversant’s weblog plugin. The new system has a bunch of neat new features which I’ll hopefully be doing interesting things with eventually. For now, the only thing to be aware of is that the official RSS feed now lives at https://www.mcmains.net/ruminations/rss for those of you that care about such things.

Friday night I took Kathy to see Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at Southwest Texas. One of my favorite things about living in a University town is the availability of high-quality cultural events on the cheap. This production further cemented that opinion.

Hosted at the Glade Outdoor Theater, a wonderful theater space in one of the little valleys on campus of whose existence I’d previously been unaware, the show was a delightful experience. The cast, though a bit difficult to hear at times, did a superb job with the material, and I found myself laughing heartily once past the mandatory 10-minute adjustment-to-Elizabethan-English period.

The play itself is a curious mixture of tragedy and comedy, and features a few especially memorable characters, Paulina foremost among them. Thanks to the SWT crew for the all-around great job they did with the show.

I burned my first video DVD last night using Apple’s iDVD software. For a test run, I was quite pleased with how it turned out. iDVD created chapter selection screens automatically, based on the chapter markers I’d set up in iMovie. All of the transition and photo pans that stuttered and balked when trying to play on the fly were buttery smooth once crammed together into a continuous video stream. The predefined themes make it pretty easy to create something that looks good, even for one with as little graphic design skill as me. It seems that this will be a superb way to distribute family movies to the parts of the family that are far away.

A couple sticking points: video production takes a lot of time. I’ve spent several hours on the video from our beach trip, and am still not completely done with it. Also, because our video at the beach was shot under overcast conditions, I’ve become acutely aware of the challenge of color correction. iMovie would benefit enormously from a one-button “Enhance” feature, which does one-click color/brightness/contrast correction, as iPhoto now has. Finally, burning DVD’s takes a lot of time. There may be some facility for saving an image of a disc so that you can reproduce it more quickly, but if so, I haven’t yet discovered it.

I’m just back from a great trip to Chicago with Chris, Ross, Ben and several other friends. (More about this later.) While we were there, we went to see the Cubs trounce the Pirates at Wrigley field. I decided to put Chris’ new digital camera to the test and see what I could do with a panorama of the ballpark. This morning, I fed the 6 images that comprised the shot into Photoshop Elements (one of the best $50 I’ve ever spent, by the way), and was delighted with the results:

Click on the image to get the high-resolution version of this beautiful ballpark. Best appreciated on a large monitor.

We went on Saturday to Law Enforcement Appreciation Day where Emily would receive her bike, along with about 50 other kids. After she identified the bike she liked best, she found out that it was indeed the one assigned to her. Since it was windy and cold, we then went indoors until the bike parade began.

Unfortunately, in a rather odd bit of irony, when we came back, someone had swiped the bike. We ended up with a pink bicycle that was much less to her liking and a promise that we could trade it in at Wal-Mart on the bike of her choice. Of course, since we’ve never in our lives had a positive experience at Wal-Mart, when Kathy brought Emily in, they gave her all sorts of difficulty about trading the bike. Kathy finally got fed up with the whole thing, and Emily instead ended up with a Wal-Mart gift card worth the $76 the bike evidently would have cost, which she’s keeping in reserve for when she visits Kathy’s parents this summer.

So, to reiterate: a theft at Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, Wal-Mart is evil, and Emily is a fine artist.

For all you visual learners out there, I’ve finally got a new batch of photos up. These span the last several months, and include a mix of Christmas, road trips, and general family silliness. Visit March 2003 Photos and enjoy!

…I’m pretty sure he would have been an Onion. There’s some pretty pointed war satire over there today.

My ex-step-sister-in-law(!) Celeste is an extremely talented fantasy artist who specializes in faeries, mermaids, and other mythological creatures. Though she has a fair-sized body of work, it’s always been difficult for her to share that work with many people, as her paintings are painstaking months-long endeavors.

For the past few months, she’s been working toward getting set up to sell prints of her artwork. Though the final arrangements for the prints haven’t yet been made, we’ve now got her website up, where you can see samples of her amazing work.

Warning: most of Celeste’s creatures apparently live in tropical climes, and therefore aren’t always strict about getting fully dressed before they go out. 😉

My friend Chris Morris has launched a weblog of his own. Chris is an accomplished programmer, musician, and thinker, and is one of the people whose company I most enjoyed during our time in Denton. He was also one of the coeditors of the late, unlamented (by anyone other than ourselves) Brain Saugage site.

It’s worth noting that he wrote his weblogging system himself in Ruby, and has made it available as part of his Ruby-based Wiki. (If that last didn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry about it. Just read Chris’ stuff.)

Well, it’s been upon us for a couple of days now. I was sad to see the day come, and wish that it could have been avoided. Praying for a quick resolution and minimal loss of life.

In the meantime, here are a few good links: a regularly updated timeline from Financial Times, an argument against, and an argument for.