Though I seldom talk about technical stuff here, I’ve recently found a neat tool that merits a look if you happen to be running Mac OS X. It’s called Konfabulator, and is basically a mini-platform for programming utilities. It uses JavaScript and XML to allow you to create nifty little “widgets” that can do whatever you like. Hooks to the command-line UNIX interface and into AppleScript give it even more capability, and support for Quartz blending and alpha channels help make it easy to make lovely, semi-transparent interfaces with a minimum of fuss.

Of the widgets included, I’m using a picture frame that updates every few minutes with a different photo of my family, an iTunes remote, a stock price monitor, and a weather monitor. I’ve been browsing the developer docs intermittently over the last couple of days, and when faced with a balky server today, was able to easily whip up a little widget of my own that will monitor a URL and report on how long it takes to load that page. Even better, others are posting their widgets to the site at the rate of several per day, so if a particular tool you want isn’t available yet, it very well might be soon. I’ll probably clean up my SiteWatcher widget and make it available once I have a bit of time.

While watching an episode of Reading Rainbow recently, Liam decided that we needed to go bowling for our next “Daddy Date.” The show featured both a visit to a bowling alley, where Levar Burton was showing off his mad bizowling skillz, and a trip to the ball manufacturing plant, which was a lot more interesting than you might expect. (Incidentally, it still rather surprises me every time I see Levar Burton without a hairband over his eyes.)

So last night, Liam and I hit the bowling alley together. Since it was Liam’s first time, we put up the bumpers which, instead of letting your ball fall into the gutter as it otherwise might, bounces it back into the lane. I’d like to say that the bumpers were entirely for Liam’s benefit, but I must admit that my score was a bit higher than it would have been without them. The alley had some extra-light balls for children, which were startling to pick up. There was a family with two little girls, one smaller than Liam, next to us, so there was no shortage of entertainment for the adults.

After taking a few frames to warm to it, Liam really enjoyed himself, and was disappointed when our two games were done. He got a 75 the first game and an 89 the second, even bowling a couple of spares. (No strikes yet, though I’m sure he’ll get there eventually.)

Among the last things he said about it when we were putting our shoes back on: “Daddy, I want to be a bowler when I grow up!”

This crazy old state of Texas in a fun place to live: snowmen one day, balmy 70° weather the next. Here are Emily’s previously-mentioned snow constructs, along with the proud artist. Kathy’s suggested caption: “Not everything is bigger in Texas!”

I’ve decided to break my arcade project out into a separate weblog. The reasons for this are twofold:

1. I’m writing about it in smaller, more frequent chunks than I generally write on this log, and don’t want the important stuff to be lost amid my feverish project ramblings.
2. I’ve been meaning to spend some more time testing the newer version of Conversant’s web logging system, and this gives me a good excuse without messing with Ruminations.

If you’d like to follow along, you can do so here, or alternately use the RSS feed which is here. I’m afraid, however, that those of you who read via email are stuck getting everything.

Alright, “Great Blizzard” is an overstatement, but when you live in central Texas, you take what you can get in the snow department. We had a bit of accumulated snow this morning upon waking — not enough to actually build anything significant, but certainly enough to cause the children to burst into our bedroom before we were awake, shouting their excitement at the meager dusting.

Emily proceeded to gather all the snow from the backyard that she could find and collect it in a bucket. After scouring the trampoline and the back deck, she had just about filled the container, but the cold drove her back inside before she completed her snowman-building plans. She’s still planning to continue, but it’s 34° and rising now, so her window of opportunity is limited.

This past Saturday, Emily’s friend Christopher McGinnis had a birthday party at the local Laser Tag emporium. I went with her to provide another large, ungainly target for the children to shoot. While at the arcade, I noticed that they had several old arcade solitaire machines in the window, each marked with a $25 price tag. Since I grew up in the golden age of arcades, and still have a fascination with (and employment because of) the electronic entertainment industry, I’ve longed to be able to share some of that experience with my own kids. One way that I’ve always thought would be nice would be to have a couple of arcade games around the house. However, working arcade games are expensive, somewhat hard to come by, and not much fun to maintain.

One alternative that addresses most of these problems is putting a PC into an arcade cabinet. Looking at those $25 cabinets, I felt the call of destiny (or perhaps it was the voice of immaturity — I wasn’t discriminating much). I grabbed two of the cabinets, one for me and one for Grant, my next-door neighbor and partner in crime for various musical and gaming endeavors. We were delighted when we pulled open one of the cabinets and found that the innards were basically a ‘386 PC with two custom boards that held the game software and interface to the coin slots. Further, the trackballs were apparently in working order and connected to a trackball to serial interface — parts that would have cost $110 if we’d had to buy them. This looks like it’ll be even better than we’d thought!

I’ve designed our control panels and ordered the joysticks, pushbuttons, and interface circuitry to connect it all together, so we should be making more progress on this project in the next week or two. We’re also considering putting a big hard drive in so we can use the boxes as MP3 jukeboxes as well. Photos and more info to come as the project progresses. Thanks to Arcade Controls for a ton of useful information and to Kathy for not killing me when I showed up with two arcade cabinets.

As part of my ongoing struggle to balance being a good father with being a good husband, good employee, and not going stark raving bats, I’ve recently begun taking the kids out individually once a month for a “Daddy Date.” It has been a load of fun for me to have the one-on-one time with each of them, and is proving helpful for strengthening family bonds and communication.

It’s interesting to see the various things that the kids are excited about doing. Though some of them, like trips to Mr. Gatti’s or the local arcade, are things I would have expected them to enjoy, others have taken me completely by surprise. Abigail has recently developed a rabid enthusiasm for car washes. Our last date, accordingly, included going through the LaserWash and then catching Treasure Planet at the local $2 theater. Emily really likes Chinese buffets, so we’ve been trying out various eateries. Liam has decided that miniature golf is one of the best things in the world, so we’ve gone golfing a couple of times. Maggie still presents some challenges. It seems there are very few things to do after dark with a two-year old. I’ve been taking her to the library a lot, and when it was warm enough, for nature walks down by the river. If anybody has any ideas, please let me know!

I’ve been having a tremendous lack of motivation to write anything here lately. I don’t know if it’s just the periodic realization that I’m trying to do too much and the corresponding short-lived attempt to cut back, or that I have too many other interesting distractions competing for my attention, but it has been hard to set virtual pen to virtual paper for a while.

This morning, however, I received a surprising bit of encouragement from a fellow named Stephen Davison. I’ve never met Stephen, but he was kind enough to drop some touchingly nice words on the site which have served to help revive my flagging enthusiasm a bit. Thanks, Stephen!

(Incidentally, do drop by Stephen’s website. He’s an Australian actor/sculptor/man about town, and has some interesting stuff there.)

I’ve been friends with Barry Brake since we were both attending rival high schools, but going to the same church. He’s a brilliant guy, with both an incisive mind, which comes through in his speech and writing, and dextrous fingers, which come through in his music. He did the music at Sea World for The Shamu Show a few years back, has played regularly with a jazz trio for over a decade, and is always good for a fascinating conversation on some topic or another.

Barry started this new year with surgery to remove cancer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the results were as good as he and his doctors had hoped for. He’ll be beginning chemotherapy on Monday. While that is inevitably a slightly-to-terrifically miserable experience, his doctors are optimistic that it will have good results. (His cancer is evidently of a type that responds well to chemo.)

Those who are interested can follow Barry’s progress on his site here. Those who pray, please add Barry to your list.

I’ve had Corey Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on my reading list for a while, without realizing that it hadn’t actually been released yet. Today it was set loose, to my delight, not only in paper form, but also in a variety of electronic formats that can be downloaded and swapped freely. (For you web types, there’s even a particularly nice CSS trick in the HTML version.)

Corey’s motivation for making his novel available at no charge? One of the more compelling arguments of the musicians who have embraced free music swapping over record contracts as the way to get their material to a listening public: obscurity is a greater enemy to the artist than is piracy. Since this is his first novel, he wants to get it into as many hands as possible, figuring the word-of-month buzz will do more to increase his sales than the sharing will decrease them. Should be an interesting experiment.

I’m to Chapter 3 so far, and it looks like every bit the interesting novel that I’d hoped.