While we were in Denton, we went to see UNT’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor. This was Kathy’s first Opera experience, so I was delighted when we got to the box office and plunked down our money for the cheapest seats remaining, we somehow ended up in the third row.

UNT’s crew did a fine job with the show. Though the acting seemed a bit aimless at times, the orchestra and singers were top-notch. The woman playing Lucia was especially noteworthy, jumping around in coloratura range wonderfully nimbly, and evidently very much enjoying the chance to play a character afflicted by madness. It was a bit odd to see a bunch of people running around in kilts singing in Italian, though.

Thanks for the great evening, UNT folks!

We came back from Denton with a big trampoline that one of our old neighbors whose kids have grown was ready to rid herself of. Remembering my juvenile trampoline-assisted attempts at self-destruction, I’m rather nervous about our kids having such a thing at their disposal. Now that our backyard has a treehouse, a pool, and a trampoline, I’m thinking of a bubbling cauldron of lava and an alligator pit to flesh out our child-imperilment options.

Hopefully Nietzsche is right about the things that don’t kill you making you stronger. And hopefully the trapoline will remain in the category of things that don’t kill you.

Oh, gosh, can it really have been almost three weeks since I posted last? Tempus really does fugit, I guess, especially when one is up to one’s eyeballs.

We’re just back from Dallas, where we spent a week, ostensibly for me to take a Java class, but secondarily to provide an opportunity to visit with our long neglected north Texas friends. In spite of having done our share to contribute to highway erosion since we moved to San Marcos, we hadn’t gotten back up to Denton, where we lived previously, in that two and a half year span. So, seizing the opportunity to off two avians with a single sedimentary deposit, off we went!

Of course, nothing is simple with the traveling circus that is our family. We had only just gotten settled in at the home of our friends Chad & Lynn Davenport, who went above and beyond the call of duty by opening their home to us for the week, when Liam started displaying worrisome little red spots and complaining that he didn’t feel well. Sure enough, by Tuesday, he had a full-on case of Chicken Pox going. Fortunately, all the Davenport children (excepting the still prenatal one, of course) had already had the Pox, so his infectiousness was less of a concern than was the fact that he woke up every 8 minutes during the night complaining of itching, a problem that seemed only to be remedied by twitching and kicking me as he dropped back off into unconsciousness.

(Side note: We have four children. The Davenports have three ex utero, with one in progress. Add that to the two extra boys that Lynn babysat one day, and you can quickly begin to guess what an entertaining madhouse their home was for the span of our visit.)

In spite of all the chaos that inevitably surrounds our family road trips, we were able to get some good visiting time in with our friends. As I mentioned, the Davenports were kind enough to host us for the week, which afforded a few moments of adult conversation between child-management duties. My friend Greg Pierce signed up for the Java course I was taking, which made it much more enjoyable than it would otherwise have been. We carpooled together, and brought guitars one day for a bit of pickin’ and grinnin’ at lunchtime. I got to visit Jason and Aleka Myre, who were in the middle of major home renovation, one night while desperately seeking an Internet connection. And a number of other friends turned up in response to our short-notice “Come play with us at the park before we head out of town” email. Thanks to all of you again for going out of your way to come visit!

Now we’re back home, catching up on our sleep, and enjoying being able to do that in our own beds and looking forward to the prospect of a couple of months with no long drives planned.

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, he creates a compelling vision of a Virtual Reality world called the Metaverse. One of the interesting things about Stephenson’s vision is that participants in that alternate reality could create their own objects, choose their own appearance, and program the behavior of the world in some significant ways.

The company I work for, Electronic Arts, is very close to releasing The Sims Online, a virtual world that embodies many of the concepts in Stephenson’s work. However, the folks at Linden Lab seemed determined to outdo everyone else’s efforts here. Their in-development product Second Life is a fully realized 3D world that will allow players to do most everything depicted in Stephenson’s Metaverse, including creating (and programming) custom objects, vehicles, and weapons for the combat areas in their virtual world. I’ll be very interested to see what their programming language ends up looking like (and who writes the first virus in their world)!

I suspect The Sims Online will be a bigger commercial success than Second Life, both because it has the momentum of The Sims PC Game series behind it, and because games that include 3D modelling and programming are necessarily less accessible than those that don’t. However, the creative possibilities are correspondingly larger in Linden Labs’ world, and I’ll be watching their progress with at least as much interest as that of my own company.

Dad McMains, being the observant and incisive thinker that he is, is nearly impossible to surprise. Over the years, many attempts have been made — none have been successful.

This past Sunday, we surprised him. Lana and Meara took point on putting together a party, inviting people and coordinating arrangements by email and cell phone. I worked things out with Cheatham Street, where I played on Sunday, to have some space available for our party group. On the day of the event, Lana feigned illness while Meara and her grandparents arrived early to make final arrangements and to greet people. Around 4:30, my stunned father arrived to a room full of friends from San Antonio and San Marcos. We in the band struck up Happy Birthday as the cheers went up and the celebration began.

It was great for us to see Dad in the company of good friends and enjoying the event so much, and meaningful to me to be able to be part of the entertainment for the event. We love you, Dad. I’m delighted we could be a part of this milestone. Happy birthday!

Emily, Abigail, Liam and I all went to Fiesta Gardens in Austin on Saturday for the Austin Celtic Festival. The weather was, unfortunately, authentically cold and rainy, and even though we’d planned ahead and were appropriately dressed, it took a toll; the kids slept all the way home.

In spite of the precipitation, we had a great time. The SCA was out in force, doing combat demonstrations every half hour. There were a ton of great bands, none of which we got to spend sufficient time in front of, but all of which we quite enjoyed. A lot of the groups are doing interesting things combining traditional instruments, such as pipes and fiddle, with full trap sets, electric guitars and basses, and other rock instruments. The fused sound is a great one; eminently dancable and listenable. I give it a 10!

The kids especially enjoyed the childrens tent, which included stenciling, digging for money in tubs of oats, and coloring of their own coats-of-arms. I was a bit disappointed that there weren’t more instruments available for purchase — not a single pennywhistle maker that I could find — but there was a Uilleann Pipe Club, which as far as I could tell consisted of two members. (One of those had actually built his from scratch — no mean feat.)

Alas, we missed the Highland Games, which were scheduled for Sunday. I’m definitely looking forward to next year’s event, which will hopefully feel more like October in Texas than in Scotland.

My halloween prank was a wonderful success. I stuffed the speaker and camera in the pumpkin at lunchtime on the 31st, adjusted all the sound levels so that the scream the pumpkin emitted would be sufficiently bloodcurdling, and rigged up the laptop just inside the window for observation purposes. We ended up not making the video visible to our visitors, as we didn’t feel like dragging the TV over to the window, but did enjoy watching the reactions captured as people triggered the scream ourselves. My favorite response was one teen in an alien mask who walked toward the door, turned toward the camera when the scream was triggered, and just left.

And to borrow a riff from Dave Barry, I think “The Screaming Electric Pumpkins” would make a great band name.

My friend Mark Morgan is participating in National Novel Writing Month, a bit of literary insanity in which as many people as possible are enlisted to crank out 175 page novels in the span of a single month. Though I was sorely tempted to jump in and participate, I’ve enough of a self-preservation instinct to realize that would be a pretty bad idea at this point of my life. However, I’m vicariously participating through Mark, whose official progress one can track here. He’s off to a promising start!

(Also see Mark’s web community Voices of Unreason for more literary fun.)

My neighbor and good friend Grant was rooting around at a nearby pawnshop yesterday. Being as inveterate an instrument collector as I am, his fate was instantly sealed when he found a sitar sitting therein, and he ended up going home with it.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when Abby informed me “Mr. Grant has a weird instrument to show you,” but as one whose favorite Beatles music was written by George Harrison, I was delighted at what Grant’s find turned out to be. Originally intending only to drop by for five minutes and see the thing, I ended up trailing home an hour later after we figured out how to tune it (thanks to the Internet) and played Within You Without You, Yes’ It Can Happen, some improvisation in an eastern idiom, and then moved further afield to Maria and some blues (which worked predictably poorly).

The design of the instrument seems remarkable haphazard, with two resonating chambers, 7 strings that are played directly and are propped up with an odd array of splints and bridges, 11 sympathetic strings that aren’t played directly at all, but only vibrate in response to one’s playing the other strings, adjustable frets, and a little plastic swan that functions as a fine tuner. But even with, or perhaps because of, all that the sound is amazing. The way the string lies on the bridge gives a really interesting buzz to the sound, but the notes last much longer than one expects from one’s experience with a guitar. It’s an absolutely baffling and fascinating instrument; I’m delighted to have one next door!

I’ve recently been working on a prank of sorts for Halloween. I’ve been building some software that will use a video camera hidden in a pumpkin to trigger a loud, scary scream when people walk up to the door. It will then capture 5 seconds of their reaction and display that video repeatedly so they can see how silly they looked. It should be a lot of fun.

It’ll also have an ambient audio track running to lend atmosphere. I’m going to throw something together on the synth, but the kids and I spent some time playing with a sound editor last night creating spooky sounds which will be randomly laid over the ambient track. I have one really evil sounding back masking snippet that, when you play it backwards, says “Go to church! Say your prayers! Tithe! Tithe!” The kids thought it frightfully amusing to hear their own voices pitch-shifted. My only concern now is putting in an override so I can spare the adorable 2 year olds being frightened.