[RING! RING!]

“Origin Systems; This is Sean.”

“DADDY! I WENT POTTY!”

“Good for you, Liam! I’m proud of you!”

“Yes, you are. Bye!”

Last week, Emily was filmed for a commercial one of our friends at Southwest Texas was doing for her film class. She spent most of the day down at the University studio and “on location” on our front sidewalk.

The commercial was a fun little spot for an imaginary product: Sugar-ee energy bars, which consist of 100% refined table sugar. The industrious film students actually created a Sugar-ee bar out of sugar cubes and some kind of candy coating. After taking a bite, Emily leaps into the air and, with the help of the blue screen, flies around the world, making it home in time for dinner.

Emily almost missed her chance at stardom when, the day before the filming, she had a minor bike accident, which resulted in a black eye. With some judicious use of makeup and choice of camera angles, however, she was still afforded her chance to become a child star.

The commercial is still in editing, but once we get a copy, I’ll see if I can get it up here for everyone to enjoy. Emily’s still doing her best to eat the whole dang sugar bar, which the students gave her when the filming was completed.

My company makes a software package called Oratorio that’s designed for presenting lyrics in a church service. Because we’ve been getting (and paying attention to) lots of really good feedback from its users, we’ve been able to make it progressively better and more feature-complete.

One of the sticking points for some people has been that the program bogs down a bit in some cases. I’ve been devoting a fair bit of thought to how to speed it up, and had a couple epiphanies that have helped significantly. I put the last of those changes into place this morning, and have been delighted and suprised with the performance increase I’ve seen, especially under Mac OS X. (Mac OS X has beautiful font smoothing that makes type looks great, but takes about 5x as long as any other OS to draw a piece of text. Oratorio used to do a lot of text drawing, but now does much less behind the scenes, which results in a very pronounced speed increase.)

Last night we went bowling with Craig & Ginger Corley, some of our good friends in San Marcos. I thought I’d been up on the latest developments in bowling, including “disco turbo lazer bowl” or whatever they called it when they added fluorescent balls, black lights, and seizure-inducing strobe lights to the bowling experience. But nothing prepared me for…the shoes.

Now, back in my day, bowling shoes were ugly, but almost delightfully so. They had the size printed on the back in enormous numbers so there was no way to hide the embarassing hugeness of your feet (10 1/2, thanks), and were made of several different colors of leather. They were very deliberately ugly, but so delightfully chunky and obvious that I always wanted to swipe a pair. My good upbringing got the better of me, though.

Last night’s shoes were a travesty. Not only were they made of some odd synthetic material probably developed originally for the space program to preserve food, but they featured large, velcro straps that went over the top of the shoe to secure it to your foot. Now, I’m all in favor of velcro in the shoes of children, as it saves countless hours of shoe-tying time for their parents, but velcro has no place in the shoe of a God-fearing adult. No self-respecting member of Generation X would be caught wearing these, tongue firmly planted in cheek, delighting in his clever irony. I think if I accidentally walked out of the bowling alley with the shoes on my feet, my children would make me turn right around and take them back as soon as I walked in the door of the house. And rightly so. They are New Coke for your feet. Ick.

Photo coming as soon as Craig sends it to me.

I rarely hawk products here, figuring that’s what their marketing people are for. I have to say, however, that I’ve been very happy with TurboTax for the Web. I’ve been using it for three years now, and it seems to be getting steadily better. This year it’s working fine on my Mac, has remembered all my dependents and lots of other information from last year, and offered to import data from a number of other sources, saving me some significant typing. It also offers helpful tax-saving and audit-avoiding tips, one of which was actually a pleasant surprise to me. Once you’re ready to file, you can do so electronically and get your refund deposited directly to your account.

I think some of the IRS’ budget should go toward just buying up TurboTax and making it available for free to whomever wants to use it. In the meantime, however, I’ll be happy to shell out my $19 this year.

Young Margaret has in the last week suddenly started to grasp what language is all about. Kathy and I have considered ourselves pretty advanced in this area, as we’ve read all about how when your children are preverbal, you can teach them to use sign language for basic concepts like “please,” “all done,” and “gimme.” Our children, of course, have conspired to teach us humility, and have all refused to have anything to do with signing until they’re getting the hang of spoken language anyway. Figures.

Anyway, Margaret has a couple recognizable words now, and is signing away too, thanks mostly to Kathy’s tireless efforts. It’s absolutely heartwarming to hear her giggly “Dada!” coming from the kitchen. Even if she is pointing at the cat when she says it.

A while back, I was delighted to discover the Prairie Home Companion [link corrected] website. “At last!” I thought to myself, “I’ll be able to listen to PHC when I have time, rather than having to try to catch it at the painfully inconvenient times NPR insists on broadcasting.” I was thwarted, however, as they were only posting little selected bits of each show online that I didn’t have the patience to click through, knowing I’d still be missing a lot.

I sent the webmaster a grumpy email, and recieved a gracious reply, explaining that while they thought it was a great idea to have the entire shows available online for listening, they didn’t have enough drive space — an answer I was reluctantly forced to accept.

Well, since then, evidently disks have become cheaper or their budget has become larger, because the archives now feature entire shows you can listen to. Additionally, when taping is going on, you can eavesdrop on live audio or video feeds from the show. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a whole lot of listening to do.

As one who abhors long drives to and from work, and yet has difficulty living far enough into the big city to avoid them, I’ve always been a fan of good public transit. Unfortunately, that’s often been a theoretical enthusiasm, for while the bus seemed an attractive option when I was 14 years old and wanted to get down to the mall to drop quarters in the Defender machine, its disadvantages have seemed onerous since I got my drivers’ license. Add that to the degree to which everything is spread out in Texas, and I haven’t been on any public transit since the light rail in Dallas, which we rode mostly as a lark on the way to the zoo one day.

So when I happened across a link on Slashdot to a new kind of transit system being tested in Cardiff Bay, I was very intrigued. This systems consists of a network of interlinked roadways that run computer-controlled electric cars in little channels. The cars carry up to about 4 people, and guide themselves to the destination you choose without any human guidance. This circumvents the main downfall of existing public transit systems — that if you’re not going where it’s going, you’re out of luck. The cost would apparently be comparable to existing systems, if not actually less. It’s apparently best suited to small to medium sized cities, with a distribution between stations of about half a kilometer. There’s a news article here, a technical paper here, and some information on the US version being developed by Raytheon here.

We have been having a sort of slow-motion, protracted row with the city for several months over our plans for the garage. Since we like to be able to put friends up temporarily who are needing a place to stay, we had planned to convert it into a sort of mother’s-in-law suite, with a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a bedroom. Kathy submitted several different versions of this plan to the permit people, who kept returning it to her for various reasons. After several attempts, each time making all the changes they’d asked for, they’d come up with another batch of changes. Grr.

I finally decided that my wife didn’t need that kind of aggravation, so went down and had a 20 minute heart-to-heart with one of the guys. I took careful notes of what he said, while he alternated between coming up with more expensive things to add to the plans and saying “honestly, we’re not trying to be a pain about this.” I’m afraid I went home unconvinced on the last point.

Anyway, we finally resubmitted the plans, scrapping the kitchenette altogether, as the zoning people thought it looked too much like turning our house into a duplex — never mind that the whole house would have all been on the same utility meters and have doors connecting everything together. Today, at long last, they approved our plans, so we can get back to finishing out our long-stalled renovation. (And in spite of all of that, we have had a friend staying in there for a couple months already, bare insulation and all.)

Today I found, floating in a half-full gallon container of 1% milk, several slices of sausage, some of which bore the marks of little teeth.

“Why on earth…” I started, and then thought better of it. There was no answer to the question I was forming that would justify floating, half-masticated sausage rafts in the milk. I just resolved to chalk it up as one of life’s mysteries and move on.