I think I’ve given up arguing with Jason when he tells me I don’t post enough. The “I wait until I have something to actually say” and the “Who wants to read a pile of links?” are dead on my lips. It’s true — I’m just a bad blogger.

That said, here’s a bit of what’s been going on around Chez McMains of late:

• Liam and I played paintball this weekend with a small mob of guys from our church. Today, as a result, I know what it is to be an old man. My thighs are so sore from all of the squatting and standing on Saturday that I have to take stairs stiff-legged, waddling from side to side, as the moment I bend my knees and those muscles are called on, they protest with such vehemence that I consider just giving up walking altogether for the rest of my days. Needless to say, my 1.5 mile dodder to work this morning was not a lot of fun, nor a thing of beauty for the unfortunate passers-by.
• We celebrated Dad McMains’ mumbledy-mumbleth birthday. (“I’m 16 for the fourth time!” he cheerily informed us.) On Thursday, Kathy, the kids and I crashed the course he’s teaching at the University this semester. Then on Sunday, for the official celebration, we went to the Magic Time Machine, where we were waited on by Alice (the Walt Disney version, not so much the Lewis Carroll or, heaven forfend, the American Magee version). Good times.
• I played at church. Somehow, in spite of the fact that I don’t think I’m particularly good at it and certanily don’t much like doing it, I got to be front man (“worship leader”, for you church folks) for the band again — a bit exhausting for my introvert’s soul.
• We enjoyed a delightful Guy Fawkes Day celebration with Becky and Chris. The mixing of Texan and English cultures was great fun — a bonfire, Guy burned in effigy, fireworks, chili, and stuffed jalepeños.
• The whole nuclear family went to the 2006 Austin Celtic Festival, along with Steven & Christina Hernandez. In years past, I’ve taken the kids without Kathy, so it was a special treat to have her along this time around. Though it seemed slightly smaller than in years past, we all had a good time milling among the vendors’ booths, watching the SCA do their combat demonstrations, and listening to a great deal of wonderful music.

Monday at school, for reasons that only make sense to a six year old, Maggie shoved a piece of gravel into her ear. We weren’t aware of this until Tuesday morning, when she mentioned it to Kathy, who verified its presence, but was unable to remove it.

We sent Maggie off to school where she only stayed for an hour or two before complaining to the nurse about the rock. The nurse wouldn’t let Maggie return to class (which I thought strange, given that the incident happened there at school the day before and no fuss was made about it then), so Kathy picked her up and brought her to the doctor.

The good news: the doctor’s office had the right equipment to get the rock out easily. The bad news: the equipment was broken. Their efforts with the other tools at their disposal only pushed the rock further into Maggie’s ear canal. After interminable fiddling, they declared that we would need to go to an ENT. (We still had to plunk down our copay, of course.)

So on Wednesday, Kathy and Maggie tromped off to the ENT’s office. This doctor looked things over, informed us that the stone had worked its way all the way to Maggie’s eardrum and was resting against it now. As a result, Maggie would need surgery to have it out.

Now, to my layman’s mind, surgery equals cutting. I had visions of them flaying Maggie’s little head open to extract the rock and then sewing her back together like some little Frankenstein monster. Fortunately, the procedure turned out to be much less dramatic: Maggie would merely be anesthesized and then a little suction probe would be used to grab the stone and extract it. The only reason for the anesthesia was because putting the pressure on the eardrum would cause a good deal of unavoidable discomfort.

For some reason, the doctor wanted to schedule this first thing in the morning. I’m not sure of the wisdom of going into surgery before one has had a breakfast taco and some tea, but the doctor presumably knows his cycles better than I do. Kathy and Maggie arose this morning at 5:30, and were at the hospital by a little after 6:00. By the time I’d gotten the kids off to school and made it to the hospital myself at about 7:40, Kathy was chatting merrily away with the doctor, who had already concluded the procedure and presented Kathy with a specimen jar containing a very expensive piece of gravel.

Five minutes later, we got to go see Maggie, who was happily watching cartoons and sucking down apple juice. I stuck around long enough to help open the Littlest Pet Shop play set (packaged at Fort Knox, evidently) that Kathy had bought to help put Maggie’s mind at ease about the procedure. (I told Kathy that I was going to shove a rock in my ear a week before the Nintendo Wii comes out to see what I’d get. She wasn’t particularly amused.)

So, Maggie’s done, and should be back at school tomorrow, where a whole playground full of little stones wait for her further attention. Next time, the hospital bills come out of her allowance.

Friday night Jonathan and I went to see The Sinus Show’s Snakes on a Plane at the Drafthouse.

Let me explain a bit. The Sinus Show is a live lampooning of a movie. It’s inspired by Mystery Science Theater 3000, and indeed was originally called “Mister Sinus Theater” until Best Brains, the creators of the original MST3K, set their lawyers on “kill”. As a long-time fan of the original, I’d been quite eager to check out Austin’s take on the concept, but had never gotten the chance until Jonathan organized a Guys’ Night Out for Friday. In spite of the 6 people who RSVPed in the affirmative (and the 72,000 or so that were invited but didn’t respond), Jonathan and I ended up being the only two guys in attendance. So we settled into the dark confines of the Alamo Drafthouse , Austin’s movie-lovers’ movie theater, and wondered if the Sinus guys could possible live up to their inspiration.

The answer in short: definitely. I actually found the Sinus show funnier than MST3K tends to be. Part of that was simply good comedy — the guys doing the commentary were excellent, and pretty consistently funny even when just improvising. Much of the difference, however, was due to a different set of restrictions they put on themselves. They were, of course, quite a bit more vulgar than the MST3K guys ever allowed themselves to be, which gave them a broader palette with which to work. A more subtle difference, however, was that the MST3K guys always tried to maintain the illusion that they were seeing the movie for the first time; the Sinus lads made no such pretensions, and were therefore better able to mock continuity goofs, establish bad patterns, etc. As Jonathan said, the MST3K writers seem more clever, pulling esoteric references from all over the place, but the Sinus guys get a lot of mileage out of fart jokes.

And in case you’re wondering: Snakes on a Plane is a bad movie. Really, really bad. Gut-wrenchingly bad. This isn’t interesting or surprising in and of itself, but becomes more so when one recognizes that this film, more than any other to date, was created by fans on the Internet. The scriptwriters incorporated a good deal of feedback from fans, and even went so far as scheduling an additional 5 days of shooting to incorporate the new material (which would incidentally bring the film’s rating from PG-13 to R). While James Surowiecki may maintain that groups are smarter than individuals when it comes to game shows, we can consider this conclusive proof that the same does not hold true where scriptwriting is concerned.

After getting excited about Mologogo, I broke down and bought a cell phone. Then, being a geek, I went out and started reading up on J2ME, the development system for it that would allow me to create my own applications to carry around with me. Then, still not having filled my nerd quota, I got to thinking about what sorts of interesting apps would be enabled by the combination of GPS and web access in a mobile device. By this morning, I had worked up the following application design (mostly in my subconscious while sleeping). I’m excited about the idea; if you’re interested, please feel free to chip in ideas. If I get around to coding, the current plan is to make it open-source so other people can help with the hard math. 🙂

Abstract:

Cacher’s Apprentice (working name) is a tool for geocaching from a mobile phone. It will provide facilities for locating nearby caches and for helping the user to find them. There will be an operating mode to support each of these tasks. (Note: geocaching.com doesn’t provide web services currently, but does have a lightweight interface that should ease working with their site a bit, though it still relies on session data more than would be ideal.) The ideal user is someone who enjoys geocaching and is traveling, finds herself with a bit of spare time, and wants to see if there are any caches nearby to seek out.

Location Screen:

• When started up, application will be in location mode.
• App will query the GPS receiver to get current location.
• App will then query geocaching.com with the current latitude and longitude to find the 10 caches nearest the user.
• Caches will be displayed in a list, with the closest at the top.
• User can scroll through the list and get a summary (size, distance, type) on each of the caches.
• Selecting a cache moves to the display screen for that cache.
• List can be refreshed with a “Refresh” command.
• App can be exited with “Exit” command.

Display Screen:

• Queries Geocaching.com for and shows all details (description,etc) for a particular cache.
• Commands are “Back” to move to Location Screen and “Track” to move to tracking mode.

Tracking Screen:

• Application will display the name/ID of the selected cache, and distance to it. The GPS will be queried and this information updated continuously.
• App will also display a “hotter/colder” designation based on whether the distance is increasing or decreasing.
• Hotter/colder may also have an audio cue — an ascending tone for hotter, descending for colder. (The absolute pitch might rise as you get closer, too.)
• “Found it” command will shut off audio notification and allow logging the find on geocaching.com.
• “Back” command will bring user back to location mode.
• “Hints” command will retrieve hints from Gecoaching.com and display them.

We’ve had a small group at Texas State exploring the educational potential of games and simulations for about a year now. A few months back, our director became very interested in Second Life, a virtual world with entirely user-created content. Emin, one of my coworkers, has since been building a lovely virtual space for use by the University populace within Second Life.

In preparation for a conference this weekend, Emin put together a tour of Texas State’s island. Behold, the Bobcat Village tour:

I’ve fallen woefully behind on posts here of late. Sorry about that — just lots of real life going on. Recent highlights:

• Watching 20 million bats come boiling out of Bracken Cave with the rest of the family. The critters form a vortex as they emerge, looking for all the world like a mammalian tornado. Especially striking were the occassional albinos spiraling upward, startling in their whiteness amid thousands of their brown fellows. Great experience.
• Saw Edward James Olmos speak. As a huge fan of Stand and Deliver and his more recent work in Battlestar Galactica, I had high expectations. Suffice it to say, however, than this was another proof of the maxim that expertise in one area does not imply expertise in another.
• Played at church and Cheatham Street Warehouse last Sunday. Good times, both.
• Liam and Maggie enjoyed a weekend at the beach with Mom McMains, who graciously offered to include them on a fishing/swimming/sandcastle building trip.
• Maggie caught her first fish at the San Marcos River while we celebrated Frisbee Dan‘s birthday with him.
• Had a super double-date with David and Elizabeth last Saturday. Also bumped into some old friends from my high school while we were out — what a great surprise!
• Closed out the season at Schlitterbahn. Abigail and I were the last people to ride the Family Blaster for the year.

I’m a long-time cell-phone hater. This stems partly from the fact that I don’t like phones in general, and partly from the dropped calls, intermittent signals, and latency that causes me to always feel like I’m tripping over and interrupting the person on the other end of the call. I have, however, thought for several years that there is one application that might pull me into the late-20th century cell-phone toting world: a GPS-enabled friend tracking service where you could see the location of your designated buddies on a map and get alerts if you happen to wander close to them.

I had seen an early research project along these lines a few years back where a grad student had hacked together a system to keep track of friends on ski trails. It showed good promise, but wasn’t really robust and friendly enough for wide use.

This morning while listening to NPR, I heard about Mologogo, a new effort that is much more polished and complete. It combines geolocation, chat, and social networking functions into what looks like a rapidly evolving, pretty feature-rich package — very interesting, indeed. I found myself for the first time this morning actually looking on cell phone providors’ sites to check out their service offerings. Mologogo, what have you wrought?

This morning I half-woke, needing to go to the bathroom badly. I’m not especially good at mornings, and always hate getting up out of a nice warm bed to hit the loo. After several minutes deliberation and increasingly urgent persuasion from my bladder, I eventually managed to lever myself upright and stumble blearily to the restroom to do my business. I came back to lie back down — only to wake up, still in bed, and still needing to go to the bathroom. Argh!

That was the most prosaic, and yet the most frustrating, dream I think I’ve ever had.

I took Liam to Cub Scout Camp for the day on Saturday. He had a great time running amok with other boys, practicing archery, shooting BB guns, fishing, etc.

Liam with his first catch

One of my favorite moments of the day:

Guide: (Holding up animal fur) Who can tell me what animal this comes from?

Scout: A Bear?

Guide:: No.

Scout: An Otter?

Guide: Good guess, but no.

Scout: A Webelo?

Guide: (Guffaws.)

The Sci-Fi Channel has a fun new show this season called Eureka which has quickly become some of our favorite family viewing. It was created by Andy Cosby, Ross’s production partner out in California. Further, the most recent episode was penned by our friend Johanna Stokes. It’s a great bit of writing, so go buy the episode and reward Andy and Jojo for their fine work.