Archived news items from November 2006
Since this is old news, some links may be broken.
current news
newer old news from December 2006
First things first: let's talk about the Wii. Twilight Princess was fun. This is not a surprise. Wii Sports, on the other hand.... It should communicate something that we (wii?) spent the majority of our time over the break playing Wii Sports rather than Zelda.
Tennis was amazing and intuitive and quite fun. Paul and (his wife) Julie and Deanna and I played a fair bit of doubles tennis with the four controllers we had on hand. You could quite literally put a controller in the hand of someone who'd never played video games before, and within 30 seconds they were on par with the rest of us. Remarkable.
Bowling was also really fun and very easy to pick up. Within one minute I was no longer having problems controlling the game and was instead just having trouble knocking all the pins down. What can I say; they really got it right.
I'm actually really looking forward to Wii Play, which has table tennis and 9-ball, a shooting range and tanks and fishing, and includes an extra controller for not much more than the price of the controller itself. Sweet.
In other news, I got star-light working on the pages at school. This means I'll be able to list Java source code on a web page and have it look all aesthetically-pleasing without having to manually colorize anything. Nice job, Dean.
Oh, that means that I created a syntax-highlighting module for Java, since it doesn't come with one. They're easy to create, but contact me if you'd like mine.
I also spent a while making a little applet to let students interactively play with picking random numbers in a certain range, since they haven't really gotten that nailed down yet. As a side-effect, I had to learn how to handle keypresses in an applet and roll my own text box.
So, I was good this afternoon and got caught up on my grading. Now I'm off for the Thanksgiving holidays with nothing hanging over my head. Which is a good thing.
My brother, who's a video game connoisseur, has of course already obtained the Nintendo Wii and Twilight Princess, the highly-anticipated new Zelda game. And since I'm about to leave for East Texas, I'll probably be playing it later tonight.
All you peoples out there without a Wii can be jealous now.
I'd just like to mention that my girlfriend Deanna was awarded her PhD today. So, yeah, she's probably cooler than you.
So, things have been fairly busy. Seems like every day I have a substantial amount of grading. Maybe just because it's the end of the Six-Weeks, but I'm not sure.
A week ago (Monday night) I was invited to be a guest speaker for computer science students at UT. The students didn't know what it was going to be about, but at the request of the department, I gave my infamous Don't Be Creepy talk. I think nearly one hundred students attended, and most of them seemed to enjoy it immensely. Hopefully they'll take some of the advice and get a head start (relative to me) in gaining social skills.
Then all this week Lakeline Church has been finishing our move. We got all of the stuff out of the old space by Tuesday evening. During the week we set up things in the 'ministry center' (a.k.a. the church offices). Thursday night we had band rehearsal there. Things went fine.
Saturday morning the guys from Portable Church Industries (PCI) showed up with our trailer and cool storage cases. From nine to noon we tried to fit all our old stuff and some of our new stuff in eighteen 6'x4'x2' cases. With reasonable success, I'd add.
Then we took about four hours in the afternoon to practice unpacking everything, setting the tricky parts up and tearing them down again. Then home for a good night's sleep.
This morning a dozen or more people showed up at Leander High School at 6:30 A.M. to turn their cafeteria into a worship facility. About two hours later, most things were in place. An hour after that, set-up (including projectors, lights, sound, video ) was basically complete. The service went really well. And not just "good for our first time being portable"; it was legitimately a good service.
It was actually kind of stressful-fun setting up this morning. But we'll be doing it for maybe three to five years, so I'm settling in for the marathon. Anyway, Lakeline Church is over nine years old, and this is a major development in the life of our church. Wherein we no longer take so much for granted, are better stewards of our finances, and reinforce that the church is not a building but people.
Friday was the last day of the second Six-Weeks, so my grades are due by noon on Tuesday. I've got a bit of grading to do this evening, but it shouldn't take me more than a couple of hours. And I'll try to get to bed semi-early again.
October 2006
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