Author Archives: brad

Now this looks interesting: Trigger.

It’s an open source racing game. Right now, the feature set isn’t terribly enticing, but they plan to add Mac OS X support and network play.

Now, if one of the goals of the game can be utter carnage instead of mere racing, we may have a replacement for the venerable Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now, and one that runs natively on OS X, no less.

Must investigate further…

Thanks to Gadgetopia for the link.

Santa was good to me this year:
Strong Bad DVD
New Chris Tomlin CD, Arriving
Return of the King, Special Extended Edition
Return to Waterloo on DVD
m-Audio Keystation 49e (expect more MP3s soon)
Namco Joystick with Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Galaxian, Boscovian, and Rally X
7.5 foot prelit fiber optic Christmas tree

Good stuff.

Jen and I also got a chance to perform at our new church on Sunday. We did a medley of “Here I Am To Worship,” “Papers and Boxes,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful.” We followed that up by doing the Barenaked Ladies’ version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings.” We were pleased with how it went. Apparently, others were as well: we’ll be leading worship there next week.

Also on Sunday, I helped my friend Brett move some of his fiance’s stuff into his house. They get married in less than two weeks, and I couldn’t be happier for them.

On Saturday, we did the normal Christmas thing for us. After we got up, Gracie found and opened her presents from Santa. Then we got ourselves together and headed to my sister’s house for breakfast with her family, my parents, and my grandparents. After we exchanged gifts and hung out for a while, we went to Jen’s parents’ place for more family stuff (we do our gift exchange with them on Christmas Eve to help slow down the Christmas day schedule a bit).

Good Christmas this year. Plus, I’m still off until Wednesday.

And then Thursday is LOTR day. Sweet.

So, aside from my Christmas mix, it’s been a while since my last post. Lots of reasons for that:

1) [I had to delete this paragraph. -Brad]

2) I’ve been writing a student information system at work, and at home, and everywhere I could take my laptop. The system went live on November 30, and things have slowed down a bit for me since then. Our teachers use it for attendance, discipline, and demographics. It’s built on PostgreSQL, which is great technology. The front end is done in, of course, REALbasic. For the first time, I really feel like I’ve provided the teachers with a tool that meets their needs.

3) We’re redoing Gracie’s bedroom for Christmas. It’s very pink. The tinted primer had it looking like Pepto-Bismol, but now that the first coat of real paint’s on, it looks more like bubble gum. But before we could do that, I had to sand off the pictures that Jen had painted (grass, bumblebees, butterflies, bunnies, the sun, and the moon) to cover up some of the drips and mistakes from the 2001 paint job. The majority of the walls was painted sky blue, and after sanding, I was scooping blue stuff out of my ears, wiping it out of my eyes, and coughing it up. It was nasty stuff. But the painting’s now all but done. We have some trim work to do yet, and a ceiling fan to install, but that’s about it.

4) I was sick for a couple days, too. Like unable to move sick. The day before the new system went live, I stayed up all night working on it. Big mistake. I don’t have the stamina for that anymore. Or at least, I don’t have the stamina for that after staying up until one or two every morning for six weeks leading up to it.

5) We’ve been settling in at our new church, or starting to at least. Hopefully this is somewhere we can hang our hats for a while, because I’m tired of jumping around.

So what’s new with you?

[edited for spelling]

“Green Christmas”
Barenaked Ladies

“White Christmas”
Clyde McPhatter & The Drifters

“Boogie Woogie Santa Claus”
The Brian Setzer Orchestra

“Little Drummer Boy”
Jars Of Clay

“Little Saint Nick”
Sugar Ray

“Jingle Bells”
Lisa Loeb

“Father Christmas”
The Kinks

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
Barenaked Ladies

“Frosty the Snowman”
America

“A New York Christmas”
Rob Thomas

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside (Mulato Beat Remix)”
Louis Armstrong & Velman Middleton

“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”
Ray Charles

“The Christmas Song”
Weezer

“Christmas for Cowboys”
Jars of Clay

“Christmas Song”
Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds

Look at these studs. We’re just too cool for school, man.

Seriously though, this picture was taken this past spring at REAL World 2004 in Austin, TX. That’s Thomas Reed of BitJuggler on the left, Will Leshner of HaranBanjo in the center, and yours truly of bradrhine.com on the right. Thomas developed Coffee Break Pro, Gaps, App Bundler, and other programs, in addition to his many contributions to the REALbasic community in the form of both open source code and his tireless help on the RB mailing lists. He also helped me figure out how to use eSellerate. Will is the maker of Weblog Poster (which inspired me to write Frequency), KidzMail, and KidzLog. It’s cool to see internet software aimed at kids. What a great idea! He maintains an almost constant presence on the RB mailing lists as well.

I got to know both Thomas and Will online through being involved in the RB community, a close-knit group of professional and hobbyist developers. It was great to get a chance to put their faces and voices with their names and email addresses at REAL World. I was struck by how tall Thomas is. For some reason, I had him pegged as a little guy. But you can see in the picture above that he’s certainly someone I can literally look up to. Will looked pretty much like I figured. I don’t know if he’ll be pleased to read that or not.

Anyway, REAL World 2005 is in the works already. Here’s hoping I get a chance to go again. It was a fantastic conference. I’d really feel like I was missing out if I didn’t go next year.

Some may say I’m using this election as an excuse for an evening of hookers and booze. These are cynics, however, who do not understand the liberties that make this country great.
— John Moltz, Crazy Apple Rumors Site

And I hope that he realizes that a leader can say he made a mistake without seeming like less of a leader.
— Dave Mancuso, splitfocus.org

Listen, thank you all. I look forward to working with you. I’ve got a question for you. How many of you are going to be here for a second term? Please raise your hand. Good. Gosh, we’re going to have a lot of fun, then. Thank you all.
— George W. Bush, whitehouse.gov (dot gov, not dot com!)

I might play a little rhythm guitar, but I’m not going to sing. I know my limitations.
— John F. Kerry, MSNBC

Best.
Costume.
Ever.

Halloween story for nerds: click here.

I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind.

see 13918,1340525,00.html” target=”_blank”>Tom Wolfe

With the election just hours away, I thought I’d mention a candidate of my own: Tangelo 1.0 Final Candidate 1. You can grab it here if you want to beta test. Unless any significant bugs are found, this is the build that will become 1.0 final. Ahhh, sweet relief. I’ve been working on Tangelo since December (well, since March with the current codebase). Dang, just found two bugs while in the process of writing this post. Crap. Well, they look easy enough. Hopefully I can fix them tonight.

The new version includes some more minor interface improvements and … drum roll please… spell checking, possibly the single most requested feature. The Windows version now ships as an installer, so everything goes in the right places. The Mac version is now a bundle, which was needed to support spell checking.

It’s available for Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP. If there are any brave 10.2 or Win2000 users out there, it could probably still stand some more testing there.