We decided it was finally time for the swing set in the backyard to go. It's had a good life, and we definitely got our money's worth out of it after getting it for free from the previous owners of our house 13 years ago.
The kids didn't use it much anymore, so they weren't too upset to about tearing it down.
Damon and Miles asked if they could go play by "just a piece of wood" (the exercise station across Eagle Spring Parkway). I figured they were old enough to get over there on their own, so I said sure. After a while I decided to go check up on them, since it's also right next to the neighborhood drainage canal.
Damon knew exactly what he wanted to do, because he had brought a flashlight, and this is what I found him doing when I got there.
It was hard to be mad, since 1) my brothers and I used to do this when we were kids and 2) he was so pleased with himself.
We explored the drainage area and found some bigger drain pipes to walk through, lots of balls that had been washed down there, and even a street sign in the mud.
One of the Christmas presents I got for Amber was a set of DVDs of handbell music shown as falling notes in the style of Rock Band or Guitar Hero. They turned out to be pretty fun, but they were limited to 8 notes, which made the music too simple, and often downright weird (switching keys, missing notes, etc.).
Since we already had a full chromatic two-octave set of handbells, Amber said she wished she had the software they had used so that she could write her own songs to take advantage of our full bell set. I agreed, then thought about it and realized it probably wouldn't be that hard to write my own software to do it.
After a bit of research I found a simple graphics platform I could use, but the real difficulty was going to be how to write the music itself. It all came together when I found out that the file format of the open-source music annotation software MuseScore is simply a zip file containing an xml file that defines the entire score. Now we could write music in MuseScore and have the software parse the xml file and turn it into falling notes.
I had taken time off for Christmas, so I went at it and within a few days I had a working prototype and by New Years a simple version was pretty much working. We took it to San Antonio when we visited the Leflers for New Year's Day and everyone had fun giving it a successful trial run.
By now I was having fun and I kept coming up with new ideas and kept having to update the MuseScore parser as I tried harder musical techniques. Looking at my github history, I updated nearly every day in January until it was pretty solid. At this point it needed a name, so we branded it Handbell Jams.
I still have a backlog of improvement ideas, but lately I've been having fun arranging songs to fit into the 2-octave limit to create a collection of "jams". It's been a great project and I've really enjoyed programming for fun, instead of for work.