I've been brainstorming with Ki (as in Master George) about the Civ IV bindings class that'd put Saturday Academny students in the driver's seat vis-a-vis a game engine that popular. He dug up the API, which is C-like in flavor, reflecting a lot of work already done, suitable for commercialization by way of open source testing. Those coming to the fore as prime movers of the open source version could then dive more deeply, with more capital support, into a more proprietary offering. There'd likely continue to be subversive cast offs or snap shots of the latest code. Anyway, that's one possible scenario. Perfect for our interns. I've been thinking of inviting Joyce Cresswell to our meeting. On another front, the acronym to track is XRL, the livingry (gear) associated with "extremely remote living" i.e. wilderness survival type camping, but with more aerospace input, more an alternative to cubicles than just tents i.e. you can have your computer and fat pipe Internet access. Watch for REI involvement. I think Ki's idea of what'd be a really fun and optional use of one's time on a bright sunny Saturday Morning in the prime of one's life (most of my students are very lustily youthful) is very much more likely to catch on that what I'm doing now: boring dry vector graphics of the type you should be getting when confined to school as a part of your more mandatory day. Saturday Academy should be for fun stuff, not like regular school. But then I exaggerate. Per the write-ups in my blogs and elsewhere (here for example) I think it's clear that my classes aren't quite that boring. Already I'm free to allude to and project the Civ IV API (thanks Tim) which helps boost their imaginations (and mine). We listen and watch Animusic, talk about ray tracing versus real time scenery and action computed on the fly, and use Python in a kind of "cave painting" mode to just start to get our feet wet in these subjects. POV-Ray is good for still renderings, VPython for on the fly. My classes do fill, sometimes. Kirby