Unexpected family emergency. No blogging for awhile. Pray for my family, keep them in your thoughts, whatever is your thing. Thanks.
I’d like to believe that all (both) of you who read this site thought that I wasn’t posting since Tuesday because of a romantic Valentine’s getaway.
Bad guess.
In fact, I had to hop on a plane Wednesday morning to Iowa of all places. Business purposes — presentation at the University of Iowa. Now to most people in the world, a trip to the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa (they name it three times in case you forget) might not seem too thrilling, but I was kind of jonesed to be going. I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop way back in ‘91 and hadn’t been back to Iowa City since then. Going back to a place you lived for a couple years after a decade’s absence is strange. Everything is familiar enough that you know your way around, but different enough that you feel like it’s a new place. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t stop thinking “Wow, Iowa City looks like Lincoln, Nebraska.” I spent a week in Lincoln last summer. Business again. In Lincoln, I never remember thinking, “Wow, this looks like Iowa City.” My reference points have changed.
The other thing is the amazing rush of memories triggered by place. And such specific memories. Swinging on a playground late at night with a girl I was trying to date. The time we had to haul a friend from Dave’s Foxhead Tavern to the hospital a block away. The cheeseburgers at George’s. Pizza at Joe’s. The bar where I had the first date with a woman whom I fell in love with but never had the guts to admit my feelings to. The dim light and smokey smell of the fourth floor of the English-Philosophy Building. Losing at Scrabble in the Workshop lounge. Riding my mountain bike in the snow. Thirty-five cent bearclaws. Sitting on the levy after the flood. Learning to play pool at the rec center. Ice cream at the Great Midwestern. The used London Fog raincoat I bought at Ragstock for $6 (which I still wear!). Eating microwaved chicken sandwiches at the QuikTrip on the way home from the bar, because it was the only place open. The black angel. The morning I went to my ex-girlfriend’s apartment (yes, the one I couldn’t admit I loved) to retrieve some belongings I had left, and the smell of the two eaten halves of cantalope on the two plates. The realization that she’d quickly moved on to someone else.
Lost dreams, lost passions, lost friends, lost loves. So much that I had forgotten. Forgetting sucks. It’s good to remember. Sometimes painful, but good.
Futurama cancelled?!?! Say it ain’t so!
Best line of this past weekend was from the Futurama episode. The greenish alien emperor of the planet that’s always invading earth (forget it’s name) looks at a candy valentine heart and says, “This concept you call ‘wuv’ confuses and infuriates us!” Been there, alien buddy. Been there.
Sign the petition to keep Futurama on the air.
*quote from Bender
A comment at Scripting News reminded me about this post at Jason Kottke’s site. Kottke says
“If you had to organize all the stuff that a person comes into contact with, how would you do it? Do you have any experience in doing this, say, within the context of The Brain, a Wiki, or categories for a personal weblog? How did you go about doing it? Got any advice?”
I posted a comment on his site yesterday, and had meant to echo it here:
Great thread! Thanks, Jason. This is a problem that I’ve been gnawing at for years. It began simply as a need to better manage the thousands of bookmarks that I’ve collected since ~1996. Unfortunately, I’ve been unsuccessful in finding what I need. And since I’m no coder, creating it myself isn’t an option, but at one point, I even began writing up the requirements for the software I was imagining. I’ll see if I can dig them up (be easier to find the document if I had the tool I was imagining!)
Basically, what it boils down to is I want the Yahoo engine but expanded to handle files as well. I’m continually surprised that the DMOZ engine isn’t available. I’m not interested in the data; I want the tool. The closest I’ve found is YIHAW, a Zope Yahoo-clone that I could never get functioning correctly.
As for Dave Winer’s suggestion (”Use an outliner.”), I think that might work to help begin to brainstorm categories for a taxonomy, but it’s probably not the tool to manage the taxonomy.
Of course, Six Degrees, which I wrote about this morning might make a taxonomy unnecessary. We hope.
In any event, I got some great links to interesting products out of the comments on Kottke’s post. Worth a look.
It’s funny to watch the snarkiness between Dave Winer of scripting news and Cameron Barret of Camworld. It’s pretty clear that Cam isn’t fond of Dave, and can get pretty ad hominem about the whole thing. But I also find it telling that instead of actually responding to (potentially valid) criticisms, Dave just posts snarky comments about Cam’s website (most of which are just wrong — the default Radio theme might have “pretty” graphics, but it’s certainly not as functional or usable as Camworld, permalinks notwithstanding.)
Lawrence Lessig, who I’ve written about before is starting a service, called Creative Commons, which “will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work.” Interesting concept. I like the grassroots approach to remedying the mess that we call copyright law, because all the legislation related to copyright is basically written by corporations who don’t have the artists rights and benefits in mind.
Yesterday I came across these comments from Joel on Software about a new product called Six Degrees. According to the marketing blurb, Six Degrees is “is timefreeing technology that helps you work more efficiently and complete projects faster. Six Degrees continually makes connections between the messages you send, the files you create, and the people you work with.Once these connections are visible, you can use them to navigate through your projects in a simple and powerful new way – regardless of where on your system these files and messages are stored.” Hmmm. Sounded familiar, so I started digging through the archives of Future Culture, an email list I used to participate in regularly, and came across this nugget of mine from August 1997:
Right now, if I want to draw relationships between units of information (i.e. files) I have to do it myself by organizing them into directories or by setting up links between web pages or whatever. What I want is for *the computer* to begin making those relationships, especially the simple ones. Of course, the user should retain a good deal of control over whether those relationships are made and how they are made….It should recognize content and be able to draw relationships between content on its own (according to parameters I, the user, find valuable). It should be able to automatically organize the content in a useful fashion.
I hope Six Degrees pans out to be a cool tool. Of course, if I could ever get these ideas into a business plan I’d be a gigazabillionaire.
I also independently came up with the idea for Magnetic Poetry about two years before it hit the street. I just never did anything with it besides tell my then-girlfriend, “Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if….” She thought it was dumb idea. Well, I guess somebody else showed her, huh?!
I’m glad Jonathon Delacour (with the help of Mark Pilgrim) got CSS working on his Radio weblog, but I still agree with Camworld. It’s not that Userland templates prevent users from coming up with a good design, but rather that Userland users don’t. For whatever reason, I think there’s definitely a greater sameness among Radio/Manila blogs than among Blogger blogs. Maybe part of that is simple laziness; give users a usable-but-not-necessarily-stellar template, and they’ll stick with that mediocre solution. I think a bigger part of it is that default calendar table in Userland products that just “brands” every Userland blog.
I’m impressed that Jonathon got CSS working in Radio. It reminds me that, at some point, I have to do something about the design of this site — which is a horrible amalgam of tables and some CSS. Ugh.
Addendum, ten minutes later: Steve Pilgrim, a total web development newbie, bursts the bubble of Radio usability for the true mainstream consumer (e.g. the ones whose only web development experience is via Microsoft FrontPage). At least Dave Winer acknowledges it. In a way, this is akin to my earlier comments. Even though I can throw acronyms around with the best of ‘em, I’m still really only looking for a tool that lets me post to a blog from anywhere. Radio might be risking getting lost in it’s own hype around the scripting/web services side of the tool.
: My referral logs show that someone found their way to my site by searching Google for “Greg Ritter.” I wonder if they were looking for me, or for Greg Ritter the cattle farmer or Greg Ritter the race car driver or Greg Ritter the java programmer or Greg Ritter the aerospace engineer or some other Greg Ritter.
I’ve only met one other Greg Ritter in my life. He worked at Virginia Tech when I was an undergraduate there. That Other Greg Ritter was a nice guy. I know because my great-grandmother would send me checks for my birthday, holidays, etc. and address them only to “Greg Ritter, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.” They always made their way to That Other Greg Ritter before they got to me. He would call me to let me know he’d gotten another check from my Granny. That was pretty damn honest of him, because he could have just cashed the checks. They were made out to Greg Ritter, after all. :-)
CamWorld also references an article on how Deaf and hard of hearing people in the UK are adopting SMS text messaging. I worked at Gallaudet University (the university for the Deaf and hard of hearing) from ‘96 to ‘99. During that time, Skytel pagers became very popular in the Deaf community because not only did they allow users to send text pages back and forth between Skytel subscribers, but send and receive email as well. Much better than SMS! And the Deaf community (at Gallaudet at least) was hooked into this wireless technology way before cell phones were standard in the hearing community.