In the preliminary floor plan of my dream house, I borrowed a few ideas from game level designers as to how to design doors. Instead of conveniently placing locks for doors in or by the doors themselves, I opted for a complex series of levers and switches that must be activated in a particular order before the door will open.

I’m starting to have second thoughts.

1) The correct DNS information has finally propogated, so the url tinctoris.com is now pointing here, which is convenient.

2) The layout is in a relatively stable state, and should remain so for a few days at least. I am discovering fascinating things about the differences in how Mozilla and IE treat CSS.

Let’s start with an appeal to authority, from one of the few English language sites on our protagonist.

The Latin musical treatises of the fifteenth-century theorist, composer and lawyer Johannes Tinctoris (c.1435-1511) are widely acknowledged to be among the principal sources of information regarding notation and compositional practice — especially contrapuntal, modal and mensural theory — surviving from the late medieval and early Renaissance period, as well as a central focus for important recent research on musical aesthetics, reception and education at this crucial point in western European culture.

So, Tinctoris. His work is essental to much of modern thought, yet he is not remarkably well known nearly 500 years after his death.

I discovered Tinctoris as an undergraduate student taking the survey of music history. For some reason (which I am not to this day sure of), he intrigued me, and I read more about him and the world he lived in. He was in many ways the gatekeeper to many of the things I hold dear today. As I began to use the internet in earnest, I took his name as my handle.

So we arrive at tinctoris. It is telling of hero’s anonymity that tinctoris.com, tinctoris.org, and tinctoris.net were all available at the time of this writing.