I’m in the midst of a seemingly endless stream of feature requests for my software package right now at work. In essence, my product is one which takes data which is inscrutable and makes it scrutable. My artistic hope is that the data is pleasant to observe, and allows for quick notice of relevant details. In other words, rich, clean and appealing.

My queue of requests generally falls into two categories. The first is a concrete feature request, for adding a new data view or making a change in which the back-end works. The second are the interface requests, which range from “add a button here” to the dreaded “make this easier.”

The first are simple to do. The second I find to be both fiendishly challenging and often the most rewarding. In the majority of cases, they require an understanding about how the end user actually uses the software. Even something as simple as button placement can lead to the difference between frustration and (perhaps) illumination. While I tend to get a feeling for what works, I’m constantly learning how to improve my art.

Occasionally I think on how the world would be if everyone paid more attention to matters of interface. Clearly, there would be some dramatic improvements in all sorts of inanimate objects, but more interest lies in human interface. If people were more thoughtful as to who they were and how they were presenting to others, I wonder what changes would come to pass.

There’s been a lot of rings out in popular culture lately. At least, a remake of a horror film and an incredible set of movies based on an incredible book. For me, when I think of The Ring, I think of a very large set of operas by Wagner. What follows is a brief account of my finding of the ring.

I first discovered Der Ring Des Nibelungen when I was in high school, and was precocious. That was in my “long and difficult is more impressive phase” with regards to literature (no comments, Mr. Freud). I was often found toting about Das Kapital, the Roads to Freedom trilogy by Sartre, or something similarly dense and impressive.

When I was exposed to Wagner, it was a perfect match musically to my musical snobbery. Difficult and unapproachable to many — perfect! It was Der Ring that was the pinnacle of this. 4 operas over 14 hours.

My senior year of High School, PBS broadcast the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Der Ring in four consecutive nights. I was glued to it, watching on a 5 inch black and white TV I’d dragged into the back of the house. Like most of the things I read at the time, I don’t know how much I got out of it. I do recall cheering Brünnhilde on when she was singing about jumping on Siegfried’s funeral pyre.

Superficial as it was, that was my introduction to this work. When I got to the university it was enough to cause me to fall in with some other Wagnerites, and in my first year jumped through every academic hoop known to man and enrolled in the seminar “Wagner’s Ring.” I went through the opera carefully with scores. I learned the countless leitmotifs, and their interactions. I learned the names of the three Rhinemaidens and the nine Valkyries. Our final exam was to watch the Ring in four consecutive nights.

After this more intimate meeting, the Ring stayed with me in a very tangible way. Lately, I have had the desire to hear it again, carefully. Perhaps I am a new stage of my life where I need to see what light it can shed on my personal version of The Human Condition.

I stumbled across this page this afternoon. It’s a fascinating little time capsule of the internet’s history.

Gross Glück und Heil
lacht nun dem Rhein,
da Hagen, der Grimme,
so lustig mag sein!

- Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung

Baking was a mixed success. Operation: Rye has been postponed until next weekend, on account of the unexpected trickery of the fig & walnut bread. While the end result was delicious, the recipe wasn’t entirely clear about how much time was needed, nor how much equipment.

Spent a good portion of yesterday in the pursuit on how to learning how to better use Jitter. I’ve begun storyboarding the visual elements of Dramatis Personae , and now need to be able to make that happen in code. I’m pleased with the results so far. In the following week, I’m hoping to complete the rough version of DP’s musical score. Then comes the task of notating some of the more multi-media portions.

On a personal note, I have made an excellent friend this week.

Today is the third day of Winter’s assault, and so far it is the worst. A frostbite advisory was in effect this morning. It seems that the worse the weather gets, the slower the MBTA runs.

Despite the cold, the trip home was punctuated by a trip the shop for bread pans and ingredients in preparation for Saturday’s Operation: Rye.

The full spectrum light bulbs did the trick it seems, as I am far more sunshiny than I have rights to be, based on the continuing winter assault outside.

I’ve been daydreaming of a long hike in the woods by myself, with a loaf of bread and a bit of camembert. It’s a day for simple nourishment, reflection, and wide open spaces.

It’s bitter cold today. Winter has finally bared its teeth, and unleashed ice and wind upon the hapless residents of New England.

There is some small comfort in that the sun is shining. I am starting to feel that I must be suffering from a mild case of Seasonal Affective Disorder, as the sun makes me far happier than it generally has in the past, even in my years in the rainy Pacific Northwest. The days are so short right now it’s generally the case that I miss the sun altogether most days.

While cheering my frozen, sunless spirit with chirpy 80s music has been somewhat successful, I think that I will have to make a quest for a local purveyor of full spectrum light bulbs. I used them while in Oregon, and noticed a significant improvement in my temperament. A steady diet of Debbie Gibson is not helping much in that respect.

The Fall 2002 edition of the Journal of the American Musicological Society has arrived in my mailbox. It definitely looks like it’s Opera season, as all three of the articles are Opera related.

I am especially looking forward to “Terror and Transcendence in the Operatic Prison, 1790-1815.”

I have come to the realization that I do not appreciate wardrobes nearly as much as I should. Trompe l’oeil wardrobes in particular.

When I was very young, I used an Apple IIe in school. I took a shining to Apple BASIC and was enjoying myself so much that my parents thought it was a good idea to get one for home. I was the envy of my friends, as I had 2 floppy drives and a 16-color monitor at my command. That was a “kickin’ rig.”

I did a lot of programming for fun in junior high school and the first year or so of high school. I did low-resolution animations, which were fun, but not my true love. I was infatuated with text adventures. Not satisfied to code at home exclusively, my friend Scott and I obtained eternal study hall passes to the computer lab in the library.

At some point, I wrote an impossible-to-win game called Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan which was riddled with geographical inaccuracies as I had never been to Manhattan. Buildings from Chicago had migrated, as I recall. From what I recall, the game’s goal was to deliver a package of goodies to Grandma. Of course, the package was lost, and had to be retrieved in a very circuitous fashion, avoiding the unkillable Big, Bad Wolf. I seem to recall clandestine meetings in a baseball stadium at midnight. I had programmed in a subway system, shops, and dozens of random events.

I entered the game into a competition, and understandably lost. Scott won for his high-resolution animation of Tarzan being eaten by a crocodile. I’m not sure whether it was Tarzan or the crocodile who was migratory.

At some point, I stopped programming altogether for about ten years. To this day I can’t recall why. I don’t think it was a direct result of Little Red Riding Hood, but it’s hard to tell what I was thinking. I’d give a great deal to know what was happening mentally when I wrote that game. For that matter, I’m also curious as to why I armed my construction paper penguin in second grade with sunglasses, a bandolier, a bazooka and an assault rifle.

Today marks a minor milestone in my life. I have removed Slashdot from my bookmarks and my newsreader.

In many ways, I am here because of Slashdot. It was during my days as a young Linuxophile in Graduate School when I began reading. Back then, every article was interesting, as I was new to entire scene of modern computing. As I grew increasingly frustrated with certain aspects of my education, I read and read, until one day I read an article about Ars Digita University. A free education in computer science, if accepted! Thank you Slashdot!

(I applied and was accepted, and we moved across the country to rustic Boston. I got my education and a job, after which Ars Digita was bought out by Red Hat and the university, a truly good idea, dissolved. But this is not my story, this post is about Slashdot.)

Over the past few years, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the content. The comments, once interesting, became tedious. There is only so much pleasure I can derive from hearing endless tirades about stories that haven’t been read. Yes, Slashdot remained on my bookmarks. Was it a sense of obligation? I cannot say.

I don’t know if it’s Slashdot’s doing, or my own, but we have drifted apart, it and I. Today, in the first thing resembling a New Year’s Resolution, I tossed it. Sentimental it may be, but I will toss it into the pile of “Nostalgic Items of my Past.” Perhaps in a few years, I will return and read, and tear up.

When I awoke in the dark New England morning, my dreams were involved with my landlady spackling and painting our foyer, with an admonishment to not touch the walls during renovations.

This is odd for two reasons. One, it would take a terrible amount of neglect foyer-wise for my landlady to take such proactive action. While she is a lovely woman, and reacts quickly when there is a problem, she has yet to be proactive about upkeep (which I am just fine with). Two, we don’t have a foyer.

For the sake of argument, if we did have a foyer, I would love to have it painted. The impression from my dream is that it was bright and airy, and that would be a delight. I’m generally not one for dream interpretation, but were to put on my Jung suit and take a guess, I’d wager it was one of the following:

1) I secretly would like to have a foyer.

2) The dark of New England winter is getting to me.

3) The walls of my life (feel free to insert some touching music) could use a repainting.

4) Every time I touch a newly painted foyer, things go to hell and it all crumbles around me like everything else I’ve ever touched. Oh gods, I’m so lonely and miserable.

I’m partial to number one myself. I think a foyer, with a coat-rack and umbrella stand would be just peachy.

Mr. David Ozab is a great friend of mine. A fantastic musician, an excellent teacher, and a very zippy dresser in the hat department, Mr. Ozab and I met during my stint in Oregon. From an artistic standpoint, hanging around with him was fantastic, as I learned all sorts of things about electronic music, which is playing an unexpectedly large part in my creative work right now. From every other standpoint, it was fantastic to have someone who could very eloquently discuss things that were not music, a rare talent indeed in a graduate level music program.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been having some bandwidth problems at home. On evenings and weekends, it was getting to the point where we couldn’t load a web page without causing serious latency issues in online gaming. As we’re on a cable modem, this was needless to say frustrating.

I was most furious with my ISP for their service, and I do believe I called them a great number of unsavory things.

On my last quest to reset the ethernet port on my impromptu Linux router (our last router had died, and I had to glom the file-server and the router’s hardware together to get the network up and running again), I decided that perhaps I should look at some logs to see if my machine was the problem. Hoo boy, there was a problem. Having moved the file-server onto the internet, I’d forgot to resecure the samba mounts (which serve files to the rest of the home network) from access by the world at large.

The good news is that the access was read-only, and limited to a few music files. The bad news is someone found it, and shared my information. Looking again at the transfer logs, I saw that my transfer rate was through the roof. All in one moment, I’d found the reason why we were experiencing slowdowns on evening and weekends. Not because my ISP was using decrepit hardware and employing baboons to administer their routers, but because someone in Japan and his friends were downloading Oingo Boingo from my machine.

I have taken appropriate actions. My IP is changed, references deleted. I’m going to reinstall the system files later this week, just in case my assessment of the read-only access was wrong. I’m not quite so furious with myself for my oversight as I was last night (I know I called myself a number of unsavory things), but I am humbled. Yet again, I learn that it pays to keep your own things in order.