A tune to end May, just completed; Et Tu. Creepy, crawly, and insidious.

I saw danuv off to the airport yesterday afternoon. Through pure serendipity, the Somerville Memorial Day parade route paralleled our walk to the subway, and was being run as we walked. So we caught quite a bit of the parade — Soldiers, marching bands, pipe bands and the puzzling Shriner mini-cars.

I’ve set aside today to recover my energy. I adore having company, but it is draining.

On Saturday night we watched a documentary she’d brought with her, Sing Faster, which covers the goings-on of the vast backstage crew required to put on a recent San Francisco Opera production of Wagner’s Ring. As I’m a big fan of Ring lore, I found it to be incredibly entertaining, from the stagehands playing poker between set changes to the stage managers barking orders to each other via walkie-talkie (”Valhalla should be smoking.” *crrrrrrzk* “Valhalla is smoking.”).

The most excellent Dr. David Ozab has his new album, Tempo Ficta, available on the iTunes Music Store. This is very cool; conventional distribution for New Music is notoriously tricky. If the electronic model makes it easier for these new works to be heard, it will be a huge step forward. The technology is already here; now it’s a matter of culture.

David’s music is abstract and highly textural, constantly evolving and intertwining. With his acute sense of timing and balance, he crafts each piece into a journey in its own right. This is easy music to do badly, and very hard to get right; David gets it right.

As a rule I studiously avoid McIntyre and Moore Booksellers. Is a dangerous place; I cannot go in without buying something new and exciting. It rarely has what I want, but always has what I didn’t know I needed. Yet after a satisfying dinner last night, we took a stroll and ended up standing in front of the bookshop. We went in, and I came out with (only) two books.

The first, Greek Footwear and the Dating of Sculpture by Katherine Dohan Morrow, was too curious to pass by on. Going through every extant piece of Greek art by period, it reads like an Audobon field guide to sandals.

The other is an out-of-print book, History and the Homeric Iliad , by Denys Page. As one section on the layout of the walls of Troy is based upon the dubious research of Heinrich Schliemann, I’m sceptical as to the accuracy of what’s inside, but the other portions of the book are entirely new to me and should prove to be enjoyable.

My stack of books waiting to be read is growing ever larger.

We’ve got a house guest staying with us this weekend, a good friend. Despite a little confusion involving the difference between AM and PM and arrival times, she arrived safely.

Today is the day for the standard battery of “historical Boston” activities, which will be done in the rain with a rather large umbrella. I enjoy having people visit, if only in that it gives me an excuse to wander around the old part of the city. Having recently finished The Hub, an excellent history of the development of the Boston from colonial times, I’m eager to see what new things I see.

The orb experiment is going well. It seems to change color every time I turn around, and that makes me happy.

I didn’t see The Hulk, so I don’t instantly associate Eric Bana with an angry green thing, nor as the dense “Poiter” of Australia’s Full Frontal, but seeing Paris doing so well at his archery practice did bring back some flashbacks. I wonder if Orlando Bloom is canny enough to avoid Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan syndrome.

Also interesting was the take of the Classical Studies crew.

I for one am looking forward to Troy II: Troy Harder, in which Agamemnon, king of men, pursues the son of Hector to the ends of the earth. Astyanax, now grown up, befriends a wise-cracking Persian sidekick and together they battle armies of Achaeans while coming to terms with their cultural differences, with destructive and humorous results. Score by James Horner.

Comments are back in, to a degree. It’s a clean and simple loop, but there’s a performance bottleneck, mainly me. The comment is formatted just so, logged, and mailed to me. I take the mail and drop in into the relevant comment, fill in a few attributes, and that’s it. When the site next synchronizes, the comment will appear. A “Slow Comment Approach,” if you will, undoubtedly with a host of drawbacks.

The nice thing is that everything stays inside the Tinderbox document, and it doesn’t require any sort of database mojo. Due to the small volume of comments I receive (if I get 4 comments in a day, it’s a busy one), it should work well. If comments start flowing in then I’ll re-evaluate my solution.

There’s been a good bit of discussion on the value of comments in a weblog. Are they worthwhile? In general the answer is “it depends,” and in my personal case I think they are. It’s not something that many people use, but it adds a bit of spice to the mix.

Now that things are almost back to the way they were before, functionally, I can see about doing some new stuff.

Somewhere in a box under a box in a storage unit in Oregon there’s a book that I read a decade ago. In it there’s a passage about how the poet shaves; what he does first, what he saves to last. Perhaps because of this, I find myself thinking about how I go about doing simple things.

In this house, the dishwasher has two arms and two legs. When I wash, certain types of dishes get more precedence than others. It goes:

• coffee mugs
• plates
• glasses
• pots and pans
• kitchen utensils
• silverware

I always, always wait until the very last to wash silverware. It’s not the “save the best piece candy for last” sort of postponement either.

I’m curious as to what that means, and how other people set up their subconscious washing queue.

Always a few hiccups, even when one migrates a vast amount of data from one system which he knows rather well to another which he’s still learning the nuances of.

I posted this warning just in case something weird happened and these feeds were no longer, well, feeding, though in retrospect is sounds as if I were planning to stuff vicious cyber-eels down the feed. As it happens, a completely different RSS snafu took place, during which the feed was both not updating and pointing to an out-of-date test feed which pointed not to http://tinctoris.com, but to http://localhost. For those who are experiencing newsreader woe, I am very sorry.

What?

I’ve migrated this site from MovableType to Tinderbox overnight.

The motive force, of course, was the recent Tinderbox Weekend. Firstly, it proved that the tool could do what do I wanted it to, and secondly it gave me enough of a nudge to my skills to have a moment of Tinderbox satori.

Right now there are a few things that are a different; some of these will reappear, and some probably won’t. The major one affecting you, reader, is the lack of comments. I’ve got a scheme to do this, but it’ll take a bit of time to implement. In the meantime, feel free to mail me with any comments you have. I promise I’ll fold them back into the document.

A site with Tinderbox is based on an entirely different concept than a MovableType site. There’s no easy way to zap off a note on the way to a meeting; the site must essentially be compiled out to static pages and synchronized with what’s on the server. The bottom line is that the site, technically, is slower. The comments system will also be slower; it will take time (in hours) for them to show up on the page. But slower is not entirely a bad thing.

Why?

Document. This was the key for me, and it required a paradigm shift. I’d been thinking of this as a way to chronologically record interesting thoughts and events in my life. It is that, certainly, but it is more. It’s a document, and in some way it’s the largest and most encompassing piece that I’ve produced in the past years.

So what? What does Tinderbox give me that MovableType doesn’t? Mostly it gives me possibilities. The structure is fluid, and ultimately is what I create. It’s creatively the difference between a piece of paper and an Etch-A-Sketch. The paper is harder to use, but holds more possibilities for expression.

As I go through this process, I find that certain ideas keep cropping up. I find myself starting to see my own behavior patterns, particular turns of phrase I default to. This is a painting done a stroke at a time; I don’t know where it’s going to end up, and I’m more interested than anyone else to see.

How?

In the spirit of sharing, I should provide some sort of documentation. This is coming, when a swatch of time opens up. The process was time consuming and non-trivial. I transfered almost 600 notes, and have preserved all the comments as well (they’re hiding while I clean them up). I re-implemented my template system. I wrote scripts to create redirects from the old MT permalinks to the new ones, to ensure that someone desperate for banjo rave won’t be thwarted. I did a lot of cut and paste. I did this with the indispensable help of Mark Bernstein’s sample templates, which got me out of more than a few jams.

Where To?

I don’t entirely understand how it came to this, but at this point I’m using Tinderbox for my personal, professional, and creative organization. To say that the tool is fascinating goes without saying. But interesting tools that are not useful in creating content and output are nothing more than curiosities. It’s obvious I’ve found an excellent tool; let us see where it takes us.

What a great weekend, at once exhausting and invigorating. Being in the same place, working alongside bright people from a variety disciplines is the greatest of treats. I took it for granted whilst at ADU, and getting a taste of it again was more than welcome. Every single person there was fantastic, and I regret not having the opportunity to talk more with everyone.

From an informal survey, it seemed that the basic “what do you do with this beast” exchange was the favorite. To my surprise, a few people even expressed interest in my Tinderbox for small-project software development which I consider to be the most mundane thing ever devised by the hand of man. Besides the obvious Tinderbox discussion, all sorts of other Mac tools and utilities were exchanged; the recommendation of someone who actually uses something productively is worth its weight in gold.

Overall, an excellent experience. The bonus use of “reify” in a sentence was merely the icing on the cake.

If you’re not getting your feed from http://tinctoris.com/news.rss, then you will be in for a nasty surprise tomorrow. Please act accordingly

I have a to say about the exciting goings on of the weekend, but I’m exhausted and as such it’ll have to wait a day or two.

From the New York Times.