It’s a dangerous thing to go into Trader Joe’s without a shopping list. I did better than usual today, but still ended up with some rather bizarre things in the cart.

It’s musical happyland today as I received two new Kiln discs, Ampday and Sunbox. Their sound seems to be just what I’m craving these days. It is reminiscent in many ways of the music of my ADU classmate Robb Monn and his crew. He needs to write more; well, I need to write more too.

But I’ve not been idle. I, despite my terrible cold, spent a sizable amount of time in the studio yesterday working on Jitter patches for a new piece with Orlando, which is going to be a great deal of fun. My two favorites so far are Slicer and Melter, both of which employ various kinds of visual feedback, where a frame is manipulated and then back into itself. This is quite a bit different than my previous patches, which dealt more with altering a video stream in real time.

The trip to New York yesterday was a good one, if not long. We were up at 4:30 and stumbled home around midnight. The Gates was a fabulous installation, an experience that can’t really be contained in a few paragraphs. In some ways that was the point of it for me; it was impossible to get a hold on, yet at the same time asking me to stop and appreciate the beauty and preciousness of the moment in front of me. Longing, peace, belonging, change, and changelessness all at once.

Through happy fate both Varia and I ended up getting a small square of fabric from The Gates as a keepsake (excluding 1,000,000 small squares, the rest is going to be recycled). While it is as insufficient as the photographs I took to capture the experience, it is a satisfying memorabilis.

While in line for the MoMa, a woman with a friend and her child, looking at the line (which turned out to be swiftly moving) exclaimed ‘Let’s go. There’s nothing in there worth waiting in line for.” I cringed. Fortunately the huge number of people who disagreed heartened me greatly. Once inside, the MoMa was, as expected, overwhelming. Far too much to take in at once, especially when heavily medicated.

After being crushed by a room full of Kandinsky and stumbling onto the Starry Night (I could have sworn it was at the Louvre!) we retreated to the nearest bar and grill, which happened to be called Heartland Brewery. This was, I kid you not, a Midwestern-themed bar and grill, complete with a “field of greens” salad. Much mirth ensued — Heartland Nachos, did you know they existed? — and we were fortified enough for the four hour bus trip home.

Central Park, New York City.

This is the time to eulogize $20 Car, who is forelornly waiting on the street for the junker to come and take it on its final journey to the scrapyard. Its muffler fell off dramatically during the last blizzard, and coupled with a few major repairs required… well, it wasn’t practical to keep it around. My thanks to Bryon for the opportunity to have wheels for the past few months.

For the time being we’re going to try using this new-fangled Zipcar service, which allows car rentals by the hour. It seems convenient and designed the kind of driving we do — very little.

Tomorrow V and I are taking the bus down to The City to see Christo’s The Gates and visit the MoMa. V went on her own last weekend and was so taken with it she’s dragging me along again. I go happily.

We splurged on all four seasons of Jeeves and Wooster, featuring the incomparable Fry & Laurie, and have been thoroughly enjoying it. Varia understands the mores of the time better than I; I am constantly thrown off-guard by the class relations. Jeeves is smarter, pleasanter, and more refined than his master Wooster, who is a “useless man” as one of his tyrannical aunts accurately points out. Wooster’s ability to inadvertently offer marriage proposals to females is uncanny, admittedly.

Varia explains that this is exactly the point; everyone but the upper class is striving to be proper and respectable, while the upper classes themselves have already arrived and as such can behave however they like. Jeeves, for all his class and style, will never be recognized by society as a better man than Wooster, who is de facto better.

Jeeves seems to enjoy himself, however; he toys with his gormless master while working entirely within the rigid constraints of class. He manages to let Wooster inveigle himself into trouble before pulling him out again (often at Wooster’s expense among his peers). Wooster, of course, doesn’t notice that this is going on, which leaves Jeeves’ machinations almost entirely for Jeeves’ own amusement. There’s a world of self-satisfied amusement behind Jeeves eyes and his ‘Indeed, sirs.”

Wooster almost noticed, once.

Our hero of the week is Wooster’s friend Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle, the mousy newt lover. His demonstration of the mating ritual of the newt (”it’s better than the Fox-Trot!”) is, in fact, better than the Fox Trot. Life would be easier if we were all newts, as Fink-Nottle so eloquently expounded.

I shaved, and am in that strange period where I don’t recognize myself in the mirror. It’s the closest I’ll probably ever get to shape shifting, unless biotechnology gets a lot better and I’m feeling adventurous when it does.

Last year I began in earnest my attempt to get organized. It’s not been perfect — the late Christmas gift thank you notes are being held in a holding pattern by an irrational but powerful sense of recursive guilt over their lateness — but by and large it’s been a success. My files are organized, and because of this, I know where just about every piece of paper documentation in my home is. If I’ve got something on my mind, I can jot it down and it will eventually get make its way back to me at a time when I can deal with it appropriately. I know this, and I believe that I sleep better at night because of it.

The last lot of upstairs neighbors mysteriously disappeared about a month ago, and over the past few days the screaming of giddy children has been replaced with the sound of power tools as workmen repair and prepare the apartment for the next group of tenants. I’m a bit envious as, other than the shower window and bathtub drain, virtually no work has been done on our place recently. Maybe if we move out and then in again we’ll get some home improvement love.

My guilty pleasure over the past few weeks has been the Introducing… series of books, which discuss philosophy and other lofty goals in something resembling a comic book format. Usually one ends up with a cartoon Lacan producing a speech bubble containing something like “The child who acquires the concept of ‘cat’ does so because ‘cat’ appears as one pre-existing element in the whole edifice of ‘langue’ which itself precedes the birth of individual humans.” These are not funny books.

This week’s romp was into the fields and streams of semiotics, in whose waters it turns out I’ve been unwittingly dipping my toes for some time now. How we understand and relate to things and ideas is something that we liberal arty folk dealt with on a regular basis, and it was a good thing to fasten a bit more formalism around that, naming things and associating theories to schools and people. A regular classification fiesta, really. At the end of the book I was left with just enough information to make a complete fool of myself, a reading list which would eventually aid in something approaching concept mastery, and the cruel realization that there aren’t enough hours in the day.

There are a few more Introducing… books on the shelf, so soon I’ll have a similar level of ineptitude with Romanticism and Linguistics.

I’ve been enjoying a well-deserved computational holiday. Back tomorrow.

In Oregon I was a member of the Balinese gamelan, which is a group of metallophones, drums, gongs, and so forth. We met in the basement, and produced an insane amount of noise — the gamelan in an outdoor sort of instrument.

Upstairs from us was a large dance floor; at the same time as our rehearsals there were classes going on. We could hear the loud thud-thud-thud of synchronized feet as we played our melodies in a completely different rhythm.

Here’s a bit of Tinderbox show and tell. Like I’ve said, it’s a deep tool. The word “deep” was bandied around a lot at the Tinderbox Weekend, with good reason. Here’s one of the ways I use it.

One of the first serious tasks I started using Tinderbox for was a project organizer to keep track of what was going on for work. I’d been using a rather monstrous web-based bug-tracker application at my old job, which was good for some things but bad in a lot of ways: it took a very long time to enter the information, and while a few dozen fields were required for input, the granularity of the fields was often not relevant to the problem. Most people either grudgingly used the system or fixed things on the sly.

I swore that I’d not do that in the future. When I got into my new situation, I found myself responsible for a lot of things; not only for coding as tasks came up, but for knowing what’s going on in the entire system. There’s no one else to pass the buck to, so I’ve got to be on the ball. I looked into some other pre-made solutions, and considered writing my own tool with a database backend. I ended up using Tinderbox because it seemed lightweight, adaptable and flexible.

After this weekend I spent some time refining my project organizer. The first thing I did was use the Rules (new in 2.4) to show me exactly how many incidents were waiting for attention. There’s always more to do than I’ve got time, but knowing exactly where everything stands is a good thing.

The second thing was that I decided to see what Map View could do for me. Project Organizer, the way I’ve set it up, is big gnarly outliner. For example, I’ve got my projects set up like so:

Inside each project are a bunch of bugs, features, and so forth. This is informative in its own way, to be sure! But a little time with the Map View on the same data and I was able to get a lot more perspective on what was up.

This probably doesn’t make any sense to anyone but me, but it conveys a vast amount more than the outliner ever can. And it’s not either/or. It’s both; I get my outline cake and can eat it too.

The third thing I did was take better advantage of colors. When I put something into the system, I assign it a priority, which defaults to 5. If the priority is less than 4, it’s a low priority item, a “might have.” I created a few agents to lighten the color of the “might haves,” so that while a bug is red, a low priority bug is light red.

These colors are active both in Outline and Map View now — thank you Tinderbox 2.4 — which ends up giving me a lot of information at a glance. The mix of objective (red is an unambiguous bug) and subjective (placement of projects in the map) is a good one, and it gives me a great overview of what’s going on. It’s not a project-management-for-everybody solution, yet it fits what I’m doing right now like a glove.

I got a lot done today. Ruthless, efficient, picking up slack.

The idea of a festival day celebrating romantic love is a good one, but perhaps the execution of this one leaves something to be desired — I’ve made my feelings about Valentine’s Day known before. Of course now that I’m working for a chocolate company, I’m hoping that lots of folks were of a different mind and bought chocolate for their sweeties. Perhaps not too upright of me, but it’s my conceit that I can have a preferred way of operation and not expect everyone else to do the same.

If I were King, we’d ditch this whole exercise in roses and showy dinners. We’d go back and learn how to do romantic love right, Courtly Love style. Note carefully point 20: “A man in love is always apprehensive.”

V and I are cooking a quality dinner and will then sit down to watch Stephen Fry’s Oscar Wilde in Wilde.

Hearts courtesy of the ACME Heart Maker.

And it’s over. I had a delightful time. Day two was shorter and thus a bit lighter on the presentations, but still immensely informative. Doug Miller’s use of Rules (new in Tinderbox 2.4) is going to make my life that much better. Still, the highlight for me was what happened in the cracks between presentations; chats during breaks and and meals with fellow Tinderboxers. A++++ would Weekend again, and all that jazz.