1. Today is first about people …
… getting off the 3 I ran into Regina, whom I hadn’t seen since the end of last semester (she and her husband managed to make it to Spain for their delayed honeymoon), and I recommended House of Leaves to her — she recommended an author to me, but I don’t recall the name (or the name of the books … only that they’re a type of alternate-history fantasy, in which, for example, WWII didn’t occur, but the Crimean War went on and on …)
… Angela came into the department today; I also saw Mike and Ben (I had already seen Adam), and a number of folks were hard at work, so to speak, in 850.
… upon picking up my coffee at Fair Trade I semi-encountered Kjerstin, deep in conversation with Milda. More later.
… while on a retreat in Yosemite Andrew chatted extensively about game design with Robin, the girlfriend of one of his friends. He was of the opinion that I would have enjoyed the conversation — I haven’t played a good game in ages. That’s a shame.
… I got caught up on a few emails. When I get behind on emails, when I owe someone an email, out of guilt I avoid the obligation, making my completion of the task at hand even later and later. Emails should be replied to immediately. I owed a response to Tiffany and to some Betsy in the Twin Cities who thought she recognized me from WisCon, which I’ve never attended, despite my enjoyment of Sci-Fi.
2. Aside #1
Last night I finished eight hours of Bruce Springsteen. I didn’t listen to Springsteen as a kid — in elementary school I heard of “Born in the USA” and had heard it once or twice. It was this thing on the periphery of my experience. I knew he took part in the “USA for Africa” (“We are the World …”) project; I didn’t know of his music from before that iconic song.
Eight hours of Springsteen — a lot of good stuff. Something about “The River” captivates me. I am almost out of the Bs in my quest to listen to all my mp3 and ogg files in alphabetical order by artist. Tonight: BT (I have the 2-CD “Rare and Remixed” collection) — techno/dance/eurotrash stuff? Then one CD of Bush, and then I’m on to Cake …
3. Tech
In the realm of tech, this .NET-specific article on CMS design is applicable to non-.NET projects as well. One annoying thing, though, when searching for CMS (Content Management System) and DMS (Document Management System) projects is the dilution of the term — everybody calls their pet blog project/code a CMS (or even DMS) these days, when in fact it’s not just that blog software tends to possess a subset of CMS functionality, it’s also that a blog typically includes functionality that is not necessarily part of most CMSes — the tagging and RSS and trackback and other such features. Hardly a “blog” engine out there would qualify as a true CMS.
No, I’m interested in content, not diary, management systems, and even more so, document management systems, systems for managing forms, poems, articles, essays, diaries, recipes, letters, emails, short stories, novels, genealogical records, address books and so on.
Such an application can be built using a framework, such as Ruby on Rails (Ruby) or TurboGears (Python). I’ve mentioned these before. Yesterday I saw Streamlined, another sort of framework. See, most of the framework software is for mapping your software classes to your data model (your SQL tables and relations), which, while not very low level, is nevertheless relatively low level (think of the web interface, pointing and clicking, filling in content forms, as high level, and the business logic that runs this as middle level, then yes, the backend database is relatively low level and far from the experience of the user, and, to an extent, from that of the website developer). Then the developer/programmer, has to create the business logic and interface (how one interacts with the website) by hand; what Streamlined tries to do is provide an easy-to-use abstraction layer for that task (since otherwise you have to reinvent the wheel every time you add a new “type” of information), and the video they have on their site to demonstrate it is convincing and tempting.
Back to CMS stuff and blog software — out there the idea of content is basically limited to a simple document that has a title, an introduction, a body, and an author. Looking through the documentation and links for Drupal I noticed an interest in what they called taxonomy, which at first seemed like different types (classifications / categories) of content, but they mean it at a meta-level. Is this an article about food or cooking? Or about skiing, or computers, or comics, or racing, or film … is it about a set of flat categories (color pictures, black and white pictures) or about a tree hierarchy (US -> Washington -> Spokane, US – Washington -> Seattle, US -> California -> Los Angeles, UK -> England -> London, UK -> England -> London -> Parliament …), and so on. But the document model (title, intro, body, author) stays the same.
4. Aside #2
The link is to “The Best of XRT,” where a friend of mine in Boston works. “Pretty Space Pictures” is the brief description.
5. A return to people …
I ended up with a table near Milda and Kjertsin, and when the two were done talking, Kjerstin joined me and we talked for a while, first about Berlin (“Altes Europa” was mentioned recently in the NY Times … my neighborhood cafe-restaurant-bar in Mitte, you see, named ‘Old Europe’ in the wake of Rumsfeld’s comments a few years back), and then about the new Hitler movie (“Mein Führer”), in which I am an extra, so people refer to it as “my movie” from time to time. The question, the one raised by the critics, is that of the appropriateness of portraying Hitler as anything but a monster on film. The same debate raged about “Downfall” (“Der Untergang”) a few years back. A related (but seeingly [and only seemingly] reversed) debate goes on now about the portrayal of Muslims as terrorists in the TV series “24.” We shifted to a discussion (related, you see) of sympathy and empathy … curious terms, you see, because in English we have both, and the sym + pathos, the “feeling with,” of the term has been taken over, to a great extent, by empathy, and sympathy has come to mean “I feel for you,” or even structurally more interestingly “I sympathize with you” (“I ‘feel with’ with you”) — basically a matter of identification, a connotation that is not always there in the Greek. Someone who sympathizes is on your side (thus we refer to “sympathizers” in politics and war), but someone who empathizes understands because he/she can feel, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily on your side. This led me to a brief — well, brief for me — discussion of Stephen Donaldson’s “Thomas Covenant” books … which leads me back here, to a recent diary, or, as I like to call them, MySpaciary.
Kjerstin called William, who joined us. I showed him some Berlin pictures from Kjerstin’s visit, and then these cool garlic still-lifes from July. Then we packed things up and headed down State Street for dinneer.
Hüsnüs it was. I just like using umlauts there. I mentioned to them that I probably hadn’t been there since a meal with Regina, Marcel, and Ivana nearly three years ago — it used to be such a department staple, really. I had had my Fish Fry for lunch at the Union, but enough time had gone by that I was ready for dinner, and the börek was tasty. And the Turkish pilsner? (was it Efe?) Good stuff. I had the dark, William the light. Kjerstin the pinot grigio, and we chatted and talked and remembered and exchanged, on film and cities, on people and childhoods, and traditions and follies, on Heidegger and the 68ers in Paris.
And when finally it was time we paid our tab and walked into the wind.
