Musings & Meanderings

I don’t keep a record of them all, although I remember the dates most important to me.

Jeff’s post on 911 resonated most with me today.

For me 911 invokes, not only the threat to our society which it carried out, but also every brutal slaughter and execution lodged in my memory. I think of most of my family members dying under the Soviet regime, and this, just like 911, re-enforces to me the value of our freedom, and the extent to which I passionately believe in fighting to protect it.

Focusing on freedom today strikes me as a fitting tribute.

I’m reading more today on banned books, including sassymonkey’s third in a series on Banning Books In Schools on BlogHer.

If you want to join in reading about freedom today, here’s another place to start …the ALA Intellectual Freedom Issues page.

I followed Matt’s post titled Should poetry be open source?

…to a post in which Dave Bonta thoughtfully discusses the issue of copyright versus open source in terms of his own writing

…and from within the comments on Dave’s post, I was led to and enraptured by the Poem Dancing category on Sharon Brogan’s poetry blog.

If there had been a current poem dance taking place I would have joined in, and very much hope to come across one in future.

I do believe that copyright protections still have a place, and will continue to, given the structure of the society we inhabit. I also believe in a future order in which our understanding of rights and responsibilities would be redefined in many ways. Open source is symbolic of a free internet, and a collaborative culture, where value is contributed, received and shared through means other than money. This ‘gift’ economy has grown to represent an entire sub culture, one in which free exchange greatly enhances value for all. Meanwhile, though, participants still require income in dollars to pay the rent, and most projects of any size require financial investment to achieve fruition. The frictions between open sharing and collaboration, private interests, and individual needs are many and, as we know, not easily resolved. I have come to understand that the demonstration of what can be accomplished with free is an important key to unlocking the rhythms and formulas of new orders and understandings.

A year ago I was wandering around here wondering, “Where is the public trust?”. Now my intent is to contribute to the evolution of new definitions of it.

Since today is my birthday, though, my pleasure is to release the following song fragment, which I wrote in response to the development zeitgeist, into the collaborative space…

i want fast
cars
purring like panthers
a nuclear power that sings in my veins

i want pure
lightning
unleashed by my fingertips
all destinations forever attained

the song
speeds
with a million hearts beating
unique synchronicity linking all planes

in our fast
cars

I’ve read that code is poetry. My own comprehension of code has advanced to the point where I can recognize some of it as elegant or beautiful, but the full understanding of it as poetry, well, so far I can only make this association through analogy. Becoming a parent or creating a successful business can be similar to both writing and experiencing poetry. Both are acts of creation and also, or therefore, more than a simple sum of our experiences, actions and selves.

Successful collaborative creation as greater than the sum of the individuals’ contributions… a defining element of the richest cultures?

Thoughts?
Poetry?

Tickled pink…not for switching over to new Blogger last night, and tweaking the template all over the place, and having to replace my painstakingly built sidebar with endless widget tool entries (aargh)… but for the grooved right and bottom border on each post here. I wanted it to stay open visually but the text of the posts beside the text in the sidebar was too distracting.

Ok, so it’s only a few lines of css. So what?

Well, it may be just a few lines, but figuring out how to form them, where to put them and why, is a little milestone for me. It’s the first time that I fully understood the structure part of what I was doing in css rather than just tweaking or working around something.

If you’ve read this weblog, you know that I’m not a techie, even though my husband has started to say, “My wife is becoming a geek.” Maybe I am one at heart, but that doesn’t really count when it comes to knowledge, experience and occupation, does it?

When we first put computers into our offices in 1982-3, I watched my controller making as many versions of a spreadsheet as I asked for (based on different assumptions) as if it were magic, using Lotus 1-2-3. Mea culpa… his manual left with me. Now that was easy. Start at a dos prompt, create your formulas in command form, and presto! Dbase came next.

By the time my kids were teenagers, trying to convince me to IM them to come down for dinner (I insisted that calling up the stairs was easier), the growth was accelerating, but it had little to do with me. I had to be dragged into Windows in the late 90s kicking and protesting all the way.

I get that all these user interfaces do enable a lot of people, but considering the sheer mass of languages and programs today can make my head hurt. Years ago I bought a book called Learn Html Over The Weekend, and actually did, but it seems to me that making an html template is to web building now as speaking pidgin English would be to undertaking post graduate studies in linguistics. 10 years ago I could have built an elementary website. Now I’d have to spend months learning in order to build a state of the art weblog, and I only spend a couple of hours a day on blogging.

In his post today, Brad Feld looks for a developer with experience in the following:

Ruby/Ruby on Rails
Flex 2
XHTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX/JSON/XML
MySQL
Apache2/Mongrel

This simply reminds me of why this weblog isn’t on verabass.com yet. Aside from the fact that I was out of commission from January through July for health reasons, getting a full comprehension of the best way to build what I want there (more than just a blog) is a big chore. You can’t just wander around the web with a shopping cart adding components like wikis and things and then sort of glue them all together. It’s a hundred times easier to find/hire a group of experts in different areas for a big project than to make something medium sized that is personal rather than commercial.

Don’t get me started on visual design, either. It’s the primary reason that learning to understand the way css is structured is important to me. Never mind that we need database structure and other components far more for functionality. We can’t build something both beautiful and functional with just Photoshop and javascripts, either.

Anyway, I’m tickled pink over my simple border. Isn’t it amazing how easy any little thing is once you know how to do it? Now this place will be easier on my eyes until moving day comes.

I think that I also managed to remove no-follow for comments here, although there still doesn’t appear to be any way past Blogger’s underlying structure stopping trackbacks.

ps. my learning of anything comes as much from books as from online resources, but one of the more easily comprehensible sites I’ve found with basics for newbies is HTML Dog’s The Best Practice Guide To XHTML and CSS. Beyond that, my favorite is the fab A List Apart.

196_?….perhaps I haven’t changed much after all…

Do the major events in our lives really change us, or do they just make us more like ourselves?

That’s it.

(I decided to make my 100th post one sentence for everyone who actually reads my long posts.)

What do you have a ‘thing’ for?