$disanpoter

location irritations

following up on the dorky data-based posts, i've spent a sizable chunk of the day researching options for a static resource that can be referenced dynamically to provide location information, because really, how many local, independently established copies of city-state-country data does the world need. it's a waste of effort and resources for every sales, product, mailing system to have it's own in-house set of tables for this information when they all must comply with rules and conventions established by national organizations. it's ridiculous and i resent the fact that i live in a world that hasn't come up with a better more widely adopted solution for this. oh...incidentally, this is a rant.

dreaming paras

i've been sitting downstairs at mcnally robinson today, ostensibly available for gift-wrapping (donations benefit housingworks), though little gift-wrapping has been requested. Garrison Keillor is upstairs singing something for a very happy crowd and the book sellers have been stopping by, chatting aimlessly, then going off on some book-sellery task through-out the evening. fortunately, they're chill enough to let me use the internet while i'm sitting here behind the counter, so i've been researching facebook applications and other information management topics for the dual purpose of fine-tuning the concept i have for a flashcard mashup application and finding some useful applications to extend the page we're putting together for the sub-basement project.

the flashcard application i have in mind would be different from most user made listing tools. it would simply provide a storing place for pairing of information; instead it would provide users with a place to store categorized transformations on public information. a user would create a list by pointing to a source url then specifying which fields/tags within the source information represented identifying information, detail information, and categorical information. These differentiations would then determine what information went on which side of the cards. cluster cards could be generated automatically from multiple identity records with the same category field values. categories would also be assimilated into a larger hierarchy that hopefully would facilitate merging of source data and sharing of lists. field values pointing to media files would automatically become identifier cards for such things as art history or music identification aids. finally, while users would always be free to point their list sets to a set of data they uploaded themselves, the hope would be that in forcing them to reference information not stored within the flashcard service, they would begin to seek out opportunities to leverage information maintained by subject authorities and the subject-matter authorities would respond by increasing the accessibility and utility of the data they manage.

il faudrait l'inventer

there's been more discussion regarding a permanent position for me at the place i've been temping at. it's exciting, but it also inevitably comes with reflections about the path my life is tacking versus the one expected of me, not just professionally but socially, romantically, etc. today, these reflections hit me in the form of an image (and a fairly cliched one at that): an empty road through barren land and a figure who has just stepped off it and stands looking toward the horizon the road leads to. of course, being delivered an unsolicited vision from your mind comes with it's own chain of amendments. the idea that the road can't be so easily regained, that in this representationi of divergent paths it should be something that is slightly out of reach once left - a path through an endless chasm of only air or at least a floating strip above the figures head. and this change in turn, recalls the fall. lucifer and choice, free will. the heal upturned, the moment where the ball of the foot remains in contact with the path departed but the body has passed the point of balance and must, has no choice but to continue.

none of which is to say i'm unhappy with this situation or feel i've made profound mistakes. it's just interesting how starkly my mind portrays it to me - how very real and ever-present is the sense that my life is developing counter to this other set of options rather than simply emerging from a course of its own.

prodigal JSON

work-wise, today kinda rocks. otherwise...perhaps not so much, but i'll get to that.

i've been trying to get a web-form working so that it updates its drop-down menus and fills in certain other kinds of data on the fly using the ever-popular AJAX techniques. all last week, I worked troubleshooting why a simple XML document requested under-the-hood was not being recognized as such. the cruz of the problem lay in the fact that while there were a magnitude of help pages walking through a single, virtually identical method of grabbing the XML content, there were next to none offering alternatives or troubleshooting steps should the  method not work as expected. it's a common failing of technical how-tos. finally this weekend, i made the decision to scrap the development i'd already done to deliver and digest content in XML and switch over to JSON.* this was not an insignificant decision as it meant essentially writing off at least 20 hours of work and potentially investing an additional 20+ hours to get back to the point i theoretically should have been at early last week.

much to my delight and relief, it took only 5 hours to redevelop the functionality and i can now progress confidently in mapping out the rest of the abstract functionalities i'll need to make a working system.

a side effect of all this, however, was mentioning to a friend of mine that i hate javascript (which is still true), to which he responded by asking what i was trying to do. i explained that i was trying to "implement an AJAX call using JSON objects to populate a select list." this may be gibberish to you, but he knew what i meant, and because of that, i was finally able to accept that my failure to describe to non-techies what it is i want to do with my life does not actually indicate a lack of substance underlying my interests.

on a more personal note, i've been composing more of the hadley story in my head since the weekend. it's a tricky thing. i still hesitate to express through it the kind of emotional soul-searching i've been doing? going-through? the past few years and especially this last and its silly since i've pretty much expressed most of them here. for instance, on the walk back from the bus, i was thinking about joel and how he has a serious girlfriend now (which i'm not actually upset about) and flipping that up into an imagining of past relationship for hadley and how she might think about its failing (before she gets over it), which became an interior monologue in 'hadley voice' about how we would like to have an explanation or some modus operandi for how another person works that we could appeal to when their interests don't match our own and how that just does happen. but really that's just me acknowledging that i still haven't figured out how to accept another person's lack of interest in lieu of actually figuring out how to do so. it's hard to write about some chic figuring out how to do something you yourself haven't figured out how to do. it just makes me feel kinda silly. raw and silly.

*JSON represent structured data in a way that more closely resembles how it looks in actual scripting languages, whereas XML represents it as a series of explicit containers and container-content items.

Programmer's Desktop

It was a bit nippy at 70 degrees (not so much for the temperature as for the impossible to locate (apparently/incidentally neither unlocatable nor unplaceable are real words) draft in my apartment this afternoon so I put on a duraflame log. It yielded much comfortable warmth before collapsing forward suddenly into a heap of flaming ash at the front edge of my hearth, causing wave upon wave of smoke to escape the draw of the chimney and permeate my livitchen / kichingroom with a visibly grey haze. Fortunately, I'd been diligent earlier about spritzing the Caush [?] whenever he tried to climb the screen so neither of the kittens were nearby. So that was a bit of an event.

Meanwhile, I've been returning to the thoughts i was working out at Random House regarding more flexible information architectures [this space left intentionally to represent the long winded extrapolation on exactly what needs such architectures would respond to]...gotta run...

no play

[this space intentionally left to preserve forever reference to the rant on ineffectual technology guides and lack of big-picture perspective]
I have much to get done today, not withstanding these bloody greeting cards i have to finish printing by the end of the day: I need to...

• get together a survey of popular web services to practice integrating in a clean and relevant way.
• start in on an AJAX based javascript library to have ready at will for potential freelance opportunities.
• write some more on Hadley, including some background action for the class Person bit, per feedback from my gracious readers.
• organize my job search leads
• think about what it is i want to do with my life
• write up briefs on the modular settings concept, iFrame for content iteration, and essential forms model (not to be confused with core objects). also, briefs on the user space device,  distributed content framework, and anything else that comes to mind.

XML

Robert, if you ever read this, I've thrown in the towel. I'm brushing up on my XML. I'm working on apps that actually make use of it. I'm tabling my dreams for implicit definitions and flexible, responsive architectures. I hate it, but i can use it. XML - extenuated multiplicity of lines.

ban does best but...

it's not my underarms that need freshening up; it's my familiarity with these...

Web Technologies I need to cozy up with:

• .Net
• SOAP
• XML
• AJAX
• DOM, yes the dom. (dom da dom dom DaaaaaaOM)

Platforms, Projects, Concepts I need to fool around with more often:

• the Wikis, not to be confused with the Wookies, young master.
• Movable Type
• Proto/ mash-ups
• there's another somewhere - oh write, that storytelling scripting language

Companies I need to get familiar with:

• Coghead
• outside.in
• ThinkMap
• hmmm...one that will hire me, perhaps.

I'm feeling a bit swamped
...and my battery's running out.

i'm going to pull a classic avoidance move here and not work on any of these. instead i'm going to return to the Hadley story and get her out of that post-party breakfast she's currently in the midst of.

gainfully unemployed

this is what i appear to be this week. i have income, but am not working. it's a lovely state full of sweet smells and flights of fancy, but it's not going to last, and it's going to get old even sooner. the phrase, however, is amusing in the fact that it actually exists as a real condition of existence.

anyway. i'm feeling a bit spastic today. why? partly because i was going to spend today working on my story and cleaning my apartment but am instead spending it working on a try-out project, which entertaining though it may be is not part of my original task list and has thus expanded my task list beyond my available time.

i've take a break from my project now for about a half hour. I've been playing backgammon with some stranger over the microsoft game zone network. i'm not convinced this is a good scenario for me to engage in. I find myself always assigning intentions and moods to my opponents. Some of this is warranted: a player, whoever they may be, who takes your piece at nearly every opportunity even when the risks fall mostly to them is an aggressive player; one who will not take a peice unless they can do so with absolute security is a defensive player. Where it starts getting unhealthy for me is when more interactive actions come into play. Resignations that are not accepted despite when the game is absolutely lost. In this last game, I decided I needed to get through the match quickly to get back to work (which I'm clearly doing...), so I did something I usually refrain from - i doubled the odds when I had a clear advantage. My opponent accepted. In the next round, I double the odds again, though the odds were matched, with the idea that if I won, the match would be completed. Completeness is important. It's a gesture of good sportmanship. After this, I did obtain a clear lead for a while, then my opponent pulled ahead with two consecutive rolls of double-6s. I sent the message "nice roll" to which I received no response. At this point we were both safely on our own side of the board. From that point on, the game was extremely close. before the last three rolls, we both had two pieces at 5 and two at 4. My opponent rolled 4,5 leaving 2 pieces to my 4. I rolled double-5s and won the match.

As I completed my move, fully intending to close with "Good Game," I saw that my opponent had already left me a message:
"You're welcome"
My "Good Game" went through
Opponent responded "It was luck"
Flabbergasted at this use of stock phrases to execute a spectacular display of poor sportsmanship, I hesitated only momentarily before responding
"No"
and leaving. 

friggin network

it's true - i have a history of pushing my computers too far. i'm just an uder-the-hood kind of girl. i like to see what happens if. so, that's not just a computers thing. i get myself in trouble: what happens if i don't put the cover on the blender? what happens if i jump (really carefully) onto that slime covered stone? i get myself dirty and bruised, and at times considerably in the whole in terms of dollars or time - all in the name of first-hand experience. it's not that i can envision what could happen, it's that i can. and i want to know if i'm right or not.

if however one is going to tinker with what was is able to tinker with on a network computer, one should be careful not to forget at home the added drives one has programed into the core user profile. to do so makes for a very long stall until the people with administrator privileges but not quite so much curiosity come to the rescue. and, of course, block your view from the password they type in and guarentee one's need for a rescue down the road as well...