Molasses

Our Internet service has been slower than molasses in January for the past few days. First I tested the individual components (cable modem, wireless base station), but they didn’t seem to be having problems, and the Internet as a whole, aside from some isolated problems, seemed to be OK too.

Then I turned off my wireless access and plugged directly into the router. Bing. Full connectivity. This is the second time the wireless card in this laptop has gone funky on me. I really don’t want to replace it right now, but I might not have a choice.

To drive the cold winter away

There’s something about cold winter days that makes me yearn for a good, strong, flavorful beer. (Of course, I feel that way on cool spring and autumn days, too, but work with me on this for a second.) The fine folks at BeerSummit.com are catering to that with a beery Winter Jubilee at which I will be tasting from a range of beers from over 30 brewers, including some famous and less famous Belgian, English and American producers. The producers wisely recommend not driving to the event, as none of the beers served will be less than 7% ABV.

Tip o’ the hat to Niall for finding this gem. I’ll report my observations sometime this coming weekend, after we find our way home.

“It’s like the cold if you were dead” – and then you smiled for a second

Hard to believe I was laughing a year or so ago about the surface of Mars being warmer than the surface of much of New England. Today it maxed out in the low teens—I think it was about 7° F when I woke up this morning and it’s that again now. It would have been a nice day to go skiing, rather than just hanging out in the house.

Following my weather-reporting father’s example, I’ve ordered the Oregon Scientific Cable-Free Thermometer, an indoor-outdoor thermometer that combines an indoor console with one or more wireless remote stations. The idea is you could have the inside temperature, the outside temperature, and maybe the temperature from your wine cellar all on one device. Mostly I’m just interested in finding out how much of my body will freeze before I stumble out the door with the dogs at sunrise on cold days.

(Source for the title, though the specific track, “Plainsong,” isn’t on the iTMS at present.)

Mac home theatre PC

When I was working at Microsoft, I had Windows envy for something like the first time in my life when I looked at what my coworkers were doing with Media Center PCs that they built themselves. That was a cool use of hardware. To fill that envious void, a couple veteran Mac bloggers have stepped up to start a Mac Home Theatre PC blog. The impetus behind the blog was the launch of the Mac Mini, which is certainly the most living-room ready Mac to date, but the blog is tackling other issues as well.

One hack that I’m looking forward to trying is the one that uses software included with Apple’s FireWire SDK to record HD programs off a Motorola DCT 6200 HD cable receiver. Of course, my 3 free GB of hard disk space would be exhausted by about 2 and a half minutes of HD programming, so I might have to wait for a while to really try out this hack. Still pretty cool, though.

Folksonomies

The folksonomy meme is well underway, with a well timed announcement from Technorati feeding the frenzy. I think that one thing that needs to be addressed, though, is the sense of triumphalism—folksonomy over all organized taxonomies—that I hear in some of the posts.

Clay Shirky starts to address this issue in his excellent post about the economic costs of controlled vocabularies. He points out correctly that for systems at the scale of the Internet there is just no way to control and manage tagging information in a centralized way that is even remotely economically feasible.

This is fine, but it’s not the whole story. There are plenty of systems at smaller scales than the Internet where some combination of controlled and uncontrolled tagging is necessary. Put it another way, you don’t really want your users generating all your metadata in an uncontrolled fashion. Examples: accounting codes for general ledger systems; country codes; languages; lists of employees; and so on. On the flip side, as Scott Rosenberg points out, often user-generated metadata is a lot more tractable and ultimately more useful than trying to cook up “official” lists in a clean room.

There is also discussion about issues of synonym control, browseability, and so forth. Yep. Actually, I’m not convinced about synonym control. If the system offers a way to browse by frequency, it’s likely that users will find the tag that the majority of users are using and want to be a part of it—this happened on Orkut with a number of groups, including the Mac and Macintosh groups. Of course, one of the issues there is that changing groups on Orkut was fairly frictionless, whereas changing tags (categories) on one’s blog is quite a bit stickier as a problem. Where in the infrastructure might one want to see synonyms established?

Incidentally, this is one online topic where the discussion at Slashdot, even at the Score:4 level, was completely unhelpful.

Update: Forgot to blog this even as I was commenting on it; Jeff Jarvis talks about folksonomies for people (thanks to Doc for the reminder).

Worshipping librarians

I found myself in Via Valverde on Friday with the head librarian of Goucher College, explaining the concept of folksonomies over a glass of wine. Lisa became friends with Nancy when they were on a curriculum committee together when Lisa was an undergrad, and Nancy pinged her when she was coming up here for the ALA conference. I was amazed as we talked to her to realize how many of the things I’ve become really interested in on line—such as online communication, information taxonomy and classification, RSS, and so on—are also issues of deep interest in library science, and not just to blogging librarians like Jenny and Jessamyn.

Virginia: for lovers after all

Washington Post: Singles’ Sex No Longer a Va. Crime. What a tangled web we weave, when jurisprudence we upheave. Or something. The upshot is that, now that normal sexual relations conducted in private between consenting adults have been decriminalized, the way is clear for an examination of other Virginia laws pertaining to sexual acts. Such as sodomy, for instance.

Maybe my home state isn’t quite so red, after all.

Suspicious Cheese Lords: Once more, with mustard

It is hard to remember sometimes, from the perspective of early 2005, that many choral masterworks whose existence we take for granted are relatively new to the recorded repertoire. Bach’s B Minor Mass and Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem were first recorded in their entirety by Robert Shaw for RCA Victor in 1947, nearly a full half-century after sound recordings became commercially available, and works like Berlioz’s Messe Solenelle were available only as imported recordings until the Washington Cathedral Choral Society’s North American premiere recording of the work in the early 1990s. But many more composers are mostly or entirely unrecorded, particularly the numerous choral composers of the Renaissance.

This rich unrecorded choral world is rapidly becoming the specialty of Washington, DC’s resident male early music a cappella group, the Suspicious Cheese Lords. Following their first CD, which featured unrecorded works of Elzear Genet (aka Carpentras), the Cheese Lords return with Missa L’homme armé, an ambitious program of premiere recordings from the works of Ludwig Senfl (whose name means mustard in German).

Senfl, who was a musical contemporary of Carpentras, Juan del Encina, and other better known Renaissance composers, was the court composer for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, but faded into relative obscurity following Maximilian’s death, and remained in the employ of Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria until his own death in 1543. He left behind an enormous amount of music, including over 100 mass settings. For this recording, the Cheese Lords selected Senfl’s parody mass on the popular tune L’homme armé, several motets, and Senfl’s vast (and incomplete) Te Deum, which Cheese Lord collaborator and Library of Congress researcher Michael Donaldson completed by adding an altus line in accordance with known performance practices of the time.

The performances this time around are stellar. The ensemble has grown in sonority and maturity since their debut release, and the blend and solo lines are superb. This is a highly recommended recording from an even more highly recommended live ensemble.

(And it’s been almost five years since I sang with them, so you can take that as a reasonably objective opinion.)

Meme of the day: Bookshelf

Tony Pierce: bookshelf meme. Normally I don’t play these games, but I can’t resist one that allows me to plug low-tech word distribution mechanisms like books. Instructions: ”Copy the list from the last person in the chain, delete the names of the authors you don’t have on your home library shelves and replace them with names of authors you do have. Bold the replacements.”

The list, as received from Tony and updated by me:

  1. Charles Bukowski
  2. Umberto Eco
  3. William Gibson
  4. J.R.R. Tolkien
  5. Mark Twain
  6. James Joyce
  7. Anne Sexton
  8. Doc Searls
  9. William Shakespeare
  10. George Herriman

Old North Church and Natural History

behind old north church: a tree, a wall, a gate

New photos from our tour of Old North Church on Tuesday and from yesterday’s visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History have been posted and are available from the gallery. We had a good talk with the sexton at the Old North Church, and he let us know that the belfry is opened for visitors once a year, in December. I’ll have to look for that opportunity. With an elevation like that I can imagine the view must be superb.

At the HMNH, in addition to revisiting the glass flowers, Esta, David and I checked out some of the other exhibits, including the vast gallery of whale skeletons, the slightly dusty cases of slightly cracking taxidermied specimens, and the ethnography exhibits. I was particularly impressed by the latter—I don’t think I’ve ever seen Aztec carvings in person, and the Mayan artifacts were also impressive.

Alternative no more

DCist: WHFS, R.I.P.. Infinity Broadcasting changed the format of the venerable “alternative rock” station (which had in recent years largely shifted focus, to what DCist appropriately calls “aggro rock”) to a Spanish language station. This leaves the DC area with no alternative rock stations at all.

I should be surprised but I’m not. First they came for the classical stations, then the jazz stations, then for the college indie stations…

Campania gets respect

lisa, antonio mastroberardino, and me

New York Times: Modern Love for Ancient Vines in Southern Italy. The article provides an outstanding introduction to the viticulture of Campania, including all the usual suspects: Feudi, Mastroberardino, even Riccardo Cotarella. The article talks about the growing recognition of the importance of wines made with the indigenous grapes: aglianico, fiano, falanghina, and greco.

Now seems an appropriate time to post the pictures from our 2000 visit to Mastroberardino, including our meeting the Marchese (right).