A year ago today

I turned in my last papers, blogged about a ton of stuff, and finally remembered to say “I’m done.” At the time it didn’t feel like the enormous milestone that it turned out to be. Like anyone else I miss being in school, but I’m glad I’m out—not just because I’m no longer accruing debt, but because it means I actually get to work on meaningful things.

Meeting the winemaker

Pike and Western held a tasting last night to sample the wines created by Ricardo Cotarella, the Italian winemaker behind Falesco, who helped lead a revolution in Italian viniculture by convincing grape growers to experiment with new grapes such as Merlot and improve old grapes like the Sicilian Nero d’Avola. Over the course of the evening (and seven wines from Sicily, Lazio, Umbria, and Tuscany), we learned quite a lot about the industry, such as the importance of decreasing plant yield to provide intense flavor.

Afterwards Lisa asked Cotarella if he had consulted at any Campagnian vineyards. “Yes, several,” he said. “Feudi…”

“Mastroberardino?” Lisa asked.

“No, no,” he replied, and held his hands apart palm up. “If you consult for Feudi, is no longer possible to work for Mastroberardino.” (The two winemakers split in a family feud about ten years ago.)

He told us that his favorite Campagnian varietal was probably Greco di Tufo. Lisa challenged him, asking about Fiano di Avellino, but he said he preferred Greco because while Fiano might be mistaken for other indigenous white wines such as Falenghina, Greco always was clearly Greco.

Alas, June Carter Cash

I was in a meeting yesterday when someone said June Carter Cash had passed away. It’s like the departure of an elemental force as well as a touchstone back to the Carter Family and the long-lost roots of a distinctly American music. And an American love story. Who else but June could have brought Johnny back to the straight and narrow? Who else but June could have written “Ring of Fire”?

The New York Times has a moving obituary.

In the Beginning

One last program for the year with the Cascadian Chorale, this one featuring Fauré’s Requiem and Copland’s In the Beginning. It’s fun to sing the Fauré, though I have to confess that, this being my fourth or fifth lifetime performance, I have to remind myself to stop and listen every now and then to appreciate the beauty.

The Copland is a different story. A rare piece for Copland, it’s written for a cappella choir and soprano solo and is more akin to his early avant garde works than later symphonies such as Appalachian Spring with their explicitly folk-tune based melodies. The piece is is no specific key or meter, but visits about twelve different tonalities throughout, all with hummable melodies and each yielding to the next in a slow chromatic rise of pitch throughout the piece until the final lines are sung in an ecstatic seventh above where the music started. The rhythms are propelled by the natural rhythms of the text, the first chapters of Genesis. The whole work is said to be one of the most challenging choral compositions of the twentieth century. I believe it. But it’s also one of the most beautiful.

Hope to see you all at the concert…

Keiretsu: Matrix, Paris, life changes, nostalgia

Quick sweep through the keiretsu this morning:

  • Shuman has been blogging like his hair was on fire, writing about summer movies, TV, and the iTunes Music Store. Today he tweaks the folks who expected deep meaning in The Matrix Reloaded: “The Matrix is not a terribly intelligent series. But that doesn’t matter in the least, nor should it detract from the movies. Just as die-hard Star Wars fans grew up to find all kinds of hidden meaning in what George Lucas admits were intended to be children’s movies, fans of The Matrix are remembering it as more than it was intended to be.”
  • George and Becky are back from Paris and George is blogging the experience, complete with nightly menu readings. So far, to recap, it’s been canard, escargot, foie gras, more escargot, lamb, pork, Chateau Forquet, and a Basque meal. I’ll have to find out how George talked Becky into the sewer tour. I’ve always been drawn to hidden places in cities like that, but I could never convince Lisa about the catacombs in Rome, much less sewers.
  • Craig has finished some major coursework but is taking the summer off to focus on writing. He says “The most recent book I had a hand in, Teach Yourself Web Services in 24 Hours, just hit the shelves.” Cool.
  • Esta brings back some serious found object nostalgia. In return: the smoked glass candy dish on the table in one grandmother’s house and the bobble-head dolls from Africa in the other grandmother’s curio cabinet.

Back

I tried to post something from Houston, but I lost my draft. Just as well; I was teed off about the funky Internet access there—a Wayport access point with no DHCP, and a four-point access station that offered paid wired connections but no wireless connections—and that would have you swipe your credit card to pay for an electrical connection.

But all of that is irrelevant, since I’m home now. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to spend the rest of the week with my relatives and my uncle’s friends, but getting to spend the rest of it with Lisa more than makes up for it.

Anyone for tennis?

On this, the last full day of vacation (since I spend almost all of tomorrow in a plane; I love east coast/west coast trips), I thought I’d end up eating more sensibly and exercising more. I was half right.

Breakfast was simpler this morning, by which I mean fewer vegetables (my dad and I weren’t cooking). Scrambled eggs with ramps and onions, country ham, biscuits, and grits. Surprisingly I wasn’t stuffed, having been pretty selective in how much I ate, and Mom and I went for a short walk after breakfast to settle everything in.

Man, if yesterday was the worst of late spring South Carolina weather, today was the best. Though the high was almost where yesterday’s was, the morning was much cooler and the humidity was almost nonexistent all day, and while the sky had threatened and oppressed on Sunday, today it was clear blue with only a few wispy clouds.

Which, I suppose, is how I got the idea that racquet sports would be a good idea. I dragged Mom over to the badminton court first, knowing full well that it was too windy and that we would end up at tennis. To get the full humor of this, you have to know that PE was the only high school class I ever got a C in, and the last time Mom played tennis was almost 40 years ago. Thankfully, between lots of extra tennis balls, perseverance, and the lack of jeering spectators, we managed to avoid making complete fools of ourselves.

That was probably the high point of the day. The rest: a snack, sleep, swimming, fish fry (with hush puppies), Alka Seltzer (to settle the fried fish and hush puppies), Whose Line is it Anyway?, and bed.

Tomorrow’s blog forecast: clear tomorrow with a 15% chance of early morning bloggage, clear in the afternoon across the whole country from Charleston to Dallas to the Pacific Northwest, and a likely late-evening blog flurry coming in from Seattle.

More on disappearing albums

In a comment on my article about Radiohead’s albums disappearing from the iTunes Music Store (as reposted at Blogcritics), Matt MacInnis makes excellent points about the leverage that bands like Radiohead and Sigur Ros may have in their contracts to negotiate better royalties for new form factors. I wonder why other artists with equally high leverage, like U2 and Sting, haven’t done so. Maybe because they’re on Universal?

Another milestone API

Dave Sifry at Technorati has posted an API for Technorati. Unlike the other milestone web APIs (Google, MetaWeblog, Amazon), it uses simple REST and parameters passed in URIs to get information such as the link cosmos for a URL, information about a given blog, or all the blogs that are linked to by a given blogger, all in clean XML.

Happy and eating

End of the first full day here in South Carolina. It was not as hot as threatened—the thermometer only made it to about 85° F—but with humidity well in excess of 80%, I felt enervated and listless all day. Guess I’ve turned into a bit of a hothouse flower living in the Seattle suburbs, where 85° is generally the hottest it gets and the dew point rarely climbs above 50° F (meaning the humidity is generally too low to be noticed).

Dad and I cooked breakfast this morning. Unlike my uncle’s festive breakfasts, which tend to center around lots of cured, fried pork products, today’s was poached eggs on corned beef hash, asparagus, fresh tomatoes, grits, homemade applesauce, and English muffins—with mimosas to start for Mother’s Day. We were stoking up, anticipating not eating another meal until the barbecue showed up around dinner time.

A note about the pig-pickin’—in years past my uncle had taken a reasonably hands-on role in mixing the barbecue sauce and generally cootering around with his buddies cooking the pig, but this time (given the long cooking time needed for 140 pounds of dressed pig), he left it in the hands of a professional.

Which meant that by the time we washed the breakfast dishes and walked down past the tennis court to the cookshed where the long trailer with the barbecue smoker sat, our chef had already pulled half the pig off the fire, where it had slow cooked since midnight the previous night, and cut it up for leftovers. But the other half was still there for photographing, and as soon as I get a cable to connect the camera to the computer I’ll post some shots.

After that, the day was pretty slow: a tour of the facility in the bed of my uncle’s pickup (during which I picked up a mean sunburn), a quick swim in the afternoon, and, eventually, the barbecue.

This was my first experience with the South Carolina version of barbecue, which is a more tomato-based sauce than what I’ve had before, and features some different accompaniments, including rice and something called “Low Country hash,” which contains, among other things, ground pork meat and liver in a tomato-based sauce and has the consistency of a well-cooked lentil dish. (It was actually much tastier than I’ve just made it sound.)

After that my mom trounced me at Scrabble. And so to bed.

Postscript: For the original reference for the woeful pun that titles this post, see my current listening (or click here), song 5.

In case it wasn’t obvious…

I did get at least dialup access from the place we’re staying and was able to post the two items I wrote on the airplane yesterday (thanks, Brent, for draft posts in NetNewsWire). I also noted that Esta is jealous that she’s not here (for good reason: she has to work today). Cheer up, dear. So far we’ve just had breakfast. Granted, it was a dad and me special, but otherwise you didn’t miss much. Except the mimosas.

An online pubcrawl generator

I’m missing a charity pub crawl in Kirkland today (no direct URL because I’m disconnected, but Google will find it handily). A shame, because I would love to learn more about my neighbors and the businesses in my new home town, and the pub crawl would be a great way to do it. (It also seems like a really smart way to drum up local business in a recessed economy.)

Blogdex to the rescue: next time I want a pub crawl, it looks like I can try using the Up My Street Pub Crawl service to put my own together.

Dumb airplanes, smart mobs, smarter blogs

Reading Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs in the airplane this morning between Seattle and Atlanta, it occurs to me that reading books—at least nonfiction books—has become a poorer experience since the advent of the Internet. Part of the power of Rheingold’s writing is its allusive nature: he collects dozens of points of reference and authorities across as many fields of study and assembles them into a pattern. But you’re always aware that there are depths beneath each name that illustrate different aspects of the story, such as wearable computing/cyborg Steve Mann’s collision with the new blunt instrument of airport security, who forcibly unwired him.

Reading such a work on an airplane, without an always-on Internet connection, is a poorer experience because it deprives the reader of the opportunity to check context, collect evidence that informs or opposes Rheingold’s point, and follow lines of inquiry that may digress from the path of the narrative. It also deprives one of access to Rheingold’s Smart Mobs blog, in which he continues collecting, pointing to, and commenting on evidence of the emerging collective, mobile intelligence evolving around us.

At least the laptop provides some measure of disconnected “backup brain”—I don’t know that I would have remembered that the Smart Mobs blog had its own domain rather than a home on Blogspot without NetNewsWire, my RSS aggregator of choice, which gave me the relevant URL when I command-clicked the Smart Mobs blog listing in my subscriptions list. NNW also aggregated my unread headlines as I was finishing my packing this morning, providing me with some supplemental reading material.

Maybe aggregators like NetNewsWire provide the best option for disconnected experiences and travel access to information. They’re certainly a better alternative than the previous iteration of the technology. When I was a software consultant and traveled occasionally, I relied on Lotus Notes and an extensive array of company databases that could be replicated for offline reference. Really, though, I only ever needed a small fraction of the material contained in any of those databases. Providing RSS feeds from blogs, where I can choose my subscription list based on individual providing the information, allows me to make choices based on voice and reduces some measure of information overload.

It’s not perfect, by itself. But next generation tools like Blogrolling.com (for exploring what the people to whom you subscribe are reading), Technorati (for finding out what people are saying about you), and even Weblogs.com (for sheer serendipity—I’ve had some really great random experiences by clicking on the links to blogs I knew nothing about, save that they had posted in the last three hours) help to expand the scope of my interest beyond the “echo cavern” of talking to myself by providing primitive reputation systems and filtering.

What’s the next step? How about a blog recommendation engine for people who don’t themselves blog, maybe based on search patterns or even Amazon purchase history? Google, in addition to recommending Usenet groups or DMoz directories, could recommend blogs that follow your interests, as expressed by your search terms. (This is the real power in Andrew Orlowski’s suggestion in the Register that blogs should have their own Google tab—not getting them out of people’s search results but making it possible to expand the UI into more expressive recommendations.

Of course, on the airplane I can’t do anything about this, for now.