Category: Burningbird

Semantic web, live and in color

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 14, 2003

I’m taking advantage of this server move to make some pretty drastic changes in my own sites. For instance, I’m not going to try maintaining the old numbered system for my Movable Type page names because, to be blunt, it’s a mess.

What with my recent tax evasion weeding out, and my habit of splitting weblog entries across different sites, the numbering is completely out of whack. Enough to bother even me, virtual slob that I am; for the anal among you, it would be enough to send you into a coma.

I contemplated a weblog redesign — something all new. My first thought was to put a big graphic at the top of a half naked man, but then I thought, what does this tell people about my weblog? So I discarded that idea. The For Poets sites has a look I like and I considered using it with this weblog, but displaying different photos every time you access the page. However, this idea is too much like Jonathon Delacour’s and I don’t want to steal his mojo.

Besides, I like my weblog look. I’m used to it. It suits me and what I write about. I may, however, change the look of the photo blogs, and I’m definitely changing the rest of the sites, such as burningbird.net.

The photo blogs are going to their own domain, mirrorself.com. All my photographs are going to this domain, and you can imagine how interesting this is going to be with all the embedded photos I have in my pages, and the number of photo blogs I have (each with hardcoded absolute URLSs). The For Poets weblogs are also going to their own Movable Type installation, and will be using the new page naming system. There aren’t that many For Poets weblog entries so doing redirects could be handled manually. However, with Burningbird and the rest of my stuff, we’re talking a significant impact. I have an application that’s currently tracking requests for missing resources and all I can say is, you sure can tell I’ve been online a long, long time, and that I move things around a lot.

One challenge with splitting my weblogs into completely different MT installations is my current comment/trackback facility. Normally this goes across all the weblogs; through this approach, to be blunt, I own Blogdex, as a comment for one post is repeated across all weblogs and robots see this as a fresh link to the post. I’ve been in the top Blogdex ranks every weekend for two months (weekends are slower linking times.) I’m trying to decide if I’ll find a way to work across databases, or to be kind to Blogdex.

To handle the Burningbird weblog reorganization, I’m putting my little PostCon application into full gear. The only part missing on the application is the forms-based front end that allows you to create a PostCon RDF file from scratch. I really don’t like doing forms-based development — I like working backend stuff. However, I don’t need to have the forms-based component right now. It would be handy, but I don’t need it.

(What would be nice is a generic forms application that can be used to define a data model, automatically create the forms, and then record data to create the serialized RDF/XML files. Wait a sec, I do! It’s called Protege. I’m using Protege for my PostCon pages that aren’t being generated through Movable Type.)

I integrated PostCon into Movable Type some time ago, but now I’m increasing the integration and am using pieces of PostCon, as well as Movable Type to handle the redirects — from old numbered pages to the new page system. More than that, though, is that each page now has its own particular history — what did the resource used to be named, what is it now, who wrote it, what’s it about, and linkage info. All in a machine readable format, that can also be viewed by people pushing a button on each individual page and seeing the ‘hidden’ page self-description. There’s a little FOAF in this, as well as a few other odds and ends RDF vocabularies that I’m absorbing.

I’ll be writing all this up in my Semantic Web for Poets site. I hope to show that the semantic web starts small, and starts when each of us takes a little bit of extra time to record just a little bit of extra information that could be helpful down the road. Yes, PostCon uses RDF. But it also uses plain old, Perl, too, and is served through Apache, and run on Linux. The entire Internet did not have to be rewired in order to use it.

For those who like moving parts, yes, there’s even some moving parts, though my weblog still doesn’t talk to my toaster.

Caveat on all of this, though: There is going to be some major changes and expect a rough week for my sites. Not for anyone else — the other weblogs should move with a minimum of fuss and bother.

Burningbird

Burningbird Network Move

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 14, 2003

This weblog and the rest of the existing Burningbird Network/Wayward Webloggers are moving to a new server this next week. As usual with a move, DNS changes take time to propagate so any comments made may mysteriously disappear during the move.

This weekend I’m moving Burningbird, For Poets, the RDF and photo sites, Joe Duemer, Farrago, Mike Golby and Si (AKMA’s son).

Next week, I’ll be moving Emptybottle (aka Stavros aka Chris), Loren Webster and Michael O’Connor Clarke.

We have new webloggers coming on board, including Frank Paynter, who should be livening up our environment considerably.

I’ll be posting notes and status of moves to the Renaissance Web site as I progress.

I am disappointed to be leaving our dedicated server at Rack Force — I did so enjoy tweaking it. But as I’ve said previously, the Internet is going to be taking a beating next year, and you all know that webloggers are now become a nice juicy target. (Anyone curious as to why I say next year’s going to be bad?)

I just don’t have the time to fight back the hordes. With the SPEWS blacklisting,not being able to use email with any confidence is also a continuing problem. However, I appreciate the professionalism and quality of support I’ve had with Rack Force.

(The problem with blacklisting is it can takes months to recover from what is a moment’s flick of a thoughtless switch. SPEWS is almost impossible to get removed from once added because of the distributed, non-accountability nature of the list. I know that Rack Force is trying, and I’ve tried, but I’ve basically been told by SPEWS, “tough titties”. )

I love Hosting Matters reseller software that allows me to add new Wayward Webloggers so easily! And the Waywarders are going to have fun with their new control panels. New toys. New buttons to push. New vistas to horizen or some such thing.

The move will be good. Be patient as things temporarily break.

Critters Photography Writing

Robin Redbreast

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 14, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

We had another flock of robins come through again today. Many more females this time since they are on a southern migration, not northern. Robins are ground feeding birds, so it’s surprising how fast and agile they are in the air.

Robins have long been the harbingers of spring, but for some reason, the robin is also associated with war and even with death. I wonder if its because its a migratory bird, leaving in the winter and returning in the spring. Leaving and winter reminds us of loss, while spring and returning remind us of hope.

As coincidence would have it Loren discussed Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Robin Redbreast” this week:

It was the dingiest bird
you ever saw, all the color
washed from him, as if
he had been standing in the rain,
friendless and stiff and cold,
since Eden went wrong.
…

Loren covered the poem on Veteran’s Day a day when we honor our veterans from so many wars. When I was driving yesterday, the radio played a set of ads from different organizations and companies and people in celebration of Veteran’s Day. The word Freedom was central to each and every one.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

At poets.org, I found Sara Teasdale’s poem “There will come soft rains” that references a robin. I liked it, but it, too, is somber:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

The page noted that this was a war time poem. My first reaction was: which war?

But robins are also a harbinger of spring, and they cheer me so with their puffed up chests of bright scarlet; like an old-time politician thrusting out his well-filled belly before shaking the hands of Father, while patting baby Suzy on the head.

Robins are also a contradiction: they’re a territorial bird, independent and individual, but they migrate in flocks. It’s comical to watch them when they fly as a group — they fly their own path within the flock’s path, and it looks like this big disorganized cloud of fast moving but fiercely chaotic smoke. When they land on the holly berry trees, they start to squabble when others land nearby but then remember, “Oh yeah. That’s right. Cooperate’, and settle in to feed.

Today though they picked a holly tree that has a large, well entrenched grey squirrel nest in it. The birds drove that poor squirrel to distraction — just as he chased one off, another would land.

Everything is a pest for something else.

P.S. Back online when the move and conversion are finished.

Just Shelley

Melancholia

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 12, 2003

Today was a quiet day, more mist than rain, more grey than stormy. I set out for the bird sanctuary in the Northwest corner of the state, but hadn’t gone more than an hour when I realized that I had forgotten my wallet. With my driver’s license. I carefully turned around, and just as carefully made my way home to pick it up. When I was fully legal again, it was too late for the bird sanctuary. Instead I made my way to one of my other favorite parks.

I was the only person on the paths, which suited my somber mood. Even the birds muted their singing, and whatever color still existed was dulled, as if it didn’t want to shout too loudly into the quiet.

Two hundred years ago, if I were a woman of delicate breeding, I would describe my mood today as melancholic. And I would be in good company, sharing sisterhood with the likes of Jane Austen, who wrote about her own melancholia in a letter to her sister:

Sir William listened to me in confidence and diagnosed an acute involutional melancholia (in former times known as the black bile), complicated by insomniac tendencies, for which he compounded a tincture of opium of which I am to take six drops in a small glass of port wine each bed time. I took the draught last night, but it had no effect besides making my recurrent dream all the more vivid, so I know not whether to halve or double the dosage to-night! At all events, Sir William will bleed me on Wednesday a week should my symptoms persist unabated. I have every faith in the man: it is said that Nelson suffered horribly from night-mares until he sought Sir William’s help, and now he sleeps like a babe.

Acute involutional melancholia. You can imagine a lady of the day sitting to tea with her friends, and telling them one and all that she has been diagnosed with melancholia, “just like dear Nelson”. Hearty good health was seen as an anathema to those with refined sensibilities. Luckily, being given drops of opium in wine, or being bled frequently, prevented such unseemly bouts of robustness.

Freud wrote a paper on melancholia called “Mourning and Melancholia”. He believed that melancholia was a result of loss, compounded by not confronting the agent of loss. Instead of resolving these feelings and moving on, the sufferer internalizes the feelings, turning them against their own ego. However, lest you think that Freud was sympathetic to this state — remember that he was, perhaps, the most dispassionate of all adventurers into the psyche — he was contemptuous:

[Melancholics] are far from evincing towards those around them the attitude of humility and submissiveness that would alone befit such worthless people [… as they believe themselves to be]. On the contrary, they make the greatest nuisance of themselves, and always seem as though they felt slighted and had been treated with great injustice.

The man may have made history as a the father of Psychoanalysis, but he had the makings of a modern American politician: a combination of Republican disdain for the less fortunate, mixed in with Democratic obsession with sex.

Of course, we know today that melancholia has many faces — ranging from those moments of quiet reflectivity, to the most severe form of depression. No matter who are, and no matter how adjusted we believe we are, we all suffer from melancholia at one time or another. As Francis Zimmermann wrote in his fascinating paper for the Journal of International Institute, titled The History of Melancholy:

The history of melancholia is that of an innately human experience of suffering becoming the object of a cultural construct. As a mood or emotion, the experience of being melancholy or depressed is at the very heart of being human: feeling “down” or blue or unhappy, being dispirited, discouraged, disappointed, dejected, despondent, melancholy, depressed, or despairing many aspects of such affective experiences are within the normal range. Everyone suffers from this kind of metaphorical melancholia, as Robert Burton said, because “Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality” (The Anatomy of Melancholy, I.I.I.5.), that is, a figure of the human condition.

With its sense of loss and grief, you would think we would work to eliminate melancholia, and we do seek to help those suffering from severe depressions, using a combination of therapy, support, and antidepressants.

(I once heard antidepressants referred to as mood brighteners, a term I despise. It reminds me of those laundry sticks you use to remove stains from your good shirt. “Oh, look! There’s a spot of angst. I’ll just dab in this Miracle Mental Health, and it will wash right out!”)

Yet much of our creativity has its roots in melancholia, and to remove it from our lives, completely, would be to remove the shadows that shape us. Melancholia gives us sad, soft songs to accompany misted landscapes, forming a backdrop for words of poetry, and other forms of writing.

Melancholia also gives us silence; knowing when to keep still and just listen.

Just Shelley Photography

Drops of water

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 4, 2003

The weather’s been warm and we’ve been keeping the windows open to catch the cool night air. Its odd to sit here typing at the computer with all the windows open and the fan going, listening to the rain, when a scant 100 miles away people are facing snow and ice.

St. Louis lives in that kind of space – suits me.

Last night I was in the kitchen getting some water when I heard a loud plane overhead. This isn’t that unusual, we get planes from time to time from a nearby airport. However, this sound wasn’t going away, and shook the walls. Invasion? Crash? Really lost pilot? Something I should perhaps be concerned about?

I went out on the porch and in the clear night I could see a series of Air Force transport planes flying overhead – aligned one after the other, with red beacon lights shining like tiny beads strung in a necklace. Another joined the thread as I stood and watched.

Odd how things look different when the distance changes. I know the planes are huge, they have to be from the sound. However, high overhead they’re barely more than dots wrapping a thread around the moon. But look at the following photograph, taken of a rock that’s smaller than a dime. The closeness of the camera and the action of the lens enhance and enlarge details too small to view with the naked eye.

Remember when you were a kid how you would dip your finger into a glass of water and use it to ‘paint’ pictures on the table; or you would place drops of water over writing or the tablecloth and see how the drops would magnify whatever was underneath?

I always liked looking at cloth under the drops; seeing the individual threads emerge distinct from the whole, until the drops soaked into the cloth and the effect was lost.

For some reason I was reminded of this magnifying effect of water last night, when I watched the transport ships with their tiny red lights and huge sound and faraway destinations where I imagine they fly with their running lights off. Just in case.