Categories
Just Shelley

The oddest dream

I had the oddest dream last night. I dreamed that I was in a small town located on the ocean, I’m not sure which ocean. I was there to attend a reunion of all the people I’ve met online through weblogging and have wanted to meet in person.

I was sharing a dorm room with a couple of other webloggers, two very young and very attractive young women. We were all getting dressed to go to the party, when I realized that all I had with me were my muddy, old hiking boots, my jeans, a blue jean shirt, and a white t-shirt underneath. I looked at one of the young women, and she was dressed in silver satin and black velvet that was cut down to here and slit up to there, exposing her long, trim legs and sleek belly, and firm, youthful breasts. As she primped, she chattered away about how the next day, she was going on a river float with some of my favorite webloggers. As I listened to her excitement I looked more closely at her face, and realized that she looked a lot like I did twenty-five years ago.

A large car was outside, waiting to take us all to the party. I strained to peer inside, through the darkly tinted glass, but couldn’t see into its depths at who had arrived to pick us up. As we started towards the car, I suddenly turned toward the young woman in satin and velvet and said I wasn’t going. She was disappointed, being a sweet young woman as well as pretty, and asked me why. I said it was because I didn’t want to disappoint people who were expecting her, and got me, instead.

After she entered the car, I watched it drive off and then started walking through the town. I entered, in turn, a small cafe, a tavern, and what might have been either a church or a school. None of the buildings seemed very distinctive, and all were misted in gray, with the people odd lumps of shadows standing out from the walls.

Towards the center of town, I entered a slightly disorganized bookstore that also had bits and pieces of art hanging from the ceiling and cluttering up the floor. A man entered and even though I could see him clearly and sharply, I couldn’t see what he looked like. He was the owner of the shop, though, and the creator of all the art. I started to ask him about it, when he came up to me and kissed me on the mouth. Not a friendly peck either: the kind of deep, sensuous kiss that looks good in the movies and feels wonderful, but when you see yourself doing it looks a bit sloppy, which is probably why we keep our eyes closed.

When he had kissed me thoroughly, he stepped away and told me when I was ready, the shop would be there, and the choice was mine. The choice of what, I didn’t know but I knew it was something important. Something beyond him and the kiss, but I couldn’t figure out what.

I left the building in the opposite direction I entered, and found myself on a porch that had a glass wall, and there were a few people sitting on barrels and chairs looking through the glass. On the other side of the wall, were people dressed in ordinary clothing but doing extraordinary things.

They were juggling, and tossing each other about, and riding unicycles, and all manner of wonderful stuff, and I asked one man sitting on a barrel–he was an older man, an indian, wearing a feather in his braided hair, and a leather vest over a homespun shirt–what was going on. He replied that the circus was in town and the performers practiced daily, just on the other side of the window. He and the others would come down and watch because this show was free, unlike the show that went on in the big tent.

It may have been free at one point, but I noticed an older woman looking at me from the other side of the glass, and she seemed grumpy and mouthed words I couldn’t hear but could sense, something to the effect that didn’t I realize that these people worked hard? I felt guilty and I reached into my pocket and pulled out an old five dollar bill and held it up to the glass. At that she seemed satisfied, even though she made no move to collect the money.

At that point I woke up: before I saw the dog act; before I returned to the bookstore to find out what my choices were; and before the young woman in satin and velvet returned from the party to tell me who had been there and whether I was missed or not.

I don’t know what the dream means, other than today I turned 50.

Categories
Writing

I’m not sure where

..but I came across Letters to an Unknown Audience some time ago, and have been enjoying it ever since. When I saw this site’s version of the ‘political maps’ (here and here) I thought it was past time to expos…no…introdu…nah…shout…oh brother, that’s overused…drop this site on all of you. Because.

taste:

Some went unmarked because of the austerity of the road. When I travel light I bring only a toothbrush, a change of underwear, and a set of brass knuckles. When I travel heavy I bring two suitcases: one full of clothes and the journal, and one packed with fist-sized rocks which I leave along the route, as my way of undoing the damage I did to the Earth by topping my kitchen counters with marble.

Categories
Burningbird

Why the merge?

Why the merge of the weblogs? Particularly since the two topics, Practical RDF and the rest of my life seem to have no common ground?

Contrary to what you might expect, it wasn’t my disappointment about the ETech conference. If that was it, I would have left the weblog and put, “Reading O’Reilly books kills kittens!” scrolled across the top.

I am joking, of course. Reading O’Reilly books other than my own kills kittens.

My previous posts related to Etech resulted from a combination of many feelings–some deep, some shallow (probably most shallow)– but I’m not mad at O’Reilly. Nor do I think they were sexist in not picking my proposal. Short sighted, yes. Possessing dubious taste, no doubt. Unimaginative, maybe–but not sexist. No, as odd as this may seem, it was new Feminist Weblog public aggregator that gave me this impetus.

This aggregator is for weblogs that …discuss feminist issues on a more-or-less regular, on-going basis. My first thought was to submit my weblog, as I write on feminist issues more or less on a regular basis. But then, if you compare my writings to those others on the list, I probably don’t seem like I write on feminism.

I do, though. Every time I write on technology, I am writing as a feminist. Every time I write on photography, the same. However, the times when I specifically address feminism aren’t that frequent, not when mixed in with the other posts.

Should I then split my feminist posts off? I thought about doing this a couple of times, and even started at one point. But if I follow that path, then I’m looking at splitting tiny chunks of me off every which way until there’s little left of me that’s “Burningbird”, which is supposed to be–me.

I did this with Practical RDF. I created this site to support the book, but extended it to include other RDF issues, and eventually most of my semantic web and technology interests other than weblogging technology. And Practical RDF did appear in yet another aggregator, this one related to all things RDF and semantic web.

But as I wrote at the Practical RDF site earlier today, I think splitting off discussions of the semantic web from other discussions is to lose a key piece of understanding necessary for this effort:

However, in my opinion, a key to the semantic web–the plain folks version, not that big ‘S’ big ‘W’ one–is to find a way to merge our humantistic and digital impulses to good effect. To disregard my, and others, non-technical writing and interests is to disregard important clues to making the semantic web work outside of academic and marketing interests.

Still, there’s no gainsaying that if one were to want to read almost exclusively about issues related to the semantic web, one is not going to be happy when my essays on feminism pop up; and if one were interested in promoting or being promoted within a feminist world, one may not be thrilled to see a sequence of me writing about photography.

I can understand this, and sympathize, and respect this selectivity — it makes a great deal of sense. Just not for me.

(I found out about the Feminist aggregator through Feministe who is taking a break from weblogging — ha!)

Categories
Burningbird

Merge complete

As you can see by several new items, the merge of the two weblogs has been completed.

Categories
Burningbird

Well, hmmmm

As you may have noticed, when I did an export of Practical RDF into MT format, and then tried to re-import into WordPress, the import did not succeed. I had backed up the database, so was able to recover to the point of the attempt.

I swear this is one aspect of Wordform that is going to be given lots of attention: the ability to merge weblogs, split categories out into separate weblogs, to post to multiple weblogs at one time, and to be able to move from, and to, other weblogging tools.

Moving between tools or even moving between weblogs in a tool, has been problematical in every weblogging tool I know. Yet weblog users need to be able to have the flexibility of switching tools – tool lock-in is not acceptable.

And I agree with those who I did disagree with recently when I last discussed this–the Movable Type export format is not workable. It’s too fragile, and breaks too easily. But syndication formats have a bunch of crap that data exports and imports don’t need.

What we need is a new XML format for exporting and importing data. Not an RDF/XML format – this would be a waste of RDF. But not a syndication format either, which is finetuned to a different need. A new one, just for the data management, sophisticated enough to handle each tool’s unique needs, and which we can easily incorporate into each tool using whatever template technology the tools support.

Oh well, back to the drawing board and a different approach to merging Practical RDF into Bb.