Categories
Stuff

Taste of hell

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I was at the pharmacy today and stopped by the mint and gum section to pick up some cinnamon Altoids. I like all the mint flavors, but cinnamon is my favorite.

They were out of cinnamon, but did have some new flavors I hadn’t seen before, including a line of sour fruit such as Sour Tangerine and Sour Apple. What the hey, the tin is nice. I grabbed the apple.

If you’ve had Altoids you know that when the company says something is ’strong’ it’s strong. Well, the same could be said of ’sour’. I tried one of the new mints after dinner, and had to spit it out after just a few seconds. It was the most awful, sour thing I’ve had in my life. Perhaps it needs vodka to make it palatable.

I’ve never understood the interest in food that is so strong, it burns, makes us grimace, wince, or sweat.

Tin’s pretty at least.

Categories
Weblogging

Good to see

Ed Cone shined his journalistic light on Karl Martino and Philly Future in a nice question and answer interview. Philly Future is the Philadelphia equivalent of The St. Louis Bloggers, and then some–that aggregator is a nice option. Perhaps we need a Planet St. Lous.

I liked Karl’s advice for integration between alternative media, such as local weekly newspapers, and webloggers:

—What would your advice be for us in Greensboro — both at the N&R as
it tries to set up a community web presence involving bloggers, and for
bloggers who want an independent online alt-media?

I notice you already have some great advice shared to you by folks who
know far more than me. But I’ll try my best. Take it with a grain of
salt. It appears you have two camps: those that think N&R should host
blogs, and those who think it should aggregate the independent
community. There are some that say do both and I’m with them.

* Aggregate your existing and growing local blogger community.
Encourage folks to join it. Provide them with pointers and advice on
how to do so. Get them to publicize their feeds. Greensboro101 us a
great start.

* Host blogs for those that are not comfortable to go elsewhere. Your
paper is a brand that inspires trust and some folks will be far more
comfortable using tools you host. Empower these folks and watch what
happens.

* And here is the most important point, right from Dave Winer’s “How to
make money on the internet”: use editorial staff and the community
itself to find the very best writers and posts within your hosting
solution and within the larger community. Highlight what they do and
stories they have posted. Put these posts of yours in a place where the
community will see them. In the paper. In the sidebars of your
newspaper’s online edition. Right on it’s front page. All over the
place! It will encourage participation.

Considering the recent problems with the local weekly, Riverfront Times and the former weblogger that I wrote about last week, seems to me that RFT might take some of this to heart.

Karl also had some very nice things to say about me that I’ve been thinking about since he let me know this interview was online. He wrote:

You need to really put yourself out there to do a good job of it. You need to be personal. Philly Future didn’t have enough personality (a problem it still has I think) and I didn’t put my heart on my sleeve the way I do off the web. Look at http://weblog.burningbird.net/. She has a community because her online voice is so authentic. I’m still too reserved.

I think there is personal and then there’s personal. In the last post I wrote about the famous strip tease artist, Lili St. Cyr, who created art out of the erotica, while only exposing brief and tantalizing glimpses of herself; as compared to the bump ‘n grind girls who just dropped trou and swung their boobies.

I know some great writers that can weave a truly intimate story around a simple act like buying a computer, designing a web site, attending martial arts classes, carving a Santa out of wood, or sitting outside a library getting busted by the cops; while other writers will provide every detail of the sex they had the night before, and not tell you a word about themselves.

When I write, I strive to be the former, but sometimes stray to the latter. Well, except for the sex, thing.

Categories
People Weblogging

The Lady Cyr

I finished up the base functionality for the OsCommerce application, including replacing the category implementation. OsCommerce is one of the more used applications for store fronts, and is open source to boot. However, the code is obtuse and cumbersome, and not especially well documented; you change the code in one spot, you end up breaking it in half a dozen other places.

I’ve also been working on weblog coding, and helping Feministe move from Movable Type to WordPress. I installed the application and handled the permalinks and htaccess changes, and Lauren did the import and a lovely, and amazingly quick, design. Other than forgetting to remind Lauren to turn off MT auto-generation, and her losing her initial index page, the move has gone relatively well.

Note to current WordPress users: As of a day or so ago, the default template for a WordPress installation has been moved into a theme, and the contents of the index.php file reduced to a few lines of code, easily replaced. What does this mean? This means that what happened to Lauren won’t happen after the 1.5 update.

Yes: 1.5 — the developers skipped 1.3 and 1.4, and the next release of WordPress will be 1.5.

While I was working on her site, I noticed she’d posted her results of a new quiz, Which Classical Pin-Up are you. Much better than the what kind of vegetable is one quiz. I broke away from coding a few minutes to take it and found out that:

You are Lili St. Cyr!
You’re Lili St. Cyr!

What Classic Pin-Up Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

The other classic pin-ups were Betty Grable (of course), Marilyn Monroe (must we), Brigitte Bardot, and Bettie Page.

All in all, I was rather pleased to ‘be’ Lili St. Cyr, one of the more famous of the 20th century strip teasers. Beautiful, but with a stronger face than the norm for the time, and an imperious tilt to her head. Unique in her performances, too. A classically trained dancer, when other strippers would do the usual bump and grind, Lili’s acts consisted of her taking a bubble bath on stage, or having her maid dress her rather than remove her clothes.

Standing five-foot-six, and featuring nearly ideal 36-24-36 dimensions, she was built to please. But it was her seductive moves that made her a star. She was most famous for a bathtub routine, in which she emerged from a bubbly tub, froth clinging strategically to her naughty bits. But her repertoire also featured narratives like “Suicide” in which she tried to woo a straying lover by revealing her body, and “Jungle Goddess” an exotic number where she appeared to have relations with a parrot.

Lili was a fiercely independent woman who married six times, leaving all six when she got bored. She appeared in magazines and movies, was adored in Montreal, and at the time considered the queen of burlesque. After close to three decades on stage, she retired and started her own lingerie line, where her catalogs would feature drawings or photographs of her wearing her products.

Her life was not a happy one, though, and she had problems with both alcohol and drugs. When she sold her business and retired, she withdrew from the public eye, living in seclusion with her cats until her death at age 80, in 1999.

The glamour photographer Bernard of Hollywood, creator of the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe wearing the white dress standing over a exhaust grate, took many pin-up photographs of Lili St. Cyr, calling her his ‘muse’. But I don’t know if he was the photographer who took one picture I found of Lili that stood apart from the typical cheesecake shots.

In it, Lili is posing under a bed canopy, seemingly swirling a sheer cape around herself, as she strikes a pose for the photographer. But the camera, rather than move in to tightly focus on her, is pulled back and much lower to the ground, exposing the obvious nature of the set. Because of the angle, rather than a spontaneous swirl of cloth, it looks like Lili’s cape is actually wired to be pulled up and out. Additionally, as you can see in more detail in this larger photo, the walls of the set slant in and down, drawing you into the photograph; and in the crack between them walls, a photographer’s light shining on the floor in front of the dancer actually competes equally for attention.

Off to the side is a dresser with a parrot in a cage, and you can’t tell from the photo whether the bird is fake or real; and if the latter, alive or dead. The bed, which should look inviting and seductive, seems cold, remote, and hard as bricks for all that it is draped with velvet. Rather than seduce, the image makes one’s back vaguely hurt.

What’s especially intriguing about the shot is that it looks as if someone had carefully contrived an image, and then impulsively rejected it. However, there’s more than a hint in the photo that the scene you see is exactly what was planned, and if the camera were to pull back more, yet another set would be exposed.

A compelling photo of a genuinely interesting woman.

Categories
Technology

Coding on the hoof

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This last week I’ve been heavily into development, trying to get OsCommerce to agree to operate a certain way, in addition to doing some really strange things to the version of WordPress in use at Bb (changes which will then get ported to Wordform). In fact, you may see things break here and there, off and on, as I’ve decided to do all my coding ‘live’ — directly to my working weblogs.

This is contrary to traditional development practices. Normally the rule is to code in a separate space and then roll out a nicely polished, tested, finished, fairly stable working copy. However, I thought it might be interesting for non-technologists to see what an application looks like as it undergoes changes.

I sometimes think we, the techs, hide what goes on behind the scenes too much–fostering a myth that an application is solid-state when really its bits and pieces stuck together. Hopefully, we manage to stick the bits together in a way that they actually do something useful, but that’s not always the case.

It’s frustrating for users to hit a bug in software, and when they do, they wonder how this bug could be missed and/or why isn’t the developer just “…putting out a quick fix”. What happens, though, with many bugs, is that trying to fix the code in one spot can break it in three other places because the code is really bits and pieces, stuck together in a way that hopefully works, but in this case, doesn’t.

It then becomes equally frustrating for the developer to try to explain to the user that there are so many moving parts to an application of any size, there is no such thing as ‘bug free’ code. In addition, the ‘quick fix’ the user asks for could take a month of developer time because it’s connected to half a dozen other bits of code all of which need to be changed–so they shouldn’t hold their breath.

For the next month, as I work at creating all sorts of new goodies (for WordPress, Wordform, and other weblogging tools), you can watch me break, repair, break, and then repair again my own weblog installations; all the while comfortably knowing its my site, my weblogs, my code that’s falling apart, not yours. Sort of like you being an observer behind one-way glass, and me being the insane patient under treatment.

Speaking of coding on the hoof, you saw it here first: iProngs and prodcasting.

Categories
Connecting

You must wear appropriate behavior at all times

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

When I read that the Indian Ocean quake had altered the earth’s rotation slightly and may have even caused the earth’s tilt to wobble a bit, my first reaction was to write a post pointing to this writing at Jonathon Delacour’s, referencing the comment he made last year about …the only way “the planet will slow on its axis, stop, and then slowly begin to rotate in the opposite direction”? is if I switch back to the Macintosh. I was going to ask in the post if he’d received his new Mac yet, but just as I titled the post and was about to publish it, I came to my senses.

“Horrors! What are you thinking, Shelley!” I remembered the condemnation that met Robert Scoble’s post on Sunday, when he wrote in complaint about the lack of first hand experience coming out about the tsumani:

It’s really disappointing. Citizen Journalism is really failing here. Almost no first-hand reports.

Scoble actually had to take a vacation from weblogging a day or so, as penance for his words; returning with link after link related to the earthquake, like doves of peace scattered across his page. If the reaction to his words was scathing condemnation, imagine what the reaction to mine would have been?

So I then thought about just sending Jonathon a quiet little email, pointing to the planetary wobble and asking if he’d received his Mac. After all, I’ve known Jonathon for years, surely he wouldn’t think that my comment showed that I was indifferent to the tragic nature of this event. I thought if anyone would understand the nuances of black humor, it would be him.

But I hesitated. Yes I’ve known Jonathon for years online, and have helped him through server-side issues, as he’s helped me with design; exchanging emails, phone calls, even books and music. We are friends as much as anyone can be in this disconnected environment. But I’ve never met Jonathon, face to face, and black humor is one of the most subtle and complex communication forms that exists (though the Shaklee Relief Pack comes close). I had to ask myself would he really understand the nature of my note, without there having been direct interaction between us? Or would he think that I was being, as Robert was to later call himself, “an insensitive boor”?

In the end, I didn’t write the post, or send the email. Perhaps this is just as well, because now I’m reading comments such as the following, in a post by Dori Smith:

How was the geek dinner tonight? I ask you that also regarding the recent tragic events in South Asia! Was it mentioned and if yes, was there some fund raisings for all the poor having lost shelters and loved ones?

or in a post at Joseph Duemer’s (who has been involved in rather fascinating cross-weblog comment discussion, more of which I will write about later):

Hey Joe, how about pouring those prodigious verbal energies into attention to our neighbors in South Asia? Lest the wail of suffering make all of us look small.

How uniquely 2004: the wisdom of the guardians of our conscience now being delivered to us as comment spam.