Categories
Just Shelley

The Art of Books: The cut and what you can afford to lose

I use an Exacta knife when cutting paper or dense cloth, but this won’t work with thicker materials such as gray or book board. This board is very thick and dense for strength, and normally you would use a special paper cutter or have the art shop cut the board into pieces for you. However, both techniques require money, so I buy my board either as scrap or in whole sheets, and then attempt to cut it with a box cutter knife.

I do okay with the larger pieces (they are covered, after all), but can’t seem to get the small cuts down. For instance, the Japanese stab binding requires that you cut a thin strip 1/8 inch wide off of one of the pieces for the cover, to allow for the book fold (you don’t fold the book at the spine with this type of binding). Cutting a strip 1/8 inch wide sounds easy–but it isn’t. I’ve ruined four cuttings already this weekend, and have accomplished little other than creating some nice scrap for small case bound journals.

Among the lessons I’ve learned is that when cutting, commit to the cut. You can’t stop every centimeter or so to check your progress when cutting thick board. If you do, instead of one straight line and two cleanly divided boards, you end up with several short, hesitant stabs and the resulting separation looks more like an act of luck than an act of precision.

In some ways, it’s rather like posting your writing or poetry or photos–if you don’t have confidence in your work before putting it online, you’re not going to find it, incrementally, from your readers’ reactions. Base your joy in your work on the approval of others, and your art will soon reflect the cut I just mentioned.

What a seemingly odd analogy, but it came to mind this morning during ruminations while I created yet another potential case book board. I realized that there is much of a sameness between the commonsense ‘rules’ of bookbinding and the commonsense ‘rules’ of our online efforts. Don’t cut what you can’t afford to lose can easily be rephrased to don’t post what you can’t afford to lose.

For instance, I don’t go into the art supply place and grab any old board and just start hacking away because the boards aren’t mine to hack. The same can be said of the personal lives of others, and you don’t post about friends and family, especially their private lives, without their concurrence–not unless you’re willing to lose them. I would think this goes without saying, and no one ever said free speech was free as in lunch or beer and not without cost.

This medium inspires a false intimacy, but you’re not going to want to post about your deepest thoughts and fears, or your innermost secrets because once they’re out there, everybody, and I mean everybody is going to know about them and probably even giggle about them over Big Macs at a WIFI enabled McDonald’s somewhere. This world is about six degrees of separation and there are six degrees of separation between the importance you attach to your thoughts and what a reader attaches to your ramblings; you’re cutting a single piece of board, they’re cutting six at a time, and the results will vary.

You’ll also want to be sparing with your rants, as well as cautious about posting your strongly held beliefs or opinions online–not unless you can afford to lose the right to change your mind. We all know that circumstances and experience can lead to growth and growth can lead to change, but reflect this change online and you’ll be hit with a chorus of, “But you said…you said…you said…but you said…you said…you said…”

It reminds me of the glues I use when creating a book: PVA glue bonds quickly and permanently and is intolerant to change, while slow bonding organics such as wheat starch paste give you the flexibility of being able to reposition the papers or boards if you find you made a mistake.

Life may be wheat starch paste, but webloggers are PVA.

Glue and cuts. Ultimately, the quality of the book transcends the cut and the glue, and reflects the materials used. All things have a purpose, and you can’t always use one thing as substitute for another not without risk. In bookbinding, you don’t use spit for glue, tooth floss for thread, and gray board works great as a hardcover material for a book, but I wouldn’t want to build a bridge of it.

Weblogging is the same; you can record your life in these pages, but you can’t find it here.

Speaking of which, both life and book board beckon.

Categories
Just Shelley

Here’s a thought

Tomorrow when you wake, you find that none of this is real.

We don’t exist.

We are nothing more than voices in your head.

Specters.

And you are quite mad.

Have a nice day!

Categories
Diversity

Web two, oh?

I find myself in agreement with Dave Winer and Marc Cantor about O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference, but maybe not for the same reasons.

I don’t have a problem with a more traditional presentation format, but Web 2.0 sounds, frankly, closed door and elitist. It seems like Tim O’Reilly is forgetting his open source, just plain folks roots.

What is it lately with events where we have to ask to be invited. Google has started this with both Orkut and Gmail, then Movable Type with the 3.0 beta, and now O’Reilly with this conference. Request an invitation frankly sounds like Oliver crying out, “Please sir. May I have some more?”

I don’t want to have to ask for an invite and then magically get one because there’s “room” (i.e. the event holders decide that you would add class to the event), or not (because we’re classless). If people want an invite only event, have one. I think these events do nothing more than promote the same *Upper One Hundred that always get promoted around here, and therefore the results of these events are highly suspect–but at least that would make more sense than Request an Invite

I can also see that the female/male speaker ratio follows the rigidly set and now infamous O’Reilly conference guideline of 10% women. However, in previous conferences, I have given O’Reilly the benefit of a doubt that if women aren’t applying to be speakers, it’s not the conference presenters fault if there are no women.

But unless I missed the call for papers earlier, it seems like the Web 2.0 speaker list is also invite only. Am I mistaken? If not then events such as these do much to promote technology and the Web as a genderless environment–genderless in this case meaning only one gender need apply.

I find myself getting tired of elitistism and “Request an Invite”. Events publicized such as these only serve to feather the nest of the people attending. “Oh look at us,” they say. “We’re the elite. We make the decisions. Give us your money, but you can keep your opinions to yourselves. If you want to matter, start a company and make a billion and we’ll listen.”

If we on the street doing the work, and buying the books, and using the tech, and keeping the companies running aren’t good enough, well, the Upper One Hundred can just take their little iPods and shove them where the sun don’t shine.

*Play on the term ‘Upper Ten Thousand’ used to designate the nobility in regency England

Categories
Diversity

I knew this one was coming

Surety be damned, the hell if I’m going to see women made the scapegoats for Abu Ghraib.

We’ve gone from this incident being one of frat boy behavior (and supposedly harmless) to blaming it all on women.

My first reaction is: Since when did President Bush get a sex change operation? Buck stops at the top, people. Buck stops at the top.

In some ways, this does reflect the issue of surety and twisting circumstances to an extreme so that a given ’side’ remains blameless. But we women shouldn’t feel singled out– the pundits are also blaming the Muslims and the Academic Left, too.

Personally, I blame the Australians. Damn Aussies, it’s all their fault. If they didn’t drive on the wrong side of the road, and throw around terms like ‘Bugger’ so much, this wouldn’t have happened.

They eat Vegemite, too. I mean, what kind of sick bastard eats Vegemite? But, not content with contaminating their own land, they send their actors and films and music and writing and culture to our country, and what’s worse, speak with a devastatingly sexy accent, which just lures in our youth (and not a few older of us, too), and then look what happens–good clean innocent American boys and girls pile naked men into a pyramid.

Bugger. Vegemite. Hugh Jackman. I rest my case.

(via Feministe)

Categories
Weblogging

A helping hand

While working on my next LAMP post, my thoughts drifted to those who are interested in using open source weblogging tools, but don’t want to play with the technology. After all, weblogging is about writing. I think it is. Isn’t it?

Another alternative to learning about LAMP and managing your own software updates is to hire someone to do the work for you. After all, there might a PHP-proficient student out there who needs 40.00 dollars to buy a text book, and here you sit with 40.00 and a burning desire to use WordPress. or Textpattern. Or b2evolution. Or Bloxsom. Or…

Instead of cash, consider barter (which I think is the better approach, myself): Tech person helps you install WordPress, and in exchange you buy them that CD or book or movie they’ve been wanting at Amazon.

As far as I know of, there is no central site anywhere listing webloggers who have technical skills, and who are willing and able to help others. So I’m starting one here, in this weblog page.

If you’re proficient with PHP, MySQL, Perl, Python, Linux, CSS, .NET, Java, or any other variation of technology we use within weblogging, and are interested in helping other webloggers get their sites going, put a note in the comments with a link to your site or resume, as well as a description of skills and weblogging tools you consider yourself proficient with. Or you can ping this post from your site, if you prefer.

If you’re interested in moving to a different environment, and need some help, consider contacting one of the people in this list. (If there is a list. There may not be webloggers with tech skills who need extra bucks, or a nice CD from Amazon. After all, aren’t we all rich, as well as popular?)

Note that I’d prefer that we restrict this to open source technologies. The reason why is that several proprietary tools have restrictions in their licenses about who can and cannot provide support for the tool. I don’t want to get into licensing issues.

Now, before you ping or comment, or contact anyone on this list, a couple of notes:

For those providing help:

When you agree to help someone, this means you have to help them. You can’t be impatient, surly, disdainful of their questions or skills, disregarding of their requests, and definitely–you can’t tell them what you think they should “need” or “want” (other than that which is necessary to run the tool, or in response to their request for your opinion).

Additionally, aside from a group of A-listers that can afford to do the ‘global hop and echo-echo’ dance, most of the people you’ll be helping won’t be rich. Keep your prices fair. Don’t cheat yourself, but don’t consider this a way of getting rich.

Take responsibility for your work. If you install a product and modify it, if it breaks because of your modification, fix it as soon as possible. Don’t push it off; don’t blow off the person; and definitely don’t blame it on the tool developers. Efforts like Textpattern and WordPress, and the other open source weblogging efforts, are difficult enough for the developers without them being blamed because you made a mistake.

Finally, be prepared to spend time answering questions and not charge for the time. You might charge a person 40.00 (or get a gift of a couple of CDs) to install WordPress and make some minor modifications, but they may have questions later–if you count every minute, then you’re missing the point of this effort. You’re helping another person, they’re helping you with a few bucks or a nice gift, but you both gain more from the exchange then just the compensation. Heck, you might even become friends.

For those requesting help:

Make sure you look at the experience and resumes and feel comfortable with the person before asking them for help. See their modifications in action, and how their own site works. Be prepared to give a good description of what you want before asking them for a quote.

Be responsible for your choice–please don’t come back to me and say it’s all my fault your site is now screwed because I’m attempting to bring folks together in this way. You are going with an open source product and getting help from someone you may not know; there are some risks involved. I personally think this adds interest, but respect that this may scare you to death.

In addition, no software is perfect. Bugs happen, and the best approach to a bug is with a sense of humor. Remember that not being able to post immediately will not result in anyone’s death or global warming. The developer has a responsibility to help you fix a problem, in a timely manner, but you shouldn’t ask them to wake up in the middle of the night to do so–unless the problem is severe enough to threaten to take down your server. This shouldn’t occur, though, because the only developers who sign up here are those who test their work, and ensure that it’s secure and using good, common sense development techniques. Ahem.

(And no, if the developer doesn’t read your mind and automatically give you everything you don’t know you want until after you want it, this is not a bug.)

Finally, don’t be cheap. If you’re not comfortable with the upfront costs, then you might check with other developers, or negotiate. But when the work is done and it looks good and works according to your request, pay up. The price may be in books from Amazon, or in bucks to PayPal–but regardless, pay up.

And ask questions if you have them, but don’t expect that buying that book at Amazon for the developer entitles you to free updates and modifications, forever. That would be taking advantage, and we don’t take advantage of our friends.

This is an experiment of trying to get those with skills to offer connected up with those who need the skills. We’ll see how it goes. If enough interest is generated, I’ll put a permanent link to this page in the sidebar.

(As for income tax and laws of the land, this is why I prefer barter…)