Some interesting reading in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance this evening. Here’s a little excerpt, which philosophically relates to my earlier discussions about faceted classification. Pirsig first defines classical vs. romantic views of the world:

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees in its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.

“The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. ‘Art’ when it is opposed to ‘Science’ is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition, and esthetic conscience…”

and so on. the classic dichotomy. Then here’s where it gets interesting:

“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness and call that handful of sand the world … Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it … We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.

“The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way, and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles—sizes in different piles—grain shapes in different piles—subtypes of grain shapes in different piles—grades of opacity in different piles—and so on, and on, and on. You’d think the process of subdivison and classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn’t. It just goes on and on.

“Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.

“What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to niether of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding would not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken…”

One twist on this that came to mind for me was what I’d call romantic classifications, such as allmusic, where you can start with an artist and say “I want something more playful” or “more dark” or “less sophisticated” or “similarly harsh but more arranged”. If you step back further and look at genres of media, some have only vague emotional ties (“rock and roll” might be somewhat harsh and rebellious, but not necessarily… “classical” might be relaxing and proper, but not necessarily) and others are completey emotionally detached (“documentary” has only to do with the approach to filmmaking, it doesn’t have to be educational or shocking or anything else). So it’s not surprising that allmusic chose to reclassify their database.

Speaking of media classification, have you seen this article about the group trying to find an algorithm for pop music? I like the other potential uses for the database that Polyphonic HMI is building… for example, computer-generated mix tapes. Not only could the computer find recommended music based on your current collection, it could also build a mix tape that has a nice balance of loud/soft, slow/fast tempo, etc…!

I bought Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a long time ago and its sat next to my bed for ages. Eventually it moved to the bookshelf. Then a girl mentioned it totally out of the blue (I like that: it indicates to me that it’s constantly at the front of her mind, so it must be meaningful) and she insisted that I read it.

I’m now enthralled. Originally published in 1974, this book has lost none of its relevance. I guess that’s what makes it a classic. So far it seems the author thinks a lot like I do, and he feels like an outsider as a result.

I’ll post more when I pass the 100 page mark (where, apparently, it starts to get really good.)

My note to yahoo, upon finding my guru@yahoo.com account deactivated:

Hello,

I tried to sign in to Yahoo! groups today and it says my account has been deactivated. I looked through the TOS and I’m not aware of any violations I
might have made. Perhaps you could clarify, or maybe you’re mistaken? I use
the account only occasionally for Yahoo groups and to book airline tickets.

By the way, I did have e-mail going for a while, but I got hundreds of spams,
lots of “Return to sender” messages, and lots of personal messages intended for someone else. So I stopped using mail a while ago. I think I got so many messages because my Yahoo ID is so simple.

Thanks for your help!

Carl Tashian

Their reply:
From: Yahoo!Games
Subject: Re: Feedback - Other
Date: November 19, 2003 12:59:24 PM EST
To: Carl Tashian
Reply-To: Yahoo!Games

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Games.

Your Yahoo! account was disabled pursuant to the Yahoo! Terms of Service
(TOS). The Yahoo! TOS can be found for your review at:

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Yahoo! Customer Care

My second reply:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Carl Tashian.

I noticed my response came from Yahoo! Games. Did this violation have something to do with Yahoo Games? I haven’t ever used Yahoo Games, so I can’t see how I might have violated any Terms of Service. Perhaps you could clarify what happened? I can imagine that you might be confusing me with someone else. As I said before, I only ever use one Yahoo Group and Yahoo Travel. But I would like to have my account back, because people know me by my Yahoo username.

Thank you again for contacting Carl Tashian.

Regards,

Carl Tashian

to be continued…

The Lizard Lounge is a club beneath a restaurant in Harpo, that section of Mass Ave between Harvard and Porter Squares in Cambridge. The club is intimate and friendly, it has nice oriental rugs, red curtains and red lighting, and it always delivers a good show. The stage is right there on the floor, so if you show up early and get a seat, the perfomer will be singing into your beer. Last night I went to there to see Nashville “alt-folk” singer Sarah Siskind and the Cambridge-based Maybe Baby. It was really an all-star cast up there. Sarah sounded great with and without accompaniment. I haven’t heard her sing in years, so it was a real treat because I think she’s zoned in on a style and written some great songs since then. Sometimes Sarah looks and sounds like she just stepped out of the 1800s, though her arrangements have a modern twist to them. She has really good control of her voice, and she can really hit upon some haunting melodies. If you get a chance, pick up the record Covered.

Maybe Baby was also pretty tasty. Last night it was five-piece band with petal steel replacing the usual organ/piano. They sounded pretty excellent, and it was great to see Jennifer Kimball again (I saw her probably 10 years ago with Jonatha Brook & The Story). I liked being so close to the stage, watching Duke Levine’s insane guitar solos and Billy Beard’s drumming. Good show!

So I got bluetooth going on my new cellphone, and I’m using iSync to sync up all my contacts now. I update a phone number in my Apple address book, and my phone will sync. So will my iPod.

But I can’t stop thinking about doing contact management in a more distributed way, not just distributed between all my devices, but distributed between all the people in my network. I’m surely not the first or second person to think of it this way, but it seems like there’s no great implementation yet. Why do I need to manage my address book independently of everyone else? The trouble is, if Jane tells everyone she has a new cell phone number, all of her contacts have to update their address books. So why not have Jane store her contact information on a server, and she can update it as she chooses. I sync to this server when I’m connected, and my local copy is updated automatically. If my phone syncs up shortly after, then I never really need to know that Jane changed her number. It just changes because Jane is part of my network. This is a sort of Friendster/LDAP hybrid. I like it.

Jane has a blog, too, perhaps, that’s tied into her network. Her blog has access control, so she can write an entry which is readable by everyone immediately around her, a specific group of people, everyone two or three links out in the network, or the entire world. The resulting discussion within each entry is also limited in scope. Since Jane has already established a trust relationship with the people in her immediate network, she can trust them with some items that she wouldn’t trust others with. Just as people have different social groups that they’re in: work, place (neighborhood), faith, virtual, etc. Jane needs controls over who sees which parts of her blog. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk about her job with people from her church, etc.

I’ve been thinking about the relative speeds at which different pieces of information move .. and the relative depth of these chunks of information, and some other psychadelic stuff like that.

For example, consider a continuum which has the “fast” information on one end. The fastest being a chat room, then Usenet, then Slashdot and news organizations (the first level of editorial logic and classification). On the slower end, you have “knowlege bases”, the Linux Documentation Project, and other bigger (slower-changing) documents. Standards documents and RFCs are probably at the slowest end. They are infrastructure documents.

I think there’s an interesting analogy here with houses, ala How Buildings Learn. The fastest moving parts of a house are the people and their stuff. The slow moving parts are the biggest parts: the foundation, the roof, etc. If you look at the industries, the furniture and “stuff” industries are the fastest moving, and the building industry is relatively slow moving, with raw material standards like wooden 2x4s and PVC tubing.

And of course, in both worlds, there’s room for experimentation on the infrastructure levels. A Frank Ghery building is an infrastructure experiment. His projects require the use of new materials and new construction techniques, etc. But it’s expensive. Interestingly, the entire Open Source movement has grown from the bottom up, out of the infrastructure, starting with the kernel, the core of a computer’s software operations. Even now, Open Source projects haven’t been able to come up with decent user interfaces and “facades” for their work. It’s largely underground, and I think that’s why it’s taking over the industry.

As Stewart Brand discusses in How Buildings Learn, many organizations spend ludicrous sums of money on the facades of their buildings, more so than any structural costs. Maybe there are similar costs associated with facades (user interfaces) in software, and that’s why OSS hasn’t addressed these yet. Or maybe the design “dictatorship” (like what Apple does) isn’t strong enough among the OSS community, so design is too fractured and the audience is too vague for anything to be labeled “user-centered”.

Hmm.

I heard a new phrase tonight. “Watch out everyone, I’m going to shift the telescope dome.” The Harvard student astronomers were hosting a viewing of this evening’s lunar eclipse, and Patrick and I made an impromptu visit. The telescope is situated on the roof of Harvard’s Science Center, right near the Yard. Take the elevator to the 8th floor, then walk up two flights. The view of the city from this roof was just as pretty as the eclipse itself, with Harvard’s steeples right in front, the architecture around the Square in the foreground, and Boston off in the distance. And the place was packed; this is definitely a Boston Secret. Too bad it’s only open to the Harvard community.

Their biggest telescope (the domed one) was overkill for moonwatching. You could see a small sliver of the corner of the moon in very good detail. But they did have a smaller scope with a nice view, and the thing looked great with the naked eye. Good to be up there with everyone, huddling in the cold and watching the sky and city. I like astronomical events because they bring everyone together with a common cause, even if the cause is just “wow, that’s cool!” Walking around Harvard Yard afterwards, everyone was stopped in their tracks paying a gawking tribute to the moon.

I saw a sign on a light post earlier today, “LOST COYOTE” — with a photo of a coyote and phone number snippets at the bottom. I didn’t know there was an eclipse, so I didn’t get it at the time, but I have to say someone has a good sense of humor.

I saw a Michael Joo exhibition at the MIT Media Lab today.

I can’t say I was exactly blown away by the experience. While I like an artist who incorporates science into their work (for example, a rope and noose, with a dense, two-year-old synthetic crystal structure growing on the knot of the noose), few of the pieces meant anything to me (or were even visually interesting), even after reading the descriptions. He was in the Venice Bianale recently, so I want to believe he does good work, but I really wasn’t feeling this exhibition.

Only five minutes prior to entering the exhibition, I was speaking with Robin about how some art, if you see it as a story, will leave a few key pieces missing for you to fill in. The art then makes a connection with the viewer through those missing piece. Take David Blaine for example. As far as I know, he never gave a real reason for doing his 44 days without food. I think he said he wanted to challenge himself, but that’s all I heard.

To me, his stunts fall clearly into the perforance art category, rather than protest or magic. He starved himself for whatever reason you wanted him to! You fill in the blank. Maybe it’s for peace. Maybe it’s against world hunger. Maybe he just wanted to protest against bad English food. He didn’t say, but since people can’t believe that he’d just do it for no reason, they have to assign some value to his stunt. It’s too fantastic not to! So the whole thing became political in the end. People got angry about the stunt. To me, it’s very effective art.

Wasn’t this about Michael Joo, though?

Oh well. I think I just wasn’t in the mood to fill his blanks in. Maybe I didn’t see where the blanks were. Maybe there were too many blanks. Or no blanks.

hi Patrick,

Got your VM.

We have a blog here in the Engineering department at Zipcar, and we use for general progress reports. Fleet/Operations has just created one for themselves, as well. We try to send a blog out to everyon in the company each week (on Fridays), and cover current and a little future progress.

You’d quickly fall asleep if you tried to read our blog in reverse chonological order, though, because the narrative flow from one week to the next is non-existant, and we reiterate a lot (“I’m doing XYZ next week”, followed by “This week, I finished XYZ”). But you could ask “what were we doing last July”, read one entry around there, and get a pretty good idea.

But I’d argue that you’re putting too much stock in blogs. The trouble with them is there’s only a handful of ways to slice the data: temporally, by keyword, and maybe by category. It’s really just a diary. While there’s something nice about the simplicity of blogs, I think this simplicity gets people believing that blogs are the end-all solution for many kinds of problems; the reality of it is, I think a lot of blogs are used in leiu of a more appropriate tool (that might not exist yet).

For example, I see Bugzilla as a better (though still not ideal) solution when it comes to software development. Bugzilla lets us keep up with what we’re going to do AND notify the appropriate people when progress is made on the items they’re interested in. But bugzilla is just blog * N, and the trouble with it is that it’s very granular and doesn’t give a good “macro” perspective. Bugzilla forces us to pose everything as a problem, and it isn’t good for much else, like medium- or long-term planning or “we hired an intern this week” (status = RESOLVED ;-)

So we use MT as our meta-blog, and that keeps people informed about things without the intimidation of going into bugzilla and looking around. It also lets us speak to some of the non-bugs I mentioned above.

But back to Bugzilla, if you’ll let me ride the high horse for a moment. Bugzilla also lacks a coherent categorization feature when you have hundreds or thousands of bugs. You could talk about the “component” of your software product that this bug applies to, but with a quickly changing landscape, you’d end up spending a ton of time adding and retiring components. Also, components are frequently in the solution space, and bugzilla is for reporting problems, so bugs will get mis-classified. Now you need someone to go through all of them as they come in, diligently verifying and reclassifying, etc.

On that note, I’ve been thinking a lot about QA lately, and how perspective changes a problem and its possible solution set. I could enter a bug called “I have an ear infection and need some antibiotics”, or I could enter one called “I can’t hear well and I keep getting dizzy.” The former is really a solution stated without symptoms, a self-diagnosis. I hear these every day, and they’re usually wrong. I instinctively tell people to back up, tell me what the symptoms are, explain whether they can reproduce it or not, etc. When a problem is rephrased like this, I’m no longer biased toward their solution, and I can perhaps provide something better than they had in mind.

A better method of classification might be to a “google news”-style summary page that classifies bugs simply by finding commonalities within the text. New components are auto-generated, and Bugzilla can tell you which components are the most active right now. This lets you group and identify common problems, so you’ll more easily spot duplicates and can see which parts of the system are most prone to failure at any time. Do you know much about this kind of data mining and how it works?

Anyway, what I’m really talking about is the reporting part of bugzilla, which is not really a part of bugzilla at all. I think bugzilla was created to solve an operational problem of software development, not an analytical/planning problem, so it’s not yet great for aggregation and so on. Certainly the built-in bugzilla metrics (like the “# open bugs over time” graph) are cute but say nothing that you don’t already know.

I think it’s time for something else. I want to sit down with a couple other people and figure out what it is.

Carl

feeling very inspired after a long chat with Freddie and Daniel and everyone else. hmm….

Some things to ponder:

Daniel wanted to start “a brand” … selling the lifestyle, and all that sort of rot. Get some manufacturing going in China, blah blah. I like the idea. But I have a feeling it’s logistically more difficult than just “send them your drawings, and they’ll do it”…? Daniel wanted to manufacture odd skin belts (alligator, lizard, yak, ‘coon skin, whatever) ; my twist on it was to have buckles picturing enameled cartoony animals (the animal whose skin is wrapped around your waist) in bright colors. There’s an (ironic?) contrast here: I think of cartoons as indestructable, but the skin is clear evidence of destruction/reappropriation.

Anyway, it’s always fun to think of having a “brand” and building an image, an office/retail space, a philosophy, and maybe even a product (!) from it over time. I was picturing an office that looks like what one might call “homey”.. which really means it has real character to it, it isn’t just a sterile working space. In fact, if I started an office, I’d even like to do it in a rezoned house. And sort of “move in.” Hell, we spend more time at work than we do (awake) at home, so why not make it comfy?

This leads me on to one of the ideas Freddie seemed most excited about: The Architect’s House. It’s a TV show, perhaps on H&G or PBS, covering the homes of working architects. The architect is the host for each episode— similar to MTV Cribs, but instead of simply adding attitude and entertainment (sometimes the Cribs host IS the show)— The Architect’s House would have enlightening tips for dwellers everywhere.

Why architects? A good architect can speak intelligently about space and design and probably has a smart, simple, and elegant home. And since most architects don’t live in the monstrocities you see on MTV Cribs, the whole show is more accessible, not just a vanity project.

Why not have a narrator? A producer could nudge the architect and provide a little outside interest.. but I think it’s best to let the architect explain (and, in a sense, be held accountable for) his work. And he’ll know things about the place that might typically escape notice.

Some other ideas we talked about were:

- Novels that change typeface as you go along. Why not? Who decided that we’re limited to bold and italics? I understand that dynamic type can be distracting, but it all depends on how you use it. The argument here is that anything on paper will be visual by nature, so why not make the most of the medium by introducing some well-chosen type modifications? Also, better attention could be paid to the points at which page breaks occur in a novel. For example, you end a page when the suspense peaks, and on the next page, in big letters, the punch line of the book:

THE BUTLER DID IT

or whatever.

- We talked about doing an NPR-style radio show, and found that we both wanted to be the chooser of interstitial music during All Things Considered. How many others share this dream? Were it just me putting a radio show together, I’d probably end up with great interstitial music separated by trite, lackluster commentary similar to what you’ll find in this blog. But maybe I could rely on Freddie to bring insightful ideas and good drama to the table.

- Freddie’s working on an Enterprise Perl book while I do Boston Secrets. I like the Enterprise Perl idea a lot. Of course, the obvious question is: What, exactly, is an “enterprise”?

- We also went over Market of Niche stuff; new methods of categorization for online products. The idea is to pick up on new ways to group items. This could be anything from Booker Prize-winning books to “DVDs for showing your friends how cool you and your Dolby 5.1 system are.” I’m starting to wonder about the latter part even more— how does this tie into the “brand” above. Why not construct an Internet-based boutique that sells products from various online retailers, under one roof, with a nice look and consistent style? A meta-store that filters out all the bullshit and gives you what’s “cool” — yeah.

I watched the Criterion version of In The Mood For Love over the weekend.

Words can’t really describe this movie, nor can the graphic above, taken from the movie’s not-so-great web site, which also won’t give you any idea how beautiful and sensual this movie is.

The textures throughout this movie are what put it beyond description. I think director Wong Kar-Wai and his DP have an amazing sense of color and composition; every shot looks like a painting to me. I kept wanting to reach out and touch the sets, they were so well lit and decorated with such lush textures. The colors are beautifully saturated throughout, but by no means overbearing. A spot of bright color here and there mostly, but in key scenes when the emotions run high, the whole screen is soaked in deep red. There’s a lot of sexuality in this movie, even though there are no traditional sex scenes, or even any kissing that I can remember.

Oh, and did I mention the music? The running musical theme is a simple violin line that is so nostalgic and classic with a Chinese twist. It is central to the vibe of this movie. Very nice.

The main characters, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, hardly touch each other as their love grows. There are frequent lingering moments: someone staring out the window longingly or smoking a cigarette. I think of these as the main characters’ attempts at escape, if only mentally. They’re wanting to make a different reality come true, a reality in which they can be together. The success is limited… so there’s a real sense of restraint to this movie that’s key. You see it in their clothes (all very fitted), in their mannerisms, and in their conversation. Yet it’s very relaxed in its pace. An interesting combination.

The patterns in this movie are SO GREAT. Everywhere: the wallpaper, the dresses, the ties. End papers. They remind me of The Royal Tenenbaums and Amelie.

I need to re-read my copy of Understanding Movies so I can write a real, coherent movie review (a valuable skill!)