danger smells like clean socks

Since when do pubications (granted, it's ESPN) allow photogs to publish using a fisheye lens? (source)

I love it!

I literally spent 8 minutes (I can tell cause I listened to Madonna's "4 Minutes" twice, which conceivably should be about eight minutes long) trying to determine when to use "fast" and when to use "quick."

I tend to get anal about our MindTouch press releases and newsletters when it comes to phrasing and grammar (amusing, I'm sure, given the atrocity that is this tabulas). Because of this, I try to read through all our public releases at least once.

One line in a email newsletter caught my eye today: "For those of you in need of vendor-backed support, we have updated our support plans for our Enterprise customers with response times as fast as four hours and emergency bug escalation."

Can anybody catch what would bug me? "... as fast as four hours"

It's was my previous understanding that fast is a function of speed, while quick is a function of time. The implication being that something that is fast naturally has a lot of speed (you don't describe a car as quick), while quick is something that happens in a short period of time. You don't describe Tywon Lawson as fast (3360 hits on Google), but you certainly describe him as quick (33,600 hits on Google).

So which is it? Do we have response times as fast as four hours or as quick as four hours? I thought it'd be pretty clearly quick, but it didn't feel right. The explicit time to response ("four hours") which seems to set a time period throws off the whole flow of the sentence. (And of course, we lose the whole alliterative aspect; as fast as four sounds nice). I'm also pretty sure "as fast as" is one of those phrases you can't break up (what are those called, again?)

After about 30 minutes, I've resolved to leave the sentence alone. Pretty pointless, huh?

Edit: A Google search seems to back up the etymology of fast vs. quick. On LiveJournal, of all places...

roy

I finally got around to updating the default Tabulas templates. I've been fixing up the markup coming up for the gallery and journal views, and I figured the default templates should look decent.

I'm not sure what to do with the "other" default templates. They look so ass-y, I'm tempted just to delete them.

. . .

I also recently switched over all new user accounts to use the new control panel by default.

If you're not using it yet, I suggest you make the switch ASAP, cause I'll be forcing everybody to migrate over soon (let's find those bugs together!)

. . .

Things are so busy lately. Fortunately, I've started a weekly MindTouch poker game at my place to balance out work & play (but it's with coworkers, so I don't know if that's a net plus or not). We've played twice, and I won last week. I hope we play again this week ... it's good fun ;D

. . .

Holy crap, Madonna/Timbaland/Justin Timberlake's latest has an awesome bassline (the video sucks, it's only here so you can listen to it):

As much as I love the bassline, I hate that Madonna's a part of this song. I find her incredibly annoying - all that incessant name dropping by JT is grating. Yes, I can see an old lady gyrating. Yes, I realize that's Madonna. :(

How long do you think before the NBA adopts this song as their theme song for some playoff series (if they haven't already done so)?

do you feel the weight of the world singin' sorrow
or to you is it just not real
cause you got your own things
and we all have our things, I guess...

- rocket summer "do you feel" (track uploaded as the top track of my mixtape)

I felt an immense sadness when I read this comment left in my journal yesterday: "they've grown up and stopped blogging or blog very infrequently because that's what happens when you enter the real world... "

Why is this? Why is it, as we grow older, when we have more wisdom to offer ... the less we give? Why is it, when we have more reasons to stay in touch with people from the past ... we withdraw?

There seems to be a few recurring themes from people who disappear:

• The minutiae just isn't fascinating anymore. Let's face it - most people who write online don't add anything meaningful (this site being a great example of this). Growing older, there seem to be more important things than writing about your mom saving money by "splitting" jewelry (don't forget Mother's Day is Sunday, a fact my mom didn't let me forget when I called her today). Me, I love the details. It helps me get through my day by breathing levity into my idealistic (and thus disappointing) worldview.
  
• It's embarassing to capture naivety online. There's nothing more embarassing than reading some vague entry pining about some girl. Memories are suppressed for a reason - online journals make it impossible to forget. Of course, since I have no shame I feel no regret in posting pictures like this:
  
  
  
  
• Being busy. Probably the most common reason I hear. Of course, these same people manage to find time to watch shows like American Idol and reality shows on MTV.
  
• Having nothing to write about. The most important fact of human nature (and this rule applies to everybody) is that people love to talk about themselves. People love to talk about themselves, and I'm pretty sure they love to write about themselves, too. What people fear is the empty response from the void ... so when people really say "they have nothing to write about," what they really mean is, "I have tons to write about, but I never get a response." At least when they're talking to somebody who's (seemingly) listening intently (a skill I've mastered), they can believe somebody is listening. But here's the thing: just because there are no responses doesn't mean nobody's reading.
  
• Privacy is important. The one legitimate reason. The growth of sites like Wordpress and Facebook are rather depressing, because they reinforce the (false) belief that controlling privacy across the web is impossible. Facebook's spent a lot of user goodwill on their continual privacy blunders, and that debt carries over to other social networks. People are simply scared that what they write cannot be controlled, and that really truly sucks ... because it's totally not true. (LiveJournal is a great example of this). Whenever I try to imagine where the web will be 5 years from now, I don't imagine much of a difference from the present. The biggest thing in five years will be authenticated data portability - everybody is figuring out data portability now, so granular ACL on that data is logically next.

. . .

and as they strolled along
his heart broke out in song
from all the things and the thoughts and the assumptions he had wrong

- rocket summer "never knew"

. . .

Personally, all the warts of an online journal (loss of privacy, protential for embarassment) don't come close to outweighting the benefit:it is proof of my growth, as a person, through the past five years. Every story of my life, every feeling of my insignificant life, every transition (and lackthereof) ... I can go back at any time and read over it. And to read heart-felt comments on personal posts from long-lost friends reminds me of the good times and all the people in my life who've helped shape me into who I am today.

Anyways, I wish more of my friends would write. I miss you guys.

. . .

and show me everything you've got
i know you're scared
but let your words destruct
you gotta take that step, and your heart, just let it pour out

 - rocket summer "show me everything you've got"

. . .

. . .

( I'm willing to entertain the possibility that my continual journaling is the result of never outgrowing immaturity, in which case the burden is clearly on me to grow up and find a life; thus discontinuing my disjointed ramblings! )

roy

i want to apologize for this post. i was about to pass otu (lunesta induced), when i had an idea for deki wiki which i think needs to be captured now (in case i forgot tomorrow morning). so if this makes no sense ... sorry

abolish the site navigation. problems as i see them: we can't organize shit inside wiki.opengarden.org. it's hard. i'm not even relying on the nav pane most of the time. if i wanted the site navigation, i'd just push wiki.tree() out to skinning variable. 

it occured to me when i was thinking of our last blog post about an xml-rpc extension wrapper in php ... the location of the information is under a user page on our wiki ... not really the correct spot.

but who cares!

instead of having an automatically generated opt-in hierarchy, each new page should start from scratch. it should be forced to make it association to whomever it wants to generate that navigation.

could the freeform association ever mesh with the directory listing in a usable UI manner. i know i'm probably in the small minority of people who think the new link dialogs are actually awesome, but we've already done it there. two modes: search for freeform, and directory for listing.

this mentality is equally applicable when creating relationships between pages.

currently, the hierarchy is very strongly embedded inside deki wiki. but what if we took it step by step. 

first step, remove the existing nav pane from the UI... second step: create a new dialog called "associate page".  implicifit associations to parents, children, and siblings are already created (hierarchies aren't removed in this scenario).

the dialog has a similar view as the link search dialog, except it lets you make muitliple selections; each selection becomes an association. screw that; first iteration, you simply match all pages which have the same tags. you can choose to remove any of those pages from your list (wont' delete the tag, just store a ui state). 

these associations show up along the left side, where the old nav pane existed. you can move these around all over the place. oh snap, maybe you can even do an inline display title edit. that would be nasty. how the hell could this be done accesibility? i've gone ahead and created the js dream version ... but it needs to be accessible first.

i mean, for larger wikis, hierarchies break down incredibly. its impossible to get a few people to create correct hierarchies ... and then there's always overclassification of content to the point you need like 10 pages to find what you were looking for (a search would have performed remarkably better).

each additionally page could be sorted in any order, and you could make an ajax call to see subchildren and sort those, to

Pros: it demphasizes the hierarchical behavior for trying to organize content. people keep messing with hierarchies by organizing, organizing, organizing ... it becomes equivalent of trying to fit a  triangle into a smaller circle. It requires no API changes: this feature could be built in parallel with minimal API work - putting together a PHP prototype would be trivial. (Maybe my weekend activity if sober roy doesn't shit all over this idea). hierarchies are awesome when there's a clear path to follow to apply permissions, and delete files.

so maybe in the same we decoupled the display title and url title in the front-end, we can also ... shit shit shit lost the idea. this song is making me do a really gay dance in my chair. oh yeah, we can decouple the "relationships" between pages with the "organization of the pages". relationships = tags, hierarchy = organization

i'm working on the deuce skin (finally). this would be an intersting for me to try it out with the enterprise skin. woot.

cons: it's a whole knew paradigm for the users. do people understand tagging? right now, tagging sucks as a feature, so i don't even know if it will work. fortunatekly, it's on tap to be fixxed for the next big release, and i'm going to write the specs for it.

well, the freeform associations eventually lead to a wiki that's completely unmanagable (since everybody's doing whatever). the biggest question: will it even work? my mind, right now, says yes. although it refuses to let me see through the haze for the solution.

for the record, aaron had a similar idea to this, but since he never got it down in writing, i win! (that, and i'm spectangularly awesome.

good god, this lunesta really fucked me up. time to try to cral back to bed.[

please, p[lease make sense tomorrow morning