On Tuesday, I had breakfast with Tony Byrne of CMSWatch. We ate at the famous Tastee Diner in Silver Spring, MD. We had a great conversation. I ran my ideas about content management and metaphor past him, and he told me about the work of CM Pros. It was great to talk shop with him. Later, I was honored to see that he linked to me, and even called me smart. It’s amazing what greasy diner food will make people think.

Apologies for lack of posting in the last week. WordPress broke, so I had to reinstall. Fortunately, all went very smoothly this morning! I backed up the WordPress database several times — can never be too careful — and then reinstalled the blog. Once it was reinstalled, I inserted all the previous data into the database. Of course, I left out the users table, which is where all the problems were.

All I can say is thank the computer gods for phpMyAdmin!

Have you ever watched from your window as your neighbor’s dog dumps in your garden. Perhaps you thought to yourself of your neighbor, “Ugh, I could kill that guy!” No doubt, we’ve all had moments where we used the word “kill” or “murder” without even really picturing the act itself. Most of us living in large cities experience this frequently with other drivers on the road.

To say, “I could kill that guy!” is an example of a conceptual blend, described in The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. In a conceptual blend, we take two unrelated concepts and merge certain aspects. When we blurt out our murderous intentions, we’re not really stating that we want to kill someone, and listeners do not immediately run to the police. Our true intentions are usually obvious because we’re simply blending one aspect of the concept of murder with the current situation.

From murder’s concept, we take the level of anger we believe necessary to commit murder — not the act itself, not the inevitable consequences. To express our anger, we blend that part of the murder concept with the current situation, and listeners’ brains are wired to pay attention only to that salient part. The act, from our point of view, is effortless but it is this ability that separates us from other species and that challenges artificial intelligence researchers. How can we teach computers about concepts like murder when humans use these concepts in a variety of circumstances?

Crucial to understanding the central argument of The Way We Think is the notion of form. We humans have devised numerous ways of representing ideas and perceptions. Sheet music, for example, represents sounds you can make with an instrument. By creating forms, we give ourselves means for manipulating and understanding concepts, but it’s important to understand that we’re not manipulating the thing itself. Trained musicians do not look at a sheet of notation and see a jumble of notes. They hear the song inside their head. What gives the notation (the form) meaning is the object behind it.

Fauconnier and Turner use the analogy of Achilles’ armor: we recognize the warrior inside the armor by what he’s wearing, but the armor is nothing without the warrior inside. Frankly, the analogy didn’t do it for me, and it was only when I started thinking about real-world examples of form, of ways we have to represent ideas, that I understood the idea.

I’m still only two chapters into the book, and I haven’t hit upon anything that directly relates to my thinking about content management but the leading quote of the first chapter did strike a chord:

It is far more useful to view computational science as part of the problem, rather than the solution. The problem is understanding how humans can have invented explicit, algorithmically drive machine when our brains do not operate in this way. The solution, if it ever comes, will be found looking inside ourselves. (Merlin Donald, “Computation: Part of the Problem of Creativity” in Behavior and Brain Sciences 17:3)

If the problems with content management could be summed up in a few sentences, this quote would do it. The issue with content management is that the software has been designed with the assumption that organizations behave like machines — in structured, predictable ways. We therefore take the form (say, the flowchart for producing a regulation) over the object it represents (the actual interactions between people to create the document).

Ta-da List: Simple sharable to-do lists. To-do list, todo list, task manager, task list, todo task, easy list, simple todo, free todo list manager.
Need a quick to-do list manager? This app is so simple it’s genius. The interface design is brilliant. I can easily enter list items without ever having to touch the mouse. Typing in a list item and hitting return automatically adds the item to my list and brings up a blank field in focus for me to type the next item.
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Follow-up:
Completely cannibalized Ryan’s excellent wp-delicious plug-in to publish a feed from my ta-da list.

Justin’s Links: dark night flick
By way of kottke.org, I found Justin Hall’s late-night 10-minute rant. Justin recounts his addiction (my word, not his) to writing about his life online and how it has effected his personal relationships. This addiction, it seems like any other, is disruptive and leads to mistrust.

Watching it, two things went through my head:

• This is what happens when people take themselves too seriously.
• I’m so glad I have Sarah.

Despite thinking these things, I respect Justin. It’s not like we haven’t all wondered about lonliness. It’s not like there aren’t other “addictions” in our lives that disrupt our personal connections to other people. Intimacy requires balance — not too much, and not too little. Balance requires attention and focus — it can’t just happen on its own.

Having a ball: sequins and cowboy cookies | csmonitor.com

Washington’s newest luxury hotel, the Mandarin Oriental, is preparing for a “three-day Inaugural feeding frenzy,” including 400 pounds of lobster, 16,000 pieces of shrimp, and 250 dozen “Laura Bush Cowboy” cookies.

In 1945, wartime President Roosevelt wanted a scaled-down celebration for his fourth inaugural. Congress had appropriated $20,000 for the event; the White House only spent $2,000. He cancelled the parade and the ball and held his swearing in at the White House, followed by a cold lunch of chicken salad, rolls without butter, and unfrosted pound cake.

Rock, Rolling Over (washingtonpost.com)

“A lot of musical genres go through peaks and valleys,” says [one programming director]. “Clearly, rock music is not in one of those peak periods. . . . People who run stations can’t make the music better or more mass-appeal. We are, ultimately, in the business of distributing what the music industry produces, and we can’t take a mediocre product and make it sound great.”

Um. This is a load of crap. Radio can be the engine of demand. With narrow playlists and companies owning multiple stations in a given market, the radio industry is cannibalizing itself from both ends.

What makes a good secretary of State? | csmonitor.com

With Condoleezza Rice facing Senate hearings Tuesday on her nomination as secretary of State, the question of what makes a successful captain at the helm of diplomacy is again on the Washington agenda - amplified by challenges from the Middle East to East Asia.

Arguably, the most important cabinet position these days… I’ll miss Powell…

No More Internet for Them: South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Fed up over problems stemming from viruses and spyware, some computer users are giving up or curbing their use of the Web.

In 1999 or thereabouts, I created a sitemap for a client that did not follow the traditional “org chart” approach. Instead, it used circles (or “bubbles” for the nodes) and linked them with narrowing lines. The narrowing lines were meant to show direction, such that at any point along the line, you knew which way the user was being led. Typically, diagrams use arrow heads, which can be difficult to follow across long distance, or with complex structures.

To create the narrowing line in Visio, follow these steps:

1. Open the Drawing Explorer window by choosing it from the View menu.
2. In the Drawing Explorer window, right-click on the Line Patters folder and choose New Pattern…
3. In the dialog box, name your line pattern “narrowing” and choose the behavior button that looks like one solid continuous line. The behavior determines how Visio will apply your pattern to the line. This behavior indicates that Visio should stretch the pattern across the entire line.
   
   
4. The line pattern will now appear in the Drawing Explorer. Right-click the narrowing pattern and choose “Edit Pattern…” This will bring up a new drawing window. Anything you draw in this window will be translated to the line pattern. Your best bet is to orient the pattern horizontally. To create a narrowing line, draw a trapezoid on it’s side:
   
   
5. When you’re done, close the window with the close box in the upper right corner. Visio will ask if you’d like to update shapes using narrowing as a pattern. Tell it, sure!
6. Now connect two shapes. Select the connector and choose “Line…” from the Format menu. In the Pattern drop-down, choose narrowing. You’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the list.
7. That’s all there is to it! You’ll have to experiment with line weight to make it look like anything.

This is from McSweeney’s, by way of email…

Dear Sarah “Fan Girl” Williams,

We regret to inform you that you have not been selected as a member of
this year’s class. Being able to recite, verbatim, the lines from
every Orlando Bloom movie, while impressive, is not technically a
superpower. Also, the fact that you are prohibited by law from coming
within 10 miles of Orlando Bloom might limit our team’s scope of
service. Thank you for your interest in Xavier’s School of Exceptional
Youth.

Sincerely,
Professor X

Sarah and I saw the Kirov Ballet Company perform Cinderella on Wednesday night at the Kennedy Center. I’m not the biggest ballet enthusiast, but under Sarah’s tutelage have come to recognize good dance when I see it. Admittedly, I’ve dozed during most ballet performances I’ve been to.

Both the NY Times and the Washington Post reviewed the ballet, and the Post really hit the nail on the head. If the choreographer’s intention was to reflect a character’s soul in the way he or she dances, then the audience would have no trouble recognizing the souls of Cinderella and her supporting cast.

This was a modern interpretation. Cinderella was holed up in what looked like a SoHo loft, and in the ballroom scene the group was dressed in slim-fitting evening gowns and tuxedos. The opening scene was quite startling: the stepmother and stepsisters being coiffed by flamboyant hairdressers.

From the Post:

If nothing else, you’ve got to admire the chutzpah. If the storied Kirov Ballet — the Tiffany of ballet companies — isn’t about great dancing, who is? Yet for the first half of this three-hour ballet, Ratmansky relies heavily on slapstick and sight gags.

And these I found painful. I mean, even I go to the ballet to see dance.

The Post goes on to describe that the politics among the ballerinas must have been interesting since the only one who got to dance pretty was Cinderella herself.

The men, likewise, yield all bravura to the prince. As a result, there is a poetic statement at the heart of this otherwise drastic production: Romantic love is the most ennobling of human capacities, the emotion that puts everything aright. This ballet is worlds apart from the traditional, painterly, period approach to story ballets, but it shares that spirit.

This is an interesting idea, especially juxtaposed with the romantic love we see in Romeo and Juliet. (We just watched the Baz Luhrman movie over the weekend.) Shakespeare says that the power of love will drive lovers to kill themselves rather than facing life without their partner. In Cinderella, we see a Prince travel high and low — no effort spared — to track down his love.