When I talk about Sacred Harp singing with my friends from college, they all look at me like I’m crazy. “Right, I go sing 18th century hymns set to music in the 19th century (and later,) with my hippie and queer friends in quasi-archaic harmonies. It’s a blast!” This isn’t my tradition, both in the sense that I don’t come from a sacred harp singing family, and in the sense that I come from a particularly unobservant Jewish family.

There’s something about Sacred Harp, that I think is hard to describe. Everyone comes to it for different worlds, and there are a lot of people who grew up with it and/or identify as Christian in the community. While I think most people who sing Sacred Harp find it a deeply fulfilling experience, for many its as much about the shared experience, the guttural experience of the chords, and the “sacred/special space” as it is about the texts. This is something that I think is pretty difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t felt a singing.

I mentioned a while ago my interest in writing hymns in the tradition of the sacred harp, and I don’t have anything to present to you yet, or even some example of what I’m playing with, as I haven’t actually constructed anything. I do have the following observation.

The texts and aesthetics of the Sacred Harp is encapsulated with what I think is probably a not very contemporary view of the divine. In my reading, the texts display a relationship to the divine that is distant and detached. I might even say reserved and tentative. The speakers in the text are not individuals but more collectively constituted persons--this fits well with the way the music is sung--and the speakers generally do not interact with or speak to the divinity directly, except possibly to give thanks or appreciation. Like the harmonies themselves, the texts are spare and stark; indeed I suspect their simplicity makes the tunes easier to sing (words are almost always easier to sing than shapes,) while being very careful to not distract from the tunes.

As I said, this isn’t my tradition, at all, in addition to the structural constraints of the form (common meter, for the most part,) I think the stylistic constraints present the larger challenge. I’m trying to figure out how to write text that isn’t cloyingly spiritual, and that fits my own worldview (such as it is,) but that also respects this kind of spiritual aesthetic, for lack of a better term. I’ve been reading up on various religious phenomena, contemplative orders, and the Religious Society of Friends. Because it seems appropriate.

As is, I think always the case, minimalism is always a lot harder than it looks. I’ll keep you all posted!

This post represents two major ideas, first of “app stores,” and second of “Sass” or “software as a service,” which seems to be the prevailing business model for contemporary technology companies that aren’t stuck in the 80s. With reflection on free software, open source, and the technology industry as a whole. Because that’s sort of my thing.

On the one hand the emergence of these tightly controlled software distribution methods represent a fairly serious threat to free software, as does SaaS particular insofar as SaaS exploits a GPL loophole. On the other hand these models, potentially, represent something fundamentally awesome for the technology and software world, because it represents a commonly accepted paradigm where users of software recognize the value of software, and the creators of software can get compensated for their work. It’s not without its flaws, but I think it opens interesting possibilities.

Free and Freedom

Obviously app stores present a quandary for those of us involved in the free software world. On the one hand app stores are not free, which is a trivial complaint. It’s not the cost, around which “free software” is truly centered, the true failing here is that creators of software cannot choose to participate in an app store system and distribute source code: the interaction and relationship between developers and users is very scripted and detached. These issues all grow out of the reality that app stores--by design--are they’re controlled by a single institution or organization.

Which isn’t itself a bad thing--there are contexts where centralized organization means things get done more effectively, but centralized authority is not without risk. So while this question isn’t resolved, it’s also the kind of question that requires ongoing attention and reflection.

Paying for Software

At the same time, I think it’s very true that the “app store model” and indeed the more successful “Web 2.0” business models (e.g. new businesses on the web, post-2003/2004) have posited that:

Software is a thing of value that users should expect to pay for.

And that’s not, at least to my mind, a bad thing for the software world. Free or otherwise. Or not always a bad thing, particularly for end-user software. For larger pieces of software (in the “Enterprise”) money is largely exchanged for support contracts and for services related to the software: custom features, IT infrastructure, etc. For end user software, support contracts and custom features don’t tend to make a lot of sense in context: so perhaps moving back to the exchange of money for software isn’t a bad thing.

The connection between “value” (which software almost certainly creates), and currency in the context of software is fraught. Software isn’t scarce, and will never be (by nature.) At the same time it does have value and I think it’s worth considering how to arrange economies that involve exchanging money for software. There are a lot of factors that can effect the way that app stores might work, and I think given the possibility for causing interesting things to happen we shouldn’t dismiss them out of hand.

Related Reading

Despite my (potential) lack of clarity at the moment, I think the following posts reflect some of my earlier thoughts on this subject.

• Package Management and why your Platform Needs and App Store
• iPad Reactions
• Free Network Businesses
• There’s a Widget for that
• Owning Bits

I said to a new writing friend “I’m young, particularly given that anyone under the age of 40 in the science fiction community is considered ‘a young writer.'” Which is, more or less true (on both counts,) and brought on a couple of trains of thought that I’d like to explore in a bit more depth:

1. The “youth” of a writer is long, indeed much longer than one would expect.

2. I’ve found a community of science fiction writers. Admittedly I’m new and very much on the outside, but I find it delightful that all of the “things I do,” are part of communities one sort or another: Sacred Harp singing, Morris Dancing (in the Midwest, particularly,) Contra Dancing (on the East Cost, particularly,) Free/Open Source software, blogging, and apparently Science Fiction writing.¹

The Portrait of the Author During Youth

I’ve written here before about the challenges and inherent problems of “being a writer:” the work we do is potentially hard to understand, good writing is more than the sum of its parts, and because writing is a sign of education for most people, sometimes it’s difficult to figure out (even those of us who “are writers”) to figure out what’s “writing,” and what’s just throwing words together.

Now to be fair, I’m not complaining that the period of “youth” as a writer is so long. This standard seems wrapped up in the idea that a large component of being a “real writer,” is having lived long enough to have enjoyed a great deal of unique experiences (which can inform your work,) and also to have had enough time writing “crap” to be able to have the (learned) skill of being able to construct quality texts.

It’s really hard to tell people, epically the young, that they need to “wait until they’re older.” But I think once we (I) get done with the pouting, there’s a pretty strong silver lining: the extended adolescence of the writer provides a longer window to read, to experiment, to apprentice to other writers, and to grow as a writer. Additionally, if the “youth” of a science fiction writer is longer than it is for writers in other fields (and I suspect it is, slightly,) the science fiction community has created a way to compensate for the exclusion of science fiction from most academic writing programs. These are all largely good things, to my mind.

Community Discourses

I think communities are fascinating, and I’m delighted to touch so many different and interesting communities. It seems to me that the formation of communities is very much not a project for youth. As young people, our communities are local, and based on where we go to school, where we live, even where we work. The communities I’m thinking about there are, in turn based on what we’re interested in and what we love to do. Although there’s a potential for insularity and self-selecting qualities, there’s also a great potential for diversity. There are a lot of different kinds of science fiction writers, sacred harp singers, folk dancers, open source hackers, and so forth.

There’s another interesting set of common factors for these communities: they’re all built around shared experiences and activities in the “real world” (as it is,) but the members of these communities tend to be scattered across a given geographic area. Though I don’t have much to compare this to, personally, but I think the ways that these communities are supported and connected through the Internet. As much as Facebook irritates me on a technological level, its done it’s job.

The principals under which communities function and adhere are not something I have a terribly firm grasp of, I must confess, but I know what I find myself in one, it’s a good thing indeed.

Ok, so not really.

This post is mostly about playing a head game with yourself, in an effort to get more organized. But not “head games” in a bad way. On my to do list for the past few weeks I’ve had something like “write a blog post about todo list item titles,” because in light of this post about org-mode it seems like a topic in need of further definition. Basically my goal is to explore, the best way to think about what we have to do, to allow us to accomplish what we want to. The GTD system which so many people are enamored of present a few ideas on the topic, and while the GTD way is a good place to start thinking, it’s not a good place to stop thinking.

We’ve all done it. Made a todo list that we didn’t end up using for one reason or another. Todo lists, need to be useful: they should help us organize our day, and help us keep track of all the things wee need to accomplish. In a lot of ways, maintaining focus over our day and all of the tasks that nag at us are contradictory, so todo lists are failed by design.

The first, and frequent issue in my own organization are lists and plans that go too far and list too many “actionable items.” This divides your time and actions into too many little pieces, leading to a number of outcomes. The first risk is that you might start to ignore the list entirely because it’s too long and complicated, even if it’s an illusion caused by the size of the items on your list. Ergo, the total length of the list you “work off of,” needs to be manageable and comprehensible.

The second risk, is that, an overactive todo list is one where you over plan for yourself, such that your list--while accurate and comprehensible--isn’t useful. Beyond simply providing “outboard memory,” the best todo lists allow us to structure and make plans for our working time. When working (e.g. writing, at the computer, etc.), I like to have my projects chopped up into pieces that can conceivably get done in the time I have to work on them, but that give me the time and freedom to bury myself on a side project, or follow inspiration or a train of thought to its completion when needed. While effective todo lists help you structure your time, flexibility is still valuable.

There are issues on the other end of the spectrum as well: when lists are too short, and the “actionable items” on a list are too conceptually large, the effectiveness of lists is degraded as well. A reminder to “write a novel,” even a specific novel, is less than helpful for helping you accomplish something in the moment. Even a dozen items, on a list where you end up checking something off once every day or two doesn’t help you figure out “Ok, what do I need to work on now.” Besides the chances are, if the items are too large and the list is too small, that you probably have it memorized anyway.

Right? Other strategies?

As you all might have heard that Amazon (finally) released a Kindle Application for the Blackberry. When I heard this I thought that this would be a good thing, as I have (and quite enjoy) both my Blackberry and Kindle. Here’s the rundown:

• The Kindle App for the blackberry is probably the most well designed blackberry application I’ve seen thus far. Having said that, the bar isn’t terribly high.

  In a lot of ways, the way (before the Kindle app) to make a “successful” blackberry application is one that figures out how to make its data “fit” into an email or messaging context and then blend that data into the messaging/event feed in a useful sort of way.

  This doesn’t do that, and I think learns a great deal from advancements made in iPhone app development. The resolution on the Blackberry Bold is amazing (same number of pixels as the iPhone, much greater density.) and the buttons/interface is really intuitive and well designed. The app itself gets as many thumbs up as I can manage.

• I’ve been having phone angst recently. I don’t use it very much, I need to have better filtering of my email and reorganize how I do my voice mail, and while this is easy enough to say here it’s a much more substantial project than I’ve got time for now.

• The Kindle App isn’t a replacement for the kindle, but it’s a great compliment, and it makes it much more possible to lighten the load in my back-bag, and it makes it easier for me to entertain myself with my phone. This might not seem like a bit deal, but I think it is.

  There are also situations where the Kindle isn’t usable (in bed when the lights are off and various other low light situations) and that’s alright, but the Kindle app is. So that’s a good thing indeed.

• I had hoped that the kindle would make it easier to read in the in between moments throughout the day when I might read but didn’t. That isn’t exactly true, as it turns out. Reading on the Kindle still requires a fair piece of directed attention, and it’s not the kind of thing you can idly whip out while you’re waiting in the grocery check out line.

  I’m not sure at this point, of course, but I do think that having access to the Kindle on the phone will improve this usability feature.

• I’m sort of annoyed by the lack of subscriptions. While you can have multiple devices attached to your Kindle account, when you subscribe to a periodical, that content is only accessible to you on one of your devices. I don’t really like this, and it represents a huge loss of value for the Kindle store.

While I got the Blackberry shortly after the first iPhone 3g came out, the “app explosion” hadn’t really happened yet. I must confess some “app jealousy.” The Blackberry is awesome, and really it does the messaging quite better than anything else around (I’m convinced.) And I love the hardware keyboard. But when I think “I’d like to do something with my phone,” the chance of getting a Blackberry app to do that is… unlikely. I don’t know if I want a lot of apps on my phone, in the end, but I know the hardware is capable, and it’s nice to take advantage of that from time to time. In any case…

Onward and Upward!

Perhaps part of the reason the iPad doesn’t make sense for me is that I’ve never really used an iPhone, and at the core iPad is basically iPhone++. I opted to get a Blackberry because I wanted a device that did email right and messaging, I had/have an iPod Touch that I don’t really use and the little isolated applications that don’t interact well with my existing work flow and lock data in didn’t really appeal to me.

People are always talking about “the apps,” as if there’s something revolutionary happening here, and I’ve always been a bit non plussed. At least for my personal use, more “applications,” or places where “things can be done,” doesn’t always equate into more productivity.

Running in parallel to this, of course is the whole Web 2.0/web-based application development thing. (Is Web2.0 coasting to a halt yet? In any case, it’s probably still a current phenomena worth noting.) Although iPhone applications and Web applications are constructed in very ways that are quite technically distinct, there’s an underlying commonality between the way that both function. These applications are very much not general purpose. The best iPhone (or web) applications take a specific kind of data or information (or a collection of such), and provide a way for you to interact with that information in a way that’s (hopefully) intuitive.

In contrast the old familiar applications typically are designed to be either: platforms that enable you to accomplish a whole range of tasks within a certain sphere (“Office tools,” email applications, emacs), or some sort of filter or pipe that allows you to access data in one format in an interface that’s easy to use (RSS readers, Content management systems, pdf readers, web brwosers, etc.) There are certainly web applications that are basically pipes, and I’m sure Google would love it if we all used their application stack.

So, then, what describes this new “widget,” class of applications for mobile devices and the web? On the one hand it’s a case of developers “making do with what there is:” the iPhone imposes a number of serious constraints: small screen, limited on board computing resources, and a potentially inconsistent data connection. Small structured apps that are all about allowing you to interact with a small set of data work best in this environment. Additional I suspect that technology has advanced to a point where making these kinds of applications is finally possible and worth the it takes to build them: MVC frameworks have finally matured perhaps.

The enduring questions in my mind:

• Is the data that we’re throwing into databases by way of iPhone apps and web applications going to continue to be useful in the future? This gets at the “open data” question as much if not more than the “open source” aspect of applications. What’s the realistic utility of our data in the long form?
• Does this shift mark a move away from a certain kind of “paper-based logic,” to a more digital way of organizing or data and digital experiences?
• Is this just the process of bringing the kinds of “business applications,” that enterprises have developed and used for decades into the consumer sphere?
• How do the concepts of software freedom and data ownership transfer to this mode of using technology. While it’s easy to say “data ought to be free,” and “source code still matter” (both of which are true,) I think practically it’s a bit more difficult.
• What do these applications look like on the Desktop? Is the future JavaFX, Flex, Silverlight, and Apple Desktop Widgets? Is the desktop going to be stuck in the browser? Are there other options?

And while I think we’re definitely using and creating this kind of software with abandon, I don’t know if we’ve reached good answers to these (and other related) questions. I look forward to exploring these ideas, and hearing your thoughts!

A few years ago, highly citational, link/youtube video blogs came back into style again. This time rather than calling them blogs, we called them “tumblelogs.” I never really got into it, though I tried, and even my original inspiration for starting tychoish.com was to do a more “tumblelog-esque” blog.It never quite worked out. Then I read this post by Michael Coté which inspired a few things:

First, it got the following title to stick in my head and refuse to get out. Second, it left me with the idea that, although successful, sites like tumblr and to a different extent posterous basically ruined the tumblelogging revival.

Here’s the thing about tumblelogs: they worked and worked so well because they were efficient, because the people creating tumblogs were doing something unique and had unique voices, because you could keep your pulse on most of a single discourse by watching only a few sites/rss feeds. And then it became, very suddenly, trivial to make a tumble log. And so everyone had a tumblelog, and it was like blogging was new again, except things “meme’d out” at an epic pace and it became difficult to track what anyone was saying. It was like a distributed denial of service attack on our attention spans.

And as the dust settled, tumblelogs, at least as far as I could see, became less about a sort of delightful amalgamation of interesting content and more about templates, about piping in a fire hose of content from delicious/twitter/etc. So not only were there too many tumblelogs, but the style had devolved somewhat into this weird unedited, awkwardly template-ed mass of “crap” that is (in my opinion) quite hard to read or derive value from.

What Made Tumblelogs Work Originally

• The systems that powered them were kludgy but they made it very possible to post content easily. That’s a good thing.
• They used a unique sort of web design where design elements (tables/grids/CSS magic,) reflected and accented the content type.
• They were largely editorial functions. People followed tumblelogs because their authors were able to filter though content with exceptional speed and grace, and in the process of filtering provide real value.
• They were multimedia, and incorporated many different kinds of content. Not just links, not just embedded youtube videos, but snippets of IM and IRC conversations, song lyrics, pictures from flickr, and so forth.
• projectionist one of the first and best, was a group effort: when group blogs work, they really work. The tumblelog, seems like an ideal platform for group blogging.

How We Can Make Tumblelogs Work Again

• We use publishing systems and tools that are unique and that stretch and bend the form. A tumblelog theme for Wordpress, will probably always reek like wordpress. Same with other popular content management systems. Tumblelogs work because they’re not just blogs, they need to distinguish themselves both visually, and in terms of how their authors write the content.
• We undertake tumblogs as a collaborative effort. Group projects complicate things, of course, but they also create great possibilities.
• Vary content, intentionally, post quotes, chat excerpts, links, videos, lyrics, etc. Make sure that there’s a great deal of diversity of content. This is perhaps a problem to be solved in software, at least in port.
• Emphasize and cultivate editorial voice, and create an interface that forces authors and editors to touch the data.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

ETA: I’ve started to work on this wiki page outlining a “tumble manager” tool. I also did a bit of textual refactoring on February 27, 2010

I went to a Dance festival a few weeks ago, and wanted to collect, as I am wont to do, some thoughts on the subject. No particular order or organization.

There was a sacred harp singing event at the festival, and then a group of us had a little ad hoc sacred harp session in a hallway (better acoustics) afterwords and the next day. The end result: I feel like I’m starting to really have a clue about Sacred Harp singing. I mean I’m not great or anything, but I don’t feel epically lost at a singing. Because I don’t come from a particularly background, and don’t have any real training with the singing thing, singing from the Sacred Harp has been an adventure. But now I sort of feel like I have the basics: I’m able to get the pitch most of the time. I feel like I have a good sense of myself as a leader and the kinds of songs I like. I’m beginning to become more familiar with a number of different songs in the book, and so forth. I don’t have the shapes memorized (or the middle verses to most songs!) but these things are coming.

It was also a very rewarding experience to be part of a group of singers who did that--for lack of a better term--jamming in the hallway. I don’t play an instrument, I don’t really lead songs in informal settings, so the whole “jamming in the hallway thing” is something I’ve never really been able to participate in. And getting the chance to do that was pretty cool.

But it was a dance festival. So how was the dancing? Pretty good. the space sucked (bad floor,) but the quality of the dance was wonderful. Contra-dancing in the Midwest, where I hail from, isn’t the hip musically experimental thing that it is out here. Part of that is due to the incredibly strong Old-time music community in St. Louis, which isn’t a good thing (even the less amazing contra bands in St. Louis are pretty damn good.) And there are a lot of factors that make contra dancing awesome out here: open/participatory bands as musical training grounds, more bands that travel (because things are closer together,) and more dancers that travel as well. That’s always nice.

Having said that, I’ve never really felt like a contra dancer. In high school, when I got into folk dance, I did a lot of international folk dance, and I think my defining folk-dance participation these days is Morris dancing, even though I probably do more contra than anything these days. When you’re a kid in the dance community, particularly one of the few kids in your local dance community you can pretty much glide through everything on enthusiasm and good intentions. While I think I’ve learned a few things about folk dance, I’m aware that I’m not the flashiest, or the most polished dancer around. This is particularly apparent at big dance festivals. But I got to dance with people who I think of as great dancers, and I had a lot of fun, so maybe it all works out. And then I went to a local dance and felt like a great dancer, particularly in terms of my ability to gracefully recover from flubs, and my sense of a dance’s relative complexity. So there you have it.

Things that are awesome about contra dance:

• Gender swapping partners in a dance. Particularly when everyone can go with the flow.
• Dips.
• Long rooms where you don’t get to the other end of the set in a given dance.
• Bands with awesome elements like foot percussion and woodwinds.
• Changing lines when you get to the other end of the dance.
• Rewriting a dance from the dance floor. Partner do si dos that become balance and swings. Shadow alamandes that become swings.
• Spins with your neighbor’s partner in the middle of heys for four.
• Conspiring with your partner to mess with neighbors.
• Graceful recoveries from dance flubs.

Onward and Upward!