Wishlist
'Tis the morning of Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring, except me and the cats—actually, that's most of the creatures—all the creatures were stirring except Barbara, who's still having visions of sugarplums.
Instead of sugarplums, I had a dream last night about a method for
tagging blog entries. Every concept
used as a tag should have at
least two aspects, one more general, one more specfic. For example, to
tag an item christmas
, the item would receive the tags
holiday
and christmas
. To add the tag season
, one
might use season
and winter
. Each tag is an orthogonal
axis, and receives several more or less general points along that axis.
I don't know if this is a terrible idea or not, but I suspect I should
probably read more about taxonomies before I present my recently
invented round-thing that I've decided to call the wheel
.
I'm intrigued by the way F-Spot uses a tree structure to
organize tags. If you have
a tag Places
, and under that tag, you add a child,
Nebraska
, and under that, another, Lincoln
, when you add
the Lincoln
tag to a photo, it automatically and transparently
behaves as if it also has the Places
and Nebraska
tags. That seems like a cool approach, though it makes adding a new tag
a little more cumbersome: it requires that the tree structure be edited
whenever a new tag is added, to put the new tag on the correct branch of
the tree. Also, photos exported to flickr only receive
the leaf tags. I'm not sure, yet, if that's a bug or a feature.
All that is just a digression from the actual subject of this post, which was intended to be a set of Christmas wishes, two front teeth style. So without further ado, here are a few things I'd like to find under the tree this morning.
- Time and energy to finally debug and fix session.py, which is the only thing keeping comments from working on Get Up 8.
- Less stuff. As I get older, I'm learning the emptier a room is, the more I like it.
- More opportunity to practice Japanese.
- Motivation to work on the house.
- A physics class. Or cognitive science. Or LIS. Or...
- Somebody to go to aikido classes with, and maybe trade blows with bokuto.
- Is it to corny to ask for a world that's more sane too?
Checking In
The trouble with holidays is, though it seems like an expanse of time
with which one will be able to do whatever one wants, there always seems
to be a list of high priority things to be dealt with. The problem with
priorities is practical
always seems to trump fun
.
Despite the whininess of the previous paragraph, this (long) holiday weekend has been nothing to complain about. Everything has been relaxed and fun. If I do have a complaint, it's that there aren't enough hours in a day, and I have too many toys.
Christmas morning I picked Caitlin up at a quite godly hour, we came home, opened our modest pile of presents, all of which we appreciated by the receiver, then went to Shannon and Curt's for Christmas dinner. The most interesting gift I recieved was a black silk obi from my mother. It's a beautiful piece of work; now I only need the kimono (and the occasion) to wear it. The most useful gift I received was a pair of fenders for my bicycle. I will likely install them as soon as I finish this entry.
The jukebox is working great, though I've been spending more time than I thought I would fixing up metadata downloaded from freedb.org. Partly this is because many mult-artist discs have not been well-catalogued to start with, but my own anal-retentiveness cannot be ignored.
When I started the project, I had intended to rip our discs piecemeal, as we wanted to listen to them. Ripping has proved so easy, though, that I've just been working my way through the collection. When the machine spits one out, I just drop the next one in the drive. The whole issue of play-on-rip seems to be moot. (...Which is fine, because it saves me some trouble.)
The next issue we've tackled involves long term storage of our CDs,
and indexing those so we can find them if we need to. (I say we
because this seemed to me to be a library/archives kind of issue, so I
asked Barbara what she thought would be best.) We settled on Rubbermaid
Revelations 31 qt containers—they're the perfect size for two rows
of CDs in jewel cases, 100 per box—and a flat text file for
indexing. For a while I was thinking about generating a summary report
from the rhythmbox metadata, and saving it in XML format or something,
but this is much better. Ease of implementation is a good thing.
The day after Christmas, I helped Steve find a computer to replace the one Amy is currently using. He tells me her monitor is dying and the machine is old and glitchy. I told him we could try cleaning up the system or even reinstalling, but he felt a new system would be a better choice. We did some comparison shopping, and he felt that the HP s7220n best suited their needs.
There are a few other project's I'd like to work on in the near future:
Finish implementing search for this site. When I put it down a couple of days ago I had swish-e indexing the vellum generated pages, and was thinking about how best to proceed in indexing the pyblosxom-managed pages.
Do something about comments. The distributed comments modules needs some slapping around before it's ready for primetime.
The perennial move-services-to-musashi project.
Settle on an OS for the new (old) laptop. It's running FC4 now, but comes in way under the hardware specs. I'm not running a desktop environment, and that helps, but it would be interesting to try a distro optimized for legacy hardware, like DSL.
Continue learning about XSL with my FOAF-via-XSL project. (See foaf link at the top of this page.)
Learn to knit. Barbara says if I do this, she will spend some time learning about linux. I almost said
learning to install linux
, but with modern point-and-click installation, this is a non-issue. Plus I'd like to know how to knit.
See? Too many projects, not enough time...
Today is the eighth anniversary of our marriage. We are celebrating by walking downtown and dining at Vincenzo's, our favorite Italian restaurant.