Some of you who read domesticat.net know me in person—know me personally. Some of you only know about me through my association with greymatter. The latter group has grown significantly since I took on the job of running the greymatter hacks/mods site. Whether I like it or not, I'm not laboring in quite the obscurity that I once did, and I now have to be a bit more careful of my words since I know that people are reading.The short version is that for some time, I've been a part—more like the unofficial cheerleader and ringleader—of a group of people who are continuing to do some work on greymatter in the absence of Noah. I've said nothing, mostly to protect Noah's privacy and peace of mind—but the cat's about to come leaping and meowing out of the bag in a few days anyhow, and I no longer feel the need to be quiet.
There will be a version 1.21c of greymatter (it currently stands at 1.21b). It will contain bugfixes and a few new variables. It is, I hope, the laying of groundwork for more work to be done later—but that's the future, and the future often holds strange things.
This has been a difficult and frustrating journey for me. I am not a Perl coder by any stretch of the imagination. What I am, however, is organized and (occasionally) efficient. I've spent more time prodding and cajoling other people to do things than I have actually looking at code.
I like to joke about "taking the heat" when 1.21c is released. I'm hoping it won't be much, but at the same time I realize that at this moment, there are four people who are highly visible when it comes to greymatter now (the forums and such). Subtract Noah, of course, because he's not actually involved—that leaves three of us to smile, nod, and take the heat on this endeavor: Indigo, Geof, and myself.
People are going to assume that the existence of 1.21c means that future developments are planned, and they're going to ask questions. Guess it's time to get prepared. Questions sent to the three of us are questions that don't get sent to Noah, and that's a good thing in my book.
I didn't want to be "public." I wanted to write for a little website, maybe have a few readers, but go on in relative obscurity. I remember when I first got to know Noah, he tried to explain to me why his even releasing a bugfix was out of the question. I now understand: a small step, even such as that, has ramifications. Give 'em an inch, they'll want a foot. Give a foot, they'll ask for a mile and be angry when they don't get it.
I shouldn't do this if I'm not ready to shoulder the responsibility. But I've tackled things so far and made them work. Indigo made greylogs exist. I added my knowledge and created two subsites—the mods site and the dev site—two sites that, in absence of new versions of GM, got a lot of traffic from people who still wanted updates and changes.
I wonder what this is going to be like.
Tonight, I'm taking a blank version of 1.21b, adding patches and tweaks, and putting together what will become version 1.21c—which I've jokingly nicknamed "cow." As soon as the greylogs infrastructure is ready and beta testing has been done, we'll make the new version available.
Shortly thereafter, I think I'll pack my maps, warm clothing, and toiletries and drive to Illinois. I'd originally harbored the hope that I could take several days away from the computer, but I now no longer believe that this will be the case.
Either way, I've been busy, and I've been secretive. The latter isn't exactly like me. Now that the cat's out of the bag, I'll be a little more open about what I'm working on. There's a lot to tell.
Oh, and if you're interested in beta testing, let me know.
]]>I've spent a couple of days buried pretty deeply into the greymatter hacks/mods portion of this site. Seems like every time I do that, I come out two days later with no desire to touch any kind of HTML for a while. If nothing else, it's subsumed the urge to create new designs for at least a few days.Since Tuesday, I haven't touched any kind of design. I think that's the strongest evidence of how much the events in New York have shaken me—they've stopped my creative process for the time being.
]]>I've spent a couple of days buried pretty deeply into the greymatter hacks/mods portion of this site. Seems like every time I do that, I come out two days later with no desire to touch any kind of HTML for a while. If nothing else, it's subsumed the urge to create new designs for at least a few days.Since Tuesday, I haven't touched any kind of design. I think that's the strongest evidence of how much the events in New York have shaken me—they've stopped my creative process for the time being.
I'm past the immediate shock and anger. I'm still working on forgiveness and understanding. So far I've managed to read, watch a couple of movies, call some friends, cuddle the cats, but never get much past that emotional depth. The emotions are still there, ready, waiting on me—for whenever I'm ready to deal with them.
In the meantime, I had to get on with my life. It's difficult to pass the half-mast flags and the patriotic songs and the fervor and anger and pain and say, "No, I have to do things like buy groceries and cook and vacuum," but it's true. These things must be done.
After all, there is no Litterbox Fairy. Much to Edmund and Tenzing's disgust.
So yes, that's my news from here: we're living in a deliberate state of shallowness. Not because we're avoiding what's underneath, but because there's such a thing as an undertow: too much emotion, raw pain, anger, to handle. In the meantime, we've tried our best to carry on: we cook, we love, we curse the malfunctioning lawnmower, and we try to get someone else to empty the dishwasher so that we can stay on the couch for a few minutes longer.
It isn't terribly meaningful in and of itself. It's only meaningful when you realize that we're doing all these things in avoidance of talking about or dealing with the real issue.
Sometimes the mere act of coping is in itself impressive.
]]>Over the past year or so, I've stated one thing repeatedly: I'm not a coder. I'm a graphic designer and a writer. With the listing of writing comes one small caveat—'linguist.' Languages—their similarities, differences, pronunciations, and etymologies—are a source of endless fascination for me. Everyone carries around useless and random tidbits in their heads. One of the tidbits in mine: I know that 'avalanche' is the only commonly-used word in the English language that is derived from Romansh (the fourth official language of Switzerland). Another: that both Hungarian and Finnish, while Indo-European languages, branched off so early from the rest of the common Indo-European languages (think French, English, Spanish, Italian, etc.) that they bear almost no resemblance whatsoever to the rest of the Indo-European languages.
When I offered to host the greymatter hacks site, I asked myself—'What can I offer to the site, since I'm not a coder?'
I decided to put my linguistic and investigative skills to work. Since the days of the week and months of the year were hard-coded into greymatter's scripts, several users had requested special versions of greymatter that provided versions for their preferred language.
I got started—and the further I dug, the more interested I became. I realized that the chances of someone actually needing a Hungarian or Scotch Gaelic version of greymatter were slim, but that I was doing this research more for my own benefit than for the hacked versions of greymatter that resulted.
A few days ago, I decided to put my results into tabular form and make them available on the web. I had been chagrined to discover that no one, it seems, has bothered to do this and do it right.
What is doing it right, you ask? For me, it's using Unicode characters to correctly represent alphabetical characters. Using é instead of e'. Using escaped characters, not graphics, to display Cyrillic and Greek letters.
I've posted my results on this page. I admit it's a partial list; I'm missing languages that should be there, but which I'm having trouble finding reliable dictionaries or listings for on the Web. If I know that a language makes extensive use of accented characters and the available listings have none, I have chosen to assume that the dictionary's been dumbed down for the diacritical-afraid English-speakers, and have chosen not to use it until I find one that correctly reflects the source language.
Then again, what feels partial to me may be exhaustive to others!
Some random comments from creating this page:
Side note 1: spouse and I are currently discussing music. Did Foreigner ever write any song that wasn't specifically about sex?
Side note 2: Geof has loaned me an album of Dave Brubeck songs. This is some seriously fascinating stuff—look for plenty of Brubeck and Thelonious Monk to appear regularly on the playlist for a while.
That's all. Carry on.
]]>I love it. I can implement a new design in less than an hour. This looks to be absolutely fabulous.
]]>I love it. I can implement a new design in less than an hour. This looks to be absolutely fabulous.
Dinner tonight worked well—I did the Iron Chef thing and had the wondergeeks suggest ingredients that I should incorporate into the meal. I had to work with onions, parsnips, and pork. So we made: parsnips roasted with brown sugar, balsamic vinegar, and thyme; and pork chops with a cherry/balsamic vinegar pan sauce, served over caramelized onions.
It was yummy.
And, as for me, it is nearly midnight, and I am definitely trying to turn into a pumpkin. Expect a real update tomorrow.
]]>As a result, the time that I would normally spend working on daily entries is still going into the site—but just part of it that you don't see.I'm hoping that the transition will be a mostly seamless one. There will, however, be some changes. I'm still working out exactly how I'm going to handle the archives page. A bonus is that each entry will, once it is archived, have its own separate page. Since my entries are generally long ones, this pleases me.
Blogger's been useful to me. I donated when they asked for donations—because without their software I probably wouldn't have continued working on domesticat for more than three months. But it's hard to argue with the sheer flexibility of greymatter, which offers me the opportunity to truly template all of my pages—not just the ones that are part of the posting-archiveindex-archives loop.
The end result will be that with greymatter, I can execute a design makeover of domesticat within thirty minutes—and most of those thirty minutes will be while I change the guestbook script, which has to be done by hand.
It looks to be truly worth the time and effort I'm putting into it. And yes, I'm a good citizen—greymatter is donationware, and I've donated.
Something good: I think I am finally getting well. This weekend, I had the energy to work on cleaning the house—something I really haven't felt like doing since early December. (Jeff was an incredible help.) I started noticing at the end of last week that I wasn't exhausted by the end of a workday. Last night I went home and actually wanted to cook—something I also haven't done much of since early December. After that, I watched Ally McBeal and then worked on domesticat for a few hours.
It feels like I have more hours in the day. It feels like I'm actually awake for most of those hours. I don't think I realized how tired I'd been until I wasn't tired any more.
So, hopefully, I will get the errata ironed out of both geek-chick and domesticat, and then I can move back into working on real journal entries instead of apologies.
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