Mary Panttaja

The sign out front says Bed and Breakfast, but its called 414 Hotel. I found it by buying the Rough Guide to New York City to find out what they recommended in the less expensive range of hotels. Looking at reviews of other cheap hotels on line was very disconcerting—raves and awful pictures of mold giving conflicted and confusing images. But the 414 Hotel was listed in the Rough Guide as the best of the cheap hotels. (Cheap is not a good word for this place; it’s too clean, nice, and elegant for that.)

It has been created from two townhouses that have a little garden patio between them, where you can sit in the evening or morning air. The rooms are nice, modern decor (even a gigantic flat screen tv on the wall), full baths. Service is excellent. The only down-side, really is the dark gray covering the walls in the hallways.

It’s a west-side style neighborhood (sensible, since it is on the west side) though a little more business-like than the cozy upper west side. The block is lined with trees and homes, and the next block has an array of restaurants. It was only a three block walk back from our play last night, which is a dream after a long night at the theatre.

We will try to stay here often, though they seem to be pretty booked in advance.

We got a bit of exercise this morning, walking from midtown to Chelsea for a meeting (about 2. 5 miles). We are also having coffee later with our nephew, Andrew, who works for TPM Media as an associate editor for this important political blog.

PS. We are sitting at an outside table in the Chelsea district (southern end of Manhattan) on a beautiful summer-like morning, not too hot yet. The restaurant is called Pastis. Jim has his network working and we’re both working on our blogs. What a way to work, eh? LM

Or not. In the air, on a bus, now on a train from Newark to NYC for a day of meetings. What started out as a light trip has filled pretty much up to the brim: a morning meeting, a required trip to Roberto’s (purveyor of fine saxaphones and Jim’s current favorite sax shop), an afternoon meeting and then “Moon for the Misbegotten” with Kevin Spacey, Eve Best (up for a Tony), and Colm Meaney. Tomorrow, two more meetings and a train to Boston. The weekend is also filling with a social schedule—partly adopted from our daughter, Erin.

This is theatre month. For folks who live in the country we tally up a lot of theatre, mostly in one week when the entire family goes to Ashland, Oregon for the Oregon Shakepseare Festival (usually 6-8 plays in 4-5 days). Unknown by most people, half of the OSF productions are modern plays written by modern playwrights. We have a relatively serious relationship to theater in the family and everyone takes it quite to heart. Luckily my son’s wife and my daughter’s boyfriend are also into the theatre experience so everyone shows up. Nowadays someone has to hang out during each play to watch the babies, but that is also a coveted opportunity.

So adding MFTM in NYC to June is a kind of warmup. It starts at 7PM which must be for some reason—and we hope to be able to sleep in a bit tomorrow.

We are trying out a new, inexpensive hotel in midtown this trip. Hotels in NYC have priced themselves out of any sense of reasonableness—though as long as folks pay the price, I guess it’s fine. I love spending time in the city, but it’s hard to justify a $600 per night room. We’ll see how this place goes—I’m excited to find something reasonable ($200). I finally figured out how to really find a good cheap hotel (anything under $350 per night—we bought the Rough Guide to NYC—the book European travelers use to find their way around—it was a big help. All the web sites promoted the same hotels and advertised low rates that never panned out. So we’ll find out how 414 Hotel turns out. I’m very hopeful.

Crossing under the Hudson River. The day looks to be beautiful, not too hot or muggy. And not raining.

We did a couple of things over the weekend that made our exercise more fun by making it a part of another activity. Like one would naturally do if we lived in the city and walked to the store. (Here in the country, I just hike down to the garden before dinner.)

We still needed to buy two more replacement boats and we managed to turne it into an diversified activity. To try out the boats, we rented them and took the first pair off to Sailor Bar on the American River and paddled around 40 minutes in the current. We swapped those boats out for a second pair and set up a river run from Sailor Bar to Elmante—about 4 miles on the river. We only brought one car, so we set the shuttle up with our bicyles. You have to think it through (bike routes AND river routes) and decide whether to bike first (and have the car at river’s end) or bike second (and have to go after the car).

So here’s how it went:

• We drove to the boat take out and dropped the bikes off—locking them up of course.
• We drove to the put-in and parked the car, packed the boats, and headed down river.
• We took out, swapped the boats (locking them up with the bike lock) for the bikes (changed shoes as well) and headed back up river to the car.
• Then we loaded the bikes, drove back to the boats, loaded the boats and were ready to go.

It was a four mile paddle and a seven mile ride. The drive was a little longer because of the roadways, but not too taxing. It’s an economical way to do river runs, but you could also use it for any paddling—across a bay, along a beach, or around a lake. We’ve used this technique on the Snake River to great effect. It would be more challenging in hilly country where the bike ride could become a real challenging part of the day. (One secret is that only one driver has to actually do the bike ride! Everyone else could rest. We don’t let ourselves know that.)

Yesterday we rode into town (normally 7 miles, but we added 3 miles to the trip to make it more work), had breakfast, dropped off prescriptions, and rode back (added a hill). We got our exercise, but also got some chores done.

All good and the bike riding gets to seem like an normal part of the day.

An interesting post this morning from Tim O’Reilly about an NSF grant for research on translating American sign language (ASL) to speech. This will accellerate (cute!) the development of the use of accelerometer sensors as part of the input device into the computer. ( Accelerometers capture the speed and direction of movement.) I asume the ASL speaker would wear devices on his hands/fingers.) This is what the Nintendo Wii has done with its new hand-held controller that captures directional movement. Last week we learned to play tennis on the Wii at my son’s house. Jim and I got a kick out of using full arm swings, though Jon just uses his wrist.

I get a kick out of a reference in Tim’s article that is becoming mainstream (at least mainstream in the geek communities): The Minority Report UI, from the movie Minority Report. This refers to the elegant computer interface used in the movie, with a clear class wall as in the screen and dramatic arm gestures to control the high-bandwidth visual data being displayed. So this sci-fi movie reference is becoming a defining factor in how we talk about the future of our technology. Of course, this is a ongoing relationship between future-looking fiction (they do their research) and our culture (we get to see the future before we build it.)

Speaking of alternate UI technologies, we spent some of the weekend playing with the speech controls on our Macs, to only middling success. (It works better if you wear a microphone.) I am hoping to start using a recording/transcription device while I ride my bike—just to capture ideas and sentences that occur to me. (More on that in another post.) So finding multiple ways to move work into the computer is just in the air these days.

Jim and I were half way through a morning ride the other day when we stopped for quick drink of water. Jim’s report from the GPS analysis was encouraging (we finally purchased a replacement GPS for the ones missing from our bags on our return from Peru). We were two miles per hour faster this day than the previous run which was in a dastardly wind. Over just 9 miles, that is a meaningful increase in speed.

Of course, it reminded us not to pay too much attention to speed, since it would always be dependant on outside variables, like wind—elements of the world arising outside of our control. So we can’t take too much blame for slow speeds but also not too much credit for quick runs. So then we mused, if we can’t tell how well we are doing by our speed, then maybe we track time, time on the bike. But then, your “credit” is less if you go faster—which is always a seeming goal—to go faster. So maybe then it’s how far you go—how many miles you can clock.

Suddenly we realized that we were scouting around for the definitive way to measure our experience. And left staring at the question of what that was: the need in us to measure it all. It felt a little silly, and Jim said, “just ride” as we took off on the second half of the loop.

And, while I understand that with some goals, measurement is a helpful tool, it seems that we have a tendency to lose the focus on our personal living experience and grasp onto external measurements to evaluate how well the day, our lives, our work is going. Even though we know, if we think clearly, that external measures are always going to be part of the whole world’s arising into being and not simply a function of our effort. We can have done our part valiantly and, for external measures, it may look like a failure. And on the other hand, sometimes we win through the “luck” of the draw, because of the flow of events.

But what is really meaningful to our workouts is the continuing development of the strength and health of our bodies and minds. Any measurement is a minor reflection of that, a simple tool, but never the actual, useful result. Our evolving capacity for participation, whether in our exercise program, our life, or work, is really the measure of our growth.

And, okay, sometimes it is nice to go fast.

Sorry for the short post, but I’ve been trying to upgrade WordPress this afternoon and got stuck. Turns out you HAVE to especially set the encoding to ASCII. I didn’t, so the originally files were damaged. Well here we are now. Only sort of working. But lets see if this post goes out properly.

This edit screen is messed up and there is no “view post” section on the page. I may be sorry i did this.

Later. Hopefully.

PS Okay I found the preview—they moved it. Whew!

I have been writing two books and have discovered a real need for a non-linear way of writing and presenting material, which of course is rather obviously something we understand in the digital medium. I am looking to both produce and present material as a “context” (instead of a linear flow) with overlapping and interweaving meta-structures. (Structures and attributes like time, sequence, themes, voicing, tempo, density, audience, multi-modal, etc.) We can improvise this with tagging and linked-lists, etc, but I can imagine a tool that supports the structures and illustrates how each unit of writing is woven into the weft of the material. I built a few kludgy tools to help me, but didn’t find the ability to manage as many of these threads as I would have liked.

I envision a tool in three parts:

• A visual, multi-structural context editor which allows you to identify media components (text, images, sound, video, whatever) with threads/identifiers/sequences and weave them into the context; ideally both the context data and the components are stored in a database;
• A flexible text editor with html/xml as basic targets and CSS applied according to the meta-structural definitions so that readers can “feel” the structures;
• A deployment module which delivers to a database, print, web, blog, wiki, or a hypermedia-context object (which includes a potentially infinite number of components) with all the links, sequences, and meta-structures as defined by the author.

I can hack a simple version of it with hypertext if I keep a complex diagram/map of the context, but without any support for the structures being built and the meaning of the links and threads. But, of course, modifying or restructuring anything, which is one of the important features of this medium, causes massive rework.

I can also see using the meta-structures to deliver the materials, allowing the reader to meander along paths, diverge, regroup, etc. making the intentional threads more obvious as navigational tools. (Also recording the paths taken.)

In short: I’m looking for a tool that allows the writer to create complex contexts instead of linear lines of development, but that includes a visual way to understand and manipulate the structures underlying the context.

It has been interesting to see these requirements arise in both my fiction and non-fiction writing . For the fiction, I was able to evolve a complex enough linear sequence to represent what I was getting at, but I don’t really see a way to properly sequence the other book—it really wants to be multi-structural. The concept of “writing contexts” (you can’t really call them books anymore) is an obvious application of the technology we have now—but I don’t really see a tool that covers what I envision.

So, the question is, are you aware of anyone who is working on such a model for both the writer/developer and the reader/consumer? Where the writer can define the complexity of the meta-structures within which he wants to compose and weave the context (with whatever constraints he wants to put on them); and the reader can explore the material within the meta-structural context with some access to the structures themselves.

I’m just thinking out loud. Sorry if I’m not quite making sense of it. I wanted to see if anyone knows someone working this direction before I start to think about tackling something like this myself.

Any suggestions?

(Some things I have looked into: Storyspace, Tinderbox (the closest thing I’ve found so far), hypertext editors; I’ve tapped into some of the research going on at UCLA and Vectors-A Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular; also, publications by MIT Press in their Mediawork series.  And this morning I found a post over at Web Worker Daily with a lot of suggestions that I will be following up on.)

PPS. I meant to add that I realized that in many ways I’m looking for an object oriented component manager with multiple inheritance….a weird blend of my writing and software architect selves.

So, today I drove into town and bought a sandwich at Starbucks so I could use the network and get into Second Life. (We are working it out with our service provider to see if we can make it function at home.)

Yesterday offered a disparate set of chores. One minute I was researching venture funded companies, the next, the in-memory database market, the next, building a drip system for a new garden bed. But at lunch, I was reduced to trying to figure out how to use the arrow keys to keep my avatar from running into a wall. Don’t get me wrong, it was a little compelling, a bit like learning to paddle a recalcitrant new kayak in a swirling current. (Without the benefit of the actual river.) One that can fly and in which your paddling leverage occurs only at 90 degree angles.

And that was it. In 30 minutes, I got Second Life working and walked and flew around the training area. There were a few other people there, but clearly they were in the same self-conscious state I was and we carefully ignored each other. I found a Buddha-like frog and tried to see if I could elicite any wisdom from him, but to no avail. I managed to wander into the ocean and was assured by some commentary that I wouldn’t drown—not to worry.

In retrospect, I can see that my relationship to this is why I haven’t ever gotten into playing computer games (not that I’m a great games person anyway, to the chagrin of my entire family). I have some trouble measuring the time used against all the other things I want to accomplish. So it will be interesting to see if I can get passed that sort of reticence enough to actually experience what’s going on in Second Life. We’ll see.

I do like my little avatar—a purple and black Manga get up with pigtails. I’ll have to see if I can get a picture of her into the real world. (I mean me, a picture of me.)

PS. Now in First Life, we did find some really cool kayaks last week. Seems that to buy river kayaks, you have to go to the river. A real river, that is.

I was in the orchard this afternoon checking out the fruit set. It looks good; especially after last year’s debacle. We had one (count it) Santa Rosa plum that fell off the tree before it ripened. This year there will be hundreds. There are dozens and dozens of tiny red fruits on the pear trees. The apple set and the oranges aren’t done yet—though because of the incredible bloom, it should be good.

I heard a shrill scream overhead. And then a second. I look up to see a large white-tailed kite, brilliant against the sky, sail right over my head. Followed by a second. They proceeded to chase and circle around our hill. They swirled and chased up into the sky. And then they seemed to clasp their feet and, in a spinning cartwheel, began to fall out of the sky with a fling and flare of white wings. Down almost to the tree tops they cascaded.

In the last minute, they separated and began their climb back into the sky.

Are they brave? Do they need courage to take such a plunge? Or are they simply surrendered to who and what they are? They are so completely themselves, so completely the embodiment of white-tailed kite-ness; completely free of any ideas of worry or fear. And as they perfectly reflect their kite-ness, it turns out that they really are safe, and that any idea of danger or safety we might have for them isn’t meaningful to their lives.

They were so free and so beautiful.

Yesterday morning I headed out of our hotel in downtown Seattle to hit the street and head down to the harbor. Having been writing for a few hours, I kept noticing things I wanted to note down—will have to get some technology working to help me out in these situations.

Some of what I noticed:

• A young woman was settling herself in front of Barneys New York. She was striking with her very delicate skin, pale red rastafarian-like hair (not unlike my granddaughter’s). She was having a gentle moment with her dog, comforting him, settling him in on his cushion next to her. She spread her blanket and sat carefully. She began to unpack her violin and I saw the glimmer of a silver flute. Everything arranged, she began to put the flute to her lips. I caught her eye as I turned back to look again.
• There was Lush—the soap store. And I had walked blocks out of my way in SF the day before to check it out. We like their hard travel shampoos and travel with them everywhere. I was hoping to find other useful travel accessories—but most of their options are a little bit extravagant for me. I remember this company from about 30 years ago—having long ago used their little round tins of solid shampoo.
• Seattle waking up is cleaner and more pristine than most cities I know. Having shuffled around San Francisco in the lunchtime crowds this week, it felt very shiney and barely used.
• An image caught my eye. A Miro-like picture framed in a window—a floating sphere, a stem, a flower, orange against cream. I notice that there is a series of them. I look again and see spring hats and flowers in a department store window. Someone with a wonderful eye has taken much care.