Peridyd's Progress

And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers,

and we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words!

When across the sky sheet the impossible birds,

in a steady, illiterate movement homewards.

Now that I (hopefully) have your attention....

I was introduced to Joanna Newsom's music by David D. who gave me a CD mix with Peach, Plum, Pear on it. I enjoyed the track so much that Amy gifted me with The Milk-Eyed Mender, the album on which Peach, Plum, Pear was released, for Christmas. Without David, I doubt that this aging hippie could find any new music worth listening to, but this time David's gone above and beyond the call of duty.

I'm listening to The Milk-Eyed Mender this morning, and I'm near speechless (can't you tell?) listening to the gorgeous lyrics and unusual blend of blues, harpsichord, harp, and Appalachian vocals.

Let me underscore this. Notwithstanding Tracy Grammer and Dave Carter, Newsom's lyrics are the finest I've had the pleasure of hearing in years. The finest.

The finest.

If, like me, you're longing for a spark for your musical palate, if your tastes are firmly plant in Indie roots, if you enjoy well-crafted lyrics that endlessly offer up more than it would be fair for you to expect of them, then Newsom's just what you're looking for.

This Side of the Blue

by Joanna Newsom

Svetlana sucks lemons across from me,
and I am progressing abominably.
And I do not know my own way to the sea
but the saltiest sea knows its own way to me.

The city that turns, turns protracted and slow
and I find myself toeing th' embarcadero
and I find myself knowing the things that I knew
which is all that you can know on this side of the blue

And Jaime has eyes black and shiny as boots
and they march at you, two-by-two (re - loo - re - loo);
when she looks at you, you know she's nowhere near through:
it's the kindest heart beating this side of the blue.

And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers,
and we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words!
When across the sky sheet the impossible birds,
in a steady, illiterate movement homewards.

And Gabriel stands beneath forest and moon.
See them rattle & boo, see them shake, see them loom.
See him fashion a cap from a page of Camus;
see him navigate deftly this side of the blue.

And the rest of our lives will the moments accrue
when the shape of their goneness will flare up anew.
when we do what we have to do (re - loo - re -loo),
which is all you can do on this side of the blue.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Looking at the off season acquisitions they've made one might well think that the Dodgers are sitting pretty and that Chavez Ravine will soon be heaven on earth. After all, this is their opening day pitching rotation:

Jason Schmidt
Randy Wolf
Derek Lowe
Brad Penny

Chris Jenkins from the San Diego Union correctly terms that rotation the best in the NL. Given the incompetence of the GMs of my two favorite teams, the Seattle Mariners and the San Diego Padres, you really have to give Ned Colletti credit for strengthening his team in the most important area: pitching.

This coupled with the fact that the Dodgers are no long owned by Rupert Murdock should mean that they aren't on my short list of teams whom I always and unequivocally root against--i.e., The New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves. These are teams that Amy and I call inherently evil. We do so a) because it's fun to argue that baseball teams are good and evil, and b) because the transactions that those teams make are, in the long run, bad for the game of baseball. If you want to know what I'm talking about, read Bob Costas' excellent analysis of the state of the game, Fair Ball: A Fan's Case for Baseball.

So why the title of this post, you might well ask? Because the Dodgers, despite the fact that they were soundly beaten in the head-to-head contest with the Padres and therefore won the wild card, and not the division championship, despite having the same record as the Padres after 162 games, are claiming that they're the "defending NL West co-champions".

Those aren't the rules, guys. The rules state that if you end up having identical records at the end of the season, then the winner of the season head-to-head contest is the champion. Period. The Dodgers won the wild card, not the division. The Padres, ever lackluster in the post season, did, however, win the division.

That they would claim otherwise smacks of unsportsmanlike conduct--in the front office, which, to my mind, negates any boon they might have garnered by sloughing off the infamous Murdock as their owner.

In short, there are still 3 inherently evil teams on Amy's and my list: Yankees, Braves, and, once again, the LA Dodgers.

May the Dodgers reap the rewards that were visited upon both the Braves and Yankees last year: either a post-season miss or a post-season early departure.

Not that my Padres did any better, you understand....

Thanks to Mom for the Jenkins article.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dries Buytaert, leader of the Drupal Project, has an interesting discussion on his blog about the future of the CMS, which--in a telling rhetorical move--is alternately defined in the discussion as a content, community, and collaboration management system. Indeed, it is all of the above.

The trajectory of my professional career, in many respects, lands me squarely in the middle of CMS technology/implementations, and Drupal is definitely my favorite CMS (e.g.,1, 2, 3). So to say that I'm interested in the discussion is a bit of an understatement, especially since Dries is conceding that Drupal isn't quite there yet (wherever "there" might be).

What I find most interesting is the notion that the CMS is evolving into a web portal that is tightly integrated with the office suite, ala Microsoft's Sharepoint. For those of you who are, at this point, completely lost, Microsoft actually has a passable description of what Dries, et al, are discussing in their explanation of what Sharepoint--this next generation CMS--is and does, and it's fairly descriptive, despite the obvious digressions into market-speak.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

I haven't used Sharepoint since I was at Washington State University a couple years ago, and then only briefly. The way it was being used back then was as a glorified CVS repository, and, as such, I was largely underwhelmed. It seemed clunky, especially because my desktop at the time was Redhat Linux, and, lacking Internet Explorer, I was unable to take advantage of most of the functionality that my Windows colleagues were "enjoying."

But the notion that I could edit, employ document version control, establish workflow rules, share, and publish documents (both to intranet and the Internet) via my unit's CMS is a powerful one. But as one of the commenters makes apparent, it all depends upon the CMS's reliance upon open standards. The Microsoft marketing quote above promises interoperability, but are they serious? As Windows loses marketshare to OS X and Linux, it's going to be increasingly important for enterprises to implement technolgies that play nice with all platforms.

How might Drupal or other Open Source communities respond? That's the theme from the discussion on Dries' blog in which I'm most interested.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm tempted to post this without any commentary or contextualization, but I think it's too critical (to those of us who work with technology) to let the issue speak for itself.

First, take a look at the article. Have you done so? Good. Now, consider the source. It's not one of my left-leaning, Linux-junkie, online-only rags; this is mainstream. This is old media. This is CNN <smirk>. Now consider this excerpt:

Microsoft's oversight with SQL is one reason, among many, why analysts don't expect Vista to appear in the workplace until 2008. And it's become yet another sticking point with corporate IT departments already frustrated by their dependence on Microsoft. In the long run, the lack of SQL support could delay widespread adoption of Vista even further. (emphasis added)

I know that in my consulting business I'm frustrated wtih my dependence on Microsoft, and quite a bit of my frustration can be traced back to the fact that I'm comfortable with (if not an expert in) Linux/Unix alternatives. Notwithstanding the perspective of the article--which is nothing, if not critical of the way Microsoft is mismanaging its business--the mere fact that it was written by and for a mainstream media outlet like CNN.com suggests that there may well be broad dissatisfaction with Microsoft and its business model of ensnaring its customers into an quasi-addictive dependence on its proprietary software solutions.

I've said it numerous times, but it bears repeating. The push toward open standards and inoperability among the various file formats/software vendor products is not only ethically and morally sound, it's a good long-term business strategy. Eventually everyone's going to wake up and demand it, and then Microsoft will be one software provider among many. Wouldn't it be better to have been a pioneer in the movement toward open standards than an obstructionist? What happens if this resentment toward Microsoft spreads beyond those "in the know" (those of us who build, noodle with, and program servers) into the real mainstream: the desktop consumer market?

Surely, for all of Ballmer's posturing and Bobby Knight-like antics, even Microsoft sees the handwriting on the wall; even if they dare not discuss it.

Thanks to Paleck for the heads-up on this issue.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Lest we blue-state liberals--who live in cities like "The People's Republic of Eugene"--think that the so-called Heartland is uniform in its support of the Bush regime, here's proof that they're not.

Helen Nichols, a retired Nebraska Teacher has written a book, An Open Letter to George W. Bush: Including a Great Number of Select Quotations, as a way of resisting complicity and docility when faced with the overwhelming and disturbing change that she saw in her country. She remarks that she wanted to be able to tell her grandchildren that she'd done something to resist torture, the loss of civil rights, and murder that have tainted this nation during Bush's tenure in the Oval Office.

Here's an interview with this articulate and exceptional woman in Feministing, which is the source of this post.

This book looks like one to buy.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever since the anti-trust issues of the '90s surfaced, Microsoft has been roundly (and justifiably) accused by the digerati of sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) around issues of Linux, Open Source, and what Lawrence Lessig terms Free Culture. Hence, the agreement to collaborate between Novelll and Microsoft several month ago was greeted by Open Source supporters with suspicion and with much reading of the tea leaves.

Yet, to my mind, the whole discussion has taken on the appearence of a witch hunt. (M$ is evil, dude. Linux is l33t. 3rgo this suks.) This, despite the fact that there is an underlying sound business model here for both Novell and Microsoft. Linux isn't going anywhere (indeed SUSE Linux--a Novell distro--is the platform that yours truly uses whenever he's not gaming, like right now...). And like it or not, neither is Windows going anywhere, at least for the foreseeable future. So why wouldn't two leaders and erstwhile enemies decide that it made good sense to colllaborate and provide their customers with better products and, thereby, give themselves a competitive advantage?

Why not deploy Occam's razor to explain the partnership instead of trying to ferret out the evil conspiracy? The simplest explanation is that the agreement is exactly what it appears to be: a business partnership.

Now don't get me wrong, my mission in life is to get all my games running in Wine so that I never, ever have to install Vista on any computer in my household. I loathe the Microsoft business model. I despise the fact that when I terminated my licensing agreement with them a few months ago that they sent me a nastygram threatening to require me to provide a "certificate of destruction" (whatever that might be?!) if they suspected that I was still running their precious--and for this Linux user, utterly superfluous--software.

Yet, for me, that only means that I won't be buying Vista, SQL Server 2005, Exchange, et cetera, because there are viable and more cost-effective alternatives. It does not mean that I'm going to turn into a conspiracy theorist.

All of which is preface to my including a link to this article, which I believe gets it right.

Members of the open source “community” will probably throw virtual bricks through my Windows (pun intended) because I support this agreement so enthusiastically – just as members of the Microsoft “community” did when my research proved the cost benefits of Linux in January this year. However, I believe it delivers what businesses need – document interoperability, management capabilities for heterogeneous environments, cross-platform support for virtualization, and the freedom to choose the right mix of operating systems for each requirement.

This in turn will improve enterprise adoption of Linux and open source.

And it is enterprise adoption – much more so than ill-informed bloggers sitting in their basements tweaking their kernels – that will drive success for Linux and open source.

Well put. It's a good read for my fellow techies out there.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been following this conversation in Salon as it's progressed. Basically, B. Alan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies is responding to positivist/materialist critics regarding a Salon article a few months ago that profiled his field of inquiry. (You'll need to watch a brief commercial if you're not a Salon subscriber.)

As a novice meditator and fledgling Buddhist who finds that he's run head on into the limits of positivist/materialist inquiry when he investigates the self, I think Wallace has deftly and logically argued for expanding the limits of what we can and should consider when we investigate consciousness.

As we do so investigate (and I think it's inevitable that we will), it's interesting to consider how post-structuralism might inform our meta-analysis of our inquiries. Ultimately, there is no place to stand, no Archimedes lever giving us the objectivity that science seeks.

It's all impermanent, it's all suffering, and it's all consciousness. Sarvam duhkham.

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't think I could have articulated it any better. The poor execution of some of these issues in my WoW guild is largely responsible for my leaving the game (not that that was a bad thing in the long run). I was no doubt partially responsible for some of the communication difficulties in our guild as we shifted from high-end to end-game content. Yet, there's a lesson here: be careful who your guildmates are....

Peridyd

Posted by Dennis Bennett at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)