A Dotty Prezi

I endure a lot of Powerpoint presentations, and my heart goes out to the people who make them, and have to try to make them interesting and eye-catching, but still readable. I mean, how many legitimate things can you do with a title and a stack of bullet points?

So I was delighted to stumble upon Prezi, an alternative method for making engaging presentations. In half an hour I whipped up this not-yet-finished presentation on Dotty, the application I am building:

How to empty a storage unit on Prezi

This is a lot of fun! I'll be making more of these things...

going dotty

The problem: we have two storage units full of stuff from my mother's house. She is now in an assisted-living facility, and there is no chance she will need the stuff in the storage units again. There are five of us siblings, and among us we have 11 children, and we don't all live in close proximity to the stored stuff. So how are we going to get the stuff divided out, with a minimum of hassles, so everyone is as happy as the circumstances allow?

I have been working on a solution, called Dotty. It's an online tool that lets each of us log in, review the stuff from storage, and put colored dots (a different dot for each of us) on the things we would like in our households. I have just opened the site for testing with a couple of my sisters, and still have a few bells and whistles to hook up; but overall I am very happy with the app. I built in in FlashBuilder, using Flex 4, with ColdFusion 8 pages to provide access to the MySQL database--and it could hardly have worked better.

I will post a movie soon of Dotty in action. Nice addition to the old portfolio...

Odd props

A few months ago I noted that I had a script in progress that had been stuck at a certain point for months and months. I am happy to report that that play, and two others, got themselves finished by October and had their first reading at a playwrights' crit group in November. I am a slower writer than I would wish to be, dawdling and delaying for weeks and then turning out page after page in unexpected writing surges. If I could harness them...I guess I would be a different person than I am.

One of these new plays takes place on a stalled Ferris wheel, with a couple rocking in each of the cars we can see and a repair man clambering over the structure of the wheel. Another is the famous police-lineup play, in a town too small to have enough people for a lineup. I tend to put ordinary people in proximity to odd props or odd situations, and often good plays come out of it.

For the next couple of months I am concentrating on some software projects I am building, little apps for tiny niche audiences. But if they work out they will make nice additions to my resume. For sure, I am learning all the ways in which Flex 4 is different from Flex 3...

But rustling at the back of my mind there are a couple more script ideas. I have the idea backlog of a member of the leisure class, and at the end of a long day of not-leisure work I can barely stand the sight of all those little nuggets of inspiration. Until I can't stand not to work on them, and we are off to the races again.

Your feedback is very important to us

So I was riding on the commuter train from Boston to Lowell, and the wifi kept cutting out. I am by now inured to losing the Internet connection once or twice during the 40-minute trip (there is a black hole near North Chelmsford), but nine times?

So I found the customer comment form to let them know that the service is deteriorating from 'okay' through 'annoying' to 'why even pretend it's a service?' And I could not submit my feedback on the form they supply. There is a required field called "Topic" with a pulldown menu and the instruction "Please select a Type of Feedback". And there are no options available. Nothing to choose. I clicked "view source" to double check. Hahaha up your nose, Mr. Customer.

So I called them today and waited for an hour to talk to a customer service rep who didn't have a clue what I was talking about, or why I was telling her. But she carefully took down what I said and promised to pass it on.

I guess I'll plan to do only offline work on the train from now on.

               

                    Select One

Speaking so as to be heard

One of my great goals when I was growing up was to be able to speak at least the second language of everyone I was likely to meet. This is a valid and highly laudable goal for a Canadian, but it quickly spins into difficulties if you live in a metropolitan area.

And then I compounded my troubles by spending several years in the Canadian Arctic, where I learned and used Inuktitut and Cree. They are wonderful languages, but they don't travel all that well unless (as Rebekah and I are known to do) you want to discuss something in a Muenster restaurant with a fair degree of confidence that other diners will not know what you are saying.

I live right now north of Boston, and my English, French, and Spanish would seem likely to cover most of the people I run into.  But I didn't realize until I moved there that Lowell, MA, is 20% Cambodian.

I have tried learning Khmer. I got several chapters along, so I could thank shop clerks and so on. And then I met the chapter that laid out the 29 ways you can say "you" in Khmer, and how deploying the right word is important to respect the other person's years/status/relationship to you. I have not gone further.

Oh, and did I mention that the building we live in is about 20% folks from Brazil? I just learned today that Portuguese is in the top 10 of world languages:

1. Mandarin (over a billion speakers)
2. English (about a billion)
3. Spanish (500 million)
4. Hindi (490)
5. Russian (277)
6. Arabic (255)
7. Portuguese (240)
8. Bengali (215)
9. French (200)
10. Malay / Indonesian (175)

 As a kid, I figured that the imperialist languages were the ones to follow, as they would have left speakers of their languages in all their former colonies. Works great for English and Spanish.

What now? I guess the sensible next-language decision these days would be the next biggest trade/commerce/Internet language that I don't now have. So if I'm being sensible, it's off to Mandarin lessons...

Three graces

Our granddaughter Etta, at lower right, communes with two of her cousins at a family gathering in Ottawa.

image caught by Etta's dad, Terry.

On the Concord River

We went out for a bike ride today through a part of Lowell we don't know all that well, Fort Hill Park, Shedd Park, and the Lowell Cemetery area. We spent some time hanging out with the late Senator Paul Tsongas, where he rests on a bluff above an extremely paintable stretch of the Concord River.

Spent some time thinking about people who give theirs lives to public service, and people who use the benefits of their position to benefit others as well as themselves. Case in point is Freeman Shedd, who deeded 30 acres of his land to Lowell for a recreation park about a hundred years ago. He seems to have made his fortune in cologne, among other enterprises, and certainly lived in a grand house on Andover Street as a reward for his success. Nobody said he had to give anything back to the city of his birth, yet he did. I don't know whether he was a pleasant man, or a deeply thoughtful one; but I am grateful to him.

Playing in Midgard

My old favorite role-playing game, Midgard, is becoming active again after a long time of sleep. Turns are being processed and new adventures are beginning!

It's a measured sort of excitement, of course, because this is a moderated, turn-based game. You send in your turn, and then wait and wait to see what turns out. The last time I was active, I spent months, at a rate of a turn every three or four weeks, getting my clans into position to help with the assault on a city--and then the game master died.

One of the challenges for new players (for old players, too) is that the turn sheet is quite complicated. Up to 30 actions, and each action having as many as five arguments, and the arguments have to be in the right syntax. So I have been building the Midgard Turn Builder to help players with their task:

I'm building it in Flex 4 (Flash Builder), and having a lot of fun learning and using the new functions in that tool.

I have just let the player community know that the Turn Builder is ready for testing. Will let you know how it goes.

Oh, about the gore

And there was sufficient gore in Titus to satisfy any vampires in the audience.

Beyond gore

This production of Titus Andronicus, wrapping up tonight, is light on the gore and shock effects, and wrestles with the core of the conflicts between the Roman factions, the vengeful Goth queen, and wild cards like her advisor and lover, Aaron.

Spouse and I were talking this morning about how Titus is all about love of children. Titus, Tamora, Aaron all make their key decisions based on their perceptions of what their children need or what they expect of them. Maybe that's why the characters who have neither parents nor children in the play (Saturnine, Marcus, Bassianus) seem less substantial to me.

Shallow breathing

I am reminded, by my stance for the last few minutes of the current production of Titus Andronicus, of the importance of planning for one's death, since it may come suddenly. In this case I receive a dinner fork to the spinal column, and it does more damage than you would think likely. It's important to die in character, of course, but there are some more mundane considerations: don't fall across the leading lady in such away that you cut off blood circulation to any of her body parts, come to rest in a way that you can stay at rest without your knees or knuckles screaming at you and trying to make you writhe, and find a position that lets you go on with the standard actorly business of breathing without distracting the audience by the rhythmic rise and fall of your chest.

I am sure there are the elements of an e-book in this: Sorrow is an Enemy: Leadership Principles of the Andronici. I will send it to the staff at BP immediately.

open-ended

I have a short play part-way done. It has been part-way done since November, when my big writing project that lasted until this month got really busy. But it's also part-way done because it has been evolving in surprising ways, and I'm a little scared of it.

The complainant who does not really have a complaint is about to view a lineup of suspects that is not really a lineup. Is the hard-bitten police lieutenant not really hard-bitten? Or perhaps not a lieutenant? Stay tuned...

learning learning

When I learn lines, I try to subdivide long scenes into meaningful and manageable chunks of a page or less of script. Then I learn the first chunk of the scene, and then the last chunk. This gives me confidence that I will be able to enter and leave the scene strong, even if I rattle around a lot in the middle. Similarly, I usually learn first my last scene in a play, and may even work backwards, scene by scene, depending on the rehearsal schedule.

What bumps into this is the debt I owe my other actors to provide them, as early as possible, with an energized performance that is somewhere in the neighborhood of what I hope to do in front of our audience. I don't much like surprising people with new business or a new emotional level when they are struggling with their own lines and characterizations. So scenes where I might not have much to say, but where other people's performances rely on my informed response to them, get high priority, too.

We ran through Act 2 last night pretty well; as you can see, the gaps are closing. By Sunday's rehearsal I hope to not have to call 'Line!' to the stage manager at all.

Just one week to go!

Act 2, Scene 3

This is a power scene. Titus is rejected by the tribunes as he pleads for his condemned sons' lives, and is reduced to preaching to the paving stones. Then his daughter Lavinia is brought in, having been deprived of her hands and tongue. Then he learns he may be able to save his sons' lives by chopping of his left hand and sending it to the emperor. What is a loving father to do?

 As you can see from my Goalscape, I worked on 2:3 a LOT yesterday and today. About halfway through the scene during the rehearsal tonight, I will have to whip the script out of my pocket. I could in theory have learned more lines last night; but the passions in the scene are pretty intense and I was exhausted as if I had been boxing.

The lines, the lines!

Titus rehearsals are going well. On Sunday we had a morning of combat training for all those moments when bodies go flying or sharp objects zip quickly past earnest actors' body parts. In the afternoon we ran--well, staggered--through the entire show, and not too badly.

With two weeks to go, here is my updated Goalscape of the lines I have to learn. The light-colored areas are where I still have work to do:

Those two big scenes at the bottom of the chart are obviously where I have to put my energies. I have left them until now because they are full of long speeches by me with relatively little interaction with other actors. I did the other scenes first so I could give my fellow cast members some lively and appropriate interaction, to feed energy back to them. In Act 2, scene 3, I do a lot of talking to paving stones, which have not minded the neglect so far.

Drawback of getting older, that I had not noted until now, is that my eyesight has changed so that, when I lie down to talk intimately with said stones, I am too close to my script to read the words. Good stimulus to learning them, I guess.

Taking on Titus

About twenty years ago I wrote short versions of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens for the Hampshire Shakespeare Company, and they went really well. Last week I agreed to step into an almost-full-length version of Titus, as the actor playing Titus had to withdraw for personal reasons. I had my first rehearsal Tuesday, and the show opens June 18, and I am remembering why I enjoyed the twenty-minute version so much. There are so many lines...!

Fortunately, the cast and director are kind and patient, and I think it will turn out to be a great show for Ghostlight Theater. Hands chopped off here, tongues torn out there...and excellent grammar.

I made myself a Goalscape of the script, to keep track of the scenes I have to learn. As you can see, I have about a third of the lines down and a LONG way to go (the "pp" numbers are Titus' pages; the whole script is about 75 pages long:

I'll let you know how it goes...

Coding coding coding

I am building a turn-builder tool for a role-playing game called Midgard. Each turn has up to 30 actions. Each action has up to six values, and up to now a big problem has been players submitting turnsheets with tons of mistakes (values in the wrong fields, missing required values...). The turn-builder only shows you valid options for the choice you made in the first field, and then only valid options for what you chose in the second field, and so on, until you have enough valid stuff for the action to be ready to submit.

The second through sixth values for an action may need a text box, a number stepper, a picklist, a  combo box (that's a picklist where you can add something you don't find in the list), or a checkbox. That's a max of 3125 combinations of controls, and then sometimes the values are required and sometimes they are optional.

I need to say this from time to time to remind myself why I need to write so MANY lines of code. Thank you for listening.

Getting a useful view of a project

I am a big fan of mind mapping. I usually start working out what's going to be involved in a project in a mind-mapping tool like Mindomo. I have even tried to track a project (what is complete, who owns what needs to be done, how done is it) using a mind map...with pretty poor success. A mind map node doesn't know anything about the state of its children, except that they are there, so there was a lot of repetitive bookkeeping for me in updating how done things were.

I am working on a project right now for a great old turn-based game called Midgard. It's a sort of medieval-with-some-magic political-struggle game where you start out with a couple of friends and a couple hundred retainers and try to make something of yourself in a huge and often hostile world. You are asking, why play a game when I can get that at home for free, and it's a valid question. Which I can't really answer right now, but I will return to it in a future post.

Anyhow, one of the painful aspects of Midgard is entering your actions on the turn sheet in the correct syntax. You can use as many as 30 actions per turn, and each action can have as many as five arguments. "City - Warehouse - Load - [warehouse #] - [quantity] - [item]" and actions like it are very easy to set down in the wrong order.

So I am building the Midgard Turn Builder. Basically, what you choose as the first part of each action governs what the Turn Builder will let you choose or enter for all the other arguments. When this finally gets working, it should reduce blood pressure readings all across the player community, and probably cut the turn processing time dramatically.

I will post again about the Turn Builder as it develops (you are free to go visit now, but the turnsheet screen is only partially hooked up. Come back June 1), but right now I want to show you how I am keeping track of everything I have to do.

I started with a mind map, as is my wont. Here is what it looked like at an early stage:

All the little branches represented things I thought of and tried to organize by some sort of logical method. But how to track what was done, and what needed doing next?

I recently found Goalscape, and it is proving a huge help in tracking the project. Goalscape displays the project as circles within circles. The innermost circles are the general categories, and their 'children' are the tasks within those categories:

The parents know about the status of their children, so as you record progress on a child task, the parent task gets proportionately colored in.

See that orange little thing? I can zoom in on it and see all those little children in a readable way:

Looks like I have some work to do on the code that handles the action arguments!

There are features I am not using yet, because this is a one-person project; however, Goalscape lets you assign deadlines and task owners. It is a young tool, so I bet cool additions are coming soon.

If you have a tangled project, consider flattening it out with Goalscape.

Problematic penitence

My Lenten penance so far this year has been to listen to the spring training games of the Washington Nationals. I follow this team because they used to be the Montreal Expos, and I was living in Montreal when that franchise began playing, back at Jarry Park. I have hardly ever been in Washington, and have never seen a Nationals game live, but they are my team.

And this spring they have started off with 11 straight losses, following the tradition of the last two full seasons when they have lost more than 100 games each time.

Ah, but now, today, they played two split-squad games and won both of them. Will I have to root for single-payer health-care reform from now on?

Harsh realities

The less I pay attention to Canadian politics, the pleasanter my memories of it. We have been out of Canada for five years on this current stint (just got the notice saying we are being dropped from the voting lists because of prolonged absence), which has allowed me to pretend that Canadian politicians, base their fervent disagreements and maneuverings on high principles and a shared concern for the well-being of all citizens.
But I have been following events a little more closely over the last few months, and my rose-coloured lenses need to be set aside.
The Conservative government shut down Parliament around Christmas time to choke off an investigation into mishandling of prisoners in Afghanistan, and to try to defuse a confrontation where the government is refusing to provide documents which Parliament claims it has the right to see. The shut-down in itself was cheesy and petty, and underscored that the dispute over the documents seems to be because they would be embarrassing to the government, not because they would reveal matters damaging to national security.
And this week the government's budget proposals came out (Summary article by a former Conservative staffer: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/ericmang/2010/03/conservatism-and-economic-incompetence). More tax cuts for those who have already had tax cuts. Retrenchment on efforts to help people out of the disastrous recession. A more militant military. Much much less for the arts.
The government has the principles of its dogmatic base at heart, but not the needs of the generality of Candians. Why, they are almost acting American (Bush-era) in their arrogance and disdain.
I much preferred the rosier view I had built up. Wish I was in a position to do anything about the current situation.

Tribal knowledge

At my day job, I keep running into word-walls, where the evident meaning of the words is not what the text is trying to convey. So, we have an "application accelerator" that does not accelerate the application. Evidently, it accelerates the process of creating the application, and what happens after that is up to the developer. We have an "autogenerated" modal window that turns out not to be autogenerated, or not in the sense I would understand that term. I still have to tell it what I want in the window and how I want it to look.

Probably what I am running up against is the speed of development of our product. It had its cranky places in times past, and you had to have a large chunk of "tribal knowledge" in order to make it work at all. And now it is much more simple and straightforward for anyone who ever used the older versions. But I did not. I am only seven months here, so my baseline is what everyone else things of as this huge advance over the past. What they want to trumpet as wonderful improvements, I see normal or almost-normal software behavior.

This would be funny if it did result in my wasting so much time tracking down where my understanding does not match the expectations of the team with good tribal knowledge.

Ugly face

Jack Layton is the leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party, has been for the past seven years. He is an energetic fighter for his party's position, and also a stylish leader who does a good job of eviscerating opponents' positions and actions without sticking knives into their guts.

Jack announced on Friday that he has prostate cancer, which is scary but likely treatable. His dad had prostate cancer almost 20 years ago and fought it successfully. I am a great Jack Layton fan, but even if I were not I would wish him the greatest success in this battle. As Gilles Duceppe, leader of the rival Bloc Quebecois, tweeted, "Cher Jack, ton dynamisme et ta détermination viendront à bout de cette épreuve. Bon courage."

I found remarkable, though the quality of comments left on Canadian news sites as the rumor mill churned before Mr Layton's press conference...and even after. People found the most hateful, irrelevant things to say about someone they probably have never met and who arguably thinks benevolently of them. I understand that people who don't get out much and can't keep friends tend to lurk and the world of comment-posting, but still I have clung to a romantic image that this would be Something Canadians Just Don't Do.

I am wrong, of course. Canadians are as trashy as are any other people, and ever have been. I remember now sitting as a poll observer for the NDP in a Halifax riding where the great Muriel Duckworth was our candidate, the first woman to run for a seat in the Nova Scotia legislature. Observing for one of the other parties was a college-aged troll who kept up a non-stop flow of disparaging commentary of all things that were not of his party. But he didn't really know all that much, so his commentary was mainly about how ugly or stupid or lame various prominent figures looked--his chief target was Stanley Knowles, MP, labor activist, and clergyman (who, even his friends would agree, could look a bit like a long-legged bird). I remember wondering at the time, "What planet does this kid think he is on? Why does he think what he's saying has merit?"

It didn't have merit, of course; but as these past decades have shown us, meritless speech poured through a megaphone can have great power. So I guess he was a harbinger of what we now experience.

Speedy healing, Jack!

Home on the prairie

I dashed home from work last night and went off to the nearest AMC theater complex to see a simulcast of Garrison Keillor's radio program, "A Prairie Home Companion". I thought I might be all alone in the theater, but the audience eventually got up to about 150 folks. Most of us were geezers, but not all.
Do you know this show? It has been broadcasting almost forever on Saturday nights on public radio: two hours blending inane skits, local acts, big-name stars, a classy house orchestra, and news from the imaginary town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.
The concession booth had no Powder Milk Biscuits or ketchup, two of the supposed sponsors for the show, but aside from that the evening was perfect. We laughed and applauded and held our breaths at the virtuoso music and sound effects. Elvis Costello was the big name of the night, but he had good company.

That was some fun. I hope they broadcast the radio show this way at regular intervals. I will never get to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota; but this was almost as good.

Swoled

I wish that my lip, after I have once bit it solidly enough to leave visible damage, would not develop a kinky attraction to the teeth chomping down next to it. But it seems to swell towards the danger zone and get itself bitten again and again and again. Even when I wasn't eating anything, just talking on a conference call with some suddenly-startled folks in India. "What was that?" they said. "Must be something with the connection," I enunciated.

On the way to the train

So we had a train to catch on Sunday morning in Albany. About two weeks ago I started to think about winter storms and icy early-morning highways, and we opted to book a bed and breakfast for Saturday night in Troy, NY. One of my rare bursts of genius.

The Old Judge Mansion bed and breakfast is so large that the old judge himself maybe be lurking in one of the many upper rooms. There is one parlor given over to the playing of Texas Hold'em poker tournaments on Sunday nights. There are downstairs public rooms that I saw, but hardly had time to inspect. Kindly hosts; firm beds; off-street parking; ample breakfast.

Oh, and good directions to several restaurants nearby. The first one we went to was booked until late April, so we went to another one, Loporto's, which was also very busy. But they squeezed us in at the bar and fed us mountains of food while the barman (who has worked at various jobs in the building since he was twelve) put on a show of pouring, mixing, shaking, and serving.

Troy and I had had a benevolent ignorance of each other before this past weekend, but now I am happy to have made the acquaintance. It's a former 'Richest Town in America' that looks through much of its downtown as though great old structures had been leveled without much thought to replacing them. But we very much enjoyed what is still standing. And we made the train on time on Sunday morning.

Back to Midgard

Oh, so long ago there was a hand-moderated game called "Midgard". You mailed in your turns and they dealt with them and some weeks later the results came back and you knew if you had found the gold mine or walked into a trap. I have played in a handful of versions and variants of Midgard, usually as a minor character on the lawful side. The game had a major hiccup when the owner of one version died and the owner of the other was overwhelmed by technical issues and sold off the game.

But now Midgard is almost ready to go again. I have my turns for my two clans, and my computer wallpaper is a 30,000-foot view of the land and oceans of Midgard. I can't wait to go exploring again!

Too good to set aside

In the fall I went on a little sprint of writing short plays. Completed four; have as many as seven more in the pipeline. But I had to put that aside for the next few months while I work on a huge (8,000 pages or so) project with a tight deadline.

I have been worrying that when I finally get back to the short plays I will find that they have become dusty and uninteresting. But not so. I just visited one of the unfinished short plays, where it sits in my project space on Celtx. It is very funny, sort of crazy, and is either almost done (if it turns one way) or still in the opening scene (if it flowers a different way). I am so totally tempted to put the big project aside and work on this little baby. Must. resist. cute. script.

The New 10 Commandments of Screenwriting.

Really useful slaps upside the head for screenwriting:

The New 10 Commandments of Screenwriting.

Old Fogey

I have a bit of a reputation in my family for going to the video store (that's how long ago I developed this reputation) and bringing home what we came to call "Boffo European Comedies". As in, "they may be funny to the people who hate these people, but they sure ain't funny to us." The foundation stone of this series was I Even Met Happy Gypsies, of which the most memorable scenes were the repeated repossession of the family television and attempts to push the body of the dead man through a hole in the frozen river.

Well, I did it again today, although I was mine only victim, with a German romantic comedy which starts with a horrid German gentleman in Turkey running over a hitchhiker with a car that has a dead body in the trunk. A dead body which we begin to suspect is the body of the hitchhiker's true love. I can't say for sure, because my old fogey meter hit red and the movie is on its way back to Netflix.

I don't understand. And get off my lawn.

A tiring book

I just finished reading a brick-thick mystery novel set in the west of England. Had all the elements that should normally attract and entice me: interesting locale, feisty vicar, headstrong teen, slumbering mystery about to awaken.

Yet I only finished the thing because I am sick at home and was too weak to get it off my chest once I started reading it in bed. It was so relentlessly busy, so filled with collisions and unlikely discoveries, that I just had to dawdle along after each page rather than really keeping up with the plot. It didn't help that I have been a feisty vicar myself, back in the day, and I am pretty sure that no feisty vicar who wants to go on collecting paychecks would keep the proper authorities so in the dark as the main character does in this book.

A book like this makes me yearn for the novels of Patrick O'Brian, with their rich, glowing balance of event and introspection, tense drama and low comedy. Oh, and lots and lots of nautical tehnobabble. Double coaked sister-blocks forever!

Accentuated

I am on a conference call right now with a room-full of folks in India, plus some folks in North America. Can barely understand what is being said--I wonder how much is because I barely understand the topic, and how much because I am not all that used to pronounced Indian accents. Of course, I am afraid to ask.

My ear seems to be getting stiffer as I get older: I can't pick up very much at all from Radio Canada talk shows in Quebec French, and tried out a very frustrating first lesson in Mandarin where I just could not hear the difference between the essential four pronunciation tones. Maybe I should stick to printed text...

Jump rope

There is a long list of skills that I somehow overlooked learning as a young person. I don't think I ever hung by my knees from a parallel bar, or learned to make music, a la Bobby McFarrin, by thumping my chest and belly in various ways with my hands. I dance like an old white guy. Don't let me put a foot on a skateboard.

So, when I say that our new jumpropes arrived yesterday you will understand the trepidation I feel. Jumproping is good for the body in all sorts of ways, if not so good for the downstairs neighbor. And there is a gratifying skills progression you can set yourself to.

Or you can tangle your ankles every five or six passes of the rope (supposedly) under your feet, and stagger toward some sharp-edged piece of furniture, and try again with a mounting debit balance of dread.

This should be easier.

Bells and whistles

On my commute most weekdays I pass a Boston hotel on the edge of the Charles River. Well, separated from the river by a highway, and bordered by an access road that runs up onto the bridge across the river that takes the traffic, the trolley, and pedestrians like me to and from Cambridge.

It's a classy hotel, I guess. It has a doorman in a long coat, and this doorman gets taxis for hotel residents. Well, I guess he does, since he has a whistle and plies it at five second intervals while waving imperiously at the highway and the access road. But I have never seen a taxi swerve out of its course in response to his calls; in fact I have never seen a taxi in front of the hotel.

There is a subway stop just across the street, but maybe the visitors are too classy for that, or are going to odd locations. But as far as I can see, they aren't going anywhere.

I can ignore the gestures, but the whistle is very demanding. Maybe I should design him a little Android application for his smart phone that will summon taxis when he needs them. And another one to play the whistle noise so the residents will know he is hard at work.

This sort of thinking gets me across the bridge in spite of the stiff northern wind.

Pocket diaries

I used to keep a record of what I was up to in little pocket appointment books. My dad gave me one every Christmas for many years, and I filled up a fair number of them with summaries of my works and days in tiny mouse writing.

The surviving books live in a bureau drawer and nobody will attend much to them until and unless my fifteen minutes of fame become truly remarkable. However, when I turn the pages they evoke the rhythms and even the smells of those days very clearly, in a way that Twitter and Facebook entries do not do for me. I follow the diary entries of John Quincy Adams from 200 years ago that the Massachusetts Historical Society posts on Twitter every day, but I know these entries are just faint reminders of the diary volumes that I could go visit in the museum at Quincy, if I chose to.

I am going to try to be a more consistent blogger this year, even though my laptop does not have gilt edges or the faint smell of leather and sweat.