Caveat Lector

After this week, I am forcibly reminded why I am not a web designer. In brief: doing actual web design reduces me to fits of sputtering, inarticulate fury. If I could write a virus that would corrupt every single copy of Internet Explorer on the planet, after the week I’ve just had, I would.

That wasn’t all that got my dander up this week—as I believe I said, I spent Monday and part of Tuesday working around a PHP problem that could have been solved with one line in my php.ini file. Live and learn—and sputter inarticulately.

Then I tackled the next problem: recreating a department’s web design in OJS. It took me four tries over three days to get something that would work well enough (I had to kill some of the vertical interest, and part of the remaining decoration is missing in IE, but oh well) cross-browser.

What else did I get done all week? Jack, that’s what. I hate web design!

Today I got a sizable envelope in the mail with “DO NOT BEND” written on it in large friendly letters. Inside was a lovely print of a pen-and-ink drawing of the building David and I were married in.

The artist, Elizabeth Ragsdale, was a co-worker of mine back in my conversion-peasant days. She was and still is a talented book designer; after the place we both worked for treated her egregiously badly, she struck out on her own, making a living with her art.

Which makes her signal act of generosity—I asked how much she normally charged for prints, and explained why I wanted that particular one—all the more striking: she gave me the print.

Well, the least I can do is thank her publicly. She’s got a show coming up in Madison, and all of my peeps should absolutely go give it a look.

I am so grateful. Not just for the print—for the example.

Someday I will manage to learn the innards of a new system without breaking it repeatedly.

Open Journal Systems was not that system, and yesterday and today were not someday.

I ran into a problem yesterday that (I learned today) could have been solved with the simple addition of one line to my php.ini file. Yesterday, though, with the patient assistance of a net-friend I pieced together a laborious workaround over the course of about four hours. It broke two hours later.

Eh, well, at least the correct fix will be going onto my production machine.

Today I absentmindedly managed to remove read permissions from all the files in the top folder of OJS. OJS didn’t like that. Can’t run a file you can’t read.

Tomorrow I get to test a laboriously-executed imitation of a local departmental website on Internet Explorer. Someday Internet Explorer will go away, too. But that day is not this.

I am an inveterate markup and CSS fiddler. I am never happy with any out-of-the-box web app. Not infrequently, what I come up with is worlds worse than what came out of the box, but that is the price of fiddling. (And I’m still proud of what I did with the repository I run. That puppy looks good, yo.)

Sometimes, though? It pays not to fiddle with stuff. I spent most of my last workday fiddling with Open Journal Systems’ markup and CSS. I came in today, ruthlessly copied the out-of-the-box defaults over my work, and am starting over. Why? Because I want to work with (okay, okay, rip off and change) other people’s journal designs, and if I fiddle with the markup and the base CSS, I can’t. Fiddling’s more trouble than it’s worth in this case.

I’m fiddling. A little. Journals without a logo now get MPOW’s logo as a default, and I’ve messed with the sidebar some because I don’t agree with how it’s organized. But most of it I’m just leaving alone, and when I get the urge to fiddle with it, I’m just gonna slap my hand good and hard to stop myself.

I used to think that the stupid mechanical overhead involved in fiddling with DSpace designs (upload, ant update, copy .wars, kill Tomcat, restart Tomcat; have I mentioned lately I hate Java?) was a bug. I’m starting to think that for inveterate fiddlers, it’s actually a feature.

The OEBPS FAQ started my career. No, it really did.

Back in the day, a wee conversion peasant got annoyed at the repetitive questions about markup and conversion thronging the main ebook listserv, and decided to write a FAQ. So she did, and said FAQ brought her to the attention of luminaries such as Allen Renear, luminaries who did things like running working groups.

So she landed on the OEBPS working group, and lived there a few years, only departing when the OEBF stabbed the working group in the back. (“We’re now a trade organization,” they said. “We’ve done the technical-standards thing, and we don’t need to do it any more.” Earlier this year, lo and behold, the OEBF’s successor organization reconstituted its technical working group. Most of the Old Guard, including the formerly-wee-conversion-peasant, were invited back. Most, including the f-w-c-p, did not accept.)

By the time she left, she had gotten well and truly browned-off by publisher inertia, ebook marketing hype, and the abysmal markup and preservation practices all over the e-publishing industry. Gosh, she said, somebody somewhere must be doing markup and preservation right!

And the rest is history. Or something.

Dropping the third-person… the OEBPS FAQ lived on my ex-employer’s website for a while because I was stupid enough to let it become a work-for-hire. (The word “pottage” springs irresistibly to mind. I was stupid when I was wee, yes indeedy I was.) When my ex-employer dropped it from their site, I took a small legal chance and picked it back up for my own professional website. Which is now fallow, waiting for me to get enough of a round tuit to put things back up. The ex-employer no longer exists, and I doubt the entity that bought it has any kind of paper trail establishing the OEBPS FAQ as their intellectual property. So it’s pretty much mine again.

Problem being, the OEBPS FAQ is a museum piece. I don’t need it up on the new textartisan.com. I’d kill it entirely, except that the wretched thing is cited in the scholarly record. It needs to be archived somewhere, is what it needs.

Oh. Duh. Yeah. I run an institutional repository, don’t I? I can put my own stuff in it, even.

So I did. Unfortunately, DSpace’s HTML ingest is too stupid to handle external CSS correctly, so it looks like the wrath of $DEITY, but it’s there. Chalk one up for the scholarly record, I guess… and note to self: my DSpace-ingest massager needs to deal with the CSS problem.

Me: Hiccup.

Him: “You’ve got the hiccups.”

Me: “Yep.” hiccup “I do.”

Him: “Try wiggling your toes.”

Me: “What good will that do?” hiccup

Him: “Absolutely no good at all. But you’ve never tried that as a hiccup cure before.”

Me: “Uh-huh.”

Him (airily): “And I can say that again next time, because next time you won’t have tried it either.”

Me: hiccup

Dream is getting used to the whole pilling thing. The pill-popper is working as advertised, and we’ve definitely shortened the ordeal in the week we’ve been doing it. So now I hold him down, David pills him, I let him go, and he wanders over to the kitchen with his tail in the “Okay, where’s my treat?” position.

And then Didi scuttles over too, because if there are going to be treats, she wants one.

On the downside, be it hairballs or I don’t know what, Didi is regularly hurling. So we cleaned everything and we’re brushing her constantly; what else can we do?

And I’m avoiding the real news, which is that my poor husband is up for a root canal and a wisdom-tooth extraction—not the same day, but soon. He was all worried about the cost; I told him (rather rudely) to shut up, because I’m certainly not going to balk at getting his teeth fixed given the amount of money we’ve spent on the cats!

But it’s not going to be fun for him; my teeth hurt just thinking about it. Owie.

I went to a consortium meeting earlier in the week that made it perfectly clear that the other attendees used to wonder what the heck I did all day—and that they now understand. Thinking of an institutional repository as a thing that sits on a server and happily gulps down materials doesn’t fly; Cliff Lynch’s definition says “set of services” for a reason.

Had a task force meeting today. We’re actually (knock on wood) doing okay; three of our six charges are fulfilled, another is nearly done, and we’re making headway on the last two. If the original May deadline floated for this group had stood, I would be panicking right now, but we have until June, and I think we’ll be all right.

I got a lovely email from a library-school student interested in digital librarianship who is coming to Fairfax and wants to shadow me for a day or two. Mark well, students—just ask us stuff, because the worst we can say is “no” and not infrequently we’ll say “yes” instead. I popped an email over to the head of one of the other campus libraries, because I know she makes a point of hiring library-school students, and there’s no reason one or two of them couldn’t hang around too.

My skunkworks project is about to endure the official fisheye. Please wish it luck. I’m thinking about submitting a proposal in response to this CFP for articles on institutional repositories, but I’m undecided about what precise topic to tackle. If anybody has strong opinions on that score, please do share them.

And the big news for the day, in the shameless self-promotion department, is that my most excellent colleague Jen Stevens and I are about to ink a deal to write a reader’s-advisory/research guide on selected fantasy authors.

So, yeah, I should be far too busy to get into much trouble for the next year or so.

We did a straight-up runthrough of the Holst last night.

And. Oh. $DEITY. Did. It. Ever. SUCK.

Eggs. Rocks. Boulders. Words exist not for the total suckitude that was that runthrough. Wow, the last time I remember a runthrough that bad of anything, our conductor unceremoniously yanked it from the program.

We don’t have that option. So we’ll just have to soldier on through.

In our defense, this is certainly the most technically difficult music I’ve ever tried to sing. Holst doesn’t exactly shy away from musical weirdness. Split the chorus into eight parts, then put each part on a different note of a whole-tone scale? Yeah, sure, why not? (It actually sounds pretty cool, I must admit.) Syncopation ’r’ Holst, as are tricky entrances, inconsistent phrase-ending lengths (I’ve taken to writing down the number of beats, in preference to doing music-math in my head while trying to count beats simultaneously), and no orchestral support in key spots.

I’d like to say I’m confident we’ll turn it around. Unfortunately, I’m not. That isn’t to say it’ll be a disaster from one end to the other; we have considerable swathes of it right. It’s just the bits we don’t have right that we, well, don’t have right.

I think a large part of our problem is that we were coddled too long, singing it at too-slow tempi. After a while singing it slow (but not ludicrously slow), that speed bakes itself into the brain, and abruptly speeding it up to the proper tempo gets folks lost. Back in high school, my conductor had two speeds: half-speed (when necessary) and a tempo. I think it worked a little better than what we’ve been doing here.

But we’ll see. Some choruses have amazing powers of pulling things together at the last possible minute. Hope this one is one of ’em.

Bob Chilcott sang with the utterly godlike King’s Singers for quite a while before turning his hand to choral composition. His singing experience shines through his compositions; he writes gorgeous singable lines even for the oft-neglected inner voices, understands singers’ ranges, and doesn’t over-orchestrate. His work is modern and pleasantly accessible, not exactly the commonest of combinations; a little reminiscent of Randall Thompson.

“Canticles of Light,” a series of three hymns about the fear of darkness and the godliness of light, is most remarkable for Chilcott’s sensitivity to the rhythm, sense, and emotional content of the texts he is setting. I strongly recommend reading and pondering the texts and their translations (”Te lucis ante terminum,” “Christe, qui, splendor et dies,” and “O nata lux de lumine”) before you come listen to them. (Because you’re all coming, right?) Duruflé has an annoying habit of not putting stressed syllables on the beat, subordinating the text to the melody he happens to want. Not Chilcott, whose lines flow so handsomely along with their texts that you won’t even notice the considerable effort the chorus has put into getting the rapid-fire time-signature changes and polyrhythms correct.

(I kid you not. Measures 16 through 25 of the “Te lucis,” to hand you a not-unrepresentative sample, run 5/8 4/4 3/8 4/4 5/4 5/8 7/8 5/8 2/4 4/4. Once I got the sense of it, it worked for me and I could more or less ignore the bar lines, but it’s not exactly music for sightreading.)

The mood Chilcott creates is delicately hopeful, trustful, confiding. Bad things can happen in darkness, but Chilcott’s singers trust that they will be protected from them; they have only to ask. God is an ally to be praised, not a judge or executioner to be feared.

This is a gorgeous piece. When I sing on a walk or at the bus stop (which I do; very old habit), more often than not these days it’s a bit of the Canticles. My sense is that we’re doing it justice, which I like. I’m also grateful to it (and to our very skilled and patient conductor Doug Mears) for getting me over the worst of my fear of changing rhythms and polyrhythms—just keep counting, subdivide as necessary, and it all works out in the end.

More or less. Heh. But that’s what rehearsals are for.