@lindsay.at

[Note: The events and deals described in the post are currently in flux. I advise not acting upon the information contained within, for the moment.]

So, with respect to my recent post on getting a pseudo-Three Martini Lunch, I did it anyway.

That is, after talking with a workman (making estimates on work on the house) about the ridiculous charges from local web designers, I mentioned "something I already considered but decided against" to Rosemary. She's also been brought up with a nose for a bargain, and, as expressed in Pounds Sterling, getting onto TxD's premium service ladder-rung "for life" was appealing to her as well. It didn't hurt that she had some joint-rainy-day money squirreled away, either.

So now we have a Mixed Grill and a Premium one-time-payment hosted Joyent plan, and even more eagerly awaiting the introduction of the Joyent Core.

[Note: The events and deals described in the post are currently in flux. I advise not acting upon the information contained within, for the moment.]

Over on the Joyent forums, Jason Hoffman answered a query saying that there is a backdoor discount to the equivalent of TextDrive's Three Martini Lunch (3ML) special. If you pay for Joyent's Lifetime Premier plan for the application suite, you'll get upgraded to whatever the equivalent of the Three Martini Lunch will be.

It all hinges on a bit of faith, but what the 3ML will turn into will closely resemble:

• Joyent's Premier plan with 100 users/100GB of storage,
• Strongspace's Premier plan, again with 100 users/100GiB of storage, and
• TextDrive's Business hosting plan, with 20GiB storage, 60GiB/month of bandwidth, and loads of websites and databases.

...all for the life of the company (which seems very vigorous indeed, of late). So, for the price of ten months of any of these plans, you get the whole whack "permanently."

I thought long and hard about this deal, if I want to jump in on it (the door seems to be closing this week), and I decided not to. Money is a little thin this month, and really, I have to work hard to get the full benefit of my Mixed Grill plan, anyway. The heavy-duty business hosting was the most tempting: I would love to be able to move successful sites onto a bigger server, but I don't have anything that big in the pipeline. The Strongspace is also tempting: I already come close to my storage quota there, and 100GiB of secure, off-site storage sounds like a great deal. The Joyent portion would be tough to take advantage of, as it stands today.

Cast as an investment into the future, it's sorely tempting. Measured against buying the equivalent amount of hardware (which, let's be honest, probably will have the same useful lifetime), it's looking a little pale. I've held off on buying an iPod with video so far, this should be easier to resist. Cast as a bargain, it's amazing at $400 less than the normal "special" price.

Perhaps it's a bit cheeky to diss a CMS on a blog that doesn't use it, but I use WordPress, even if it's not on this site. My "big time" blog is moving house, from a dedicated server that I more-or-less maintain (in my wife's office), to a shared server on TextDrive. Performance certainly has taken a big hit, but I can pretty much guarantee that it can scale to higher traffic better and that it won't be taken out nearly as often or as long by random downtime.

I spent huge swathes of the weekend trying to get the site's theme working in a way that I liked. The K2 theme boasts of being a flexible theming framework, allowing you to do what you like in CSS, and "baking in" support for several popular plugins, lowering the need to tinker with the core theme files even further. The promise didn't quite match reality. K2 is an attractive, clean theme, and I like the fun, AJAXy things you can do with it, but it still has a set structure and strong ideas about how elements are displayed. Unfortunately, I was trying to match a known structure and layout, and had strong ideas about what the design should look like, myself. WordPress was good in allowing complete flexibility, but in the process I completely changed the internals of the infamous WP-loop, meaning I have to do a lot of work if ever I want to upgrade the K2 theme.

(This makes me wonder about plugging XSLT into the WordPress theme hierarchy. You can radically rewrite elements using that. So I'd imagine a master Xhtml document being created by the loop, and optionally doing a run through an XSLT stylesheet before being shipped off to the reader. Obviously, I'm a bit swayed by this site's architecture, and it's simply moving the problem to another place, and not entirely avoiding maintainability problems (and creating further performance issues as well). But, computer science is nothing if not the art of moving problems around... Anyway, that's an aside to explore later.)

What really let me down, however, was the complexity of the master CSS file for the K2 theme. The default theme has a lot of attractive, complex, subtle things going on, and the CSS is a mess to deal with. First off, if the makers of K2 want to encourage CSS-only styles, they would do well to strip out the unnecessaries in the base CSS, and move the attractive blue Kubrick-2-like theme into a default style of its own. There were far too many settings to override, deeply buried within the CSS inheritance hierarchy (I had to impose my choice of font family at least four times, manually, for example).

Quite contrary to K2's implied promises, I ended up with a cluttered, fairly arbitrary stylesheet that was a series of hacks. I know at least part of the blame falls on my empirical, hack-y CSS coding method. Part of it also falls on the state of CSS, and the tools we have to deal with it — I think there must be a better way. (Does anyone advocate grouping by properties instead of elements? All the elements of the same color could be named once, and then all font styling is done that way, etc. I see flashes of this in exemplary styles, but it isn't consistent. [I see google brings up one page, originally from 1996...])

So, since I must count you as one of my dedicated fans (especially if you've read this far), I can point you to the site as a preview, because I'm sure it's not going to be overrun by a Slashdot effect from here: mediadescri.be. I like the URL a lot. I've been sitting on it for the better part of a year.

Yesterday marked my ten-year anniversary of living and working in Europe. On 19 October 1996, I got off an overnight Sabena/Delta flight in Zaventem airport, and took started on an adventure that at the time was framed as, "a year contract to be paid to live in Europe? What's the downside?"

Well, here I am, fairly well ensconced in a job, with a house and a family. The years of living on the continent have taken their toll: I'm certainly carrying a lot more weight around than ten years ago. I'm still using Macs, and am still surrounding myself with fun work on multimedia. I hand-coded my html then, and I still prefer to do so, now, only with a bit of CMS help on the boring, repetitive bits.

Although I have (a couple) iPods, I listen to music a lot less often than I did when I was dragging huge stacks of CDs from place to place. That's going to have to change.

The majority of my adult life has been spent away from my country of origin. I have always felt an outsider, anyway. Before 1996, I had never been outside of North America, or even on the west coast. Now, I am a seasoned (some might even say jaded) traveller, who can hit the ground running in any of four continents.

So, here I am. I don't think I want to turn it into ten more, right away.

Really, there's nothing to say right now. I mostly wanted to post here because I could: I'm killing time in between flights at London City airport. This trip is my first time through the airport, and on my way out (to a meeting in Luxembourg), I honestly spent so little time in the airport it was a blur.

This time, on my return, I was left with too much time on my hands: I could theoretically have made a 7pm return flight after landing at 6:25, but would have had to pay £85 for the privilege of having to cancel the taxi, dealing with un-routed luggage, taking the train, and arriving at home probably one hour earlier than otherwise.

So.

I'm in the departure lounge, going in via my phone, thinking that if I overrun my data allowance by a bit, it would still be cheaper than the £3 for half-hour local charges (par for the course, actually). And I have nothing to say. I don't normally want to post personal drivel on this blog, but a guy needs a diversion.

I was impressed with the Digital Music weblog's further digging on Tower Records' demise... Majors pushed Tower over the edge, now the minors feel the pain:

The final nail in the coffin that sent Tower Records spiraling into its second bankruptcy came when three of the big four labels stopped shipping product and demanded payment to resume. Tower, unable to order new major label music had no choice but to file bankruptcy, and the rest is history.

What you may not have realized though, and what interests me most is, the major labels had very little to risk when they sent Tower into its final death throes. When Tower filled for bankruptcy the first time, the major labels asked the bankruptcy court to become secured creditors. When Tower toppled, its weight fell squarely on the competition of the majors; scores of independent labels for who Tower Records meant big business. The major labels will be paid just behind the banks who financed Tower's attempt at recovery, but well before the minor labels who compete with the majors for shelf space.

(Via The Digital Music Weblog.)

The ever-excellent Guardian gives a nice overview (and eulogy) of where Tower Records stands today:

Tower Records, once a sign of the vitality of the US music retail market, a multinational purveyor of musical knowledge and influence, has gone under. Two years ago the company filed for bankruptcy. It recovered and at the start of this year a new chief executive, a bankruptcy and crisis management specialist, was brought in. But on August 20 the company again filed for bankruptcy and three leading record labels stopped supplying the chain, saying that it had not paid its bills.

It's a bit of a shock to be reminded of yet another fondness of my past in America being destroyed. My whole time at MIT, I lived within a decent walking distance from large Tower Records outlets: across the river as an undergrad at Baker House, and in Harvard Square while living in north Cambridge as a Masters student. They made for a great (if not necessarily cheap) evening out, with Tower's late hours. I think a very sizable proportion of my CD collection came from Tower (probably second to Newbury Comics' wicked deep discounts), and a lot of my most treasured finds were from there.

With the force of their retail presence in the Boston area, I always thought of Tower as representing the solid establishment, with enough sway to have a definitive catalogue alongside the popular stuff. It turns out this was just a product of the times, and since I left America ten years ago, the landscape has changed dramatically. I don't think I can work up the energy for an anti-globalisation/homogenation rant at the moment. It's more of a melancholy recognition that America really has changed, and each time I return, I know it less and less.

[Update: I had no idea this was such a popular topic.]

I saw the article, "In the iPod's world, black is the new white" last night, and it definitely rang true to me in the context of an earlier post :

With those conspicuous white earbuds and that gleaming white case, the iPod is etched into our consciousness as an alabaster icon. Over the past year though, there's been a quiet, seismic shift...

Steve Jobs and the crew at Apple seem to have created a design language where black means premium. Are people buying it?

To find out, Baker was nice enough to crunch another batch of retail data, this time on the MacBook laptops, which also come in white and black. His finding: In June, July and August, white MacBooks outsold black ones almost 2:1. But wait – the black ones were also more expensive, by about $200.

"Obviously, given their thought process, they believed that black deserved a premium. The surprising thing is that it sells that well, given that it's $200 more." Baker said he would have expected, given the price difference, that white would have outsold black by more like 4:1. "It's a lot to pay in a business where we haven't paid extra for color before. That says to me it's really successful."

(Via The Utility Belt.)

So, I discovered that the Symphony CMS is now for free. I had heard some nice things about it, and looked at it for a few minutes, when I was considering setting up this website, mostly because of the XSLT architecture. I took another quick look last night, and I think I'm still happy with this Flux CMS. Symphony felt a bit like a prettified TextPattern, with XSLT in place of tags. If it had been released for free perhaps a week earlier, I might have built lindsay.at on that architecture, but right now I have no regrets.

I also stayed up far too late last night getting the skeleton of Ian's site up, using WordPress, Gallery2, and WPG2 linking them, in a subdomain of my site. On one level, it's amazing how the pieces work together so easily. On another, there's a lot of fine-grained tweaking that still has to live in stylesheets (which one, now?!) in order to make things right. I guess it's a while before we'll see an architecture that allows everything to be set up and display and interlock in just the right way.

One thing I would like to take from Symphony is their tumbleblog revival: my old site had one of those in the form of an unordered list on the front page, with pointers to pages updated on my site. Sounds like a helpful, light way of incorporating site news without being overreliant on the blog architecture. Hmm.