Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Wishlist: MT ‘tag’ category plugin

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Thanks to Flickr, I’m becoming more and more of a fan of keywords or ‘tags‘ as categorization tools. Rather than having a set number of categories or sub-categories, tags are an amazingly simple way to categorize items (such as photos on Flickr, or links on del.icio.us [which I really need to look more closely at]) just by tossing whatever descriptive terms you want into the tag field.

What I want now is a way to use tags in my Movable Type installation rather than categories. I have no idea if this is even possible with the current plugin scheme, or if it would take a lot of lower-level source code hacking (seems like it might…I’m guessing you’d need to disable MT’s category system, replace it with the tag system, remove the Category drop-down menu from the MT interface and replace it with a field for inputting tags, incorporate a tag search feature, etc.), but I’d love to see it. Even better would be if enabling the tag system in MT would automatically create a dynamically-generated tags page similar to Flickr‘s, with the top X (50? 100? 150? User-definable?) tags displayed using variable sizes, and a link to a full tag list.

Okay, I want to rip off Flickr’s entire tag system and use it on my MT blog. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? ;)

Of course, I can’t code a “hello world” application (well, maybe in BASIC, but not in anything more complex than that), let alone tackle a project like this. But I can dream.

Barring some kind soul figuring out how to shoehorn such a thing into MT, though, do any of the current weblogging tools support tag-based categorization? I’m not entirely sure if that one feature would be enough to tempt me away from MT, but it’s obviously bouncing around my brain enough to make me ask…

Addendum: Just before posting this, I looked at the ‘Keywords’ field in the MT interface. Hmmm. Maybe all we need is a plugin to parse and interact with the keyword field that’s already there? Damn, I wish I knew more about programming…. Ideas, anyone?

Later tonight I may see what resources I can find to toss this idea into the wider MT community and see if some bigger brains than mine feel like poking around with this.

Update: Ben Hammersly is doing something similar, only rather than being an internal categorization system, it uses keywords to link to del.icio.us tags. Not quite what I’m thinking.

A comment there led me to this directory — which might be close to what I’m thinking of, though as the documentation is little more than “put it in your plugins directory”, it’s a little hard to tell what it would actually do.

No solutions yet, but apparently others have at least started looking this direction, so there’s hope…

Update: Another piece of the puzzle, and this from someone who pokes their head in here from time to time: Dan has PHP code for a weighted keyword list. Now, if those could be linked into some sort of category-like listing…

Moose or Mouse?

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The actual story itself is mildly amusing, but what really made me laugh was that when I read the summary on Fark — “Mouse causes auto accident by climbing inside the driver’s pants” — I actually read it as “Moose causes auto accident by climbing inside the driver’s pants”.

Big pants. Or tiny moose. Either way, wouldn’t the antlers get rather uncomfortable?

iTunes “This One-Eyed Man is King” by Legendary Pink Dots, The from the album From Here You’ll Watch the World Go By (1995, 5:12).

New Earth Time

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Via Mike Whybark: New Earth Time.

Their site goes into more detail, but in brief, timezones are a pain in the butt. As the ‘net connects more and more of us in real-time, perceived distances become smaller and smaller (my Flickr contacts page, for instance, has a few people scattered across the US and others in Luxembourg, Singapore, Johannesburg, Brisbane, and Tunis). Rather than having to deal with local time zones and the bother of constantly converting back and forth, NET is an attempt to standardize one global time system.

This isn’t the first time something like this has been put forward, of course. Mike referenced WRLD.time, which I’d not heard of before, and I remember Swatch Internet Time. These projects always interest me, though, and I’d be thrilled if this actually caught on.

Okay, well maybe “thrilled” is a bit much, but it’d at least fall into the “really nifty” category.

The NET site provides a couple different javascript clocks, and pointers to both Windows and Mac clock applications. The Mac software they link to is an old System 9 menu bar extention, so it’s not terribly useful under OS X — but as the JavaScript clocks look fairly simple, it strikes me that it shouldn’t be terribly hard to slap together a Tiger Dashboard widget (and, should such a thing be put together, it seems to be that it would be useful to include a converter, too…). Not that I know the first thing about doing that, aside from the very theoritical basics, but it doesn’t seem like it’d be very difficult.

Then, as long as I’m daydreaming, I wonder how hard it would be to hack around and automatically compute the NET time from the post time of each entry to include that in the dateline of each post on my site…

Visual Halo

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As long as I did manage to come up with working recordable DVDs, I decided to finally follow through with a project I’d had in mind for a while now. Sometime last year I found a repository of videos from Nine Inch Nails, including the uncensored version of “Closer” and the infamous Broken short film. Most of the videos have been available on VHS for a while now, but the DVD version hasn’t been released yet, so I decided to play with iDVD.

I’ve not really poked around with either iDVD or iMovie in the past, as I don’t have any sort of video input other than my iSight. Home movies aren’t exactly something I’m playing with at the moment, in other words. Still, it was really easy to put this project together: opened iDVD, chose an appropriate background theme, tossed in the videos, added background music from iTunes for the different menus, and burn. Nice and easy, and now I’ve got my own DVD of Nine Inch Nails videos — and even when they are officially released on DVD, I’d lay good money down that the collection won’t include the Broken short film, so I’ve got that, too.

Visual Halo main menu

iTunes “Closer to God” by Nine Inch Nails from the album Closer to God (1994, 5:05).

Recycle!

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According to the Seattle P-I:

As you’re clearing those wine bottles and beer cans from last night, don’t throw them out with the rest of the trash if you live in Seattle. Starting today, recyclables cannot be placed in garbage containers under a new city ordinance.

Good to know, and I’m all for that. Unfortunately, my apartment building doesn’t offer anything in the way of recycling collection bins — all we have is a big trash dumpster in the parking lot that everything goes into. So what are we supposed to do (barring manually hauling our recycling to a collection center — not only do I have no clue where one might be, that’s a little impractical without transportation other than the bus and my feet).

iTunes “Animal” by Prick from the album Prick (1995, 4:09).

DVD-R? DVD+R? Argh!

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In theory, according to Apple’s promotional literature, iPhoto is supposed to be able to handle up to 25,000 photographs in its library without a hiccup. I’d love to know what kind of hardware they were testing that on, because I’ve got around 7,000 photographs in my iPhoto library and it quite frequently brings my 2.0Ghz G5 to a standstill, if iPhoto doesn’t crash out entirely.

Annoying.

So, part of last weekend’s running around was picking up a small spindle of recordable DVDs so that I could back up the older photos and pull them out of my iPhoto library. Prairie and I hit Best Buy and found a spindle of fifteen recordable DVDs for about ten dollars.

Yesterday, I grabbed all my photos up through 2003 (only about 2.5Gb out of the 4.7Gb available) and told iPhoto to burn the DVD. It asked for a blank disc, I put one in…and it popped it right back out and asked again for a blank disc. “That’s odd,” I thought, and put the disc back in. This time iPhoto went ahead and started chugging away, and I didn’t think more of it.

Until iPhoto finished burning, and the disc never mounted on the desktop. I started trying to figure out what was going wrong, and then some small part of my brain kicked in. “Wait a second…aren’t there a couple different DVD formats?” Sure enough, I’d picked up a spindle of DVD+R discs, and the Superdrive in my G5 uses DVD-R discs. Crud.

I’m just glad the discs weren’t terribly expensive, and I’ll just chalk it up as a learning experience. Thanks to an Office Depot just a few blocks away from my apartment, I now have a spindle of 25 DVD-R discs (for only \$9.99, too — the sale goes through Jan. 8th, and that’s a pretty good deal, as their spindles of 50 DVD-Rs are priced at \$40), all my photos up through 2003 are successfully burned onto one disc, and most of 2004 (Jan-Nov is all that would fit on one DVD) is merrily burning away in the background as I type this.

Boo to the industry for having two competing and incompatible formats, though, especially so similarly named (one is “DVD ‘plus’ R(ecordable)”, and one is “DVD ‘dash’ R(ecordable)”, I guess, though it could just as easily be read as “DVD ‘minus’ R(ecordable)”, which is even more confusing). If I hadn’t had some vague memory of reading about the different formats at some point in the past, I’d probably just have assumed that there was something wrong with my computer or the Superdrive, and been a lot more frustrated and aggravated than necessary.

iTunes “I Sit on Acid ’96” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1996, 4:31).

Gallimaufry 2

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Same as before, ten songs that iTunes chooses at random:

  • Naughty by Nature, ‘Every Day All Day‘, off of Naughty by Nature: One of the weaker tracks off of what’s overall a very good 80’s hip-hop album. I’ve never been a huge hip-hop fan, but generally when I am, it’s 80’s era stuff, and most of Naughty by Nature’s stuff was a lot of fun.

  • Rent Cast, ‘Tune Up #3’, off of Rent: One of the brief inter-song mini pieces from the Broadway musical. Works well in context, but these short bits are rather odd when mixed in with everything else in my collection.

  • Rent Cast, ‘Today 4 U’, off of Rent: Another odd coincidence with random selections. Angel’s introduction song, Rent’s single foray into a pseudo-techno piece. Again, one that works well in context, but it doesn’t really stand well on its own (it’s somewhat annoying on its own, to tell the truth).

  • Linda Perry and Grace Slick, ‘Knock Me Out’, off of The Crow: City of Angels: A slower, somewhat atmospheric song. Not bad background music in a mix, but it doesn’t really stand out to me one way or another. Of course, the movie it comes from is pretty hideous (sad to say, I’ve seen all of the Crow films to date, and the first one is by far the only one worth paying attention to).

  • James Horner, London Symphony Orchestra, Mel Gibson & Sophie Marceau, ‘Not Every Man Really Lives‘, off of More Music from Braveheart: A little bit of dialogue from the movie leading into some of James Horner’s wonderful soundtrack. Every time I hear some of the music from Braveheart it makes me want to give the movie another watch.

  • Nine Inch Nails, ‘Down In It (Shred)’, off of Down In It: One of the remixes of Trent’s early singles. At this stage, he hadn’t become nearly as experimental as he did later on, so there’s really very little to tell the various mixes of Down In It apart from one another. Still, not a bad little song in itself (even if he has openly admitted that he was essentially ripping off Skinny Puppy‘s’Dig It‘ when he did this track).

  • Eddy Grant, ‘Electric Avenue (Hot Tracks)’, off of The Edge Level 2: A DJ-exclusive remix from the Hot Tracks remix service, this is from one of their 80’s retro discs. “We gonna walk down to Electric Avenue, and then we’ll take it higher….”

  • The Weavers, ‘Goodnight, Irene‘, off of The Best of the Decca Years: I got this album mainly because of Wimoweh, and then figured I’d see what all else they’d done. It falls right in line with much of the music I heard growing up in my dad’s collection, and I ended up knowing a lot more of these songs than I expected at first.

  • The Remains, ‘Why Do I Cry‘, off of Rock: The Train Kept A Rollin’: A 1966 pop-rock track from another of the discs in the Sony Soundtrack for a Century series that I’ve been working on collecting. Not a bad track, but not really a standout track, either.

  • Nine Inch Nails, ‘La Mer‘, off of The Fragile: This is the album that got me to stop obsessing over anything Trent Reznor did. After quite a few years of talk about how different his next album was going to be, and hearing his remix work with artists like Puff Daddy and the Family, instead of anything new or groundbreaking we got an album comprised mostly of tracks that sounded like all the instrumentals off all his prior albums. I was unimpressed, and as such, have only listened to the album a few times.

Not quite as interesting a selection as I got last week. Maybe we’ll do better next time…

And now, the ‘bonus track’:

iTunes “Case #12” by 29 Died from the album Sworn (1995, 1:29).

Goodbye, Grandpa

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I just got word from my dad that my mom’s father, Harold Ward, died peacefully in his sleep last night, at the age of 88.

Grandpa, mom, and GrandmaGrandpa had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease last year, and had been deteriorating fairly quickly over the past few months. Earlier this week he was admitted to the retirement community’s hospice center, and it was expected that he would pass on fairly soon. Mom flew down to Florida to be with him and Grandma last night, but Grandpa died while she was on the plane. Dad will be flying down as soon as he can. Unfortunately, I don’t currently have the spare finances or available time off to fly down, and as there has been a fair amount of traveling in our family recently as mom fit in as many visits as she could this past year, I most likely won’t be able to be there for the funeral.

Grandpa and Grandma, Mom and Dad, Grandmother and Grandfather at Mom and Dad's weddingDue to the distance between G&G in Ft. Meyers, Florida and our family in Anchorage, Alaska, I never ended up as close to my grandparents as many people do. They would come up to visit us every few years, Grandpa driving their big Winnebago, and we’d go on trips around Alaska (and no trip was ever complete until Grandma had sat on the bread). We’d fly down to visit them in Florida every few years too, and those trips are where some of my strongest memories of Grandpa are from.

He spent many of the last years of his life as a tour guide at the Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford Winter Estates in Ft. Meyers, and we would always get to go on tours of the grounds. Grandpa would lead us through the gardens with plants and trees from all over the world — complete with a huge, beautiful banyan tree that drops its multitudes of trunk-like roots over the grounds just in front of the main entrance — and then into the family homes, through the workshops, and on into the museum at the end. He never seemed to need a script, and was always content to to keep track of a couple of very excitable (and probably frequently bored) children year after year, filling us with information that was probably forgotten straight away as we looked forward to the nearly obligatory trip to Disney World later in the trip.

I may not have known him as well as I might have had we lived closer, but I have a lot of fond memories of the times we did get to spend with him over the years.

Goodbye, Grandpa.

Into your hands, O Merciful Savior, we commend your servant Harold. Acknowledge, we beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of eternal peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.

Update: The official cause of death is undiagnosed leukemia. I keep waffling back and forth on that one — on the one hand, Grandpa was already ailing and all, but I really wonder how common it is for leukemia to go undiagnosed (apparently it’s not entirely unheard of), and how much longer he might have lived if it had been diagnosed. Of course, given the effects of the Alzheimer’s and the necessary treatments for leukemia, perhaps this was easier on everyone than a longer, more protracted battle would have been.

iTunes “Dies Irae, Dies Illa (Sequence from the Mass for the Dead: Requiem)” by Capella Antiqua Munchen from the album Gregorian Chant: Sequentiae (1992, 6:05).