Labor Day

Labor Day for us meant our daughter came home for her first break from Valdosta State University, which was great. We miss her when she’s gone, which already kicked in after she left earlier today to return to campus.
We watched The Shining together; her first time. During the first half she was rolling her eyes. Second half? Scared out of her wits. She’ll carry that one around for a while. Hey, they don’t call it a psychological thriller for nothing.
On nerdier notes, I sorted out my text files and narrowed my iOS app use to Notesy for quick reference (though I’m still digging into Editorial). I also began migrating to the new Apple Affiliate program. When you click links to apps and make a purchase, you’re supporting this site.
You can learn more about me, this site, and click updated affiliate links on the About page.

Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style

Robert Bringhurst’s 20th anniversary edition of The Elements of Typographic Style (version 4.0) is a pleasure to read, breathing life into letterforms with his rumination on typography design principles. The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, describes Bringhurst as one of Canada’s most revered poets, as well as a typographer, translator, cultural historian, and linguist.
On designing a title page:

“Think of the blank page as alpine meadow, or as the purity of undifferentiated being. The typographer enters this space and must change it. The reader will enter it later, to see what the typographer has done. The underlying truth of the blank page must be infringed, but it must never altogether disappear – and whatever displaces it might well aim to be as lively and peaceful as that original blank page. It is not enough, when building a title page, to merely unload some big, prefabricated letters into the center of the space, nor to dig a few holes in the silence with typographic heavy machinery and then move on. Big type, even huge type, can be beautiful and useful. But poise is usually far more important than size – and poise consists primarily of emptiness. Typographically, poise is made of white space. Many fine title pages consist of a modest line or two near the top, and a line or two near the bottom, with little or nothing more than taut, balanced white space in between.” (p 61)

On automation versus the pleasure of kerning by hand:

“Binomial kerning tables are powerful and useful typographic tools, but they eliminate neither the need nor the pleasure of making final adjustments by hand.” (p 34)

And one more quote on bringing a book to life for human readers:

“A book is a flexible mirror of the mind and the body. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all lend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.” (p 143)

For a book about visual elements, the physical features of the book itself are a joy to any reader’s sense of touch. The archival quality pages are free of acid, produced from sustainable materials, and smooth velvet to the fingertips. The cover, likewise. Bringhurst’s book is a treasure to see, a pleasure to touch, and a joy to read.

Bringing order to semantic chaos

Because my brain stays scattered, my use of tags, categories, or other methods of classifying items in a manageable taxonomy is haphazard at best. The idea of successfully using tags has intrigued me for years. Just try to imagine what I was thinking of when I produced something, type in a few key words to narrow it down, and find exactly what I was looking for along with other closely related files that may be helpful.
The concept of semantic organization by something like tags first struck me when I began to use DEVONthink ((for serious research I am also a fan of DEVONagent Pro)) after reading how Stephen Johnson uses the software (a meta-article about his essay Tool for Thought published Jan. 30, 2005, in the New York Times). Building a hierarchy of tags has been possible on a Mac since at least Mac OS X 10.5 as OpenMeta and Apple is bringing tags to the forefront as a key new feature of Mac OS X 10.9 (codename Mavericks, expected to ship fall 2013).
The thing is, I never committed to using tags. I would use them for a while, then forget about them, then remember them and begin tagging again, then forget again. This vicious cycle leads into a useless and confusing void. One of the challenges

Categories and tags on CaSt

This website is a steaming example of such nonsense and I hope to prune back the problems starting here, even backtracking for a bit as time allows. With my recent migration to WordPress, I have both categories and tags at my disposal and plan to use both. ((I plan to use a category at the least to be refined with tags.))
One reason tagging gets out of hand is the unintentional replication of tags. Huh? Consider these examples:

  • operating system
  • operating_systems
  • os
  • mac os x
  • macosx
  • osx

Yeah, it can get crazymaking pretty fast. My plan moving forward is to create broad categories refined with descriptive tags, enabling CaSt readers to trim their diet to suit their interests. Think of it as a two-level hierarchy with categories as the folders and tags as the files in those folders; something like this:

  • tech
    • ios
    • macosx
  • writing
    • quotes
    • authors
    • blogs

In my head, and therefore on this site, categories will be singular (like sections of a library or book store) and tags will be plural (because a ‘writing’ category full of of ‘quote’ doesn’t make sense).
Now, if I can just stick with it.

On avoiding writing

Usually, writers will do anything to avoid writing. For instance, the previous sentence was written at one o’clock this afternoon.
It is now a quarter to four. I have spent the past two hours and forty-five minutes sorting my neckties by width, looking up the word ‘paisly’ in three dictionaries, attempting to find the town of that name on The New York Times Atlas of the World map of Scotland, sorting my reference books by width, trying to get the bookcase to stop wobbling by stuffing a matchbook cover under its corner, dialing the telephone number on the matchbook cover to see if I should take computer courses at night, looking at the computer ads in the newspaper and deciding to buy a computer because writing seems to be so difficult on my old Remington, reading an interesting article on sorghum farming in Uruguay that was in the newspaper next to the computer ads, cutting that and other interesting articles out of the newspaper, sorting—by width—all the interesting articles I’ve cut out of newspapers recently, fastening them neatly together with paper clips and making a very attractive paper clip necklace and bracelet set, which I will present to my girlfriend as soon as she comes home from the three-hour low-impact aerobic workout that I made her go to so I could have some time alone to write.
—P. J. O’Rourke

Making Adjustments

Both visitors to Carrying Stones will notice some changes.
Gone is the overgrown path to my writing, which is now featured front and center where it should be. My trials on the web during the past year focused on polishing HTML skills, learning CSS, picking up a little JavaScript and jQuery (with a side of perl), then figuring out where those tools intersect. The result was a mediocre site that only a determined sadist could bring themselves to visit every day. OK, once a week. What? Less than once a month?! Come on!

The journey is more important than the ship.

The astute reader will notice a redesigned keel guiding this ship, so allow me to clear the deck before moving on to reflect on and redefine the purpose of this site. After tinkering with Movable Type for about year, I am giving WordPress a whirl and may switch to yet another platform soon. You may see some schizophrenic changes happening as I settle into my new home. I may talk more about this later for the nerds in the audience, but that’s all for now. The journey is more important than the ship.

Missing the Boat

Jimmy Buffett recorded his story A Pirate Looks at Forty in 1975.

The song contains the bittersweet confession of a modern-day, washed-up drug smuggler as he looks back on the first 40 years of his life, expresses lament that his preferred vocation of piracy was long gone by the time he was born, and ponders his future.
Wikipedia, A Pirate Looks at Forty

As long as we agree to disregard my early days on Usenet, we can agree I have no claim on the pirate’s life. ((I have vague memories of going to bed with a 33.6k Global Village Teleport Modem struggling to download hundreds of segmented files to reassemble in the morning, or maybe that was someone else. Yesterday’s BitTorrent.)) It’s the longing in Buffett’s song that pulls me in with a wish to go back in time to my first contact with computers was the Tandy TRS–80s in junior high school. My first personal computer was a TI–99/4a (should have gone with the Commodore 64) and time was screaming past when I bought my first Mac in 1994, a clumsily-named Performa 6116CD. I was a 22-year-old college English student working full time to support to support my wife and 4-year-old son. My course seemed clearly charted, except it wasn’t. Anything can change if you let it, and all of the signs were there if only I had read them. Here are a few of the beautiful shiny buttons, the jolly candy-like buttons, I strolled past as if they weren’t even there.

  1. Growing bored with Mac OS 8 and itching for a challenge, installed LinuxPPC (still active as PenguinPPC) on the aforementioned Performa and later migrated to Yellow Dog Linux.
  2. A preview release of BeOS PR2 was among the software CDs bundled with the Power Computing PowerCenter Pro 210, a Mac clone I bought in 1997. Of course I ran it! Jean Louis Gassée’s folly screamed on Motorola’s PowerPC processors (@gassee still shares his strong opinions on Twitter) and may have overtaken Apple’s OS if not for Steve Jobs’ decision to stop licensing the Mac operating system. Nonetheless, I dreamed of buying a BeBox.
  3. In 2000, I attended the final Atlanta Linux Showcase toting a new Blueberry iBook (triple booting OS 9, OS X beta, and LinuxPPC no less) before the event moved to Oakland, Cali. I chatted with Eric S. Raymond, saw Larry Wall from afar, and watched what happens when you mix free alcohol and nerds at the after-party hosted by Slashdot.org. A manic performance of a punk-Devo karoake version of Madonna’s “Vogue,” en vogue at the time, is forever burned in my brain. I corresponded with lead developers at LinuxPPC prior to the event and met that inner circle of nerds devoted to running Linux on PowerPC processors, even working with them to write early drafts of documentation. ((The Internet does not forget. I found evidence of early correspondence with fellow PPC pioneers on comp.os.linux.powerpc from 1999!))

These memories begin to illustrate my lifelong interest in computer technology starting as early as computer classes in 1984, ballooning with with my first Mac in 1994, and exploding with my introduction to *nix around 1999. Now, at 41 years of age, I remain what people used to call a computer hobbyist and look back with bittersweet lament that I never pursued those passions as a career. All of my websites since the first hand-coded vanity blog christened in the late 1990s have been experiments; portals for me to learn new things about computers, technology, and the Internet.
The ocean is full of tech bloggers who began building their audience (which included yours truly) while I turned a blind eye to what I wanted to do, instead doing what I thought I had to do. Hindsight reveals I neglected the opportunities of being in the right place at the right time. Maybe sharing my errant past will clear the path for others who feel stuck to know they can change course at any time, a valuable insight I still struggle to accept at 41. As a nerd with a college education steeped in English literature and writing, my secret goal was to build an audience of readers who return because they enjoy what I write. As I breathe, it is not too late for me to refocus on that goal.

Defining a Purpose

It is now clear to me why, with the exception of a very close circle of friends, each iteration has been a failure. Reflecting on my shenanigans on the World Wide Web is akin to looking at photos of myself as a pudgy pale kid bedecked in striped athletic socks up to my knees, or wearing a Jacque Costeau-style diving mask and flippers at the beach, or wearing a sleeveless black muscle shirt in the driveway of my future wife (that part worked out OK bless her heart). My focus has always been more on the nerdery than the writing, though I cannot ignore both passions and promise to stride forward with less navel gazing.
How do I define Carrying Stones? CaSt is the nexus of my love for writing and technology. My influences include a cast of characters ranging from David Foster Wallace to Hunter S. Thompson with special thanks to Patrick Rhone, John Gruber, Merlin Mann, and Dan Benjamin. I am thankful to these mentors whether they know it or not.
This readers’ guide will help you get your sea legs as I continue my journey:

  • Carrying Stones—This site, which will focus on the posts I write for readers.
  • Terrazzo—My Tumblr blog will host the digital detritus that washes up on my shore (e.g. links, interesting stuff by others, pointers to items of interest).
  • Twitter—For personal (usually silly) conversation as @ELBeavers.
  • App.net—Staying in touch with my nerd self as @ELBeavers.

I hope you stay with me. Let’s go.
N.B. Looking Back While Moving Forward: I considered wiping the slate clean and moving forward with a fresh start without the broken links and mishmash of prior posts. For good or ill I decided to leave it with this post standing as a totem marking a turning point. Kindly take all past work with a grain of salt.

Overview effect

[vimeo 55073825 width=700]
OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.
I’m posting this here because it’s beautiful, inspiring, and to help me remember it exists. Astronauts and philosophers discuss the impact–they call it the Overview Effect–of looking back at the earth from space.
Really, watch it through to the end if you can. In HD. Full screen. Gorgeous.

Ulysses III brings something old, something new

Buy Ulysses III – The Soulmen GBR and support this site.
The Soul Men launched plain text editor Ulysses 10 years ago and introduced Mac users to the glory of a full-screen writing environment. I don't claim to know Merlin Mann's opinion about the latest release, but this is what he had to say on his site 43folders.com in 2004:

Ulysses is a text editor for writers. That’s it. It doesn’t make code, draw pictures of your kitty, or pop kettle corn. It just helps you plan, organize, track, and write your stuff in a way that I find entirely intuitive. Other document editors have a full-screen option–Scrivener1 springs to mind, I'm a fan–and the concept has infected Macs and iOS devices as full-screen design was embedded in the operating system. The developers of Ulysses have had ample time to reflect, refine, and redesign the writing environment.

New design for a new era

One of the concepts that made Ulysses unique from the beginning was the idea of semantic writing. Using a predefined set of textual cues, a simplified set similar to the HTML and CSS use to manage textual style on websites, allowed the writing to embolden, italicize, and otherwise enhance the style of their text completely within a plain-text environment.
Since the application's genesis, semantic writing has become relatively commonplace as more writers adopt John Gruber's Markdown, which is baked right into the app.2 The Soul Men also include “Markdown XL,” which augments Markdown with text-based editing marks to mark up a document with inline comments, annotations, or suggested deletions for yourself and collaborators.
By default, the blinking blue cursor is reminiscent of iA Writer for Mac OS X and iOS. The rigid standards required by Writer pushed me away, though I appreciate that app's resistance to my fiddly nature.3

iOS influence, iCloud done right


Well-placed popover windows peppered throughout Ulysses III attractively spice up the app with a flavor of iOS.4
Apple Pages and its ilk still freak me out a little when it offers an iCloud dialog box upon opening. Ulysses III eliminates any weird iCloud-Finder5 confusion by altogether skipping the dialog. Much like most iOS apps, users just open a new “sheet” and start writing. Those sheets may be organized with groups or filters.
The developers built in support for their iOS app, Daedalus Touch, as a natural extension to Ulysses III, though wordsmiths may also sync their work via Dropbox (affiliate link) and Box.com, or their own WebDAV server.

Write once, publish anywhere

Most of the words I write are slated for publication on the Web, yet who doesn't need to print every now and then. Ulysses III provides an attractive stylesheet for printing to actual gasp paper. (Print tip: limited options to adjust the fonts are available in the print dialog box).

Room for improvement

Autopairing items such as [], (), and "" would be helpful for writing in any flavor of Markdown (keyboard shortcuts exist for tasks, i.e. select a word or phrase and press ⌘-i to wrap it in asterisks or underscores for italics, ⌘-b for bold, etc.) and I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who would like to see MultiMarkdown support rolled into Ulysses III.
The Soul Men encourage and welcome suggestions at the bottom of each page at their website:

There may be shortcomings, errors even, and you will have questions. We are anxiously awaiting your feedback, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Let us know how it fares. The Soul Men have done a lot of things right with their latest iteration of their premium writing application. Let them know how they're doing by email at support@the-soulmen.com and on Twitter as @ulyssesapp.

  1. Scrivener also enjoys cross platform support with versions for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. More information is available at literatureandlatte.com. ↩
  2. I look forward hope the developers will expand to support Fletcher Penney's MultiMarkdown (fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown), which enables writers to display attractive tables set in plain text and more. ↩
  3. For writing apps, I waffle between Adobe Source Code Pro and Inconsolata (though I'm trying out Courier Prime as I write this review in Ulysses III). ↩
  4. Apologies if my extended metaphor left a bad taste in your mouth. ↩
  5. For the record, I prefer Path Finder. ↩