"We don't have to worry about making it interesting; all we have to worry about is getting rid of the pig." -- David Mamet, On Directing Film

styles: neoclassical | modern | nouveau

Latest Books: Pendulum. Atonement. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

A Year Ago :

In A List Apart: Writing The Living Web. (also in Italian and Czech)

Recent research papers: Collage, Composites, Construction (pdf); Card Shark & Thespis: Exotic Tools for Hypertext Narrative (talk) (pdf); Storyspace I (pdf)

3 Jun 2004
TinderWest

We're starting to plan a West Coast Tinderbox Weekend.

How does October 2-3, in San Francisco, strike you? If that's particularly good or especially bad, please let me know right away!

2 Jun 2004
Notes
1 Jun 2004
Worst Kitchen Of 1960

Today, the plasterer came to start the walls of my old studio, which means kitchen demolition can't be far behind. Last weekend's feat might just be the last big meal from the official Worst Kitchen of 1960. Just for the record, the menu was:

  • roasted orange peppers with garlic and anchovies
  • crispy, spicy confit of duck legs
  • oven-roast mackerel with cilantro-coconut chutney
  • stewed fiddlehead ferns and mushrooms
  • skillet-roasted potatoes
  • blueberry pie with robiola al due latti

Update: commentary from Mr. 12.

1 Jun 2004
Welcome, Dylan Kinnett


Welcome to Eastgate's summer intern, Dylan Kinnett, who got a running start today. About an hour after he walked in the door, he was writing copy for a new postcard about Eastgate's next hypertext fiction.

He's a student at Maryville College, and he'll be sending reports back through the college's Reports From The Field weblogs. Weblogs for interns -- now that's a good idea.

28 May 2004
Weekend Webpage

Maureen Baehr has created a new Wiki page with notes on the recent Tinderbox Weekend.

Waiting for your remote membership package to arrive? It'll be on its way next week: we had to reprint handouts to meet the unexpected demand.

28 May 2004
Get Well!


Hypertext pioneer Rosemary Simpson was crossing the street yesterday, when a car rear-ended the stopped car in front of which she was crossing.

She's got a nasty broken leg, and will be laid up in RI Hospital, Providence, for a week or so before surgery. She's comfortable, all in all, but annoyed that she can't use her computer and impatient to get back to her hypertext work. Get well soon, Rosemary!

27 May 2004
Notebooks Now


Eastgate's shipment of Moleskine notebooks has arrived. Good prices, too...

I'm not a huge fan of notebooks and blank books, but I carried a Moleskine through Rome earlier this year and it's great. It's small enough that it's not in the way, but it's there when you find yourself with an odd bit of time. I hate waiting in line. I hate waiting, period -- and it's always worse then you're someplace interesting, someplace where the trip home will come all too soon.

27 May 2004
Atonement: Books, Mothers, Time

It was almost a year ago that I was at my mothers, visiting with Mom and Janet Kohrman, an old family friend from way back. We were talking books, as we used to do (my mother was a great reader, before Alzheimer's), and Dr. Kohrman had just finished Atonement, which she loved.

I finally got around to it, and I shouldn't have waited so long.

26 May 2004
Planning with Tinderbox

J Nathan Mattias describes a lovely application of Tinderbobx for experimental information architecture.

"This project is fairly large, and I need to completely write a finite set of pages before July 1. By mapping things out in Tinderbox, I am able to see a comprehensive list of all the pages I must write. Individual pages can then added to TODO lists and tied to email communications, appointments, and research related to the individual pages. By storing all the writing in Tinderbox, I am able to search and edit and spellcheck across the entire site."

25 May 2004
Tinderbox Weekend Trip Report

Lisa Firke has posted a fine trip report on Tinderbox Weekend.

" The whole weekend was like this, really. The best moments were those sudden glimpses into other people's Tinderboxen. I am grateful to Rosemary Simpson of Brown for unseating a very fixed prejudice against MS Word, showing me that the art tools (silly bloated add-ons) can be used to make witty cloud callout adornments for Tinderbox maps. The complexity and size of her research file was boggling and yet extremely graceful."

Elin Sjursen adds:

"The seminar became something much more and deeper than how to do cool stuff in Tinderbox - I met a fantastic group of people who all are thinking about how to collect, organize, and most importantly, make sense of and analyze their data. They are all using Tinderbox in extremely different ways, and every single one of them brought some inspiring thought or insight to the table."

Jeffrey Radcliffe just moved tinctoris.com to Tinderbox.

"I've migrated this site from MovableType to Tinderbox overnight."

"The motive force, of course, was the recent Tinderbox Weekend. Firstly, it proved that the tool could do what do I wanted it to, and secondly it gave me enough of a nudge to my skills to have a moment of Tinderbox satori."

"...."

"I don't entirely understand how it came to this, but at this point I'm using Tinderbox for my personal, professional, and creative organization. To say that the tool is fascinating goes without saying. But interesting tools that are not useful in creating content and output are nothing more than curiosities. It's obvious I've found an excellent tool; let us see where it takes us."

His Tinderbox Weekend roundup is a hoot:

" Every single person there was fantastic, and I regret not having the opportunity to talk more with everyone.... From an informal survey, it seemed that the basic what do you do with this beast exchange was the favorite."

"Overall, an excellent experience. The bonus use of reify in a sentence was merely the icing on the cake."

24 May 2004
Fire

On Saturday, at Tinderbox weekend I showed a nice demo that Jay McCarthy helped put together -- a bit of javascript wizardry that lets you add outliners and collapsible boxes to Tinderbox exports. About twelve hourse later, Sunday morning, he woke up to alarms:

"About 5 or 10 minutes later I started smelling smoke and heard my dad looking in the attic outside my room. It was now he started screaming, The house is REALLY on fire. Get anything you can and get out! He said this as he walked down the stairs and when he came back in after putting something outside."

A fellow weblog writer has a donation site.

24 May 2004
Tinderbox Weekend!

Well, that went well. We're all exhausted, of course, after two solid days of Tinderbox immersion.

If you'd like your own copy of the handouts and sample files, you'll still be able to order a corresponding membership for another day or two. Corresponding memberships are a nice way of supporting Tinderbox, too.

I think the best part of the weekend was seeing such a variety of examples of ways people use Tinderbox. From personal todo lists to storytelling, from Lisa Firke's office organization to David Kolb's fascinating research hypertext for Hypertext '04. Not to mention Marc-Antoine Parent's hacking tour de force, moving from his email server to Tinderbox and then from Tinderbox to GraphViz, Melissa Chase's Egyptian archaeology, Rosemary Simpson's thought balloons.

Lots of fun, though we're all going to need to catch up on sleep!

22 May 2004
Live from Tinderbox Weekend

Posting live from the first session of Tinderbox Weekend!

Elin Sjursen is showing us how to use prototypes to inherit key attributes in Tinderbox.