Jason Cook"

Punting is tougher than it looks. It’s certainly harder than the guides ferrying tourists up and down The Backs make it seem.

Arrive in Cambridge on a warm, sunny weekend (happens every few years, I hear) and you’ll see punting’s gnarlier side: the ‘self-hire’ crowd. Once these all-too-literal boatloads of amateurs take to the water, the whole British notion of a ‘jolly riverboat jaunt’ is replaced by a tourist blood-sport that’s more akin to log-rolling or demolition derby. It’s best to watch from the shores of The Backs, I think - you might wince occasionally, but between the crashing, splashing, and multi-lingual shouting, you’ll at least remain dry.

My own punting skills are no better, likely worse. But last weekend, I managed to elude the rent-a-boat crowd, at least, by punting away from Cambridge, towards Grantchester. (Actually, I rode down, then punted the way back.) It’s a 90-minute push either way - plenty long enough to leave me cold, soaked, and pretty well tired. I lost the pole twice (the river bottom is like clay, in parts), and then got rained upon, to boot. Happy I went, of course, but I’m done punting ‘til summer returns.

I completed another journey this week, and one which took me far longer - sixteen years, if I count correctly: I finished Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, the very week the last installment was published.

Can’t complain about the time - after all, it’s taken King 30 years to write those books, and he’s said this final volume heralds the end of his massive writing career. I can believe that - almost every book he’s written ties, somehow, into the nexus of The Dark Tower, and now that it’s done… where can he go?

So how good was it, at the end? Tough to say - his yarn was obviously good enough for me to read one after the other, and year after year; I’d also agree with the author’s own conclusion that the tale was ‘not entirely successful’. The big concern, of course, was the ending, including the author’s sudden, interjectory warning not to read it. (I’ve read a lot of books, and never have I seen an author pop into the narrative and lecture me against turning the page.)

King was right, of course. I should’ve closed the book. The journey is the reward, etc. - and any ending would have to be more bitter than sweet. This ending, though - man, after thousands of pages, a decade and a half… it just left me crushed. King says endings are heartless, and so this was. Almost.

No spoilers, here. All I can say is that choice facing the reader and Roland were one and the same - dare you enter the Tower, to finally see and know what lies inside? Or would you sit on the doorstep, deep in that field of roses, knowing there that the quest is good and true, and already complete?

I’m entering B-school with one eye open.

See, Mod gave me a Daruma on our last visit to Oakland. It’s a Japanese thing, Daruma, a paper-mache figurine of the monk Bodhidharma. He’s a round, roly-poly guy, the backstory being that Bodhidharma’s arms and legs fell off after he meditated for seven years straight.

Daruma dolls have no eyes - it’s up to you to paint them in, yourself. One eye gets painted when you start working towards a goal, and the other eye can only be painted if and when you complete that goal. Unsurprisingly, it’s mostly a New Year’s thing, though I’ve heard Japanese politicians make a big show of drawing Daruma eyes during political campaigns.

School’s started. Which means our once-blind Daruma now sits winking by the telly, and I vaguely suspect he’s watching more BBC than he should.

Update: 1 year later…

We just rented ‘Shaun of the Dead’, which proudly bills itself as ‘a romantic comedy, with zombies’. Unlike most movies, it actually delivers on that promise. Az laughed, I found it romantic, and yes, the walking undead get their screen time.

The kid at Blockbuster tried warning us off it, after hearing my American accent. “This is quite good,” he said, then hesitantly added “but very English”. Fair enough. But so then are Wallace and Gromit, Flying Circuses, and The Office - and they export just fine. (In truth, if ‘Warning: Very English!’ labels existed, I’d slap ‘em on Walker’s “Roast-Lamb-and-Mint-Jelly flavour” potato chips, first thing. But I digress…)

Actually, there is one joke in ‘Shaun of The Dead’ that hit me as tragically, tearfully hilarious - largely because it is doomed to go unnoticed by most Americans. It happens like this:

Shaun and Ed, urgently needing weapons for zombie-head-removal, stumble across Shaun’s old record collection, at which point they frantically start tossing discs (Frisbee-style) at the neck of a nearby zombie. However, (and here’s the British comedy for ya) they can’t help but bicker and argue over which LP’s are too precious to be thrown at the zombie onslaught.

Ed [holding up a record]: Stone Roses? Shaun: Noooo! Ed: But it’s ‘Second Coming’. Shaun [pauses]: I liked it!

Thing is, the Stone Roses hardly made a dent in American pop culture, and remain relatively unknown in the U.S. despite having been massive chart-toppers in the UK. The band released only two albums in their ten years, the first being hailed as the album of the decade, and the second (coming) widely trashed as… well, I liked it.

Sure, you’ll still find a few hopeless Roses fans (is there any other kind?) Stateside, and I proudly count myself amongst their number.

For Roses fans like me, it’s been a good week, and not just because they’ve written in-jokes for us into ‘Shaun of the Dead’. On September 13th, former Stone Roses lead singer Ian Brown released his fourth solo album, ‘Solarized’. I was personally excited because it was the first time I could buy one of his albums without an ‘Import’ sticker and 30-dollar price tag on the cover.

And how is it? Not half-bad, in fact.

A few tracks shine: the surprisingly sweet ‘Time is My Everything’ stands out as my initial favorite. (Respectably, ‘Time’ achieves the highly-improbable feat of substituting John Squire’s legendary guitar licks with latin horns, of all things.) ‘Longsight M13’ and ‘Keep What Ya Got’ (w/ Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher) also display the craftsmanship you’d expect for radio singles. Whether this ‘approachable’ sound was a production decision, or the result of Ian Brown recording this album sober (so he claims), I can’t say. But it’s better than the last one.

There’s still a fair shake of the less-listenable, self-indulgent stuff. (Not exactly uncommon with lead singers who’ve ‘gone solo’, now is it?) But c’mon — it’s hard not to spot the warning signs for that, right on the cover - the album artwork/branding consists primarily of Ian’s name written in various fonts, and the highlight of the liner notes is a juvenile photo-collage of you-know-who’s simian face, striking various poses. Anybody who buys this album should expect as much.

At the moment, though, it’s the only CD we own. (We hauled our MP3 and AAC collection with us, but left the good speakers behind.) So, for better or worse, Solarized is getting heavy rotation hereabouts.

I steeled myself for my upcoming capitalist indoctrination (B-school starts next week) by watching ‘Battleship Potemkin’ on Sunday. The movie, in true socialist form, was free for the masses - it played in a drizzly Trafalgar Square, and featured a thumpin’ new soundtrack composed and performed live by the Pet Shop Boys.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t so much a big spectacle, as a good show. I’d expected a double-dose of high camp; that the synthetic techno bombast of Mssrs. Tenant and Lowe would serve only to make Potemkin seem anachronistic and crude by comparison, probably send the whole thing up as a terribly naïve work — technologically, artistically, politically, historically, whatever.

Instead, it was engaging. The music was surprisingly complementary, at times almost natural, and if anything, made the film seem more contemporary, not less. Given, I actually like the music of the Pet Shop Boys (hence my trek from Cambridge to London), so my opinion is undoubtedly suspect to some, but I’d call it a success, and an artistic one at that.

No, it wasn’t perfect: some passages veered too far to the club sound (IMO, the words “Da!” and “Nyet” do not a natural bass line make), some slower strains went on just a bit (like Phillip Glass pumped full of Red Bull). But pacing, I suppose, is something the revisionist soundtrack composer can’t completely control, and one of the more obvious aspects where early cinema shows its age.

Standing in the rain surrounded by umbrellas wasn’t the best screening venue, but it was memorable. The best seats in the house, alas, were on a red double-decker bus snarled in Trafalgar’s traffic - we watched passengers wind their way to the top deck, sitting high and dry, until a traffic cop finally cleared ‘em out.

Just north of the Cam, past Magdalene College, is Kettle’s Yard. From four 17th and 18th century cottages, Jim and Helen Ede built foundations for a single house, and a singular home.

It’s an art museum, now - though I suspect Mr. Ede (himself the curator of the Tate in London, once) would agree that the scale and setting make it something altogether different. Above all, Kettle’s Yard remains simply a home: you need to tug on the doorbell to enter, and once inside, you can grab a seat anywhere, and pull a book from the shelves. And that’s how it went for us, yesterday afternoon.

Of course, art is the big draw: when you’re a networked fellow like Mr. Ede, I suppose it was easy to gather up pieces from ‘artist friends’ like Ben Nicholson, Gaudier-Brzeska, even Miro and Brancusi. However, the personal authenticity of the collection is what impresses the most — knowing that behind every piece was afternoon tea or a handshake, the ties of friendship and patronage.

You can feel how the house was all slowly assembled, truly built — not simply bought at Sotheby’s. In that sense, Kettle’s Yard reminds me of Jim Thompson’s house in Bangkok: like the organic shell of an extraordinary life. That, and then there’s the fun of traipsing through the tiny bedrooms, hallways, and winding staircases, so unlike the squared halls of most museums.

Best of all? At Kettle’s Yard, it’s the arrangement and selection of every piece which matters, not cash value; some of the most important features are pebbles, plates, and lemons (just ask), each item placed properly, and just so.

Oh — and it’s free. Next time it really rains, I’m heading back.

I bought my gown last week. I couldn’t help but grin, trying it on: the long robes are probably one of the more peculiar and quintessential images associated with Oxbridge colleges.

Actually, the first time I glimpsed a formal Cambridge robe was in Berzerkley, of all places; one of my undergrad professors was a Cambridge (and Oxford) don, and at graduation he’d ambled onto the stage wearing colorful garments which looked like a cross between a rodeo clown’s outfit and the Vatican Guard uniform. Amidst all our cookie-cutter rental-quality black robes, and the tattered business-class upgrades worn by most Berkeley profs, his outfit was… brilliant.

Americans generally associate gowns only with graduation; here, it was a more important part of your daily outfit, once upon a time. I needed to purchase mine before school starts (T-minus 2 weeks, ack) because it’s still mandated for nightly dinner at my college.

Thankfully, I won’t need to strut about town always looking like Zorro, or a wayward Renaissance Faire vendor - graduate-level gowns are simple, uniform black affairs - and anyhow, I gather it’s a thing to keep stashed in a locker or backpack right until you walk into Formal Hall. Perfect compromise, in my book.

All it takes is a little Murphy’s law: the day after local papers led with “WETTEST SUMMER IN 50 YEARS”, this place starts feeling like California. In a sunshine-y sense, that is.

We took a most civilized stroll out of town yesterday, and walked alongside the river Cam towards Grantchester. The footpath dips and rises through hyper-pastoral meadows, and it offers exactly the sort of scenery you’d hope for: grazing livestock, starry-eyed punters, and rolling farmland in the distance. It’s quiet, verdant, and all feels (relatively) isolated, especially for a route that starts just twenty minutes’ walk from the city center.

An hour later, we stumbled across Grantchester, and its tea-room of some repute: The Orchard. As the name implies, the outdoor grounds are sprinkled with apple and pear trees; Az and I entered from an adjacent meadow by first squeezing past some cows and then climbing a cattle-fence. I’d hoped to congratulate myself on my little discovery, but turns out this is a place Cambridge students have flocked to for 100 years; The Orchard even offers a glossy brochure listing its famous tea-takers, beginning with Virginia Woolf and ending with John Cleese.

Closer to my own heart, they claim Alan Turing ‘first conceived’ the idea of Artificial Intelligence whilst strolling from Cambridge to The Orchard. I don’t entirely buy it: I’m no genius, but do I spend an inordinate amount of time daydreaming about computers, sci-fi, and othersuch nerdworthy nonsense, and I can say that bits, bytes, and computer cognizance were the last thing on my mind during that pleasant walk. To me, it’s like arguing that Thoreau penned Walden whilst riding the London Underground. Doesn’t jibe, somehow — but, then again, I’m no genius.

The local weather report is lately prefaced by so many apologies, and so thoroughly riddled with qualifiers, that it’s tough to tell just what the day’s weather is actually supposed to be.

“Not nearly as nice as it ought to be,” is how the weatherman sheepishly started his routine Sunday. By the end, he was preaching stridently about how things could really be “much, much worse”. The end result, I found, was one of those days where it’s too brisk for a T-shirt, but you’d sweat when wearing a jacket.

I suppose this can’t all be the meteorologist’s fault; things are uneven, recently. It’s like George Lucas was allowed to direct England’s summer — not original-Star-Wars-George-Lucas, but lame-new-trilogy-George-Lucas — giving the viewer only occasional brilliance in a show that’s mostly mediocre, like an hour of warm sunshine glimmering on the Cam amidst grey dross and unremarkable rain showers.

Hey! You know the one restaurant in town that never seems to make it? The name changes, the menu’s shuffled somewhat, and day-glo vinyl banners proclaim Grand Reopenings, Under New Management, and so forth… just for a few months, until everything goes dark, again?

Yep, and so it goes with this oft-mothballed blog. Still the same management, alas, but other items are moving around — us, namely — as we’re translocating to England.

It’s a year move, at least, and we’re allowed just four suitcases. All are empty, at the moment, save for a single frying pan that’s nestled in one. (Experience has taught us that most furnishings can be cheaply IKEA’d across Europe; obtaining well-seasoned, hard-anodized kitchenware is another story.)

Our saucepan might be a nice addition, too, but unlikely. I’m considering wearing one, Johnny-Appleseed-style, right onto the plane. (“What ma’am? Oh, it’s my Calphalon Safety Helmet. They say Chairman Kaga wears one made of gold, you know.”) But then, what if the overhead luggage spot fills? It’s hard enough to sleep in Coach Class, as is… could be uncomfortable.

…quick, then, before they hit the lights, a run-down on Mighty Atom Syndication.

Updated, 2008: And hit the lights they did. For sentimentality’s sake, I’ve reproduced the text of the original article below. This one was fun to write:

Mighty Atom: Really Similar Syndication?

Last time around, we took a look at the increasingly popular graphic, which developers use to signpost links to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) files. Well, RSS has a new competitor now: the upstart Atom Syndication Format.

Atom files can be recognized by their own cute-as-a-button button, . And whether you click or , you still get the same raw-looking XML markup — not quite fit for human consumption. All these cute buttons have a real and practical purpose, though: Site Syndication.

Those corresponding XML files are designed for audiences using the “news aggregators” — sort of like mini Web browsers — much favored by high-volume websurfers. Using a news aggregator, you can browse through the latest updates from a customized set of your favorite websites in just a fraction of the time it takes to do the same thing using Internet Explorer. Also, because syndication files follow a standardized XML-based format, they allow other sites to integrate your latest links and headlines into their pages, automatically.

So, what’s the difference between Atom Syndication and RSS?

It’s kinda like the difference between “newfangled” Philips screwdrivers and “old-fashioned” Slotted screwdrivers. A few fire-eatin’ types may spend their days trolling the rec.arts.woodworking forums, debating the differences of torque capacity thresholds, drill bit cam-out, patent history, and manufacturing-cost issues between these incompatible rivals. But most of us are more or less resigned to keeping both types of screwdrivers in our toolkits — we’ll use whichever one is handy and fits our needs.

Similarly, Atom Syndication and RSS are both tools designed to do the same basic job: advertise and distribute website content by creating machine-readable XML newsfeeds.

Chances are, your choice of syndication format will be influenced largely by your choice of Content Management System. Google’s Blogger, for example, pushes the nascent Atom format and includes a pre-built starter template for Atom feeds and Atom feeds only. (All this, even though Atom is still a work-in-progress, only at version 0.3.) Tripod’s Blog Builder tool, on the other hand, offers an RSS 2.0 generator.

Whether you’re invested in a CMS already or you’re still shopping around, it’s a good idea to have a working understanding of both technologies. We went over all the whys and hows of RSS in “Sharing Your Site With RSS,” so in the pages that follow, we’ll be focusing on Atom, starting with why people bothered to build another site syndication format in the first place.

This blog now seems to be officially shuttered for the summer. ‘Cause it’s sunny out.

Elsewhere, though, there’s this: Metadata, Mark II, an overview of some nifty metadata technologies.

Update, 2008: Webmonkey shuttered its doors not too long after this article was published. I’ve pasted the original text of the article below, for sentimentality’s sake — one of the last freelance writing bits I did while living in Rome…..

Metadata, Mark II: FOAF, RDF, GeoURL, and SMBmeta

Remember META tags? Once upon a time, a finely crafted META keyword tag would get you the bourgeois treatment from search engines. You could specify exactly which search words should be associated with your site and, best of all, META tags were invisible to users, allowing webmasters a touch of the ol’ “editorial liberty.”

Yeah. That didn’t last. Almost instantly, META tags were abused and mis-used by pageview-hungry Web developers, who crammed all sorts of irrelevant and naughty keywords in their pages, trying to shunt the flow of Web traffic their way. And now today Google and other search engines essentially ignore META keyword tags.

(Of course, if you’re absolutely adamant that your page be promoted in response to specific search terms, Google, Yahoo, HotBot and the gang are happy to help, but with an improved targeted-placement technique far less attractive to spammers: It’s called Advertising, and it costs cash-money.)

End of story? That’d be sad, indeed, because META keyword tags were a rather sweet idea, at least on paper: short, sensible descriptions of your site, tailored so that machines could quickly read and index it, and subsequently help people find it.

Well, META’s not dead.

In the pages that follow, I’ll be giving you a bird’s eye view of a few independent technologies, each aspiring to get useful metadata back into the Web. Some are homegrown, some corporate, and some academic, but all of them let you enhance your site with useful information and improve the ways your site is associated with other sites. Sound interesting? Good, then here’s the game plan:

1. We’ll start with an explanation of that metadata word (so we can finally quit italicizing it).

2. Next comes a tour of the platitudes and latitudes of GeoURL, a fun, on-your-site-in-just-ten-minutes META tag that pinpoints your webpage’s real-world location with GPS-style accuracy.

3. Then we’ll check out SMBmeta, a newly launched metadata framework designed to give small businesses their fair share of the Web limelight.

4. We’ll finish up with a macro look at some of the “Semantic Web” standards favored by the W3C: Dublin Core and RDF — and we’ll show them off a bit with FOAF (Friend of a Friend), an application which leverages both those high-minded efforts.

OK then, let’s get started!

Metadata Background

A lot of smart people (like Tim Berners-Lee, who merely invented the Web) are still laboring to make the big dream behind the old “META keyword” come true. That concept is Metadata, which, strictly speaking, means “data about data”, but in our context means “stuff describing your Web page as a whole”: who wrote it, what it’s about, related concepts or categories, the date it was written or updated, the language it’s written in, who controls the copyright, physical locations it describes, if there’s a Table of Contents, etc., etc.

The point is, nobody necessarily wants to see all those details cluttering every single Web page. But if that data were invisible, machine-readable, and used to describe both the contents and context of Web pages, that would open a lot of possibilities, allowing Things of Great Niftiness to ensue. The W3C calls this ambitious idea the “Semantic Web”:

“The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.” Scientific American, May 2001

So having a metadata-rich Web wouldn’t just improve our user experience as we search and surf the Web, but it would also augment the ability for “robots” or software agents to collect and process information on our behalf.

When people talk about the “Semantic” Web adding meaning to the Web, it’s not really for you and me — you and I generally understand whatever we’re reading, and know which links we need to click to get certain tasks done — it’s about adding meaning that machines can process and navigate.

Whoooo! Robots! Software Agents!

Indeed. Which brings us to this rather key caveat: In this tutorial, we’ll be looking at a mishmash of different technologies that are not yet widely adopted, and may well never be. (That includes the aforementioned Robot Agents.) As of press time, not a one of these technologies will deliver the slightest boost to your Google PageRank or your listing on HotBot. And there’s absolutely no guarantee they will in the future.

Still, ‘tis better to lead than follow, and more fun to fiddle with emergent tech than to wait for the “critical masses” to show up and master it before you, right?

Let’s start, then, with a metadata application already adopted by thousands of webloggers, because it’s fun and entertaining but keeps its feet firmly anchored in the real world: GeoURL.

…and so it’s a 5am cab ride to Fiumicino, her eyes closed and dreaming to the taxi dispatcher’s lullaby, who is calling over and over for cinque cinque and quaranta sei, with promises of prenotazione and passegieri, until you’re suddenly both awake and there already, hurriedly hauling this thrown-together luggage set, a total of just 3 bags, but in sum nearly a year, and almost a home.

The heat, as singer/songwriter Glenn Frey once poignantly observed, is on. Day after day now of inhospitably high temperatures, 30s C and 90’s F, but it’s the whallop (that’s, like, a big dollop?) of humidity, stickily slathered across the city, that’s making things unbearable.

Our squat little pinguino still loyally conditions the air in our apartment, but in a tactful and rather non-confrontational manner (penguin-ish, to a T). It steers very well clear of the gruff, freon-oozin’ and temperature-stompin’ attitude that is the more vulgar custom of California’s air-con culture. No, Mr. Pinguino does not seem to cool the air at all, in fact, but instead hums and gurgles in a way that suggests an air conditioner is present, and therefore, ostensibly cooling things.

So, neat, it’s like a psycho-somatic or sub-conscious air conditioner. Or maybe it’s just busted.

One of the stranger shopping experiences Rome offers is a visit to Mitsukoshi Roma, the ‘local’ branch of the upscale Japanese department store.

Mitsukoshi is a cultural frontier outpost the likes of which i’ve never before seen: a full, multi-level department store catering solely to Japanese tourists. Every price is in Yen, every product listed in kanji, and every floor swarming with impeccably-uniformed Japanese salespeople.

The big kicker is that they don’t sell anything Japanese, nope, nothing so fun. Vended instead is a dull and clichéd assortiment of ‘Italian’ goods. (Think heavily-branded Gucci, Prada, Armani, and Diesel items, plus little gift-sized packs of olive oil.) The entire store, you see, is designed for package-tour tourists needing to snap up souvenir goods and gifts, but unwilling or unable to navigate the shopping experience in Rome proper.

The most delightfully bizarre aspect of Mitsukoshi is the purgatorial waiting room in the basement, near the bus garage, I suspect. It’s been done up in a sort of Mediterranean-meets-Sanrio motif, with a large and colorful paper-mache apple tree in the center, featuring a built-in bench seating a dozen bored-looking husbands, each one quietly chain-smoking while a Muzak’ed rendition of ‘Tico Tico’ plays in the background.

A slightly less surreal shopping experience awaits you at M.A.S. (Mas Allo Statuto), not a kilometer away from Mitsukoshi. No, the average ‘Romano Romano’ doesn’t hang out here much, either, but the budget-conscious (esp. Rome’s immigrant population) do. An unsavory amalgam of Price Club, Pic-N-Save, and a Goodwill shop, the massive M.A.S. hawks things like surplus army blankets, cheap Chinese cutlery, and amazingly unfashionable footwear by the basketful. Additionally, there’s lots of low-low-price sweatshop textiles, mostly poly/cotton blends with dubiously-licensed logos, like the ‘Fruit of The Lover’ T-shirts on sale for 3 euro each.

We’re back from a week in Madrid, and still trying to sort out impressions from the place. Though this much i can recommend right away: rent yourself a rowboat at Buen Retiro park, since euro-for-euro (or dollar-tentytwo-for-dollar-twentytwo), it’s one of the best buys on the continent.

Oh, and i don’t know if it was because I had churros for breakfast, or what, but ‘Guernica’ underwhelmed, while Rothko’s ‘green on maroon’ just socked it to me. How’d that happen?