September 28, 2005
Tramps Like Us
Columbia Records is coming out with a 30th anniversary edition of Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run.
(A moment of silence while I reflect on how old I am getting.)
I am a big fan of Bruce. He is my man in popular music--the one rocker I will still overpay to see in concert. I own all his records, have t-shirts from a few concerts over the years, a poster or two, ticket stubs, and some other memorabilia. I have seen him enough times to have lost count. I have seen him in Boston, Providence, Worcester, and New York. I have seen him at least six times here in Boston, including at the "Old Garden" and the Fleet Center (now the "New Garden"), the Music Hall (now the "Wang Center"), and, blessed be, Fenway Park. Seeing Bruce at Fenway was as close to nirvana as I will come.
In 1975, though, Bruce was only vaguely on my radar screen, and what I knew of him I resented. See, I was 16 and I was into Dylan, and there was that whole "new Dylan" thing and that whole "cover of Time and Newsweek thing." I heard his songs and some small part of me grudgingly realized I liked them, but I was 16 and I was sticking with Dylan.
But in March of 1977 my older brother Dan came home from classes at BU one day and told me had scored two tickets to see Springsteen that night. It was either the third or last night of a four-night run at the Music Hall. When he asked me to come, I wasn't going to say no, despite my anti-Springsteen compunction. I was a teenager. Teenagers go to concerts.
We get there, and see that they are great seats. The Music Hall was a fine venue for rock--about 4000 seats I guess, great acoustics, great sight lines, comfortable seats. We are on the floor, about 10 rows from the stage, dead center. Most people are seated already as my brother wades into the row in front of me, and then I hold up as he realizes someone is in our seats. I brace for some kind of confrontation, but little or nothing is said. It is a boy and a girl, probably college age, and they are really trashed. They quickly get up, brush by us, and we go to sit down.
It takes us no time to realize the girl was really trashed: she had puked all over the floor in front of her seat. Being the little brother, I take the puke seat, trying my hardest to hold my sneakers an inch above the mess. My mood is souring quickly. I start telling myself that I really didn't want to come to this concert. Fuck Bruce Springsteen. Fuck the new Dylan. Fuck the cover of Time and Newsweek. There's a sea of puke under my shoes and the goddamned concert hasn't even started yet.
But then the concert starts. The band runs onto the stage. Ten rows back and dead center, I am close enough to see Springsteen's molars. He is a little, wiry, hairy thing, but his voice booms out some primal greeting--I make out "Boston.... ready... rock...tonight..."--and then the band explodes into sound. We are lifted, en masse, onto our feet, and then onto our chairs. It's a freaking miracle!
I have the benefit of this great web site that tells me exactly what songs the band played that night, how long they took, and what order they played them in. With the exception of the song "Born to Run" itself and covers of several rock classics that came at the end, I had never heard any of this music before. But I was lost in it. Everyone was singing and clapping and screaming and waving their hands. We stayed standing on our seats the entire night, high above the puke. Everyone else seemed to know every word, every note, every cue--when to sing along, when to be reverently quiet. I just followed along, happy as a clam.
The night ended with a ten-plus minute version of "Higher and Higher"--a song that had been recently made a hit by Rita Coolidge of all people. But I would learn later it was a Jackie Wilson classic.
You know your love (your love keeps lifting me)
Keep on lifting (love keeps lifting me)
Higher (lifting me)
Higher and higher (higher)
I said your love (your love keeps lifting me)
Keep on (love keeps lifting me)
Lifting me (lifting me)
Higher and higher (higher)
I knew the words. I could sing along. And sing along I did. Springsteen had us doing some goofy combination of bows and waves, swaying side to side, forward and back, screaming the chorus at the top of our lungs. It was a silly, simple, joyous song. It wasn't Dylan. It was fun, damnit. And as I stood there on my chair, head back, arms waving, I knew for maybe the very first time my heart was singing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:47 AM
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
45 years ago today, Ted Williams homered in his last at-bat in the majors. Soon after, John Updike wrote his New Yorker essay about the moment, including perhaps the most eloquent sentence ever written about baseball, "For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill."
Now that I have The Complete New Yorker
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:22 AM
September 22, 2005
Content Management Books
Thinking about XML books got me thinking about content management books, so I decided to add a Book section to the CMS Resources page I have been developing.
Here is the list I started with. Should I add some more?
- Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Strategy by Ann Rockley
- Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko
- Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery by JoAnn T. Hackos
- The Content Management Handbook by Martin White
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville
- Professional Content Management Systems: Handling Digital Media Assets by Andreas Mauthe, Peter Thomas
Of course, if you are in a book-buying mood, feel free to buy either of the two books I have helped write: one on DRM and one on SVG.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:51 PM
XML Books
Someone asked me to recommend an XML book for nonprogrammers. I like two, actually, both from O'Reilly: Learning XML by Erik Ray and XML in a Nutshell by Elliotte Rusty Harold, et al.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:38 PM
September 20, 2005
The Complete New Yorker
This looks like a lot of fun--every page of The New Yorker ever printed, in a set of eight DVDs. It's called The Complete New Yorker
This is also a technology story of course. The back issues of the great American magazines are a treasure trove of material, and the question of how to get high fidelity versions of the back issues out to a wide reading audience has continued to present practical problems. PDF is a great format of course, but it can be bulky. The New Yorker project uses a page rendering technology from LizardTech. Document Express with DjVu provides readers with a high-fidelity page in a much more compressed format.
I emailed LizardTech some questions in response to this press release. I will let you know what I learn.
There is a nice flash demo here.
Justyna Bednarski of LizardTech wrote back with the following stats.
How many pages in total? The New Yorker had 500,000 pages scanned into TIFF-formatted files totaling 15 terabytes of document images, then used LizardTech's Document Express with DjVu Enterprise Edition to convert the TIFF files into the open source DjVu electronic document format, where they measured a mere 300th of the original scanned size.
Total stored data in GB? 15 terabytes prior to compressing into DjVu.
I also asked how big the same collection would have been in PDF, but Bednarski didn't want to speculate on that. Bednarski added, "We cannot assert the size in PDF, as nobody wanted to try it because they didn't think it would be practical. The New Yorker didn't think it was practical as they say in the case study."
The case study can be found in PDF format here. You can also view it in DjVu format here (requires installation of the DjVu plugin, which can be found here).
Browsing The New Yorker web site, I also learned that The Complete New Yorker is a live project. According to the site, "Every year, The New Yorker will offer an updated Disk 1, which will include an additional year of issues, an updated index, and other enhancements."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:57 AM | Comments (4)
September 19, 2005
CMS Resources Again
I have continued work on the list of content management resources. I have been focusing on news feeds and related sites, but am also working on a couple of other categories, including member organizations and analyst firms. I may extend this to blogs and other things--am still thinking this through.
I know the CM Pros site, as well as some other things Bob Doyle has been working on, also are intended to aggregate CM resources. My goal is slightly different I think, as this is meant as a catalog of resources, and not an aggregator or something you would consult every day. Rather, it attempts (I think!) to list--at a high level--all of the authoritative sources of information about CM in certain categories.
I would love to hear what you think, either through comments here or by emailing me. Also feel free to suggest additional sites, and in which category you think they should be placed.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:18 PM
September 14, 2005
Indeed
I have been staying away from the wingnut blogs for the most part, but I peek in every now and then. I thought this pretty much describes that world.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:16 PM
CMS Resources
I have been compiling a list of CMS resources, starting with the various magazines, newsletters, and Web sites that provide CMS-related news. If you noticed any I have missed, please email me.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:59 AM
DITA and FrameMaker 7.2
I have a pretty lengthy entry over at the Gilbane Report blog on the new release of FrameMaker and its support for DITA.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:55 AM
September 12, 2005
eForms Resources
Well, at some point this past Spring, between my laptop dying and a hard disk frying, I lost a few versions of my eForms Resources. I republished it today, with some links updated and cleaned up, but I definitely lost some data along the way. If you want the RSS feed, you can find it here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:49 PM
September 11, 2005
Call for Members: CM Pros
Bob Doyle is putting out a call for new members of CM Pros. He points out that Tuesday, September 20 will be the anniversary of the launch of CM Pros. They are currently at 473 members and growing fast. For more information, see the CM Pros site.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:42 PM
Examples of DITA Specialization
Any good examples of DITA specialization out there? I would love to hear from folks who have taken the DITA DTD or schema, specialized it, and are now creating content using the specialization. Please email me to discuss.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:16 PM
September 9, 2005
Roundup of DRM Technology
Writing for Information Today, Robert Smallwood has a nice roundup of DRM technology and its role in ECM and Enterprise Rights Management (ERM).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:03 PM
September 7, 2005
Newsfeed Reader Recommendations?
I am outfitting a couple of computers and wanted to put a newsfeed reader on them. Any recommendations? I run Windows XP.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:41 PM
September 6, 2005
Someone Was Feeling Left Out
This is Petey, our mutt since last October. Apparently, he heard about this post and demanded equal time. Needless to say, it is well deserved.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:23 PM
September 5, 2005
Goodbye, Columbus
The Arts and Leisure section of yesterday's New York Times tells us that Philip Roth has become only the third living writer to have his works published by The Library of America (Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow were the other two). The first two volumes are out, and the first volume, of course, features, Goodbye, Columbus.
You can read the original review of Goodbye, Columbus from the May 17, 1959 New York Times. Considering that it went on to win The National Book Award, this is a fairly tepid review.
I came to read Goodbye, Columbus years after my own discovery of Roth. My boyhood friend Sean McCarthy told me about Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. We were probably 11 or so. Just guessing, as it was published in February of 1969, a few months before my 10th birthday, but I didn't meet Sean until 5th grade, or a year later. Sean had older brothers who told him about the sex scenes, so Sean and I would sneak upstairs from the children's library and into the adult library and read the book standing in the stacks.
(By the way, considering the temptations my own sons face today, this story seems oddly quaint.)
When I finally read Goodbye, Columbus in college, I was deeply moved. I was the right age for the story, and I imagined myself an Italian-American Neil Klugman. I read it again probably 10 years ago, and was still moved. It's time to read it again, I think.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:22 PM
September 3, 2005
Welcome
You may have been redirected just now from another blog. This new blog combines two blogs, A Thousand Furnished Rooms, which has been active since March 2004, and a second blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing, which I wrote from August 2003 to January 2005.
A Thousand Furnished Rooms was a personal blog with a specific focus. Over the last several years, I have been developing narrative nonfiction. I hesitate to call it “memoir,” because, well, that seems too precious to me. “Narrative nonfiction” seems both more accurate and less precious, yet also somehow less limiting to me.
My professional blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing, focused on the subject matter of my business, New Millennium Publishing. New Millennium is a consulting practice focused on emerging technical issues for publishers — including content management, XML, and digital rights management.
Like its two predecessor blogs, this will be a work in progress. I will post a mix of new materials, recent materials, and past materials that I am revisiting.
I realize that in combining the two blogs, I run the risk of alienating readers who come here expecting one or the other blog. Some of you may only be interested in the entries related to technology and publishing, and some of you may only want to read the more personal entries. To that end, my developer, Aaron Schutzengel, added a “switch” that allows you to choose “personal posts only,” “tech posts only,” or “everything (default).” It seems to work really well, so if you feel strongly about such things, by all means, avail yourself of it.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:50 AM
