Hidden Wisdom

After Jim McGee said such a kind thing about my Law of [Non-]Simplification, I have to spread around some of my new organizational-theory whuffie, pointing it at Merlin Mann. You may think Mann has all the whuffie anyone could need, with countless tech hipsters eating out of his folders, but as I was drowning myself in an RSS subscription backlog, I spotted a gem of a comment from him.

In response to a story about Apple picking up the tab for a reservation he and some friends made, Merlin notes that “Things like this make me feel they’ve got elves all over making smart micro-decisions. . . .” That’s it — “smart microdecisions”; that expresses in two words what I have always aimed at in administrative functioning. When you make smart microdecisions as an administrator, experience suggests to me that other people start making smart microdecisions, too. The administrative ecosystem begins to work in your favor, good sense starts showing up at the roots, and the tree flourishes. Now I have a phrase for it — thanks, Merlin.

Back To

I haven’t complained about my exercise regimen lately — for a subtly important reason. While Margaret was home in December, I fell out of the habit of exercising. Unfortunately, the internal somatic good-will built up by my commitment to health, vigor, and ascetical self-discipline did not carry me over through the holidays, so I lost much of the ground I had gained by the fall’s grueling exertions. Beginning today, I hope that I will resume regular enough exercise that I may end up complaining about it online again.

In the meantime, often as I have disagreed with Dave“Formerly Time’s Shadow, Now Groundhog Day” Rogers in the past, he makes some very strong points in response to David Weinberger on the world-liness of the web. (Speaking of Dave’s blog’s name, Pippa doesn’t remember having seen Groundhog Day, which means that in the near future we have the prospect of a delightful movie-watching evening.)

[Later:] And Jeff Ward, too.

Things to Figure Out

Relative to the Seabury site redesign, I just visited two of our site authors who use PCs, and discovered (to my dismay) that Explorer doesn’t like our two-column layout or the character entity (⊕) that I used as a dingbat . I now have to figure out what went wrong with the dimensions of the columns such that the left hand column gets pushed to the bottom, and I have to replace the character entities with some other thingy (I s’pose either a GIF or a plus sign).

I also want to be able to share with them the joys of newsreaders and blog entry clients, but I don’t know the best (and the free) PC applications in those categories. It looks as though Jeneane is having a good time with Qumana — I’ll investigate that for starters. It was very cool to be able to show them that Feedster already knew about Seabury’s RSS feed.

But first I have to fix the columns, sigh.

That’s Just Weird

I’ll bet you’ve never attended a Canadian dissertation defense at which dooce was chair of the committee and Keanu Reeves served as a special guest outside examiner! Well, in a dream from which I just woke up, I did — so there!

I got to the defense a little early. It was held at Heather’s house, and she was showing me around. The house was set on pronounced hill, so it had a view of the neighborhood, which was flooded at the time (surprisingly so; Heather hadn’t noticed how the water level had risen in the recent rains, but two-story houses at the base of the hill were under water). Heather, of course, praise Jon’s judgment for selecting so marvelous a house.

The defense started, and it was actually more like a critics’ get-together. The dissertator had evidently prepared an art project as her thesis, and everyone (a very well-attended defense, perhaps because of the guest star, but I saw some of my former colleagues from the biblical faculty of Princeton Seminary there, too) was milling around, waiting for someone to speak first.

At first, people asked some tentative questions, but Keanu was evidently worked up about something, and I nudged him to speak his piece. He asked the dissertator, with a tone of desperation, “Did you really mean just to say, ‘A – O; A – O; A, A, A, A, O, O, O, O’? Wasn’t there something more you could have done?” That caused a flurry of tut-tutting and disavowal of any involvement with the project. As people embarrassedly drifted out, Reeves went on to praise the dissertator’s earlier work — there was a painting that I had myself seen, a sort of Andy Warhol paint-over-photo with some crayon outlining, that everyone had thought sensational. Reeves was beseeching her to say why she had gone from a marvelous, subtle painting (you’ll have to take my word on that) to a videotape of two people saying “A – A – A” and “O – O – O.”

When the hors d’oeuvres ran out, I headed back to my office, a rather more spacious habitation than my present phone booth, and was settling down to ignore some work when a clump of attendees, knocked at my door. I invited them in, and a stream of black-turtlenecked hip critics flowed in, occupying every available seat and a bunk above a file cabinet (that is a very cool idea, by the way, and I may look into having a bunk bed over my files cabinets if I move — I could use a place to nap). I didn’t know all these people very well, so there were lengthy futile introductions, and just as we were getting around to discussing the dissertation defense we’d just seen, along with a project for indexing the works of Bob Newhart, somebody began deliberately scooping out the grounds from my coffee maker and spilling them on the floor. It turns out that this guest (who was the one lying on my bunk) was not one of the dissertation critics, but was just a wanderer who had stumbled in, drunk. I dragged him off the bunk, so that he landed in the midst of the grounds.

At that, I woke up, and felt the imperative urgency to record the weirdest dream I’ve had in ages.

NT Resource Page

At the end of each term, or each Adult Ed gig, the odds favor the likelihood of somebody coming up to me and asking, “Can you recommend any commentaries on that?” Add that to the number of times I try to whip up a starting bibliography on a given text for my New Testament classes, and you get a relatively strong case for my building up a repository of my recommendations relative to secondary literature on the New Testament.

So this morning I started a blog whose entries will all be topics in the field of New Testament studies, the contents of which will be bibliographic suggestions along with casual evaluations of the works in question. This way, I’ll be able to leave it open for comments (so that visitors can make helpful suggestions) and hyperlink to online resources. This overlaps, to some extent, with Mark’s wonderful work on the NT Gateway — though with a bloggy difference, since over the long run my pages aim not for comprehensiveness, but for partiality. The NT Resources page will run under Moveable Type, but I won’t be treating it as a daily-update site. I’ll flesh out and edit entries as I see fit, and probably won’t multiply entries once I cover the canonical books and some pretty obvious thematic headings.

I’m starting with the Epistles, as I’m teaching through them this term. I’ll put up a page for each unit as I encounter them, but I won’t have the time to put together a rich overview of the literature right away. The advantage of using a CMS for this work, though, is that I’ll be able to return to each topic as I have time, or as I run into a work that particularly impresses me.

In this way, I’m putting my time and energy where my mouth and pen are. If (as I submitted) the future lies with seeded-search rather than a filtered-links/gateway approach to online research, then it behooves me to post my biblical scholarship links; indeed, if I get up the energy (in other words, when I have something more important to do, for which this provides a congenial distraction), I may even code in vote links.

There’s definitely a way in which one could read this gesture as my bowing to the value of the gateway; if it were important for me to differentiate these pages from (say) Mark’s, I suppose that I’d say that mine aims less toward comprehensiveness, more toward critical evaluation. Of course, if one stops browsing at my page and treats it as a last word on biblical scholarship, then mine would certainly constitute a throttle to knowledge; I prefer to think of it as Google- (or Technorati-)fodder. . . .

New Law

When trying to simplify a complex [bureaucratic] system, any change that does not result in an obvious quantum of simplification amounts to further complication — or, more concisely, “any attempted simplification short of a quantum change is always a complication.”

All I Want For MacWorld

For the record, the various devices that the rumor sites identify sound terrific and all, but the one MacRumor of consequence to my life would involve a resuscitated AppleWorks. That antique program is hardly useable these days; a snappy new version, Cocoa-fied, would be good news indeed.

On the other hand, if Tom is on the right track about the headless media center, a new version of AppleWorks might look pretty pallid in no time flat. Apple should hire Tom straightaway — but then, they shouldn’t have fired Kevin, so obviously I’m on a very different wavelength from their employment priorities.

Cool and, Potentially, Cooler

I’m a late adopter when it comes to last.fm — due mainly to problems working out what my password was (does the last.fm play appropriately with Safari? Might that be the problem?), but I finally got the password straightened out, and the possibilities of that project look terrific. I’m always to eager to learn about new artists whose work I’ll like, but I’m slow to try out music. The “profile” radio function should be exceptionally helpful in that regard.

Here, though, I see the usefulness of something I’ve never used much for my own iTunes purposes. The “profile” sorting would be more powerful, wouldn’t it, if it could read my ratings of the selections I play? I mean, I play plenty of tunes that aren’t my very favorite (and I don’t bother marking them as such, since I know which ones I like and don’t) — but the profile engine might benefit from knowing that I play Flaming Lips because I think they’re great, but I play Wu-Tang Clan because I’m trying to refine my hip-hop sensibilities, and am not perfectly ready to make a commitment to identifying them with my profile. I could tag “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” with five stars, “7th Chamber” as two (or no tag at all), and my profile would more accurately reflect my taste (until I realize that Eric is right, and mark Wu-Tang with five stars, too).

Comings and Goings

Juliet

This morning, life at chez AKMA returned to normal. We had a visit from Juliet for the weekend, which was great (we hadn’t had a visit with Juliet for ages); we planned the service of blessing for her wedding, and caught up on her life and ours. Her visit was particularly welcome with Beatrice, who appreciated Juliet’s constant [favorable] comparison of her with her fiancé’s mother’s bichon.

Jennifer

Juliet’s visit didn’t overlap with Jennifer’s, but Jennifer’s sojourn here was delightful, too (and longer than Juliet’s!). After having lived with Jennifer and Juliet for years, it’s oddly beautiful for them to pop up into our daily rhythm again, and in almost exactly the same ways as ever. It’s exciting keeping up with Jennifer’s new flickr account; I wonder if Juliet would use flickr? Hmmm, perhaps a wedding present. . . .

Most importantly (to me, he said selfishly), Margaret returned to Durham this morning. She has an exhilarating array of courses for her second semester, but it’ll take some concentration for me to focus on her accomplishments and intellectual opportunities, and to bracket my missing her. I’ll see her again in February — time to begin counting down the days again.


Margaret