Gap replaces pig’s feet

Well! All in all, a surprising day. The first surprise was the lack of snow—though, given that it is Washington, DC, a city in which weather is as unpredictable (and boring) as a leaf in the wind, this wasn’t actually too surprising.

The gig at the Monastery went quite well. There were seven of us, so with me left as more or less a pinch-hitter, I sightread through the Mass and then relaxed and enjoyed singing the material with which I was familiar. I found sightreading much easier this morning, probably because it wasn’t 11:30 PM. Dim sum followed with Jim Heaney, his girlfriend Deb, and Skip and George. I regret to report that no chicken feet were consumed.

My next stop after Cheeselord Manor was to be the Littles. George was my neighbor at Virginia my fourth year, and when Lisa and I met Bethany with George at my five-year reunion we all hit it off tremendously. Bethany and Lisa have a lot in common—as Lisa points out, they’re both short Italian-American women with impeccable taste and fabulous hosting instincts. The plan was for them to meet me at the Monastery and to proceed from there. Unfortunately, through a snafu they couldn’t make it, and I drove from Chinatown to the Cathedral to plan the next move.

I went down the hill to Georgetown in search of a city map, as mine is currently locked away someplace. I found a good one in Olsson’s, but not before an unpleasant surprise. Au Pied du Cochon, which was a little hole in the wall that could be counted on for good single malt and bad cassoulet when my friends and I were hungry after singing the Tenebrae service at Georgetown, is no more. A Gap is in its place. My blood runs cold—my memory has just been sold: my bistro is a … true slime mold? [Note to self: get better rhyming dictionary.]

Afterwards I got in touch with George and Bethany and came to their house. Continuing in the same string of real estate luck that found them a townhouse complete with wine cellar full of 1974 Mondavis, they found a 3500 or 4000 square foot house up the street from the back gate of the Italian ambassador’s residence that was built in the 1940s and that they purchased from the original owner. I’ll probably have a few things to say about the house, but I’ll leave off now with the observation that the kitchen contained built-in steel pull-outs for foil and paper towels; the mostly unfinished attic contained a cedar closet previously used for minks; and the first floor powder room currently sports an intriguing combination of brown wood paneling and red and black lace wallpaper(!) that calls to mind some of New Orleans’ more notorious establishments. And a dog that likes cheese. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

The manor life

I just realized I described the “Cheeselord” part of Cheeselord Manor, but not the Manor part. The house that Skip and George own is best described as having a crumbling gentility. It’s situated on a corner lot in Northwest DC, measures about 20 x 60 on each floor, and has three floors, a finished basement, and a tower garret room. The “crumbling” part is due to the old roof, which Skip and George recently replaced, though they haven’t had the chance to fix all the interior damage yet.

The house was built in 1912 (as Skip puts it, the year the Titanic sank), and used to be offices for a nonprofit organization. These days, the front room sees a lot of Cheeselord rehearsals, complete with an upright piano that may be older than the house is and wood floors that have a tendency to slope in unpredictable directions (the last is notable as the Cheeselords have been self described as a “drinking group with a singing problem”).

Skip and George have known each other for years since Georgetown. Skip directs a diagnostic lab around the corner, used to be a monk, and sings countertenor; George has more muscles than I’d know what to do with and a deep bass voice, and composes music when he’s not doing medical things. I met the guys in the Cathedral Choral Society when Skip invited me to come over for dinner one night while they sightread the Tallis Lamentations of Jeremiah. As an old Renaissance music buff, I eagerly accepted, little knowing I’d spend some really amazing years with the group. We did a lot of music, from early medieval chant and conductus through Renaissance and Early American to late twentieth century masters like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener (and of course George). Today I’m singing with them at the group’s second home, the Franciscan Monastery in Northeast DC, which is best known for its replicated catacombs under a fairly magnificent sanctuary. I can’t wait.

Long day’s journey into DC

I would say I’m tired, but that hardly seems adequate. It’s been a long day, and a good one. I left my inlaws’ place in New Jersey this morning around 10 am and started driving south on the Turnpike toward Washington. On the way, I decided to call my mother at my grandfather’s in Leola, PA; the family Christmas party was to be on Sunday and I wanted to make sure she got in OK. “Oh,” she said, “it’s actually today, from 12 to 6.” I looked at where I was and decided to forgo an afternoon in DC — and spent a lovely time with my relatives in the church basement, catching up.

I’m now at Cheeselords Manor, where my friends Skip and George live. I used to sing with them in a twelve voice men’s Renaissance ensemble called the Suspicious Cheese Lords (it’s badly translated from the title of a Tallis motet, Suscipe Quaeso Domine). I’ll be guesting with them tomorrow morning at DC’s Franciscan Monastery. I feel humbled after running through the music–it’s been too long since I sang.

Unexpected snag

I’m going to have to delay the release of Manila Envelope. When I used it yesterday morning it was working, and now the preferences have broken. This, I guess, is a danger of using someone else’s code without fully understanding it. I’ll have to do some digging through Cocoa to figure out what’s going on.

In the meantime, I’m hitting the road after a great night’s sleep at my in-laws in New Jersey. Next post will be from Washington, DC.

On the Road Again

Not much time for an update today, I’m afraid. I’m tired of there being no snow in Boston so I’m heading south to where the action is.

Okay, that was a little flip. I’ve been wanting for a while to see some of my friends in the Washington DC area, and I haven’t been back since July of 2000 when I left to come to MIT Sloan. It was a transitional time–I sold my car, hopped in a moving van, and dropped myself in the middle of Cambridge while Lisa started looking for a new job. I need to see what’s going on with my friends. And I’m getting a chance to sing with my friends in the Suspicious Cheeselords.

I will be stopping in New Jersey overnight to pick up my car. While I’m there, I hope to borrow my in-laws’ DSL connection to post the alpha release of Manila Envelope for general consumption. After all, I will have about five hours in the train to fix all the bugs. 🙂

So queue up Paul Simon singing “Graceland.” My traveling companions aren’t ghosts and empties; they’re a PowerBook G3 and an iPod. It’s time for some catch-up.

Manila Envelope – Part 9b

One additional thing about Manila Envelope — it’s a little bit of a paradigm shift from my scripts. I think the change is for the better.

With TextEdit2Blog, I started out trying to write a universal “save to the Web” script menu item for all text applications. The script was supposed to grab the selected text from the frontmost application and post it to the web. I soon realized that this just wasn’t feasible. There was no way to address all text applications universally–some had a “selection” property and some didn’t, and each exposed it differently. I decided instead to tie the script to one easily available application with a simple AppleScript Dictionary.

With AppleScript Studio, I don’t think this makes sense any more. It’s too easy to slap a text view onto the user interface, add some menu items, and essentially have all the functionality of TextEdit inside the app. Besides, as someone pointed out to me, copy & paste and drag and drop are pretty universally understood ways to get data into different places.

So Manila Envelope will have more of a text-based application feel to it. Cool. Now it just needs an icon. Anyone with skills want to share?

Manila Envelope – Part 9

If all goes well, this will be the first time I’ve posted something using my tools that I’ve been able to set an explicit Department for the news item.

A point about how Departments are implemented in Manila. Each news item can be assigned to a Department (for instance, this news item is in the Scripting Department). A site editor can define the categories that can be used and assign them unique images. Unfortunately, the only thing I’ve found in the Manila RPC that addresses Departments is the ability to set the Department for a news item using a string. There’s no way to get a valid list of departments for a given site.

That’s a shame. I’d love to have a drop-down menu that allows the user to choose the department. As it stands I’ll probably have to have the user type it in.

Manila Envelope – Part 8

A follow-up to my earlier item about using secure text fields: Apple’s mailing list comes through again. Tim Bumgarner, the tech lead on Applescript Studio, emailed me to point out that I could address the secure text field as a regular text field instead since the secure text field class inherits from the regular text field class.

What I find interesting about this is that it points up some interesting philosophical differences between Applescript Studio and other environments I’ve programmed in. Here, to address a control or other user interface element, you need to specify the control by class, for instance 

get contents of text field "userPassword" of theWindow

Note the quotation marks around the text field name? The control’s names are not bound at compile time but are interpreted–good and bad; you can pass the name in as a string variable but you don’t get any protection from the compiler if you make typos.

Manila Envelope Part 7

I’ve been digging for a while on Manila Envelope, getting frustrated by a few things. Still impossible to work with secure text fields in AppleScript Studio. However, I now have the application working with a preferences file. This is pretty critical, as this was the last missing piece of functionality to make Manila Envelope do everything that my old scripts did.

My original goal was to make this release an “everything and the kitchen sink” one, and add in lots of stuff like style translation and so on. I think, though, that it’s time to avoid the Mozilla syndrome and fix on a reasonable set of requirements for 1.0. With this, I can hopefully release 1.0 in the next few days, before I go on my January road trip.

Don’t ask me about claptrap…

Thing #2: The moon in the mountains of Buncombe County, North Carolina, outside Asheville, is bright enough to walk by.

Thing #3: Buncombe County is the origin of the word “bunkum,” or “bunk.” Apparently Felix Walker, the representative from Buncombe County, started it in the US Congress by making a longwinded speech for show to his constituents while he was on the House floor. This may give you some perspective on some of the things written on the pages of webloggers. We tend to make a lot of speeches for Buncombe. 🙂