Yes, I'm still here - having offended mightily against the cardinal rule ... post well but post often. My son's wedding, golf and bright summer days intervened. The Mets? Arrgh. Anyway, sue me. Isn't that what the powers-that-be want to do these days a la Net, anyway?

I've spent some time exploring other tools but I am still diggin' on Radio and getting back into Frontier/Manila too. I'm looking for some tight corner-turn convergence between these siblings in time to come. I think I'll share my current conclusions sometime soon. The bottom line? Userland's platform still makes the difference as does UL's passionately idiosyncratic design.

Let open source flourish but it remains by necessity software by committee. Think film (Hitchcock), music (Dylan), novels (Sterling) or journalism (hmm, still looking). Think architecture (Lloyd-Wright).  Think MS Basic even. Crude but glorious, it was. Point-of-view from real people compels. Committees repel. (Python and Ruby yield counter-examples of open source directed elegantly by their authors. Life is messier than weblogs, happily.)

I also bought Eastgate's Tinderbox. This is a cool and extraordinarily powerful product. Mark Bernstein is another auteur. I want to use it. I want to master it. Honest. It could complement Radio/Frontier beautifully. But are there enough hours in the day?

When it comes to those precious few hours, my real brainstorming returns to Radio and the notion of packaging a real book (online, natch) for ordinarily intelligent people getting into Radio for the first time - 180-200 pages? I will rework pages already done on this site and elsewhere and add another 100 pages ... with significantly more polish and care.

Selling it too.

feedback:   9:41:42 AM