saturday nite, aug 27th (faire opening day, yes)

members of the "drama" lineup of Yes are doing a reunion tour and will be at the Ram's Head Concert Hall in Baltimore that night.  i'll probably just go straight there after pub sing.

(just a personal bookmark)

Turning on "tags"

If you've been to the home page, you'll see that LJ has a new feature called "tags".  these are rather open-ended ways of marking your blog entries as you want them to, and is rather ingenious.  One interesting thing is that you can actually set it so that others can tag your entries for you, and even create new tags (or delete tags) that apply to your LJ (as in, they can affect your tags for your entries, but can't blithely attach their own tagset to your entries unless you give them permission to add them).

Once this is done, tags become filters you can use in the URL, so that http://www.livejournal.com/users/acroyear70/tag/music/rock is only those entries tagged as "rock" related.

I've created 2 tagging types and have opened up tagging to "friends".

The first type is subject matter, ranging from music, celt, geek (high-tech stuff, not geeking out on sci-fi subjects which i've labeled...), fandom, politics, etc...these will be more likely set by me.

The second is ratings using slashdot's schemes.  These I leave to you -- if you want to rate a post i've made as interesting, funny, overrated, etc, simply use the tags that are "/." prefixed.

now these are independent of any other feature in LJ at present.  you can not

• have a tag setting automatically apply an icon.  if you use a particular icon for a subject you have to tag it and set the icon separately
• have an RSS feed only show those items with a particular tag (allowing one to turn tags into full categories)
  
• have your friends page only show those entries from a particular user that have a particular tag (like only show entries of mine that are "politics" or "/. interesting"
• have your tags automatically set based on the friends filter set for the post or vice-versa
• have nested categories automatically; as in, i can create a tag "music" and a tag "music/rock", but they are separate tags so that by looking at "/music" i don't see those in "/music/rock" (unless I tag them that as well).

still, interesting approach to things.  i expect the RMM feed and the "only show entries tagged 'x' in my friends page" will come soon.

note: these tags are not "html-like" tags in the sense of "lj-cut".  most 3rd party tools (like deepest sender) aren't yet "tag aware".

about this week

Everything we do generates repercussions. If our actions are necessary, we can handle the repercussions. If our actions are a result of us doing-what-we-want-to-do, then we may be overwhelmed. If our actions are a result of arbitrary impulses, we will be swept away. -- Robert Fripp

Necessary actions took place this week, often decided without access to all the information that would have made decisions more comfortable. Regardless of the lack of information, the repercussions of those actions, being necessary, could be and were handled.

There is still one more necessary action on my part that will happen when it has to, and its getting closer. It'll probably happen this weekend with the hopes that its repercussions will be dealt with by monday. This last action is entirely internal on my part:

I have not yet grieved. This is not denial. This was a conscious decision, an exercise of the discipline I have developed in such matters, a necessary action for me to do in order to allow others their time to grieve. The repercussion is that I still have to grieve, which I can handle. This action is necessary, and its repercussions I will also handle. I'll party-hardy tomorrow, but don't expect me to drink too much...i'd rather not be swept away.

In the end I found beginnings, not a vision, a wake up call,
Raised from the dead by a beating heart and at last I can see it all
And my eyes were opened to the darkness, in my hand a burning flame,
A spark of life to touch the fuse and blow these clouds away,

I can make it happen, if I want to,
Make it happen, if I try,
Forgive, forget, forever never means as much as it does today,
Make it happen [-- Fish]

I have not lost my grandmother, but I miss her company.