(no subject)

So M's thing went all nice. It started out on a sour note (literally) (not of her doing, though) but just as my G&S friends have told me, half the skill in live performance sometimes goes into paving over screw-ups, and the whole performance carried off quite well, said prog of the untrained ear. The only weird thing was a bass soloist, who spent most of the time sitting quietly in the front row. Twice he rose, faced the audience, did his bit, then quietly turned and sat down again. Poor guy couldn't help giving off a my work is finished here! air whenever he did this, but, all good.

Then we had a little wine & cheeze & ramen thing with various people at M's place. These may have been the first people I've met through M, as opposed to M&N together.... if I end up hanging out with them more, I'd call them members of Circle-N by the most literal metric, but that doesn't really seem right anymore. Maybe I'll just declare a new Circle-M. Gee, I better decide soon, since it's so bloody important. Hmm, who invited this guy? Out into the snow with you, sirrah. Make me some snow angels. Bah. Yes.

---

Snow indeed, hey? I'm allegedly taking advantage of the walk that I can't easily walk to the Diesel (and can't possibly drive there, believe me) by cleaning my apartment, but what I'm doing more is thinking of improvements I should make to it. I have a pretty good idea now of the things I need to obtain, and where I can get them. I'd get them this weekend, but for the snow.

I'm excited about getting this stuff, though; it'll double my loungey-space, as I plan on finally turning my barren dining room into a welcoming place. (Currently all my loungeness is invested in my living room, which is a fine place... but that futon should be replaced with a real couch, hmm.) I've already got a bit of a head start on it, as of this evening; I started this post because I had M on my mind, because I just now did a nice thing to mimic something I noted in her apartment last night. Dug out a nice little speaker/subwoofer system I got for the last place, and set it up on top of the CD rack (which is empty, and will soon become a tapestry-holder, or something). When I plug my laptop into it, zap, I have instant, apartment-permeating music (or news radio, courtesy WBUR's QuickTime feed), emanating from a visually attractive setup. Verrrrrry nice.

Well... sort of. I'm writing this while sitting on the floor underneath the speakers, because I can't use this nice setup and also have my laptop in any other place. I sense scaling issues. Surely I can do something clever and wireless here? Surely.

Anyway: Once all this is done I'll finally have the get-togethers at my place that I've long been threatening, particularly: Bizarro Thursday Night Movies (for which I have obtained blessing from the regular-RNM person; they probably won't be on Thursdays, for one thing, nor at all regular), and Games That Nobody Except Me Likes Night, where there shall be Gnostica, et al.

A question about footnotes.

I'm wondering, very very loudly, if footnotes (or endnotes) that contain nothing but a website URL (something that occurs quite a bit in my current writing project) have any purpose in this, the amazing future. On the one hand, it's intuitive to put them there, since that's generally where simple attributions go. On the other hand, since I expect that many (most?) people who read this book will do so in a Web browser, it seems a bit roundabout.

Were I writing exclusively for the Web, you see, I'd just turn the text I'm annotating into a hyperlink. In this case, however, I'm writing in DocBook, with multiple target media (well... Web and print, at least) in mind. In print, a footnote containing a spelled-out URL doesn't look any more alien than any other kind of scholarly attribution, but on a webpage it does seem a bit too handwringy. (Yeah, I know the W3C does this all the time. That doesn't convince me. :) )

Were I to forgo footnotes for URL-only attributions and use inline linking instead, a given passage rendered into HTML might look something like this:

My favorite poem is "The Purple Cow" by Gelett Burgess. It is the basis for how I live my life, and sleep my nights.

And in print, something like this:

My favorite poem is "The Purple Cow" by Gelett Burgess (http://www.notfrisco.com/calmem/burgess.html). It is the basis for how I live my life, and sleep my nights.

...or maybe I could add, in the latter case, a preproccessing step that finds all attribution-style inline links and turns them into footnotes, before rendering the text into PostScript or whatever.

Any "traditional" attributions referring to rare works not living at the business end of some URL would receive a footnote no matter my book's publication medium. And in any case, URLs, along with brief descriptions of the content they point to, make up the bulk of my shockingly traditional-looking bibliography.

Any opinions on this from my learnéd pals?

(This is the sort of question I'd take to my editor in Book's previous incarnations, but I don't have one to turn to this time around. So instead I invite everyone I know to fill the role for me. Yay!)