• Seth Dillingham is my former boss from my time at Macrobyte Resources. I count the time there among the best employment situations I’ve enjoyed, due in large measure to Seth’s leadership of the business. He manages to combine extreme depth of programming knowledge with good managerial skills in a way that’s far too uncommon in the technical world. He’s a great programmer (I’ve looked at a lot of his code!), and shines even more when put in a position where he can combine those skills with his abilities as a manager.

  Seth is currently looking for new work. His resume is here. He currently lives in Mystic, Connecticut.

• Seth Goldberg is my former coworker at Electronic Arts. He and I worked side by side on the Broadvision/ClearCommerce based billing system there. Seth was one of the hardest workers I’ve ever been on a team with, and made phenomenal strides toward stabilizing a billing system that was buggy and had been neglected for a long time before we were hired. He’s also a very talented musician, and plays and spins as Ketadream.

  Seth is also currently looking for work, and can be contacted at ketadream@ketadream.com. He lives in Austin, Texas.

One of the decisions I made when starting work on Oratorio was to use XML to store songs and presentations. The promise of XML is portability of data — since all the data in an XML file is structured and labeled, it should be straightforward to use the data in other places and ways than those for which it was originally intended.

Unfortunately, XML is taking a bit of time to mature to the point where this promise is realized. I did, however, get a tantalizing glimpse today of that future. I spent about 30 minutes reading articles and creating a CSS file (which tells how to display the XML data), and was rewarded with the ability to view Oratorio songs directly in Mozilla, the Netscape-derived open-source browser. The cool thing about it is that I didn’t have to do anything special, other than creating and pointing to the rules for displaying the data. Mozilla effectively already knew what to do with an Oratorio file.

Now, if we could get all the browsers displaying XML in the same way, this would really become useful. Once that happens, I’ll be able to put up a library of songs in XML format that can be viewed within a browser and downloaded directly to an Oratorio song library with no extra work. Very cool.

The kids and I got to see the latest incarnation of the ubiquitous boy wizard this past weekend courtesy of one of the drug companies that was trying to convince Mom McMains that theirs was the best antibiotic ever. The movie version of Harry Potter was quite ambitious, clocking in at two and a half hours — quite a stretch for the children at whom it’s aimed. Director Chris Columbus did a good job with the film version, remaining very true to the source material, and creating a lovely and believable version of Rowling’s story.

At the risk of sounding like a boring Luddite, the thing that I found most unsatisfying about the film was that the richness of the world was (perhaps unavoidably) sacrificed. Though two and a half hours is a long film, it’s still a dreadfully short time to fully savor the fiction upon which Ms. Rowling has evidently lavished such thought and care. As with Tolkien, her characters inhabit a deeply textured universe. She leaves various mysteries dangling from one book to another to help create a more fully melded tapestry of the whole multiple-book story arc — a luxury we’re not allowed in the film version. But given the constraints the medium inevitably puts upon the story, Potter fans should find this a satisfying addition to the merchandising avalanche.

Over the weekned, we went to see the Gaslight Theater’s production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, which my software business sponsored. (We evidently paid for the smoke machine.) The show was very well done, with a much larger cast than we’ve previously seen in that small venue. It combined comedy and psychological insight to create a very interesting portrait of groupthink movements. Ionesco wrote the piece in response to the communist and socialist movements that were sweeping through Europe at the time, but it’s equally applicable to any situation where people trade in their own mind for that of the mob. (The mob in this case is intent upon becoming Rhinoceroses — a cicumstance from which much of the play’s comedy springs.)

Good show, Gaslight crew!

Steve Martin trying for a baby with Gwyneth Paltrow? I think Kathy and I could learn a thing or two from that struggle. Good luck, Steve!

We’ve pretty much finished up construction on the treehouse. See the treehouse page for photos and details. Huzzah!

I’ve been meaning to learn to program the Palm Pilot organizers for a while now, and purchased CodeWarrior several months ago to further that cause. Unfortunately, in spite of having scanned through a couple books on the subject, I haven’t been making any progress at all until this weekend. I finally decided that what I needed was a project to work on, so I’ve started my first PalmOS program — a utility which will make entering certain kinds of reminders faster and easier.

Over the weekend, I built a first version of the user interface and added a little code to it. During lunch today, while waiting for an oil change, I started wiring up the interface so that it would actually do something. Now I can merrily click among all the different screens in the application, though none of them actually do much yet. It’s fun to be learning a new platform, and brain-stretching to be programming in C again after ignoring it for about 6 years. I still like higher-level languages, but I can certainly see that C’s efficiency is a valuable asset on a small device like the Palm.

Since she’s become ambulent, one of the pecadillos Maggie has been able to indulge more easily is her taste for cat food. Given the slightest opportunity, she will make a beeline for the cats’ bowl and start scarfing down the cheap, dry food we give them, which she evidently finds preferable to any human food we’ve sent her way. We’ve now taken to putting the cat dish in the laundry room and keeping a very careful eye on the door so that our cats don’t waste away to nothing.

She is developing a nice shiny coat, though.

One of the great things about having Ben in the area recently has been that he’s been lending me some excellent music. Among his recent loans was Livin’ it Up When I Die, by The Electrics. They’re equal parts The Chieftans, Simple Minds, and Brave Combo, if you can imagine a thing — fun folk rock from Scotland with pipes, electric guitars, accordions, and rock drums. A couple of tracks from their next album are up on the site. Good fun dancing music.

I’m starting to accumulate quotations from various things I’m reading that I’d like to be able to come back and look at again later. If you’d care to follow along at home, you can do so on the Quotes page.