Ah, a new website. Sort of like stretching in a new apartment, only not nearly as expensive, and perhaps not quite as satisfying. As you'll find out if you attempt rudimentary navigation, it is still woefully incomplete, but the content is around, waiting to be put in its propre place. Some area names have remained constant from the old place, others have gone away.

Over the next few days I'll be filling in the music and photo sections and the reading room with some nice contentstuffs, and importing a year and change's worth of entries from the old site into Movable Type.

Remarks on the name: the root noet- refers to thought, or sometimes consciousness. Autonoetic means self-perceiving. Another good word from it is anoetic, which is often used to describe a state of consciousness in which no thought occurs. I chose it partly because of my interest in rare and interesting words, and partly out of a fascination with the question of what makes us conscious, or "conscious" as a good philosopher would say, and self-perceiving, and whether or not we can bequeath these qualities to things like programs or web sites.

A lot has been a-changing around here, so another meta entry seems justified.

First, all three areas of the site (other than the blog) have content, and more is on the way soon for the reading room and photo sections. The "slideshow" seen in the photo section is my first attempt at CGI programming from scratch, and let me just say this about programming when the only output is essentially "it works" or "it doesn't work:" I don't recommend it. But happily the script does now work, and is nicely general, although the coding style ended up rather terrible. Some New York pictures from a year ago, and the ones from America: the Tour, are soon to come.

All the old "Think of a Name" entries have been imported and given quick titles, but not categories. Don't be clicking on any of the internal links in them, you'll only be disappointed by the result.

Speaking of which, the old site has finally been taken down by Michigan. So if you haven't found your way to this site yet, this is a good time to do so.

The new thing I'm most proud of is the "random rare word" you'll see to the left. This is the first good use I'm getting from my dictionary of rare, archaic, obsolete and otherwise fun words, which I'll probably put up in its entirety soon. You can see a new word by reloading the page, so now you have a whole new reason to sit there reloading this page all day! Besides the other ones.

A few notes about the words and definitions. I've only provided information about pronunciation, part of speech, transitive/intransitive, and such when I thought it was necessary. So if you're confused about any of that, or the definition itself, let me know. Keep in mind that some of these words are old and rare enough that no one really knows how to pronounce them, or even what the precise meaning was, so you don't need to worry all that much about using or saying them wrong. Also keep in mind that the process of compiling these was one of much mental and physical fatigue, so my decisions about when to include such information were often rather foggily conceived. Thirdly, there were some cases in which I included the word precisely because the definition was so cryptic and crazy.

I was 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through my second alphabetic pass of adding words when I recently lost my umich OED access, so the dictionary is a bit topheavy in that respect. I will try to complete the second pass by Christmastime using other access.

Finally, by way of responding to comments, thanks to Milkshake for pointing out my omission of the Green Party, which I realized that afternoon but then fell asleep. The reasons for that choice may be obvious, but I still tip my hat to them.

Part 2 of the photos from the A+ Attitude Summer Tour are finally up. Not sure if I mentioned this before, but you can now click on the site title banner above for a rambling discussion of its meaning. And the entire rare word dictionary is now up, letter by letter.

I never quite made the decision not to sleep last night, it just happened. I had slept from 11am-4pm the previous day, so it wasn't the most difficult task. At some point I decided it was finally time to use the multimeter I purchased last summer but never bothered to put a battery in. When I removed the panel, I found a battery had been there all along, in a wrapper and therefore not connected. Turning it on I realized it was a rather complicated machine, and endeavoured to search for the manual. Although I obtained it without too much trouble, it sent me into a flurry of paper-organizing, a rare state for me. I accumulate a really large amount of paper, and a couple of big piles on my side table went back 2 and 3 years. It's all quite valuable to me. I especially enjoy finding tattered slips of paper of the type I carry in my pocket at all times, on which I originally scribbled what would become lyrics for some of my good songs.

This process lasted most of the night, at the end of which H joined me for a film double header, The Quiet American on DVD and "Master and Commander" at the Ziegfeld. Both are fine films with much to recommend them, and the latter is unfortunately being marketed quite poorly. How do you start a TV ad with Now, to stop them, he must sink them? But, I suppose the money is better spent on the film itself than the marketing. And now, my fingers find themselves near unable to type.

I've been indulging my inexplicable hunger for well-written journals of Americans' time spent in Japan, previously satisfied mostly by the now-defunct Kind of Crap, Tokyo Damage Report, and sometimes Jean Snow, who has a huge talent for talking about things that it seems I should care about, but don't, at all...by reading an actual book, Donald Richie's "The Japan Journals 1947-2004." Yes, it wasn't enough to read through the entirety of Galvin Chow's rantings until I caught up and could read them in real time, now I need nearly 50 years of entries to satisfy me.

For some background, Richie has written tons of books about Japan, many partly autobiographical, and others about Japanese film and culture. He's a great observer and kind of a godfather to all the current American japan-bloggers.

In the traditional sense Richie's stuff is written far more elegantly than almost any blog I've seen. It's hard to know how much of this is the result of self-editing and how much is due to the inherent eloquence that people seem to have had back in the day. His examinations of the characters around him seem incredibly perceptive and can be brutal--he takes down several of the celebrities who started coming to him for tours after he became well-known, particularly Truman Capote, who comes off as completely childish, closed-minded and pretentious within a page or two. Sometimes his style becomes rather infuriating, as when he engages in poetics to describe how a pie brought to him by a friend reflected her personality:

"Mayumi has made and brought a pie. She did not want the pie to be sweet and so she made it, not sour, but non-sweet. I have never seen a pie that looked so much like a pie and yet had so much difference about it. It crumbled at once, like a fragile work of art, dissolved into crumbs, and it did not taste like a pie at all. It had all the appearance of itself, and yet it was something else. Just like her."

Good lord, it's just a bad pie! I find it very amusing, though, to imagine these words coming off the pages of Kind of Crap.

Sometimes Richie does a pretty amazing job of bringing to life parts of Japanese history and culture that I'm only beginning to know about, such as when he gets to watch Kurosawa and Mifune film a scene for "Drunken Angel" or hang out with Yukio Mishima.

Other times my prevailing reaction is wonder that people actually live like this. On the positive side I mean constantly hobnobbing with legends like Kurosawa, Mishima, Philip Johnson, Yasujiro Ozu, and Nagisa Oshima, and countless other names I don't recognize, but who are presented as TV or film stars, or preeminent scholars or writers. On the negative side, Richie seems to have a sexual relationship with almost everyone he knows, both men and women (but mostly men), many of them married or otherwise romantically linked. He lets these details slip in slowly, but eventually I started to just expect it. It produces in me a strange combination of jealousy and doubt that a life like that can ever be happy or free.

If anyone else is thinking of reading this, I'll also warn you of Richie's policy of not repeating any passages that have previously been published. This means that many pieces of these journals have actually been left out, despite the completist presentation. I understand the integrity behind not selling people the same thing twice, but it seems just as bad in a way to make me buy most or all of his books to get the whole story, and wonder if what's contained herein is not in fact mostly leftovers. But it is nevertheless a good read.

In the midst of all this Netflix-related content, I've finally gotten around to installing the Netflix Suite plugin for MovableType, so you can see what discs I currently have out. You can get this here. If you know me and also get Netflix, let me know and we can hook up the Friends feature.

While I was messing about, I tried my hand at hacking up MovableType itself. It has always annoyed me that the text boxes in which one edits entries and templates are so small. Trying to look at html code with a 20x80 character box is like walking down the street with a pair of binoculars attached to your eyes. Since others might have the same peeve I'll give some instructions for this. The usual caveat applies about my information being obscenely out of date, since I'm still on MT 2.64 and they're up to the low 3's by now. But H. has told me he doesn't think the size of the text boxes has changed. If the implementation of the gui-generating code hasn't either, we're in good shape.

The files you want to edit are in your cgi directory (usually cgi-bin)/tmpl/cms. The two files I changed are edit_entry.tmpl and edit_template.tmpl. If you look about 45% of the way down in the file you'll see a section that looks like this:

<td colspan="2" valign="top"><textarea<TMPL_IF NAME=AGENT_MOZILLA> cols=""</TMPL_IF> class="width500" name="text" rows="<TMPL_IF NAME=DISP_PREFS_SHOW_EXTENDED>10<TMPL_ELSE>20</TMPL_IF>" wrap="virtual"><TMPL_VAR NAME=TEXT></textarea><p></td>

At this point I also realized I could get more height out of the box without doing any code-editing by customizing my page to not show "Extended Entry," which I never use. But that wasn't enough. So I changed the '10' and '20' numbers of rows to 30 each. To increase the width I deleted the 'class="width500"' attribute (I didn't want to try to find out if there is a class600 or class700) and put a value of 120 in between the empty quotes of the cols attribute.

Now that I look at the code a little less impatiently, your mileage may vary if you use a non-Mozilla browser.

In edit_entry.tmpl the section you want is close to the end of the file and looks like this:

<td valign="top"><font class="title"><TMPL_IF NAME=TYPE_CUSTOM><MT_TRANS phrase="Module Body"><TMPL_ELSE><MT_TRANS phrase="Template Body"></TMPL_IF><br><textarea<TMPL_IF NAME=AGENT_MOZILLA> cols=""</TMPL_IF> class="width500" name="text" rows="20" wrap="virtual"><TMPL_VAR NAME=TEXT></textarea></td>

Upload those files whence they came and you should be wallowing in lavish text boxes the next time one of the relevant pages loads.

You may have noticed that some things on the site look pretty crappy right now. I'm in the process of upgrading to Movable Type 3.33, from the ages-old 2.61, to try to cut down on the 10-20 minutes a day I've been spending trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the deluge of spam comments. The upgrade itself went surprisingly smoothly, but I failed to realize that MT would callously overwrite my CSS file without warning me. So I've gotten it back to the point where everything's at least legible, and everything should be pretty much back the way it was by tonight when I can retrieve a backup copy of the file. Until then I'll be playing with the new tools I have to combat the spammers.

Update: back to normal now, as long as you don't go exploring in the archives too much, as I know you're dying to do. But now that I'm 'back in the game' of caring about how this site looks, more changes may be afoot.

The site was down for several days until this afternoon, as you may have noticed. As near as I can figure this was triggered by an overdue bill, which I paid on the 15th of the last month. I had gotten a warning email that day before I paid it that my account could be shut down in 48 hours if I didn't pay, but I never got another one that my web sites had actually been shut down. I didn't discover the shutdown until Monday, and the sites were brought back up after three emails to my hosting company, the first two of which went unanswered.

While the hosting company certainly should have been more communicative and responsive (and this may be the excuse I need to move over to Dreamhost soon), it also would not have lasted nearly as long without my own many-faceted neglect of the site. And even though there's no commerce going on here, and no one was complaining that it was down, I have somehow come to believe that it is important to maintain my online presence. So I apologize, and will make sure nothing this severe happens again.

So I've gone and redesigned the entire site. The effort to do so started about a year ago, with off-and-on efforts since then. The motivation was largely aesthetic and to some degree functional. The new site also reflects a lot of my learning over the past year or more about web standards and css (cascading style sheets).

Some of my primary influences in the new design were Daring Fireball, kottke.org, and Subtraction. I've tried to achieve a modest level of originality while taking a lot of ideas from other sites or standard approaches.

And now, remarks on details of the new design that will probably be of little interest to non-geeks:

• I took the idea of entry dates on the left from the default Tumblr template.


• I've finally done away with categories in favor of tags--the categories have been all but useless for quite a long time.


• In redoing the sidebar I tried to choose elements that would be, well, of use to readers. "Below the Fold" are the entries that have most recently fallen off the front page, compensating for the lack of pagination of the index.


• The element I agonized over the most was the Calendar. Few popular blogs have this, because they tend to post more than once a day. For me it's always been a quick way to see how frequent my posting has been, but even that is lacking at the beginning of a month, and the utility is questionable to readers. I doubt anyone ever clicks on the dates to see the entry from that date. So if I can manage to post consistently for a while perhaps I'll remove it.


• The master archive index turned out to be the biggest hassle. I really wanted good usability for this page. I liked Subtraction's approach of showing individual entry titles for the last few months, and then a less granular view of all the preceding months in the blog's history. The difficulty of this gave me a new appreciation for how much effort these guys have put into their sites. The key plugin turned out to be MT-SomeDays, but the documentation is pretty awful--the only example code it contains is a recreation of the calendar, which is already included in Movable Type. By the way, you'll notice on the Subtraction page that after the granular view of the most recent few months, those months are repeated in the overview with all the less recent months. It seems this is impossible to get around with what's currently available, so I separated the two elements more to make it less obvious.


• The static non-blog elements of the site, such as the music pages, "reading room", and access to the whole rare word dictionary, are not linked from the home page for now, and still have the old look. These haven't been updated in a long time, and get very few visits, even compared to the blog. At some point I may try to bring them back into the fold.


• Some other plugins that helped me: Amputator, which properly encodes ampersands for XHTML validation, Compare, which enables some conditional logic in templates based on comparisons, and Archive Date Header, which also helped with the archive index.

That ought to do it. Please do not hesitate to let me know if you see any problems or have any feedback on the design. I've given it a once-over in IE 7 and Safari as well as my home turf of Firefox, but nothing exhaustive. You can see the old index and the old archives page for comparison. Hope you like it.

There was an issue until today with comments; they were being caught by the spam filter after I tried out increasing the "aggressiveness" from 0 to +2 (on a scale of -10 to +10). I then failed to check for false-positives, until today after a blizzard of 100 or so spam comments that the filter still failed to stop. I should have realized that most real comments, with no links in them, get only a +1 score. I believe all the held up comments have now been published. I was beginning to wonder about the deafening silence on the redesign. Sorry about that!

JV has suggested that after posting a comment one should be redirected to the main page. I think for some situations this might be confusing, because you may not have come from the main page. It may also require writing a plugin or changing the source code of Movable Type. But given that JV is my best customer and probably responsible for over 50% of the comments that have ever been made here, I will definitely give it my all.