Brandymore Castle

I was prompted by something Andrew Shafer of Reductive Labs said (on the FooCampers list, so I won't reproduce it here, since it was forwarded to me) about the quality of communication among software developers. He was talking about how communicating the overall design and intentions of the project is vital, so the developers are not left guessing about how the application will be used and what its architects think it should do. What is important is the existence of a conversation between the leaders of a project and the developers writing the code. This hits very close to home, because our farmfoody.or g project is essentially there to improve the flow of information between producers and consumers of food, to enable a conversation . It occurred to me the solution is to throw away the flash cards and bulleted design specifications and just facilitate the conversation. Why not use social networking tools for developers to communicate? (You can get a sense of another approach from ...

I was thinking about the difference between novel writing and haiku poetry. In a novel, detail is included, in a haiku, detail is omitted, except for those exquisite details that distill from the experience to represent it. The advice to writers is to write what you know. A novel or haiku starts with a preexisting experience, something from the life of the writer or from an intense experience ("haiku moment," which is distinct from just having an idea or taking one from memory), which is like a photograph. The haiku may be more photographic than the novel, since the novel requires the author generate much more of the picture. In haiku, the reader supplies half of the picture. This is like painting compared to photography, where each begins with the scene, but the camera captures the scene and the painter generates the scene. Each process may be equivalent, since the photographer manipulates the scene through the camera in much the same way the painter manipulates the scene n...

I am trying out MuseScore (http://musescore.org), an open source, free software for music composition and notation printing. It is the most robust and full featured of the open source music editors. It has a few bugs and some way to go before its features threaten the commercial competition, but it looks promising. I like the way it displays the score as a big page you can move around by dragging. I am still using an older version of Cakewalk, and it drives me crazy scrolling horizontally to read a song lyric. With MuseScore I can read music as if it were printed on a sheet of paper without scrolling. In Cakewalk, I get lost scrolling through the score, but in MuseScore I can immediately see where I am. Using Cakewalk's linear display it is difficult to compare measure to measure in a song. If I want to compare the melody in the fourth measure of the second verse to the melody in the fourth measure of the first verse, I must furiously scroll back and forth. Or print the score out ...

I've discovered local food and connecting producers to consumers came up at the WhereCamp earlier this year. I thought with the growing interest in theorizing about local food and connecting eaters to the people who grow their food, I'd gather up some links here. You can download a PDF filled with some of my early theorizing (I'm revising my "manifesto" but have not finished, for release at next year's season). It is available as a PDF Farm Foody: A Social Network Connecting Independent Farms to People presenting my rationale for how the social network benefits the family farm and society. My vision of "leveraging the network" as a way of helping small farms compete in a big agriculture economy falls not far from the idea of "How do we create an incentive system stronger than the federal incentive system?" asked by the WhereCampers. You can read about their ideas in a wiki summarizing the discussion. Food Talk at Wherecamp 2008 ...