The Hours

O, what a wasteful web we weave…

Bardelys thought of the musk melons, growing in secret virginal splendor beneath the viny leaves. So much for the good, he thought; but I do wish I might solve the journal software problem!

This, he realized, was a long-standing flaw with him. He did love toys, especially word- and text-processing tools. How often in the past had he found a new gem of an application or path, and spent his hours in rapt attention reading manuals and help files, translating his incomplete tales into the new file formats, prettying them up, playing and learning some of the capabilities of the new software … meanwhile the tales themselves got no closer to completion.

Lester del Rey had once said: ‘Some writers are interested in computers, and some like to write.’ The point was well taken in Bardelys’ own case, he ruefully acknowledged.

Ah well, he thought, shaking his head. What can I do? ‘I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam,’ as Popeye sagely remarked.

He had almost made up his mind now. He had almost solved the riddle. Almost.

Scrivener could contain the blog posts, although he was minded to give JreePad a good try. Both JreePad and Scrivener only contained organizing trees and nodes, and Bardelys wrote all the posts in a plain-text markup, then copied it, and transformed it in another application. So he could carry on with either application. Scrivener, though, could be set to capitalize sentences automatically, and do other neat tricks; it counted the words of each post; it contained spell checking; it was OSX-native, coded in Cocoa, and was aware of Bardelys’ system services. That gave Scrivener a powerful edge. He might compose in Scrivener (or OpenOffice.org equally) for these advantages, then copy the results into JreePad, but this introduced another level of complexity to the whole thing.

The mowing was best left alone, as a spreadsheet. Each part of the fields had its own column, and each row was a new day. He would then color in the background of the relevant cells of the fields he had mown on the days he had mown them. This gave an easy-to-read visual ‘map’ of how often he mowed which fields, and how many days had passed since he had last mowed any given field, and which field was likely to be needing mowing next.

That left the farm journal. And for this, Bardelys had today had a brainstorm.

Why not make something for the journal that was like the mowing journal?

It would be like a large calendar, with notes on each day. Only this calendar would be small, but expandable. On each cell of the table of this calendar (for he dreamt of an html file for greatest standardization) he would mark a word for a topic that applied: ‘Mow’ on days he mowed, ‘plant’ when he planted, ‘reap,’ ‘rain,’ ‘health’ when there was something to report on this front, and so on. The cell would only have a list of these words, but in a browser, when Bardelys hovered his cursor over any of these words, the ‘tooltip’ or ‘alt text’ would appear, with the relevant details: just what field he had mowed, what he had planted, reaped, how much rain, what pains or aches, and so on. This would allow the table to be small enough to glance over a month or more at a screen, but details would show up if he wanted them. He could in this way see when it had rained, when he had mowed, and so on, over a large period of time, easily. Each of the topic words could be written in a different color, or have a colored background, to make them stand out even better.

It was a nice dream. But Bardelys was not the html-coder for the job. He knew images could have alt tags, and he knew that links could have alt text as well. It seemed as though he might do the same in formatting text in OpenOffice.org, but the ‘title’ did not appear under the standard browsers Bardelys used.

Could it be, he wondered, that the thing might be done as a simple Open Document format text file? It was worth checking, he thought.

And so the hours fled, and danced in, and danced out, linking graceful arms, smiling in Botticelli gowns of summer. And no more work was done that day…

(Composed on keyboard Friday, August 1, 2008)