Ceryle Blog

George Carlin, can you hear me??

Yeah, I'm yelling, even if I'm not typing in ALL CAPS.

I'd originally planned to use this blog for only technical stuff, but I thought about it again lately and began wondering why I felt the need to be so restrictive. I think it was the fear of boring people. But given that on reading a lot of blogs this doesn't seem to have been a barrier for anyone else, why should I be the one to stifle myself?

Okay. So I'm reading this article on George Carlin in the New York Times by Warren St. John, Cancer? Suicide? Politics? That's Hilarious!, and I come upon this:

[...] For all his talk of disengagement, however, Mr. Carlin is by all accounts an obsessive worker. He splits his time between California and Las Vegas, and takes limousines over planes whenever possible, Mr. Hamza said, because he finds it easier to work on his laptop in a car. Mr. Carlin is constantly scribbling notions down in a notebook or recording them on a small voice recorder, and he spends most of his time typing, organizing and reorganizing his ideas in a library of 2,300 files he keeps on his computer – raw material he may someday forge into actual jokes, monologues or material for his books. And as soon as he has recorded a new HBO routine, he begins cycling in fresh material, so that over the course of two years, his entire routine is replaced, and he's ready to record another.

"It's like a sock," Mr. Carlin said. "I darn the sock so much that none of the original material is left. It's the same sock – it's my show – but the old material is gone."

"I have no hobbies and I have no leisure activities," Mr. Carlin added. "My greatest joy is working at the computer with my ideas."

and I'm immediately trying to figure out how to contact him. I mean, 2,300 files! In need of organization! George is my ideal power user:  literate, intelligent, full of ideas, tech-savvy, obsessive-compulsive, and with a lot of material to be organized (and already in files!). He even sounds a bit like me, work habit-wise. So what do I do, I locate his booking agency, Richard De La Font Agency, Inc. (who admittedly are in Oklahoma and don't claim to be his exclusive agent) and spend what must have been a half hour trying to figure out how I might get a message to him. I probably ended up using more than half of the seven words you can't say on television. They have this web page that is all about how you can contact him, which in reality is designed to waste your time in telling you in a whole lot of different ways that except for professional bookings inquiries, they won't help you. Talk to the hand. Fine, so why waste my time with that damned web page? So my option is now what? Buying a book of celebrity mailing addresses?

I completely understand privacy issues. I recently tried to contact Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by writing to her publisher Bloomsbury in London. She lives in Cambridge, about an hour away from where I live. I tried to explain that I had developed a research tool designed to assist writers, that I wasn't selling anything, that I didn't want her email address and only wanted them to forward a message on to her, well, they would't do that, wouldn't help me in any way. I would love to understand how someone puts together an 800 page book like hers, but I certainly wasn't asking for an interview, I was offering up this damned tool I'd spent three years building.

The barrier erected by agents and publishers is understandable. If I were famous I wouldn't want fans to have my email address, much less my phone number or home address. I get enough junk as it is — on a bad day more than 200 spams. But if someone were to approach me saying that they'd spent several years developing a tool to help me do my job and they were willing to give it to me free, I'd at least take a look. It's not like I was asking them to autograph a glossy 8 by 10.

So, Mr. Carlin, if you happen to read this, I'm not selling anything. I'm giving this thing away. It's a tool that could help you organize those 2300 files by subject, or in whatever way you like. You can visualize the categories, use a Google-like full text search engine to locate stuff, and even compose sequences of text components into a whole. I don't know that you'd use that latter feature, but Ceryle was designed to organize textual material. I wouldn't even require that you go through the Writer's Survey. So if you contact me I promise not to tell anyone (if you want privacy), and you get free support! What can you get for free these days?! Other than a disease, not much.

Perhaps it wasn't such a good metaphor.

I wanna say "blast off!" or something equally silly, but that seems a bit inappropriate. It's not like I've actually left the ground and am now flying upwards at high speed with my 1950's style rocket ship full of happy, bubble-headed users. It's more like I've cracked the champagne bottle over the prow, the boat didn't sink, and the sails are gradually filling with air... we're underway. And there are a few people on board. Thanks!

Alright, enough with the metaphors. I've so far had a reasonable number of people submit a copy of the Writer's Survey and at least a few people have demonstrably downloaded and tried Ceryle out, as evidenced by them running into a bug or two. This is alpha software, it says that right on the cardboard box. I think the biggest bug right now is the lack of documentation, as amongst the things I've heard so far is that some people simply can't figure out what the hell the thing is for. Fair enough. I hope to write an Overview document this week (complete with screen shots) that will be part of a tutorial going through some of Ceryle's features. We'll build an XHTML version of The Hound of the Baskervilles from its component chapters. Maybe even using wiki text.

One thing that has been great is that I have received some very useful feedback from some very generous folks. The first release was alpha 7, the second alpha 8. I'd hoped to release a third version prior to Friday, but decided to spend the weekend trying to finish up some of the issues mentioned in the feedback, particularly the lack of documentation.

The next version (alpha 9) has a feature that allows new Help documents (tutorials, etc.) to be loaded directly from the Web by typing a URL into the location bar. The document is then downloaded into a Document View and you'll be asked if you want to store it in Ceryle's database. Then you can just open it from the Help dialog's Topics... button. The idea is to make it easy to distribute new versions and updates to Ceryle's documentation. I'm now trying to finish up support for the bibliographic reference features.

There's a backlog now of people who've filled out the survey but haven't received any notification from me. If you're one of them, sorry. I'm hoping to finish up the changes for alpha 9 by Tuesday afternoon, then I'll send out a notification of the update, plus a hello message to the newcomers.

In addition to the Ceryle announcement mailing list (which is just my mailing list or sending announcements out), I'm also going to be setting up a mailing list that will allow subscribers to post messages. I haven't yet worked out any web-based archives for those messages, but at least there'll be a place to have community-wide discussions.

For now, back to fixing more bugs and writing more documentation...