I’m open, then, to friendly reader suggestions as to what is motivating my subconscious to inflict the righteous wrath of Roger Waters upon the hapless (or not so hapless, depending on individual) ranks of BP representatives gamely navigating their employer through the disaster currently mushrooming in the gulf.

4 weeks ago, when it became obvious to even the most optimistic that this was going to be a 24/7 news item for the foreseeable future, I resigned myself to the certainty that a fatigue of some sort would set in eventually.

I just wasn’t prepared for it to take the form of “Dogs”.

Three days ago, as I’m watching the latest update on the containment cap that does/doesn’t contain the expected/pathetically inadequate quantity of raw crude oozing up from the sea floor, the attractive but clearly sleep-deprived young lady appearing on my TV delivering BP’s latest round of assurances that all is as well as can be expected, an odd thing happens.  Specifically, her voice dims…I see her lips moving on the tube, but nothing comes out of the speaker.  Instead, I hear the following in my inner ear, the one we all have, that only we can hear:

“You have to be trusted/By the people that you lie to.”

Where the heck did that come from?  But it continues, to my amazement.  A few seconds later:

“And in the end you’ll pack up, fly down south/hide your head in the sand.”

At this point, the TV goes off…and Roger’s bitter sardonics vanish along with it.  Clearly time for me to head to bed.  Which I do.

Wrathful Waters is not so easily assuaged, however.  The next day, the next briefing, this time a even-more-exhausted-looking middle aged man steps up to the podium and….cue the Floyd.

“Deaf, dumb and blind/You just keep on pretending”

etc., etc., so forth, followed shortly by:

“Who was told what to do by the man/Who was broken by trained personnel”

Clearly, my inner Roger is annoyed at being cut off yesterday and is venting on the luckless schmuck.  Poor git.

However special attention is reserved for Tony Hayward, El Jefe Absoluto of BP.  Seemingly everywhere attempting damage control.  But Roger is watching, Tony!  You appear in front of me today and…

“And when you lose control
You’ll reap the harvest you have sown.
And as the fear grows
The bad blood slows and turns to stone.”

Roger, enough already!  Find some other vehicle to deliver your righteous wrath.

So now I’m getting a bit apprehensive about turning the TV on.  For one thing, this doesn’t strike me as a sane, measured reaction to weeks of slowly building anger and frustration at the greed, incompetence and stupidity responsible for this whole debacle and its aftermath.  A sensible person might be a bit worried at this.  But perhaps that’s just me.

A more pressing problem is that we’re quickly running out of relevant “Dogs” lyrics.  Although I will confess surprise that “You gotta be crazy” hasn’t popped up yet.  At this rate, though, we’re soon going to be reduced to the middle section of the song, the part with nothing in it but Richard Wright’s keyboard beds and random “Here, Rover!” dog whistling.

But honestly, my biggest worry is that this is just the beginning…that whatever dark urge lurking in my hippocampus driving this whole piece of surrealistic karaoke is just biding its time, waiting to expand virus-like to the other players in this drama.  Some this might make sense for…the angry and baffled residents of the gulf coast would seem a lead-pipe cinch for

“I’ve got to admit I’m a little bit confused./Sometimes it seems to me as if I’m just being used.”

Word up, folks.

But other actors just frighten me.  The government, for example…what maps to them?  Can even the mighty lyrical talents of Waters contextually grapple with that great grey force majeure? I fear not…and that I’ll end up with one of the following:

-  John Cage’s 4’33, in its entirety.

-  anything written by Ke$ha (the lyric definition of sound and fury, signifying nothing.)

rattling around between my eardrums as Sartre-ian farce every time one of the (many) government representatives holds court.  At which point I will likely throw myself into the gulf to end the madness.

Thanks for nothing, you schlemiels at BP/Transocean and many,many others.  It wasn’t enough to despoil a major regional ecosystem and its attendant economic and social components…you had to throw my sanity on your vain bonfire along with it.  Have a good drown, all of you.

• Chicago’s Grant Park + beautiful late May afternoon = no better place on earth to be.   Argue with me all you want, but bring some heavy ammo for your position because my bar is raised way high.
• The Matisse special exhibit is on display through June 20th.  No additional ticket required beyond regular admission.  If you are at all a creative type, go see it, even if you know nothing at all about visual art.  Focusing on four years within an astonishing 60-year artistic career filled with textbook-subject achievements, the exhibit lovingly and meticulously details curiosity , ambition and artistic drive propelling a complete re-invention of an already-accomplished painter’s technique and approach.  The curation is spot-on; every piece directly contributes to the study in contrasts, often with dramatic effect, the commentary understated but educational and appropriate.   If you have ever tried to make something, with the accompanying sudden panic-stricken/demoralizing realization you had no idea how to express what you wanted to express and needed to discover the creative toolbox to do so, this exhibit is both object lesson and cause for hope, even if most of us never end up creating anything like The Moroccans.  Highly recommended; carpe the diem, folks, and get down to see it.
• Another big win: the (relatively) new Modern Wing of the Art Institute.  I’ve read and heard all the accolades for it; last weekend was my first opportunity to form my own judgement.  Oh my goodness, did they hit it out of the park, this one.  A gorgeous space that manages to be both minimalist and luxuriant, filled with good light for viewing and space for reflection without being stampeded into the artwork.   And the pieces themselves are a revelation; freed of being shoehorned in amongst the better-known Impressionist and 19th century American galleries, you get to experience a modest-sized but impeccably tasteful collection of pieces in their own space, in proper chronology, many of which I’d never seen before downtown (I had no idea the permanent collection included any Mondrian, for example)  Even the deliberately difficult stuff…the Dadists and full-on Surrealists are represented by good examplars that manage to demonstrate what all the fuss was about.  My only regret was not having another 2 hours or so to wander the galleries and reflect.  Genius work and another gold star for Chicago’s museums.
• Amidst all the hosannahs, one quibble: the Chagall America Windows have been off display for “restoration” for, what, about two decades now?  What’s the deal…the Windex not cleaning up neatly?  And no one has any idea when they will come back.  Free Chagall!  Or at least give us a timeline.

If that means nothing to you or if you’re asking “WTF”, no worries, just move along.  It’s a business-somewhat techno-geeky thing.

(On second thought, don’t just move along.  Instead, get a copy of this and read the namesake essay.   If you are at all involved with project management, re-read it.  And if you happen to be managing software development projects, re-read it a second time still.  Then think about exactly what he’s saying before you put your next project timeline together…because there still is no silver bullet.  And don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.)

If that does mean something to you…was your first thought “Jeez, I didn’t think he was alive anymore, let alone still writing”, just like me?

Now, if Knuth would finally finish chapters 7 and 8…

Best holiday wishes from all of us to our family and friends!

The says-what-it-is/is-what-is-says Four Songs offers features teasers from an upcoming album, the intriguingly-titled There’s No Denying Josephine.  If the sample is representative of the larger whole then speed the day, gentlemen; the band’s latest work represents Exhibit #1 in the virtue of long-term collaborative musical relationships, a strong immediately-identifiable core sound augmented by touches of sonic and lyric ambition, combining to make their own space in the vast tracts of Americana-style music.  Nicely done, guys.  And for my readership…all available on iTunes for a most reasonable price.  Put your money where your mouth is regarding home-grown labor-of-love music, people, and drop them some coin!

Much like it’s holiday-card-exchanging relatives the blues, the instantly-empowering “let’s write a song NOW” framework provided by Americana to its devotee bands can turn trap in a karmic instant.  What sounds rootsy and authentic on album #1 of a band’s catalog turns to cliche quickly by album #3.  The challenge to bands wanting staying power in this space is to find someway to make everyone’s Americana their own Americana, something with their unique musical fingerprint while not becoming some oddball pastiche of incompatible styles.  Their are many bands, great and humble, that have done one Americana album worth a listen; that list drops dramatically when asked for a second, or third, or so on.   Whether a conscious decision or not,  the integration of style and sound ranging beyond the No Depression back-yard picket fence is the single most impressive accomplishment on 4 Songs, to the band’s lasting credit.

This push into Further Musical Places is immediately evident in the Beatle-esque keyboards and chiming/droning guitar figures opening “Western Town” and continuing into Phil Favorite’s ethereal voice backed by classic guitar/piano with the most ghostly of harmony tracked alongside,  Mark Dybvig’s muscular guitar leads popping through every so often, the whole assemblage floats hazily as it relays the narrative of a lights are on but everyone’s been shipped out hamlet on the edge of quiet desperation (“kissing cousins” will not mean quite the same thing to me as it did before.)  A bigger, more dispassionate canvas than the familiar self-focused narratives trod in the past, it’s a great opening gambit for the disk, familiar yet ambitious at the same time.

Moving right along, the band heads back into classic chord-driven Byrd-land on “Heaven”.  Dybvig takes a turn on vocals here and the contrast between his throaty leads and Favorite’s thinner, purer vocal instrument is dramatic, providing a complete stylistic contrast and one which probably works great in the band’s live sets.  Longtime collaborator Jeff Helgeson adds solo trumpet; nice to hear him still in harness with the group.

Next up is “Helping Hands”, the most “classic” Lonesome’s sounding of the four tracks, musical ground they’ve been covering since Circling the Sun, but again showing a bit of push out of comfortable quartet-sound, evidenced best by Garth Hudson-esque organ fills.  As should be apparent by now, the tasteful (and that’s the only word I can think of) use of keyboards throughout the disc is a revelation; capable guest fills by Chris Hubbard and Dustin Dybvig broaden the underlying ideas just beautifully. (And, yes, Dustin is Mark’s son…that, friends, is called strategic use of your network.)

“Throw Away” closes the set, a dreamy stumble-about filled with pedal steel and more organ, shoved around periodically by hiccups of rumbling guitar and bass, featuring one of Favorite’s better lyric images (“Throw the baby out, keep the bath water/You’re going to need to wash the dirt”)  closing with a long, energetic lead by Dybvig.

You’ve heard it all before…and yet you haven’t, at least not quite the way The Lonesomes are doing it here, and that’s tres cool.  Mark Zehr and Robyn Hercey remain the assertive but reliable rhythmic pulse they’ve provided the band for years.  The dual-guitar attack is as solid as ever, chiming and energetic.  They all Know What They Know and do it well, and could be doing it Lonesome-style for the next 20 years if they wanted to.  The little touches, the organ, the various keyboards, the sneeze-and-you-miss-em tastes of non-genre harmonic progressions and two-bar meter breaks scattered hither-and-yon spice the stew and keep it fresh; the best compliment that can be paid them is that, after a while, you start wondering what you’re going to hear and when, almost like a “Where’s Waldo” picture drawn by Uncle Tupelo.  And that’s a compliment; most bands in this place never realize that all this music is opportunistically assembled, cobbled together by its original practitioners from styles, sounds and subjects they happened to have lying around the house.  It’s a style that begs for personal adaption and the Lonesomes have gigged, together and separately, long enough now to know this, as a result  trying their best to put their own coat of paint on the assemblage.

Quibbles are minor.  The generally excellent mixing shows some occasional leveling inconsistencies, all with the supporting instruments.  I expect this to be cleaned in the final product and, truthfully, if that’s the only criticism I can offer, I’m picking at nits and know it.   I do continue awaiting the single in which Zehr and Hercey get to show the world their considerable chops (and, having heard both play live for years, trust me, the chops are real and present) beyond that of rock-solid bass-and-drums; c’mon guys, even Ringo got a riffy fill once or twice!

But those are spit in the ocean.  I like this a lot, will probably like it a lot more later this year when the buffet is fully stocked, and there’s no denying that.

I’ve done enough Rails programming the past 4 years to know I still really like it, as well as to be concerned by the apparent “all things to all frameworks” philosophy starting to manifest itself in version 3.0.  It’s good-hearted to try and support any and every Ruby-based persistence/routing/templating library under the sun.  Problem is, when you’re everything what exactly are you that makes you you?   I await version 3.0 with great interest; David, Yehuda and the other navigators have a big moment coming up and I hope they’ve made the right call, because Rails is/has been the best thing for web development I’ve ever worked with.  A thousand prayers it stays that way.

Perhaps as a hedge against possible Rails heartbreak, I’m doing more work than expected with Ruby the language.  Which is, yes, doing things backward, having learned the super-duper-sexy framework before the merely-super-sexy language it was written in.  Mea culpa, particularly having discovered meta-programming these past few months; a never ending marvel of bitwise sophistry (code writing code writing code!)   Someday, someone will end up creating the Singularity using a Ruby script.  Hopefully it will not be me, by accident or incompetence.

Another super-duper-sexy development gaining traction recently: NoSQL, alternately read as “ACID isn’t everything anymore”, certainly not when it might slow your social networking site down.  I’m happy that a whole new generation of techno-entrepreneurs can get their pages served up in pico- rather than micro-seconds now.  The interest for me lies, again, rather more in the design consequences posed by a willful about-face from the all-dominant relational data storage world we’ve been working in for the last several decades.  There was a reason the industry moved away from VTAM and the like, even if few people can identify it anymore.  Have MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra and the like figured out what it was and solved it?  Or is this just the proverbial swing of the pendulum and anything that isn’t the status quo going to be in good odor, warts and all?  Of more immediate interest are how these document-centric database technologies are going to be able to peacefully co-exist with their relational brethren during whatever transition period may come.

In software development, for better or worse, who you are is as much a function of what you work with as anything else might be.  Below I discuss two major toolsets I expect to be working with in 2010 as part of my professional employment; for brevity’s sake I’ll defer discussion of my after-hours preference to a later post.  Read on and form your own opinions as to my character.

(Nothing following should be construed as my employer’s opinion on technology, but rather mine alone.  This is hopefully obvious, but best I not assume anything.)

My 15 year companionship with Java continues, but the vigor left the relationship long ago as its metamorphosis from “The Language That Would Change Everything” to “The COBOL of the 21st Century” proceeds unhindered.  It does a variety of jobs, everyone knows it, enterprises large and small run themselves on it, there’s an API to accomplish pretty much everything short of raising the dead (and there’s probably an in-process JSR being designed to handle that case.)  You won’t go wrong with Java and no one is getting fired for knowing it, a truth which keeps many of us satisfactorily employed.  But it’s an empty pairing these days, with most of the late stage JSR’s being either driven by the biggest-of-big-enterprise edge cases, exotic refinements to existing capacity and the very occasional knee-jerk reaction to some darling feature of another language.  It’s a sad endgame to what was an exciting platform once upon a time.  With IBM and Oracle the two large pachyderms in the room determining most of the real priorities this isn’t going to change anytime soon.  I keep at it and keep working, since my expertise in it keeps me in employ.  But I have no expectations for satisfaction beyond that.  As long as it keeps the trains running on time and the PT result forms flowing it’s doing its job and I can’t ask any more of it.  Which is a shame.

The Oracle ecosystem is somewhat more stimulating, simply because it’s relatively new to me.  My employer has gone all-in on Oracle; we collectively are learning quite a bit about many tools in a short amount of time.  Some of these are well-known and well-regarded (the all-conquering Oracle database technology), some well-known and somewhat of a pain (eBS, which does a great job of running a business as long as your business runs The eBS Way), some obscure (most of their security stack), a bevy of rebranded/merged/repurposed middleware (Fusion), plus the legacy Oracle technology used to run everything else, zombie-fied worse than Java but untouchable until the Fusion stack matures and is better integrated (OAS).  Keeping track of the acronyms alone is a full-time job, let alone actually wrangling the bits.  Way too early to have set opinions on this, but it is clear we will have the same struggles adapting the The Oracle Way to the The College Requirements that every other business does when it hops on the Enterprise Software horse.  We’ll end up with either a model ERP implementation or Frankenstein’s monster on application servers and I’m not laying odds as to either at present.

For the rest of the readership wondering why the fuss, it’s probably better to not inquire too closely.  Just accept this was an item of importance rivaling that of global warming and banking reform to certain highly-motivated individuals.  What may be of interest to you includes:

• The closest thing you will find to a biography of me.
• A brief rundown of what can be found here (or, more interestingly, what I hope to put up and you to find in the future.)
• For the two techno-nerd readers (you know who you are, gentlemen) an overview of the various tools I use to prepare the site.

Highly-observant readers will notice some not-so-subtle changes to other parts of the site.  Finding these is left as an exercise to you.  Enjoy and you’re welcome.

Hopefully this will occupy you all long enough for me to prepare some actual insightful content.  Which I shall do my best to provide sometime before 2011. Thanks for your patience during a nearly 2-year absence; your faith in my eventual return to authorship is simultaneously inspiring and baffling.   I’ll labor to reward your repeated visits.

Click here to view the embedded video.