Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:

Session 3: New Structures

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Session 2: New “Texts”

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Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.

Dan Greenstein, Vice Provost, University of California
“New Directions, Different Possibilities”

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I’m in Oakland for the day today, at a thoroughly exciting meeting: “New Structures, New Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press as Partners in the Enterprise of Scholarly Publishing.” I’ll hope to post my notes either during the day today or in the coming days, as I process what’s said.

Last night, I have to say, was a heck of a night of television — the second-to-last episode of The Sopranos (EVER, as the trailer for next’s week’s episode informed us, in case we hadn’t been paying attention), followed by the second-to-last episode of the first season of The Tudors. The two episodes make for an interesting pairing; one could imagine Melfi’s dawning awareness of the manipulative uses of talk therapy made by the sociopath just as easily coming from Thomas More, with the substitution of piety for psychoanalysis.

R. and I just started watching The Tudors this last week, however, and went on a fairly minor binge, watching the re-airings of season one’s first eight episodes over the course of the week, leading up to last night’s episode nine. There are some fairly significant tinkerings with the history involved in the series, not least some key deaths that are shifted around for narrative effect. Henry Fitzroy, for instance, Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, died when he was 17, but the series kills him off as a toddler. I get the dramatic impact there: just at the point at which Henry is rolling out his “God is punishing me for having married my brother’s wife” argument, his one acknowledged son dies, a harbinger of the plague that follows. But others of the changes are less easily understood. The series’s Margaret Tudor, for instance, dies of consumption in 1533ish (after having killed her first husband, the king of Portugal, and remarried Charles Brandon, the first duke of Somerset) — when, in fact, it was Mary Tudor who married Somerset and died in 1533; Margaret Tudor married James IV of Scotland and bore a line of Stuarts, living until 1541. (So far as I know, none of the Tudors killed the king of Portugal, though I could well be wrong, and wouldn’t be a bit surprised.) Why substitute Margaret for Mary here? Did the producers just like the name better?

Such changes to the historical narrative, however, are relatively superficial; the series strikes me as a compelling reimagining of the period, if through a somewhat presentist lens. That, The Tudors shares less with The Sopranos than with Deadwood, with which series I’d also be willing to swear The Tudors also shares the producers of its opening titles, as well as the composers of its title music, though I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of that hunch.

The transition to WordPress has thus far gone fairly well, and what you see is roughly the site you’ll see once I’m done. However, I’ve got one significant problem that’s going to require me to go offline briefly this morning, I think: I originally installed WP via a one-click install in my testing subdomain (new.plannedobsolescence.net), and once I was ready to go, changed the installation’s options to reflect the proper URL and moved all the files to the top-level domain (plannedobsolescence.net). For whatever reason, though, WP in this new location seems not to think that I’m the owner of the files. The permissions are set identically to the permissions in the “new” subdomain, but I keep getting funky “if this file were writable, you could edit it” messages from WP, which suggests that something’s wrong. I’m about to attempt a backup and reinstall, so if things go away briefly… well, hopefully they’ll be back.

mod_rewrite is determined to kill me. Here’s what I managed to figure out: I can use mod_rewrite to rewrite my URLs from

http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/index.php?/weblog/post_name

to

http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/post_name.

And I can, theoretically, use another set of rewrite rules to replace the underscores with hyphens. And then at least many of my inbound links should transfer to the new WordPress permalink scheme.

But!

I couldn’t make it work to save my life. It has taken me much of the day yesterday, and most of the day today, with lots of back and forth with someone on my hosting provider’s forums, to get part one of the rewriting — eliminating the “index.php?/weblog/” chunk — to work. I’m not getting much of anywhere with the rewriting of underscores to hyphens.

One begins to wonder how much trouble is really worth it.

And because I didn’t feel like working today: I managed to find a way to export my content from ExpressionEngine and import it into WordPress. And I’ve found a theme I rather like, and futzed with it until I like it even better. And I’ve gotten just about everything working the way I want.

Except for my permalinks, which are completely hosed. Now to attempt to teach myself mod_rewrite, to see if this is salvageable, or if I’m going to have to manually fix all my internal links and use a general 404 page for everyone coming in from the outside…

Hey! Regardless of what my permalinks seem to tell you, that last entry was entry number 1000 here at Planned Obsolescence. It took me a little less than five years to get here, but it’s a nice week for the milestone, given my hopes for returning to serious blogging…

For the last year or so, I’ve been an extended faculty member of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Information Systems and Technology, though that affiliation has been mostly theoretical to this point. Today, however, I’m participating in a one-day retreat aimed at brainstorming the founding of a new institute of social entrepreneurship and design.

The opening panel, which just concluded, brought together John Seely Brown, Don Norman, and CGU’s Tom Horan to discuss the purposes of such an institute and how it might create innovative modes of scholarship and learning. JSB and Norman’s presentations both focused on the parts of design that often get overlooked, what Norman referred to as the “invisible layer”: the design not of technologies, but of institutions. I’m very happy to note that JSB pointed to MediaCommons as an example of a project that is focused on such institutional change, in our desire to redefine structures of authority in reinventing peer review.

More from the day as it progresses…