Peace of Mind

it's ready. checksum, and that frees me up for other things. Finished, for now, like art abandoned, except I get to come back to it in the future. I even have a PAD file!*

I get into things. As much as we like to multi-task these days, really, you can only do one thing at once, so why not be there, 100%? The deeper in, the better for everyone, if you share. So even when I'm not *in* the code, I'm in the code. Thinking how it will interact with *you*, out there somewhere. I crossed that line, you see, decided it would be more than just for me. Release is a good word, I need to do it with more art.

Software can be art!!!

Note Three exclamation marks. Paragraphs can probably be art, too. Though my flak-bag smells of <p> tags, what can I say? Think about it. The need to declare a "Paragraph" is ridiculous. Any construct we create can be a boundary between this, and the next thing. It can be two human taps on the <enter> key, like twice the space between things I wanted to keep inside the previous section and this. A <div> is a whole new block, for example, and I can style it as I like, with CSS. Why this uncertain <p>, that has its own agenda, completely outside my creative freedom? Bin it, I did. Though, I'd not recommend it, you do what you like, but that's as close as an explanation as you'll get. In future, I just refer folk here. Ahhh.. D&D!

And then it hits me, all-of-a-sudden-like. They *could* be useful, if redefined. And also stopped adding a silly space all of their own. If they gave an individual paragraph the simple power to "be", and have its own name and stuff that I could #link to, which of course they already do, except with this space-thingie. I'd like the renderer, browser, to activate named paragraphs, too, so you could click on them, and go back to where you were, like my references do, without having to make links, as such, but that's not what I'm blogging about today.

it's like Capital Letters, took me a couple of decades to get to grips with those. And I'm thankful daily that my editor allows me to set a keyboard shortcut for "Capitalize". They *can* be useful, sometimes. I get that now. But no amount of force was going to get me to adopt them until I was good and ready! I do things differently, I know. it's not on purpose, it just is. In more than one of the things I do, it has proven supremely useful. Maybe that's a factor.

I also like to sort my email (so *now* you get why all the asterisks instead of proper italics as blog-should-be), which is dragging-and-dropping emails into folders with Names. I know it's old-fashioned, and Search is Power, but I like to do both. (and you noticed the wee Capital Flurry there, damn! you're so tuned-in today!) Search is great for finding stuff, drag-and-drop into folder is an act of completion, of making the inbox small, without deletion; anything new comes my way in this thread is well, new, a bonus; but once this is filed, it's history, or her, done-and-dusted, as they say, in The Office.

I don't mean the TV series, I've not scene that, I mean actual offices of my youth, where they have a sort of lingo for topics like this. Finished. Began. And everything in between, in the manual so to speak, and with Confidence, Laddie! I mean leaning over countless desks, learning, amongst other things, that secretaries, as well as lots of other folks, love to file.

I'd only need to conjure up the idea of filing, and they got wet. that's because I too, love to file. There's a magic in it. We make folders now. You just drag and drop stuff over into "friends", and it pops open, and then into "so-and-so", and it's gone. See ye next time! Your email client most likely also has this capability. In Thunderbird, these virtual folders equate to actual real folders on your hard drive, which is beautiful for so many reasons.

There's power there, in the acts we do at these terminals. Most users are so not aware of the awesome power that is literally at their finger tips. Seriously, just a few years ago, this technology would have been labeled Illegal Export, and you'd be in a cell deep underground for even having been in the same room as something so awesome/wicked/crazy/etc. but there you are anyway, wielding it like a toy rattle, something that flashes when you shake it. Get a Grip! LOL Not everyone, sure. But like it or not, computers have become popular. Very Powerful Computers. Good.

By the way, I've often I've "lol"ed in an email, or chat, or wherever, and felt the need to point out (assimilated individuals are chuckling reading this) that I only ever "lol" if I actually, really no-shit did Laugh Out Loud. As if some folk don't, somehow. I don't know how I got that crazy idea into my head, it's just that some people do seem to "lol" a lot, and surely they can't actually be Laughing Out Loud at all those moments, and at that! Surely not. So I make the point, in case the other secretly, only really does "lol"-for real, too, but never thought to ask or tell anyone about it. I was coming out. Those "lol"s in quotes aren't real, of course. They are in "quotes".

So I do software differently, too. I remember back to in the Kitchen some time ago, making a space to make a sandwich in, and being concerned with how I thought file compression at the time surely left much to be desired, and wondering if I was maybe meant get into that problem, and it came to me, the exact thing I was doing, with the dishes, was exactly like file compression.

.. Image it.. I've recently shopped, and There's an assortment of kitchen hardware scattered along the surface, cups, bread-knives (which I use, generally, also), spoons (always spoons), manyplates, cups and so on, so what do I do? ..

I stack all the similar shapes, cups into cups, plates on plates, and I squeeze everything together, removing all the spaces in between things. Now I can make a sandwich, publish a blog, whatever. Whatever; there is more space now. Space was what I was after.

And often in my Kitchen, more than any other place, completely unrelated things come into focus together, and make some sense of a thing. I didn't get into compression too deeply, knowing others would, I guess, that revelation was more about writing, for me. And now we have bz2, and rar, and here I am, re-inventing a Geek-101 tool for the masses, and calling it "checksum" (the cheek!), because names can be important. And because your data is important, and so is Peace of Mind. Of all the tools in all the world, I'd like you to check out mine.

In its most basic, crudest form, yet complete enough for me, I used checksum for a year. I knew all along I had something so beautifully simple that to not share would be a crime. And so it begun; the ßeta program; and checksum's journey from a simple, very basic tool, that was so radically different to what had gone before, and yet so intuitively, stunningly simple in its M.O., into a seasoned desktop application that just does the job the way that the job was always meant to be done.

Yeah, yeah, the usual ravings of this particular crazy tech dude, perhaps, but this is beta-tester-talk (recently, from the checksum page, and arguably my favourite beta-tester - my beta-test program is basically volunteer slave-labour, of a rewarding sort)..



The great thing about RELEASE, even limited-edition beta releases, is that you get honest-to-gawd, in-yer-face feedback. Unlike lots of other kinds of art, software can be truly accessible. But is it Art? Well, that's another story. This story is about checksum's release. Which is, erm, now.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

ps. and to prove that I'm serious about the releasing-art thing, I'm going to let you in on a wee secret.. I often do that without telling anyone, hide it in places, not caring about numbers, realizing those meant to find it, probably will. Release art, that is. Can poems be art? I guess.