This observation seems intuitively obvious in Europe and pearl-clutchingly shocking in America:
What’s perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.
I managed to get out and play in trad sessions for four days straight: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
Today I rest. Or rather, I pack.
There won’t be any Irish music sessions in my calendar for at least the next two weeks. There won’t be much of anything in my calendar. I’m about to be incommunicado as I travel to Amerikay on the wide Atlantic ocean.
You might have seen that video that’s been doing the rounds about how cruise ships got so big. I’m not going on a cruise. I’m going on a crossing. That video ends with:
There are over 320 cruise ships sailing around the world right now. But there’s only one ocean liner left. The Queen Mary 2.
That’s going to be my mode of transportation and my home for the next week.
Then I’ll be in New York for a weekend, followed by most of a week lying on St. Augustine beach in Florida.
All of my sparklines are about to flatline for a while: no blog posts, no links, no notes. I won’t have any internet access on board the ship.
Time for me to switch off my work email. I thought about setting up an autoresponder to let people know that I won’t be replying to their email for a few weeks. But then I thought, how is that any different from how I normally respond to email?
I’ve been immersing myself in musical activities recently.
Two weeks ago I was in the studio with Salter Cane. In three days, we managed to record eleven(!) songs! Not bad. We recorded everything live, treating the vocals as guide vocals. We’ve still got some overdubbing to do but we’re very happy with the productivity.
Being in a recording studio for days is intense. It’s an all-consuming activity that leaves you drained. And it’s not just the playing that’s exhausting—listening can be surprisingly hard work.
For those three days, I was pretty much offline.
Then the week after that, I was in Belfast all week for the trad festival. I’ve written up a report over on The Session. It was excellent! But again, it was all-consuming. Classes in the morning and sessions for the rest of the day.
I don’t post anything here in my journal for those two weeks. I didn’t read through my RSS subscriptions. I was quite offline.
I say “quite” offline, because the week after next I’m going to be really offline.
Remember when I took an ocean liner across the Atlantic four years ago? Well, to celebrate a milestone birthday for Jessica we’re going to do it again!
I’m really looking forward to it. And I feel like the recent musical immersions have been like training for the main event in the tournament of being completely cut off from the internet.
Past some point, making a system more efficient will mean making it less resilient, and, conversely, building in robustness tends to make a system less efficient (at least in the short run).
This is true of software, networks, and organisations.
When we set metrics or goals for a system or a team or an organization that ask for efficiency, let us be aware that, absent countervailing pressures, we are probably also asking for the system to become more brittle and fragile, too.
Usually an end-of-year music round-up is a list of favourite recordings released in the year. But in 2022 I wasn’t paying very much attention to new releases. I bought a few albums on Bandcamp. They were mostly of—surprise, surprise—traditional Irish music.
Still, I had a very music-filled 2022. Mostly I was playing mandolin in sessions, both here in Brighton and wherever else my travels took me.
These moments were undoubtedly highlights of the year for me.
I’m taking a nice long weekend break after dConstruct on Friday (I will of course have more to say on that—I’m collecting my thoughts still—but it was a wonderful day).
On Saturday I did absolutely nothing. It was just as well really, considering that I may have over-indulged in the pub on Friday evening after dConstruct was done. So a day of lounging around idly playing mandolin was just the ticket.
Yesterday, Sunday, I had one of those perfect leisurely days.
It began with a good bout of lazing about in the morning. Then, as lunchtime approached, Jessica and I went to a nearby pub for a Sunday Roast. In this case it was the Dover Castle. It turned out to be an excellent choice—top notch roasts!
While we were enjoying our lunch, Jessica spotted a poster on the wall for Bark In The Park, a local fun day of dog-centred activities. We were sure it had already happened earlier in Summer, but the poster said it was rescheduled to …yesterday!
So after lunch we went to the park and spent the next few hours in the sunshine, petting very good dogs and enjoying the spectacle of such catgories as “fancy dress”, “best rescue”, and “sausage catching.” We left shortly before the announcement of “best in show”—my money was on Mayhem—so I could nip home, grab my mandolin, and head to The Bugle pub for the weekly 4pm Irish music session.
After two hours of jigs’n’reels, I headed home. The weather was still lovely. The forecast was for cloudy weather, but it was unexpectedly sunny. So I fired up the outdoor grill.
We grilled: one aubergine, halved and scored; one yellow courgette, halved; one green courgette, halved; half a hispe cabbage, quartered. Once they were nicely charred outside and soft within, we ate them with a drizzle of tahini sauce, accompanied by a green salad.
By that time the sun had gone down and it was time for a nice evening spent watching the latest episode of The Rings Of Power and drinking a nice cup of tea.
Like I said, a perfect leisurely day.
I no longer have Covid. I am released from isolation.
Alas, my negative diagnosis came too late for me to make it to UX London. But that’s okay—by the third and final day of the event, everything was running smooth like buttah! Had I shown up, I would’ve just got in the way. The Clearleft crew ran the event like a well-oiled machine.
I am in the coronaclear just in time to go away for a week. My original thinking was this would be my post-UX-London break to rest up for a while, but it turns out I’ve been getting plenty of rest during UX London.
I’m heading to the west coast of Ireland for The Willie Clancy Summer School, a trad music pilgrimage.
Jessica and I last went to Willie Week in 2019. We had a great time and I distinctly remember thinking “I’m definitely coming back next year!”
Well, a global pandemic put paid to that. The event ran online for the past two years. But now that it’s back for real, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
My mandolin and I are bound for Miltown Malbay!
To be honest, I’m not all that convinced by Robin’s arguments here about overhauling the governance model at the World Wide Web Consortium (partly because the way he describes the current model sounds pretty okay to me). But I’m very interested in what he has to say in the broader philosophical sense about using values to solve problems:
A value is worth something if it’s there to help you when the rubber hits the road and starts hydroplaning. Sure, you’ll need a handful of high-level lofty values as reminders, if only because there’s always a vocal guy (it’s always a guy) who thinks it’s just outrageous to put people before profits. But mostly you want Values You Can Use.
That might be the best description I’ve come across yet for design principles: values you can use.
When we say that engineering is about trade-offs, we’re saying that engineers solve their hardest problems using values (which they call “heuristics” because everyone’s entitled to be fancy some). In implementing a system, you might need to decide between an option that provides people with the best experience, another that delivers the greatest value to the shareholders, and yet a third one that makes the control centre blinkenlights dance in the prettiest way.
I had fun coming up five trad music tracks related to the letter J.
On June 3rd, 2001, I launched thesession.org. Happy twentieth birthday to The Session!
Although actually The Session predates its domain name by a few years. It originally launched as a subdirectory here on adactio.com with the unwieldly URL /session/session.shtml
That incarnation was more like a blog. I’d post the sheetmusic for a tune every week with a little bit of commentary. That worked fine until I started to run out of tunes. That’s when I made the site dynamic. People could sign up to become members of The Session. Then they could also post tunes and add comments.
That’s the version that is two decades old today.
The last really big change to the site happened in 2012. As well as a complete redesign, I introduced lots of new functionality.
In all of those incarnations, the layout was fluid …long before responsive design swept the web. That was quite unusual twenty years ago, but I knew it was the webby thing to do.
What’s also unusual is just keeping a website going for twenty years. Keeping a community website going for twenty years is practically unheard of. I’m very proud of The Session. Although, really, I’m just the caretaker. The site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made.
I’ve more or less adopted a Wikipedia model for contributions. Some things, like tune settings, can only be edited by the person who submitted it But other things, like the track listing of a recording, or the details of a session, can be edited by any member of the site. And of course anyone can add a comment to any listing. There’s a certain amount of risk to that, but after testing it for two decades, it’s working out very nicely.
What’s really nice is when I get to meet my fellow members of The Session in meatspace. If I’m travelling somewhere and there’s a local session happening, I always get a warm welcome. I mean, presumably everyone would get a warm welcome at those sessions, but I’ve also had my fair share of free pints thanks to The Session.
I feel a great sense of responsibility with The Session. But it’s not a weight of responsibility—the way that many open source maintainers describe how their unpaid labour feels. The sense of responsibility I feel drives me. It gives me a sense of purpose.
The Session is older than any client work I’ve ever done. It’s older than any books I’ve written. It’s even older than Clearleft by a few years. Heck, it’s even older than this blog (just).
I’m 50 years old now. The Session is 20 years old. That’s quite a chunk of my life. I think it’s fair to say that it’s part of me now. Of all the things I’ve made so far in my life, The Session is the one I’m proudest of.
I’m looking forward to stewarding the site through the next twenty years.
I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.
I wrote a while back about one of my favourite photographs but this might just give it a run for its money.
It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway.
Do you have a favourite non-personal photograph?
By non-personal, I mean one that isn’t directly related to your life; photographs of family members, friends, travel (remember travel?).
Even discounting those photographs, there’s still a vast pool of candidates. There are all the amazing pictures taken by photojournalists like Lee Miller. There’s all the awe-inspiring wildlife photography out there. Then there are the kind of posters that end up on bedroom walls, like Robert Doisneau’s The Kiss.
One of my favourite photographs of all time has music as its subject matter. No, not Johnny Cash flipping the bird, although I believe this picture to be just as rock’n’roll.
This is a photograph of Séamus Ennis and Jean Ritchie. It was probably taken around 1952 or 1953 by Ritchie’s husband, George Pickow, when Jean Ritchie and Alan Lomax were in Ireland to do field recordings.
I love everything about it.
Séamus Ennis looks genuinely larger than life (which, by all accounts, he was). And just look at the length of those fingers! Meanwhile Jean Ritchie is equally indominatable, just as much as part of the story as the musician she’s there to record.
Both of them have expressions that convey how intent they are on their machines—Ennis’s uilleann pipes and Ritchie’s tape recorder. It’s positively steampunk!
What a perfect snapshot of tradition and technology meeting slap bang in the middle of the twentieth century.
Maybe that’s why I love it so much. One single photograph is filled with so much that’s dear to me—traditional Irish music meets long-term archival preservation.
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
I don’t talk that much on here about my life’s work. Contrary to appearances, my life’s work is not banging on about semantic markup, progressive enhancement, and service workers.
No, my life’s work is connected to Irish traditional music. Not as a musician, I hasten to clarify—while I derive enormous pleasure from playing tunes on my mandolin, that’s more of a release than a vocation.
My real legacy, it turns out, is being the creator and caretaker of The Session, an online community and archive dedicated to Irish traditional music. I might occassionally mention it here, but only when it’s related to performance, accessibility, or some other front-end aspect. I’ve never really talked about the history, meaning, and purpose of The Session.
Well, if you’re at all interested in that side of my life, you can now listen to me blather on about it for over an hour, thanks to the Blarney Pilgrims podcast.
I’ve been huffduffing episodes of this podcast for quite a while now. It’s really quite excellent. If you’re at all interested in Irish traditional music, the interviews with the likes of Kevin Burke, John Carty, Liz Carroll and Catherine McEvoy are hard to beat.
So imagine my surprise when they contacted me to ask me to chat and play some tunes! It really was an honour.
I was also a bit of guinea pig. Normally they’d record these kinds of intimate interviews face to face, but what with The Situation and all, my chat was the first remotely recorded episode.
I’ve been on my fair share of podcasts—most recently the Design Systems Podcast—but this one was quite different. Instead of talking about my work on the web, this focussed on what I was doing before the web came along. So if you don’t want to hear me talking about my childhood, give this a miss.
But if you’re interested in hearing my reminisce and discuss the origin and evolution of The Session, have a listen. The chat is interspersed with some badly-played tunes from me on the mandolin, but don’t let that put you off.
Myself and Jessica joining in some reels and jigs.
Fifteen years ago, I went to the Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltown Malbay:
I’m back from the west of Ireland. I was sorry to leave. I had a wonderful, music-filled time.
I’m not sure why it took me a decade and a half to go back, but that’s what I did last week. Myself and Jessica once again immersed ourselves in Irish tradtional music. I’ve written up a trip report over on The Session.
On the face of it, fifteen years is a long time. Last time I made the trip to county Clare, I was taking pictures on a point-and-shoot camera. I had a phone with me, but it had a T9 keyboard that I could use for texting and not much else. Also, my hair wasn’t grey.
But in some ways, fifteen years feels like the blink of an eye.
I spent my mornings at the Willie Clancy Summer School immersed in the history of Irish traditional music, with Paddy Glackin as a guide. We were discussing tradition and change in generational timescales. There was plenty of talk about technology, but we were as likely to discuss the influence of the phonograph as the influence of the internet.
Outside of the classes, there was a real feeling of lengthy timescales too. On any given day, I would find myself listening to pre-teen musicians at one point, and septegenarian masters at another.
Now that I’m back in the Clearleft studio, I’m finding it weird to adjust back in to the shorter timescales of working on the web. Progress is measured in weeks and months. Technologies are deemed outdated after just a year or two.
The one bridging point I have between these two worlds is The Session. It’s been going in one form or another for over twenty years. And while it’s very much on and of the web, it also taps into a longer tradition. Over time it has become an enormous repository of tunes, for which I feel a great sense of responsibility …but in a good way. It’s not something I take lightly. It’s also something that gives me great satisfaction, in a way that’s hard to achieve in the rapidly moving world of the web. It’s somewhat comparable to the feelings I have for my own website, where I’ve been writing for eighteen years. But whereas adactio.com is very much focused on me, thesession.org is much more of a community endeavour.
I question sometimes whether The Session is helping or hindering the Irish music tradition. “It all helps”, Paddy Glackin told me. And I have to admit, it was very gratifying to meet other musicians during Willie Clancy week who told me how much the site benefits them.
I think I benefit from The Session more than anyone though. It keeps me grounded. It gives me a perspective that I don’t think I’d otherwise get. And in a time when it feels entirely to right to question whether the internet is even providing a net gain to our world, I take comfort in being part of a project that I think uses the very best attributes of the World Wide Web.
This is nifty—a map of all the Irish music sessions and events happening around the world, using the data from TheSession.org.
If you’re interested in using data from The Session, there’s a read-only API and regularly-updated data dumps.
A fascinating thought experiment from Ted Chiang:
So let’s imagine a world in which Chinese characters were never invented in the first place. Given such a void, the alphabet might have spread east from India in a way that it couldn’t in our history, but, to keep this from being an Indo-Eurocentric thought experiment, let’s suppose that the ancient Chinese invented their own phonetic system of writing, something like the modern Bopomofo, some thirty-two hundred years ago. What might the consequences be?
An examination of how sites like The Session are meshing with older ideas of traditional Irish music:
There is a very interesting tension at play here – one that speaks directly to the design of new technologies. On the one hand, Irish musicians appear to be enthusiastically adopting digital media to establish a common repertoire of tunes, while on the other the actual performance of these tunes in a live session is governed by a strong etiquette that emphasizes the importance of playing by ear.
There’s an accompanying paper called Supporting Traditional Music-Making: Designing for Situated Discretion (PDF).