So, here's my plan

There are three projects needing work at the moment: the wheelchair ramp, which is high priority but very short term, my next CD, which is medium priority but longer-term, and the ongoing website reorganization. Guess which one is on my mind right now.

My song directory has gotten unwieldy, to say the least. With over 100 songs in it, both mine and other people's, and with HTML, Postscript, PDF, and two kinds of audio files, there are well over 500 files in there. Linux has no problem with this, nor do the Perl scripts I use to generate index files, but I do -- the directory listing is huge.

In addition, there are more things I'd like to do, for example have multiple versions of some songs, discographies, illustrations, more extensive notes, separate performance notes, transposed versions for performers, sheet music, ... You get the idea.

The obvious thing is to make a directory for each song. This worked well for keeping multiple tracks straight during my recent recording projects, and has the additional desirable side effect of making the songs' URLs shorter. There are, of course, zillions of links out there with the old URLs in them, but that's what redirects are for.

Since everything right now is driven by the lyrics files, which are in a local dialect of LaTeX, I'm going to move those to a Lyrics directory. I'll also put the Postscript files there, because it's very convenient for printing.

Everything else will go into Songs, in a subdirectory whose name is the song's shortname. The only real question at this point is whether the filenames in each song directory should be generic (e.g., lyrics.html, lyrics.pdf) or specific (songname.html, songname.pdf). The former makes more sense if I want to have multiple performances present, and will probably simplify scripts and Makefiles down the road.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled LJ soap opera.

Bad weather and bad judgement

When Tornadoes Attack: What a Tornado Taught Me About Our Stupid Obsession With Gadgets (And Why We Still Love Them)

Two weeks ago today, a tornado ripped through Illinois. At points it was up to a quarter mile wide, and it did enough damage, cracking giant powerlines like toothpicks and yanking old-growth trees right from the ground, that it completely closed the major highway I57 for a 35-mile expanse south of Chicago.

I was lucky enough to be traveling that day (on the way to the airport for WWDC) and pulled off the road just in time to intersect with the tornado at its worst. Inside a gas station with no basement and plenty of active fuel lines, it was the first time in a long time—maybe ever—that I genuinely feared for my life, that I thought things were over. Watch that video above. Then know that I was a lot closer.

But as I've played the scenes back in my head over the last several days, it's not the storm that’s proven to be the most haunting. It's the way the people reacted. Because in the gas station, I watched a group of 20 scared people not take shelter, but stand in front of a wall of glass to record the event—to make some YouTube clips.

Well worth a read, and rather touching in places.