Mary Rose Cook

I used to hope that love was like that moment in The Snowman where you’re staring at the ground and then someone grabs you by the hand and says Look over here and pulls you up into the air.

Last night, I leaned on the window-sill in my room and smoked a final cigarette before bed. I looked out onto my quiet street and saw a woman walking in circles in the middle of the road. She wore a sleek black coat and a black pencil skirt and black, witchy boots.

She looked at each car that came along the street, and then we would both watch as it drove around her or forced her to step back onto the pavement.

It was freezing outside, so I stubbed out my cigarette and closed the window. I watched the woman walk away down the road, and then I had a sip of water, switched off the light, got under the covers and lay in the dark.

In Held, a track by Fakes, Billie says “This is not a piece of art. This is my life.” What’s the difference?

When John Congleton of The Paper Chase put his ex-girlfriend’s break-up answerphone message on Young Bodies Heal Quickly, You Know, was his relationship with the girl already burnt out, or was he stamping on its embers?

Sunset Rubdown’s song, The Taming Of The Hands That Came Back To Life: “She said my sails are flapping in the wind. I said, Can I use that in a song? She said, I mean the end begins. I said, I know, can I use that too?” Was her reply altered by his artistic request?

What would happen if one subjugated everything to art? What if I revealed some secret things in order to write a great article, and in the process I sacrificed relationships with people I know? Or, what if I spent all my time making the best album in the world, only to emerge and find that the things I had written about were gone?

It is quite fiddly to take photos of oneself and arm-around-shoulder buddies with the iPhone. However, some slight assistance is afforded by the clever mirrored Apple logo on the back.

I walked into the Borders in the airport and picked up a copy of Saturday, the book I read when I last went to New York City, and read again about lone and strange and poignant times. Then, Theresa SMSed me say that she had missed her flight and I put the book back on the shelf and went to meet her.

At my day job, I’m working on a prototype of a community site. To support the development of experimental features, I’ve been building a flexible permissions system which can be summaried thus:

user -has-an-> ability -for-an-> item

So, users have abilities for items. That’s it. An item is something that needs to have its permissions controlled, a user is a site user and an ability is something the user can do upon the item. Some examples:

Johnny owns Johnny’s Diary
Jenny is friends with Johnny
Jenny can edit Johnny’s Diary

To determine the permissions for something on the site, three questions can be asked: does this user have any of these abilities for this item? which of these items does this user have any of these abilities for? and which users have any of these abilities for this item? Note the permissiveness of letting any one of a list of abilities allow permission to be granted.

The prototype has been coded in Ruby on Rails. The table that stores relationships has columns for an id, a user id, an ability and an item id. All very straightforward. However, there is one extra column: item type. Because items of different types are stored in different tables, the item type column is required to identify the name of the class of which the item is an instance. When any of the above questions are asked, the relationships table is interrogated by matching the class of the items involved with the values in the item type column.

What makes the system simple and flexible? First, it only consists of one small database table for holding relationships, four methods and 75 lines of code. Second, the system makes no assumptions about the site - all the semantics of relationships are in the item types and ability names used. Third, the relationships table can be understood by humans. Fourth, though it is not recommended, more complex structures can be modelled: relationships between items¹, reflexive relationships², neuter relationships³ and state relationships⁴.

¹ Where an item has an ability for another item.
² Where an item or user can have an ability for itself. For example: ownership.
³ Where a user (or item) just has an ability, but no item upon which it can act.
⁴ A special type of neuter relationship which models a state of being for a user.

On the train to Stansted to pick up Theresa, with Weiner’s history of the CIA for company. I love little trips like this.

sitting in the carpark of Taunton station waiting for the coach and playing spot the ATP-goer. Its not a difficult game. A bit like playing count the Converse.

My housemate, Cathryn, got granted a proper account by the banking gods yesterday. In celebration, she and I have decided to go to New York City in early February. I am jolly excited.

Super excited about All Tomorrow’s Parties this weekend.