The Masqueraders

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wednesday, August 16, 2000
One year ago: Identity
Two years ago: Off Task
Three years ago: Metropolis

At work, Chip is working on the auto-blurbing task. This is one of the earliest tasks in our tracking database! We got in the habit of doing this manually -- adding the listings for each new article to the author's index page, the big commentary archive, and the home page for the site (and the avantgo version for the palm, and the RSS file for syndication -- yikes, that's a lot!). So this kept getting buried in the stack of all the other things needed. But now that we are changing the authors' index pages for the new site design we are implementing incrementally, he needed to develop the script that will update all of the above, plus more. It's much faster now. Chip is a master of WinBatch! I'm sure we must be one of the most complicated websites that has the winbatch scripting language as underpinnings. It feels quite luxurious now, to just click an icon and see the status log whirring along.

I've been rereading a Georgette Heyer book: The Masqueraders. It contains a woman dressed as a young man, and a young man in drag, thus the title! It's not a Regency like many of her books; it's set slightly earlier, in the mid-seventeen hundreds. (One of the characters is on the lam after being on the losing side in the Stuart revolt.)

I don't know if the switched genders would work in real life. Women have enlisted in the military in male guise, even in the Civil War. Perhaps the young man in skirts wouldn't have passed. But in our mind's eye, all faults are overlooked. And the book is very funny, and has some real passion in it. I especially like "the mountain," the large Sir Anthony Fanshaw. Heyer makes this a lively book. (Search for a copy on Advanced Book Exchange)