Databases
This is the kind of square dancing home page that I’d like to see more of: Southeastern Mass. Square Dance Info. It’s a list of clubs and personal opinions on the clubs. What makes it interesting are the personal comments…not just a listing of who’s dancing what when to whom, but what kind of danciing, how the food is, what the usual attendance is, &etc. Too bad it hasn’t been updated since 1998. Also, be sure to check out the Open Letter to CALLERLAB, which talks about square dancing from the point of view of a “younger” (fifty-ish) couple.
Those of us who use MiniDiscs might find these April Fools pages amusing.
The SONY MZ-R100 minidisc Recorder
MZR-110PDA: This would really be a dream machine, especially if it added speed control…
Here’s an ambitious site for contra dancers: TCCD (Ithaca, NY): National Schedule Grid. I don’t know how they manage to keep it up to date, or even if they do manage… (although the info for Albuquerque looks very current).
Click on a city and a very attractive page comes up that’s filled in with info from a database. Looks like the individual dance series are responsible for keeping their database entries up-to-date.
A little more looking, and here’s the nitty gritty behind the grid: the Dance Database: DanceDB.tedcrane.com. It’s way cool…webmasters can even dynamically link to parts of the db to show up-to-date listings for dances in their areas. Here’s a list of dances in New Mexico, generated on the fly by the database:
This is what the National Square Dance Directory should be evolving into. Think about how you would try to find a dance in a city that you all of sudden have to go to on business. If you have a copy, you’d look in the National Square Dance Directory. Teeny little print and many out of date entries, but, hey, it’s there. Then you’d need to make some phone calls to find out how many of the entries are out of date and what’s really going on. If you don’t have a copy, you can start looking on the web and see if there are any websites listing clubs in the area. You’ll probably be able to find something, and with luck, it’ll even be kept up-to-date. However, suppose you’re out of luck there, so you try the square dance mailing list. Somebody immediately answers telling you that if you’d checked the NSDD, you’d have found…blah, blah, blah. So you’ve got some possibly out of date references to check. Somebody else will probably tell you exactly what you wanted to know…but it could have been easier…
Now think about going to the online square dance database. Do a search on the city and day. The records in the db will have information on when they were last updated, so you can see which ones are current and which ones need checking.
This is pretty cool: MessageClick. Ever since I switched to a network modem instead of a faxmodem, I haven’t been able to send or receive faxes. I still can’t send them, but I can receive them via email, and I even have a separate fax number.