Blistering pace with crunch and groove, my latest challenge is to accompany Tangos del Titi. I played some variations on arpeggiating the main chords with some diminished(?) chord, which sounds modern and appropriate for the way I want to play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cAqOVJHO2k

Intro:

Tangos del Titi is typically played in a minor chord, but may change to major in the middle of the song, as demonstrated above by Poveda and cuadro.



Excellent resource on Flamenco, see more here for Tangos styles. ​http://www.flamencopolis.com/archives/324

Last Thursday I attended a riveting, well-organized event about APIs, technical documentation requirements by two Meetup groups in the Bay Area, http://www.meetup.com/API-Craft-San-Francisco/events/233267541/ and I am not being sarcastic!

I surprised myself a bit, having written "riveting" above to describe this event. What was so riveting about it was the quality of the presentations and questions asked, leaving everyone with a deeper understanding of the challenge at hand - well-crafted API documentation. There was palpable tension in the room at the end, each camp, the technical writers and the API writers each proposing a vision of the ideal, one developer asserting that API implementation can change, leaving the documentation in an inevitable sorry state. To this, a palpably experienced writer claimed for the writers camp that we have a way of smoothing things out.

Most agree documentation is a developer task in the beginning, and the boundaries become less clear as the product passes from working idea, to a thing that a person uses out in the wild. At the time the docs are crafted, the users are the product creators (engineers), as well as the technical writers - but writing something worth reading requires a familiarity with product that is both high level and low level, and the other important requirement is good writing, that has been burnished after a few cycles of "dog-fooding" the product as per the documentation.

The problem has been well-explained. Documentation traditionally and by its nature comes later in the game to get a product out the door to the public and scaling this activity with a large team of technical writers is difficult and unwieldy. The smart solution is to involve engineering early and often in the task of documenting the product. As one person deftly pointed out, the spec is used as a template for the product, and this spec in the end comes to conform to the product, completing a loop which is not really a full circle, but a swirl, because the spec ends up in a different state than at inception.

If this passage from dream to reality and back were better solidified in software documentation, we'd be living in a much more reliable tech world. It is always a game of catching up. There is no such thing as getting ahead with the documentation, but planning for the future keeps us less behind, so there is something to work toward besides the docs themselves.

What better way to celebrate Don Miguel Cervantes's masterpiece than with other enlightened readers, sitting around a table fascinated how one author could engender such universal feelings in a story as surreal as Don Quixote? Uninhibited, us readers comfortably shared our reactions and hypotheses on the subject of "the Quixote", protesting the online anonymous extemporaneous conversations that drone on past the capacity of a scroll bar, shelved inside the "Read more" block in the online threads (as most of our conversations happen online don't they?)? This discussion was friendly, and unified us, a delicious bookend to the summer of Quixote put on by my friends at the San Francisco Public Library as part of the Don Quixote and the Golden Age exhibit.

No discussion I've had in any previous book club meeting was so enriching. - all that was shared made me giddy to read more. I had not come close to finishing the epic, but the themes are woven so strongly across the book, you need not read it all to understand its importance and relevance to this day. (I will be reading on!) The author, Cervantes lived a life worthy of his own story, and Jaime Manrique tackled this with gusto in El callejón de Cervantes. We would believe most of it to be fiction. Quixote garnered interest and influence in places as far away in the Spanish empire as Bolivia. Professor Quiroz, who attended the Quixote tertulia dedicated significant time to revealing his countrymen and Cervantes's mutual interest and Bolivia in his expository work., Cervantes y Don Quijote en Bolivia. I learned Cervantes had applied for a government position in Bolivia, which was denied by the Spanish crown. This position was post-mortem and Bolivians have carried on paying homage to Quixote in their own literature and more..

Don Quixote is a work that draws on the human experience, but does not interpret this experience in terms of science, but rather through art, finding humor in human folly, error and (mis?)understandings. Cervantes encodes this experience in the characters of Don Quixote de la Mancha and Sancho Panza with such force, convincing us that we are not so much products of the past, as we are a continuation of it, barely distinguishable, just as surreal: the world Cervantes knew is fascinating, a barely governed or barely governable Spain, the character of Quixote an expert in the custom and rule of knights-errant, able to cohabit and subdue by decree, some sort of might-is-right-righteousness and notion of justice, with a soft side.

I feel we are still tethered to romantic customs we want to break from, but ultimately find ourselves perpetuating: asserting we are nobility entitled to our own wild lands and a uniquely beautiful prince or princess, an imagined destiny personally crafted from a collection of stories read, breaking slightly from them and the traditions they came out of, so we can call our stories our own. Don't we all come from hometowns that were stifling, but miraculously able to produce us, great men and women, with a capacity for compassion, love and forgiveness.? We are Quixotes, and Quixote is a man-child, a person free from everything except his attraction to legend and destiny, loathe to admit defeat.

We can see our struggle for perfection and the path to each of our own destinies through the book. Specifically, finding a princess and likening our own wanderings about the earth may not resonate on their face, because they sound like the same storybook we grew up with unless you read on, but our momentary despair, injuries and perseverance are similar. - we forget these and move on, shedding skin and fears, repeating this process until we die. We are all kind of crusaders and we all fall off our nags, which we imagine to be great horses - metaphors for our jobs or successful careers. We all sort of aggrandize our turmoil and success, right? Our admission of not-so-greatness does not pass into our conversations. Is this what is most universal about Don Quixote? According to the group, I met with at the reading room esconced neatly beneath the main library first floor away from the bustling of readers and those seeking a clean refuge from the Civic Center SF streets, we nobly agreed the Quixote is as current as can be.