Well, yeah, a bike isn't stone-age technology, but it is wood. No, all bikes aren't wood, but they used to be. Some of them anyway.

In any case, bikes are essentially primitive in a high-tech kind of a way. Or high-tech in a steampunk kind of way. Right?

A bicycle is the essential hypostasis of the age of enlightenment, human progress under the banner of science and reason, Promethean humanity boostrapping Babel, all under their own power. But, God Almighty, that's a lot of work! Who can navigate a modern city on a bike?!?!? Modern cities are built around cars, which are so much easier.

Cars are essentially high-tech in a primitive way. They're the ultimate hypostasis of the age of disillusionment, human stagnation under the sign of quick fixes and easy rationalizations.

They're superconvenient. And superdeadly. It makes you start to wonder about all the work it takes to build and operate a bike. Maybe with car-age, twenty-first century techniques and a bit of that good old enlightenment spirit we can...? Nah. The Tesla'll be available soon. Forget it.

When I began to build this site in April 2007, it was like building a bike at the turn of the twentieth century. Just a bit too late for my tools (and methods) to be viable into the future.

But then, some of the super-fashionable, fully-automated, black-box, computerized conveniences of the Web 2.0 age aren't quite viable either. Have you cleaned any spark plugs recently? On a car made in the past couple of years? Can you even find the carburetor? I began to feel like one of the magnificent Ambersons.

So I'm rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. I got my titanium-alloy tubing, ice-hardened tempered-steel gears and cams, diamond-polished ball bearings, expert advice from phaylon and mst at Shadowcat, all the IRC channels, like #dbix-class, #catalyst, #moose, #reaction, mailing lists, etc.

When you get right down to it, neither my bicycle metaphor nor my bike/car disjunction are perfectly appropriate. The simple truth is that I had a dream that metalabel was a bike.

That's fine with me, though, cause I'm just introducing myself and my Perl Iron Man blog. My first substantial post will about how I learned to write a real database schema.

Look for it very shortly.