printer paper

these dot-matrix lines, word-dots
dealt out in little letter-clusters,
are pointillism poetry
machine inked on a
page framed by printer-feed fringes,
perforated holy strips, the frayed edges of this poem
whose message, completely obscured by the medium,
is small and lost among other tiny messages

but from far enough away,
the meaning is clear

slow ping, sloping

a machine on the dark slope
sliding into textual abyss:
300 milliseconds, an eternity
character repeat rates
falling off chronic charts
waiting full seconds for the
comatose command line
to show your fevered strokes

when a path is packed
packets like sardines,
all you have left to
band with are your
memories of mistakes
hoping to hit backspace
the magically correct number of times

these insufferable moments spent
chewing whole fingernails into oblivion
between typing and seeing

mt 3.11

OK, I upgraded to the latest version of movable type. Why? Because 1) I’m not getting off my ass fast enough in terms of switching to WordPress, 2) it was relatively easy (aside from the all-afternoon template finagling I’ve had to do), 3) I wondered what Six Apart had been up to, 4) clean install so comments work again, and 5) so I could beat Laura to it. (That’s last one is a joke, I swear!)

There is a lot of new shit. An amazing amount of new code went into dynamic rendering, (so much php that I’m surprised they didn’t just re-write the whole damn application in it).

The new default templates and stylesheets SUCK ASS though. There is extra white space in their stylesheets everywhere, and things are redundantly declared with great abandon. I had to make major modifications to get back to even this shoddy semblance of the way things used to be. More changes will no doubt be forthcoming. I prefer variable width to fixed width sites anyway, especially ones that are mostly (all) just text.

Tonight is the annual TCUC banquet. Laura is freaking out in the other room because she has to have all kinds of stuff done for it. (She thought she had more time to finish things.) I’ve offered to help, but I think I’m probably more help giving her encouragement and staying out of her way.

Monday night I have a sneak preview ticket to go see Team America: World Police at Block E. (I’ll also be setting up my desk and stuff at our new offices in Bloomington all day before that.) Tuesday The Faint is playing at first ave.

Today’s daily poem took a little more effort than yesterday’s. I sorta did some word doodling for about ten mintues before coming up with anything. I worry a bit about how many people will really be able to understand either of the two poems I’ve written so far. Just to clarify, I don’t feel obligated to post these if they are crap. So I may not be posting a poem a day, I’m just making the effort to write them.

I’m going to mow the yard now.

foreach()

Nanowrimo registration supposedly starts today. One month till I’ll be writing like a madman. I think as a sort of “warm up” for the big month, I’m going to try and write a poem a day. I was thinking about this on the bus this morning, and also about how I don’t write enough poems about technology, so I may try and keep to that broad theme for the whole month.

The first one is called foreach() and is written in parsable php.

===

<php
	#  poem:  foreach()
	foreach( $thing_you_know as $useful_thing ) {
		foreach( $useful_thing as $fact ) {
			foreach( $fact as $assumption ) {
				if( $assumption['unsure'] == true ) {
					unset( $useful_thing );
				}
			}
		}
	}
	if( empty( $thing_you_know ) ) {
		return true;
	}
?>