Still going after all these years.
In case anyone missed the link buried in the previous post, here is the joke about my pages as seen by MSN’s search engine:
No, I have no idea why the site description is in Chinese. Nor do I know why Yahoo claims that my site’s summary “contains characters that cannot be displayed in this language/character set.”
Thoughts?
Dear Jack,
In your first book, After Lorca, you wrote a letter to Lorca saying you wanted to make a poem out of a real lemon, not the description of a lemon. Very good; Jenny Holzer has done stranger things. You also say
I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real.
Today we can do that, Jack, kind of. This letter is a poem that points to other poems, other poets. But links break and rot just like your lemon does, Jack, and I’m not sure that what’s left is still in correspondence (as you say with those sly italics) with the lemon.
There are search engines, Jack, whose job it is to help you find the real lemon. Unfortunately, some of them don’t understand me.
I am building a house on sand, Jack, and trying to build it high enough to touch the sky. But the sand keeps slipping out from under me. And my words turn into other languages and are lost.
What to do?
Love
Tim
I think Amazon has had limited RSS support before, but this is something else. About a hundred custom RSS feeds by category. That takes me to 200 feeds… (As seen on Scripting News, among others…)
Great article in Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine about “death march” projects. Object oriented guru Ed Yourdon taxonomizes those difficult, never ending, no room for error projects according to happiness level and chance of success. High happiness, high chance of success projects are “mission impossible”—everyone wants to make the project succeed, against all odds. There are also “suicide,” “kamikaze,” and “ugly” projects; see the article for the descriptions.
If you have spent any time in the IT industry at all you probably recognize some of those project descriptions. You may even have managed one or two. This is the interesting part for me: Yourdon’s book, Death March: The Complete Software Developer’s Guide to Surviving “Mission Impossible” Projects, gives guidance for managers on how to manage these projects.
Credit where due: link courtesy of Scoble.
Someone asked me last night to describe what my depression was like. It was interesting; except for sessions with my therapist I never had tried to put it in words to anyone.
I said: I found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes I found it impossible to sleep at night. I lost interest in my work, in reading, in eating, in writing.
The worst part, though, was what my brain was doing. Or rather, not doing. I would stare at a computer screen for hours, berating myself for not doing anything constructive, then berating myself for wasting time berating myself. I would find myself confused and angry for being so stupid as to waste my own time and work, to spend days doing nothing and finishing nothing, but when I tried to do anything I would convince myself that it was such bad work that I could hardly bring myself to finish it.
I think this is what most studies of depression miss. Over time, it turns into a self reinforcing loop, a cycle that tears the sufferer apart.
