Don'cha just hate that?

So, this morning I sat down in a frenzy of writing on the bus. I got onto the bus at 6:37 and was dropped of in downtown at 7:09. In that time, I churned out a lot of words. I had started at 5,075 words this morning, and by the time I had gotten to the stop 32 minutes later I was up to 5,908. 26 WPM. Respectable.

I then went to look in my personal wiki for "Where should I be by the time I get to work this morning?" And the number sitting there was 5,909.

Missed it by >< that much.

Anyhoo, here I am 23,402 words into the arc I've set aside for NaNoWriMo and nearly 60,000 words into the, uh, overarc I guess, and now the theme of the series hits me.

Goddess, I am so screwed up as a writer sometimes. You'd think I'd have more of a plan before I start writing.

A Poem For Veteran's Day

It is Veteran's day, which started out as Armistice Day, the day WW1 drew to a close, at least as far as the Americans were concerned. Like a lot of you, I'm seriously thinking about my pittance of time tomorrow, but today, I want to provide a different kind of memory, from that "Great War," from Wilfred Owen and 1917.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Revised thinking about writing and expertise

My total wordcount is wrong. (The wordcount from this morning is still correct, however). I'm only at 23,059 words. I figured out what I was doing wrong with grep to remove the metadata from the headers; unfortunately, in the process I was leaving in the metadata that grep generates when scanning multiple files. The correct incantation is:

grep -hv '^;' *.txt | wc -w

( Long ramble about writing and expertise in general. )

Ruby is...

So, I've been wrapping my head around Ruby and Rails this week in my copious spare time (by the way, I hit by wordcount deadline for today, passing the halfway mark at 25860, yes! And the month's only a third over!) and listening to some simply incredible classical music (see the music tag) when I came to some annoying realizations about Ruby.

Ruby is Lisp. There's no other way to describe it. Ruby is Lisp the way Javascript is Lisp: both are descendents of the Lisp Way, but both have worked very hard to obscure that fact and look as if they had much in common with Algol's descendents, such as C and Pascal.

Ruby is Perl and Python. It's a scripting language as powerful as either of these, with a little of each's philosophy thrown in: from Python, ruby stole a sense of clarity with which it has not yet made peace, and from Perl, it stole the idea that there was any number of ways to do something and, oh yeah, Perl had some great ideas about what should be available by default.

Most frightening of all, Ruby is C++. Every major Ruby project creates a domain language unique to that project. Invoking the keywords of that domain language may result in great cascades of code that have little to no resemblence to "the core Ruby way of doing things," and whole chunks of your system may invoke excessively clever environmentally dependent templatizing routines that, without sufficient documentation, may deliver whole metaclass subsystems with execution trees that were never meant to be held inside the human head. Ruby's philosophy is that the domain language should be appropriate to the domain. Rails does an excellent job of living up to this expectation, but other projects I've seen do not.

I like Ruby, but that last is a major pitfall. Ruby experts love to show off their inner knowledge, often confusing the heck out of those of us new to the language, and the last aspect of the language makes it easy for said experts to mangle the brains of beginners. The Ruby community is currently going through an infatuation phase with itself, and helping new folks (like me) is going to take a while.

IBM 1401: A User's Manual

Wow.

I like avant-garde music, although I don't have a lot of respect for the people who can't play but just make up stuff and call it "art". I want to listen to people who I know can write music, who command the respect of other musicians for their proficiency, their investment in time, and their dedication to their craft. Johan Johannsson's five-part symphonic piece, IBM 1401: A User's Manual shows that he is definitely in the latter category.

The idea was simple: Johannson's father worked on one of these things in the 1960's when living in Iceland and recorded the AM sounds that would come off it as it worked, making "music." Johannson mixes those ancient tapes into a symphonic piece with five movements that is, without lyrics, utterly heartrending and otherworldly, a technological Four Seasons for the chronically melancholy. The last track is so moving that I found myself with tears in my eyes toward the end without being able to say why, since there were no lyrics. This music is not like anything you'll find in the U.S., and we are all the poorer for that fact.

If this album has a single weakness, it is the second track, "The Printer", which mixes in a recording of Johannson's father giving a lecture, in English, on how to maintain the printer. It's very technical and sounds like it comes from another time and place (and it did!), but the cold lecture voice is very jarring on top of Johannson's atmospheric, signatorial composition style. But that weakness can and should be overlooked, because overall the album delivers on style and affect, and even that track acheives what Johannson was trying to acheive.

I've only listened to the album once, but felt compelled to write about it. I don't know if I'll feel this way after a second or third listening, but I was just so stunned by that first listen I felt I had to post. Yes, I bought it because the title was so funky, and it was cheap, a used CD the store didn't know what to do with.