Category: Blogosphere

Per Terry, when you read this, post a poem.

Adlestrop
Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
It’s by Edward Thomas (1878-1917). I learned it by heart when I was about 9. A couple of years later I actually visited Adlestrop Station (long since closed) while on holiday near Stratford-on-Avon. It was a hot summer’s day, much as Thomas described in his notebook on June 23, 1914.
For years I remembered the poem almost perfectly (though I sometimes stumbled in the third verse). It was not until recently, when I was researching my blog entry on First World War music and poetry, that I discovered that Edwards’ vision of a countryside full of life yet devoid of people was a comment on how the War, and the call-up, had affected rural England.
To me this is still a wonderful picture of the beauty of England as I remember it, but there is now a shadow across the sun, and the men who should be gathering the “haycocks dry” are far away….

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell – The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

Just took an interesting little test called The Political Compass. Yeah, I know it isn’t new, but it’s still fun.
I scored:
° Economic Left/Right: -3.38
° Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.03
pretty much as I’d have expected.

While doing a little vanity Googling (speaking of which…), I came across this page: the BlogShare page for geoffarnold.com. It seems to be some kind of fantasy stock market in blogs; apparently my valuation is B$3,481.90. What the hell does this mean? Tim’s valued at B$96,968.51, which makes some (relative) sense, I guess.

Doug (who needs to get his own blog!) just sent me a link to a page which captures the strangeness of the blogosphere to a T. It’s a celebration of last place finishers in the Athens Olympics.

At the suggestion of my colleague Doug, I’m adding dive into mark to my blogroll. Reading his piece on corporate blogging, including all the comments, was delightfully reminiscent of chats with Tim Bray… and then I pop over to Tim’s blog only to find him citing Mark. So if Tim’s a connector, is Mark a maven? We’ll see. Exit humming…..

Terry Karney’s blog pointed me at this wonderful poem. Here are the first few lines….
This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it; this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death list.
Yes, it’s vaguely reminiscent of David Moser‘s self-referential tour de force (published by Douglas Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas), but it’s a much more beautiful and thought-provoking piece. Pass it on.

I was just reading Neil Gaiman’s blog (always a delight), and he was talking about how he’s making progress on his new novel, “Anansi Boys”. And then he said:
The weirdest thing about the book is that it begins as a comedy, then slowly shades into something a bit like horror, and I realised a couple of days ago that the rules of fiction mean you have to tread slightly warily as you go, if you’re going to do something like this. In a comedy, part of the underlying agreement is that good people and bad people will get what they deserve, and that happy endings will be earned, and the universe rewards nice people and sensible ones. In horror the underlying agreement is that there is no justice and that good people may be fed to the lions at authorial whim. Which realisation induced a moment or two of panic, and then I shrugged and figured it would all come out in the wash.
And it struck me how well that describes many of the engineering projects I’ve been involved in recently….

My employer, Sun Microsystems, is now hosting blogs for all employees (and interns – nice touch) at blogs.sun.com. The site opens for business on Monday, so I thought I’d get in ahead of the rush and grab the name geoff. I’m not sure how I’m going to balance the usage of the two blogs, but sufficient unto the day….

Spammers harvest addresses for two reasons. The most important is to generate targets. A secondary use is to fake the From address.
A couple of days ago, a spammer sent out a message with my address as the From. As a result, I’ve been getting bombarded with email from spam filters, mailer-daemons, and so forth. So far I’ve received at least 300 such messages. For perfectly good reasons, these don’t get flagged as spam.
This last happened to me about 4 years ago. Back then, I got a few vacation-daemon replies, a few angry human-generated replies, and not much else; it was all over in 24 hours. What I’ve noticed this time around is the wide variety of software-generated responses, and the way that the responses just keep coming. In part, of course, this reflects the diffeent responses from MTA and MUA based spam detectors. However I’m also seeing patterns that suggest that many people must be using mail services with really long latencies. A “mailbox over quota” three days after the event suggests that normal deliveries to that user are likely to be equally slow. Odd.