Writing

• Jul 17 2008 - code samples in blogger are a pain ...

  I can’t say I enjoy writing in the blogger post interface, in fact it’s pretty frustrating. For a while there I was using google docs to write posts(which I loved), then I would just publish to my blog. That actually worked great until the actual publishing process which doesn’t allow you to control the title very effectively and totally messed up my rss feed even if I did fix the title. Then I tried scribefire which again was really promising but it’s a cramped UI and again the publishing process was really clunky for my workflow. (things remain drafts for me for weeks at a time)
  
  Anyway, I’m looking at my last post and those code samples are embarrassingly poorly formatted. Not only that but if you check the source the blogger editor is introducing tons of html space entities which drives me nuts considering I’m using whitespace:pre on my blockquotes anyway.
  
  I’m really inclined to just use the tools I have when it comes to this site, primarily so that I focus on writing and not tinkering. Since moving my website from a hosted environment to blogger I have actually started to focus again on my writing and my projects rather than tinkering with a wheel that’s been built a thousand times (photo gallery scripts, php and perl cgi trickery for mundane templating etc). So while I will probably end up spending time on this at some point I really just want to find something that “just works” for showing code in blog posts. More to come I’m sure.

• May 7 2008 - poetic words = exciters of nearby symbols ...

  
  In GEB Hofstadter mentions the complexity in building an isomorphism between two poems written in two languages.

  
  
  “In ordinary language, the task of translation is more straightforward, since to each word or phrase in the original language, there can usually be found a corresponding word or phrase in the new language. By contrast, in a poem of this type, [Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll] many “words” do not carry ordinary meaning, but act purely as exciters of nearby symbols. However what is nearby in one language may be remote in another."
  
  
  Reading that acted as an exciter for my own interest in poetry. I immediately think about some of the poetry I have read which had the most impact for me and it did exactly this. The ability of a good poet to draw scenes by exciting patterns of shared experience and perception is really amazing. Choosing those “words that excite nearby symbols” is a bit of a game and for me what makes trying to write poetry enjoyable. It becomes almost technical or like solving a problem.
  
  
  I am often cynical that poetry can be really widely appealing if only because the most poignant and effective poems I’ve read require a familiarity with the writer and a shared experience that allows compact transfer of imagery. Then again, some of the power in the compression and lossy nature of these poetic images is that there is room for interpretation in the eye of the beholder.
  
  
  In a field at dusk, trees made short by distance, a line of black on blacker at a horizon pulled ever closer by night…