Monday 3 June 2002

categories: Commonplaces, Hostage to Crap

Ackerman on psychotherapy and and poetry. Poems Foster Self-Discovery. I sent him [Ed: her psychiatrist] all the poems that emerged, hot off the heart, and they became an important part of the therapy, another place where we could meet. There’s a tradition of using artworks in this way, children’s drawings especially, and it opened up some unexpected avenues. So much of life falls between the seams of the sayable. It’s ironic that poets use words to convey what lies beyond words, that poetry becomes most powerful where simple language fails, allowing one to bridge the conscious and unconscious, and even festoon that bridge with sensations and subterranean desires. In a poem by Emily Dickinson, all that may occur in a single word, phrase or even line break. Metaphor thrives in the spaces between words. Of course, psychotherapy and lyrical poetry address many of the same issues, and they both create a space where one can explore one's relationship with oneself and others. Both require rules, tremendous focus, entrancement and exaltation, the tension of spontaneity caged by restraint, the risk of failure and shame, the drumbeat of ritual, the willingness to be shaken to the core. So, though refreshingly different from each other, the two overlap in companionable places. [by way of New York Times: Books] Both of these disciplines, in their current forms in this particular eddy of human experience called the US at the beginning of the 21st century, tend to cater to self-indulgence and plumbing the depths of the mind for... Sorry; sorry—being snarky. Bad Allan. “So much of life falls between the seams of the sayable.” Nice fourteener though I prefer alexandrines. “...the willingness to be shaken to the core.” 9:01:27 PM    comment []

categories: Hostage to Crap

Just a reminder: Starring on TV: The Milky Way. With astrophysical simulations and computer visualization techniques, The Unfolding Universe on The Discovery Channel is must-see documentary. By Mark K. Anderson. [Wired News] Also, tonight will be the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus at dusk. After tonight, Jupiter will be sinking into the horizon before it gets seen. And speaking of stars and planets, I managed to reclaim about thirty megs of space by deleting my uncompressed Hipparcos, Gliese, and Tycho star location/parallax files. 7:05:41 PM    comment []

categories: Computationally Minded, Hostage to Crap

I have a microCONNECTORS USB keyboard that works pretty well. What I like about it is that the tactile and sound feedback is almost exactly like the original 128K Macintosh that I used actively until 1991—the feel and responsiveness thus make it very loud while I’m in full swing (about 60wpm) but enable me to hit those speeds, whereas the soft-touch keyboards of IBM clones and the low-impact shallow Japanese-type keyboards of Powerbooks often make me feel that I had not hit a key even though I see it on the screen. Very annoying. The things I don’t like about the keyboard are that it follows the current F-J bump trend that Macintosh keyboards have, rather than having the bumps on the D-K keys; and that when I drop the keyboard while I have a Microsoft Intellimouse plugged in to the other USB slot on the TiBook, I lose both trackpad and mouse interaction with the GUI—that is, I can move the mouse, but clicks don’t register and passing over the Dock does not produce a response. When the second thing happens, I generally have to log out (command-shift-Q, then I can immediately use my mouse on the user selection screen) if I haven’t turned on keyboard-toggled Universal Access in the System Preferences. Otherwise, I can hit option five times to turn on keypad mousing. At least, I think that this will solve my problem (5-key for mouse). Current uptime: 4:45PM up 11 days, 8:53, 5 users, load averages: 1.73, 1.60, 1.47. 4:45:49 PM    comment []

categories: Computationally Minded

A new OroborOSX   version came out in the last three days. 12:18:11 AM    comment []