Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day- 
A sunny day with the leaves just turning, 
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play 
Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite 
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away 

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see 
You walking away from me towards the school 
with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free 
Into a wilderness, the gait of one 
Who finds no path where the path should be. 

That hesitant figure, eddying away 
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem, 
Has something I never quite grasp to convey 
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching 
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay. 

I had worse partings, but none that so 
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly 
Saying what God alone could perfectly show- 
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

- Cecil Day-Lewis

enthu but tired

I think the Soldier's Tale counts as one of the most shiok concerts I've ever played in. Mentally and physically it really felt just right, I was all psyched up and everything, and I think (I hope!) I didn't let any of the other players down. There were passages that I'd never got right before, that somehow magically fell into place in concert.

Anyhow, to bed!

this blog is facing obsolescence

argharagaragargh-boom-doomph-prrrt.

I've been busy. Busy-wheezy-dizzy-busy.

Been reading Dante's Divine Comedy too. It's fascinating. I think it should be illustrated and made into a kids' 365-bedtime-story edition. I mean, 3.6 days per canto is pretty generous. Make it 300 days, give or take a few. It should be required reading, honestly, for people who want to live good human lives. You can take it religiously or non-religiously, but without a doubt it is one of the most enduring works of all time because it deals with the eternal and the ineffable.

I think Sarah Palin is her very own character assasin, and possibly at the top of her game. And it's awesome that she's taken herself out of politics. This is obviously political darwinism at work here. I think Michael Palin must be cursing the great-great-granduncle of his who decided to move to Alaska.

I wish I had more time to re-read Douglas Adams and read Kurt Vonnegut and find more humorists to pick up. The really good humorists put humanity on trial, and find it sadly wanting. Look at The Hitchhiker's Guide: you have 2 befuddled people (left over after the Vogons evaporate the Earth) and a whole bunch of amiable but clueless aliens, wandering around time and the universe with an irritatingly sentient spaceship, and they somehow manage to avoid dying without really knowing how. They are all social twits in different ways. The premise of H2G2 is actually surprisingly like Noah's Ark, come to think of it, except Arthur and Trillian/Tricia don't end up repopulating the Earth, there's no God, and the whole focus is the ark. H2G2 should also be read to kids, so that they develop a healthy sense of the surreal.

Most people who don't read enough become idiots. Life is a struggle against idiocy. Nirvana is what you reach when you get an uncluttered perspective, when your mind is finally free from prepackaged judgements and mental straitjackets.

I'll leave you with some quotes:

Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world. - The Buddha (apocryphal)

I should never have believed that death could have unmade so many souls. - Dante, Inferno, trans. Mandelbaum

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow... Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. - Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country.

Chrome OS

[Sources here, here and here.]

Google's launching a new operating system based on Chrome, evidently aimed at hitting Microsoft where it really hurts. At first it does seem like a game-breaker: to run an entire OS and all your programs from a browser. And admittedly it does look enticing - after all the future of the computer is the internet.

But I can't help thinking that this is history repeating itself. First, we had command-line-based OSes. I guess most of my generation isn't familiar with DOS, but my family was an early adopter when it came to computers and I used it for probably 2-3 years when I was a kid.

And then came Windows 3.1, which came with a delightful tutorial demonstrating things like how to use the mouse, and windowed applications - believe it or not, applications weren't always either full-screen or boxes with the minimize/restore/exit boxes at the top-right corner! - and things like check-boxes and drop-down menus. I remember a portion of the tutorial where you could do something like choose different flavours of ice-cream and toppings and it would calculate the number of calories for that serving. Really unimpressive now but then it was quite something.

And then Windows 95 introduced the Start button and the Taskbar, another significant leap forward. (And it was also much less of an eyesore!) The Internet came along around this time too, and with it Netscape. Netscape was my first and primary browser for a long time, before I reluctantly moved back to IE because Netscape 7 was intolerably unstable. 

Then came Firefox (Firebird at first) and tabbed browsing, and then I started using Opera (which I still stick to) and mouse gestures (which I cannot live without, now), and Chrome came along late last year - and now Chrome OS.

Come to think of it, tabbed browsing is awfully similar to a taskbar - they're visual ways of swapping between pages or applications. As for web applications, they've been around since javascript and flash, and nowadays with Java and all the different scripting languages you can get incredible functionality packaged neatly in a single webpage. Gmail for instance - a pretty good example of packaging combined with sophisticated scripting underneath.

But it should be pointed out this is simply a reworking of the old situation. Where once we had an OS reading programming code to display applications onscreen, now we have an OS reading code to display a web browser, which reads yet more code to display web applications, streaming videos, flash games and the like.

So now that we can spend nearly all our computer time on a web browser, it kind of makes sense to cut out the OS entirely - to make the browser the OS, as Google plans to do. Google seems to have a plan to take over everything, just that this new Chrome OS idea really isn't as revolutionary as it's being made out to be. 

If you don't have programming experience or know next to nuts about computers, I guess all this would be lost on you. So to navigate away from this page, you might as well click here.