Poem: "London Trees" · 15 December 2009

I signed up for NaNoWriMo again this year — my third time — and as before, I did not finish. However, this is the first time I felt that I quit for a good reason. I had a plot outline constructed, and characters, and scenes, and my writing was clicking along quite well (averaging about 2000 words/hour, give or take). A few days into the month, though, I realized something: the writing of my novel had transformed from an exercise in writing the novel itself into an exercise in writing — in terrific detail — about all of the art I would rather have been doing instead of writing. I decided that it would be a much more productive, not to mention enjoyable, use of my time to actually just do the art I was really wanting to do, instead of writing about the doing of that art.
Anyway, the title of the novel I had started working on, “For Our Own Destruction Weep,” was taken from a poem by Kathleen Raine. Here is that poem (you can find it, along with many other excellent works, in Kathleen Raine’s Collected Poems, available at Amazon and other sources).

London Trees

Out of the roads of London springs the forest,
Over and underworld, the veritable Eden
Here we have planted for our solitude,
Those planes, where thoughts unblamed among the leaves may run.

Sensing us, the trees tremble in their sleep,
The living leaves recoil before our fires.
Baring to us war-charred and broken branches,
And seeing theirs, we for our own destruction weep.

And women, sore at heart, trying to pray
Unravel the young buds with anxious fingers
Searching for God, who has gone far away,
Yet still at evening in the green world lingers.

Obedient still the toiling trees
Lift up their fountains, where still waters rise
Upwards into life, filled from the surrounding skies
To quench the sorrows thirsting in the world’s eyes.

— Kathleen Raine

-- David --

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Survey: Are you House or Wilson? [Survey ended] · 28 October 2009

Survey’s over! The most popular choice was…well, see for yourself:


-- David --

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"WingStreet" Slogan: Terrifying? · 8 October 2009

Am I the only person in whom the slogan of Pizza Hut’s “WingStreet®,” viz. “You Are Now Entering Wingfinity!” induces a sense of dissociated terror? Every time I encounter said phrase, my mind irrepressibly spins off into an imagined universe of meat, bones, and sauce, swirling about in a postmodern space-time goulash. I’m then forced to consider the composition of such a carniverse — what fills the meatus, so to speak, of the meat, in which visitors must presumably subsist? Are we, by “entering Wingfinity,” condemned to immediate death by drowning in 8 bold sauces? Does the carniverse still have, or need, dark matter, given the filling of space by the saucy, cleft rudimentary flight appendages? Where are all the chickens?

-- David --

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Online dating: sample first contact letter (statistically AWESOME) · 22 September 2009

Background: OKCupid recently published a blog post, “Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message.” I recommend reading that first wink.

How’s it going?

I noticed that you mention your favorite movies in your profile, and they’re pretty much awesome, LOL. Your good taste in cool video games is also fascinating!
Anyway, my name is Zeus, and I’m in a metal band called “Vegetarian Zombie Physics.” I’m an atheist — I noticed you didn’t mention your religion in your profile, so I’m kinda curious what you think about it (sorry if that’s too personal, no offense intended).
Anyway, I hope I hear from you, though I understand you’re probably pretty busy and may take a while to get back to me (this online meeting thing is so awkward sometimes!). I’ve got to get back to grad school now. Take care!

P.S. What’s your name?

-- David --

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OLE DB fun: Mute IErrorInfo and date-time parameter overflow. · 22 September 2009

Here's some useful, hard-won info.

Scenario:

Course of action:

  1. The first things to look at are the status codes for each parameter (you _are_ using status codes, I hope!). If you see that one or more of the parameter status codes are DBSTATUS_E_UNAVAILABLE (i.e., "8"), that says that those particular parameters were not the cause of the error, and you can disregard those.
  2. Look for the parameters that have a _different_ error code. If you find a parameter that has a datetime type (DBTIMESTAMP on the OLE DB side, datetime on the SQL Server side, may not extend to other DBMSs), and it is marked DBSTATUS_E_DATAOVERFLOW, this means that the DBTIMESTAMP has a value that is not within the range of the datetime value, to wit: 1753 A.D. to 9999 A.D. So, for example, if you start out with an empty filetime, which has a range dating from 1601 A.D., and you stuff it into a DBTIMESTAMP value, you will end up with this overflow error.

-- David Pickett --

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