Birthday

Well there goes my 22nd birthday, another year closer to becoming obsolete. End post.

Big Machines and Bad Poetry

A continuous casting machine in a local mill was severely damaged because of a setup error by the supervisor (or so claimed all the union workers). To save face he had to blame the control software, so I was hired on a short contract to rewrite some of the graphics routines used by the control system. The status display had nothing to do with machine control, it was even on a different computer. But he got to cover his ass and I got to be the Big Bucks Consultant for a few weeks.

It was a fun job, every time I ran a test several football fields full of huge equipment woke up and get busy. No molten steel was involved, but when you're in the control room by yourself with all that under your control you can't help but let out a little Mad Scientist cackle now and then.

Oh hell yes :-D (from here)


I'd like to moan for a minute about supposedly deep and meaningful poetry that actually makes no sense, written by people who have nothing to be deep and meaningful about. Take this for instance:

Hanging, a dark rose,
Broken on the field of justice,
A bell tolls.

That is a very formulaic (and short) example piece... and it took me about 30 seconds to come up with it in the shower this morning while I contemplated this post. Note that it makes absolutely no sense except what you want to deliberately read into it. Actually, maybe someone should do a poetry book parodying bad poetry, could be very funny :-) Actually, I'd be surprised if a million-and-one people haven't done it already, the stuff usually parodies itself pretty well ;-)