Author Archives: Gary

About Gary

I write and maintain code for various websites as both a professional and a hobbyist developer, and have used computer technology for most of my life.

14-Ties

9 Replies

Wonderland

The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo.

She succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing.

And when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away.

Besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to.

Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (1865)

for a clever animation -> Alice and the Flamingo

13-Vent

3 Replies

Mythology

But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for instance to invent those rays Rontgen did or the telescope like Edison, though I believe it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean, and the same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural phenomenon such as electricity but it’s a horse of quite another colour to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God.

Chapter 16 – Eumaeus, Ulysses by James Joyce

12-Murk

6 Replies

Shadows

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.

Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

09-Bord

3 Replies

Tombstone

The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.

Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.

Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows.

A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.

Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.

The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

08-Nine

1 Reply

Geography

These are the 9 counties of the Bay Area.

The Golden Gate Bridge stretches across water connecting Marin & San Francisco Counties.

The Delta flows into the bay between Solano & Contra Costa Counties.

City of San Jose is in Santa Clara County; Matt Mahan is the Mayor.

07-Beon

4 Replies

Hymenoptera Apocrita

On our fence, near the trash cans, every year.

As you eliminate your body on the web, you recuperate it in your physical location.

Sometimes you have a body, sometimes you don’t.

If you don’t have a body, you’re not there.

If you have a body, you are so there that your relationship with the world is what I call proprioceptive. It’s tactile. It’s not visual as it was during the Renaissance.

In the Renaissance, what was your identity? It was the outer limit of skin, a head that processed information, a dumb universe shown as a spectacle.

Identity became a point of view.

Today, identity is a point of being. We add the new possibilities of mixed identities, collective identities, just-in-time identities, fabricated identities.

There’s great flexibility, but the core business of self remains, just extended all over the planet by electronic extensions.

Derrick de Kerckhove – Wired October 1996

pro·pri·o·cep·tive – relating to stimuli that are produced and perceived within an organism, especially those connected with the position and movement of the body.