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"Murphy was an optimist!"

Poetry at 70 mph November 30, 2009 12:14 pm

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Philosophy, Poetry
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I tapped this out on my phone after cresting the hill south bound before the I-40/Pellissippi Parkway exchange. My normal glance at the peaks of the Smoky Mountains was obscured. The weather inspiring.

There are no mountains today. A cloud blankets the horizon. More so, it blankets us all. @djuggler

Theo Aukerman suggests this could become a Haiku.

With slight mods, could be a haiku: … @knoxcoder

So how’s this?

No mountains today
Cloud blankets the horizon
It blankets us all.

Hmm. I may have a thing or two to learn about meter versus moras ("on").

One on is counted for a short syllable, an additional one for an elongated vowel, diphthong, or doubled consonant, and one for an “n” at the end of a syllable. Thus, the word “haibun”, though counted as two syllables in English, is counted as four on in Japanese (ha-i-bu-n). Source, Wikipedia, Haiku

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Of Grasshoppers November 30, 2009 9:42 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Of Grasshoppers, Philosophy
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Student: Self-doubt.
Master: No doubt.

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Project Done November 30, 2009 2:40 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Programming, Technology
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I just put the wraps on one of my projects. This one was a site scrapper and a site rebuild. Scraping means the site which controls the data did not provide an API or other means to get the data so using PHP, cURL, and AJAX (in this case, jQuery), I retrieved the data, used PHP and regular expressions to parse the data to use only the parts I needed, and CSS to present it correctly. The rebuild was applying a new design, furnished by the client, to the rest of the site. Overall fun, albeit with some speed bumps and hiccups.

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Today’s Work Related Links November 30, 2009 2:33 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Programming, Technology
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I work in an ever changing industry. New techniques, new standards, new languages, new buzzwords are always developing. These changes are why programmers must be constant learners. I learn principles. Specifics of a language simply require a decent reference. I rely heavily upon Delicious as my own personal search engine and reference tool. To date, I have bookmarked 10024 websites. I can spent hours researching a problem and clicking through search engine results to read misinformation or bad links but when I find the resource I need, I bookmark it at Delicious with keywords which will help me find the information easily. The next time I need that info, I can find it in seconds.

Links I have used in my work today:

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