Category Archives: Technology

The Coherence of Poetry (and Sarah Palin’s Tweets)

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In a reprise of William Shatner’s spoken-word rendering of excerpts from Sarah Palin’s Gubernatorial resignation speech, the actor of Star Trek fame returned to NBC last night, at Conan O’Brien’s request, this time to interpret Palin’s Twitter Tweets as “poetry.” Take a look:

Sadly, this is what so many Americans have come to believe is poetry: expressing the banal (“no rain, no rainbow”) with gravitas and, preferably, an upright bass and bongos in the background. This bizarre fusion–of beatnik hauteur, the self-indulgence of Twitter tweets, and the incoherent, wink-to-camera narcissism of Sarah Palin–symbolizes so much of what has gone wrong with our society’s appreciation of the four-thousand-year-old tradition of making art from words.
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A Week in Hyperdrive

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Warp speed ahead!Normally, as the weeks roll by, I get up early to write, read in the evenings after work, and collect the occasional acceptance or rejection slip from the mailbox. By contrast, this week felt like the equivalent of some kind of poetry hyperdrive, including:

Phew! Time to get back to my day job, so I can get some rest.

Poetry and Productivity

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I would not have been able to complete an MFA in writing poetry while holding down a job as a technology executive had I not been a longtime practitioner of the GTD® methodology. In a recently released podcast, David Allen, my boss and the inventor of GTD, asked me about how the GTD concept of the ubiquitous capture tool relates to poetic inspiration. (That conversation begins around 16:56.) My process has evolved considerably in the past few years, from capturing phrases and lines whenever they came through my head to “assemble” later into a poem, to establishing a regular practice of opening up to the muse. This shift sees me capturing fewer individual lines in the moment, and focusing more on getting my head clear of work and personal responsibilities–by using GTD–so that when I do sit down to write, I can slip through the keyhole unencumbered into that poetic space.

The practice of capturing inspiration in the moment is nothing new to artists and writers. After the Ojai Poetry Fest Fundraiser, I had a stimulating conversation with a fellow writer who also happens to be a journalist. As our chat got interesting, he whipped out a pad and paper, seemingly on reflex, and began to take notes. He was “off duty” in the sense that he wasn’t taking notes for a news story–but it got me thinking that if one is, indeed, a student of life, there is no “off duty.” And a good student takes good notes about subjects that fascinate. The difference GTD makes, of course, is that it presents a systematic approach for what to do with those notes–including tracking any resulting commitments to oneself or others, and executing appropriate action and regular review in order to make one’s dreams more than just a scribble on a notepad.

So, in case I haven’t said it lately, thank you, David, for bringing this methodology into my life, helping me to bring appropriate focus and attention to the many different worlds I inhabit. The gift of being more present in my life is truly precious.

Quantified Aesthetics?

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Mechanical TurkNever before in human history has such potential existed for the large-scale digital analysis of text. Thanks to the Google search engine index of the world wide web, and the emerging Google Books project, which aims to index books, an enormous amount of text exists in indexed digital form, and this base is growing constantly. But the mechanisms by which digital texts and their indices are currently used to judge the relative quality, value, or meaning of a work of text are relatively crude as compared to how humans perceive and relate to text, and especially literature, which is text as art. This begs a chain reaction of questions: are there gains to be made in the fields of literature or linguistics by exploiting this digital base of text? Is it possible to derive aesthetic principles sufficiently logical to work as algorithms for the analysis of digital text? Would analysis based on such principles yield new insights into our relationship to language and literature? Could such analysis contribute toward something like a greater computational “understanding” of text, with implications for improving search engine results, speech recognition, and computerized translation? These questions fascinate me.
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Twitter, Revisited

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TwitterYou can find me on Twitter now. Yes, you read that right. Me. On Twitter.

As many readers know, I have been a Twitter agnostic for years. Which are centuries in Internet time.

And yet, slowly, I have come around. It started with Goodreads, then Facebook. And today, I discovered enough interesting poets on Twitter (via a reprint of a list originally compiled by Collin Kelley) to reach a tipping point.

There’s not too much difference between Twitter and the IRC chatrooms I frequented in the early ’90s, except that Twitter takes advantage of two new developments: hypertext and mobile devices. But the concept of short, syndicated conversations is basically the same.

I am a different person now than when I was an adolescent trying on virtual personae through clever quips and emoticons. So, why Twitter now? I suppose I re-joined Twitter for the same reason I read and write poetry, and the same reason I started this blog: to be a part of the conversation–about poetry, and life, and what makes us human.

Can a medium so inherently distractable provide such insight? Can we get the news from Twitter, if not from poetry? Will the signal-to-noise ratio prove worthwhile? There is only one way to find out. Commence Twitter experiment number two.

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

-Heraclitus

GTD® Summit

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GTD SummitI leave tomorrow for the inaugural GTD Summit in San Francisco. Think TED for knowledge workers. The sheer density of thought leaders per square inch is staggering. In particular, I am looking forward to seeing James Fallows, a writer-hero of mine, along with scores of technology, productivity, and innovation experts. This is going to be one seriously big party for deep thinkers.

What’s in a Name?

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Last night, I was ego surfing, and decided to check my Google rank for the keyword “Robert.” That’s right, just “Robert.” I have been in the top ten off and on, but last night this site actually came up higher than the blog of Robert Scoble.

I think this means I was momentarily famous. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel any different than before. By this morning, the effect wore off. I am now back under Scoble. Such are my thrills of late.

I also started up a stub page on Wikipedia for my googleganger, Robert Peake the Elder. Some art historian with a lot of spare time later went to town. Unfortunately, the Peake side of my family tree ends with my love-em-and-leave-em great-grandfather Peake. So, short of DNA testing (or some evidence that this painter had a double-jointed thumb), I’ll never know if we are related.

In Memory of Marc Orchant

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Marc Orchant
Photo by Brian Solis

I was saddened to read that technology journalist Marc Orchant passed away this afternoon, having been unconscious for several days following a major heart attack. I only met Marc once in person, but he struck me as vibrant, fit, and extremely likable. He is survived by his wife and two children. If you feel moved to help support them through what must be an incredibly challenging holiday time, details on making a donation are available here.

Marc’s was a lightning-quick creative intelligence and, coupled with his love of technology, made for stimulating conversation and insightful reading on ZDNet and, later, blognation. The blogosphere is abuzz with tributes to his memory. For my part, I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences to his family, and hope that they are buoyed up by the support of friends and family during this time.

An Experiment in Associative Navigation

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Linear navigation can be dull. Furthermore, it requires the person browsing to think like the person who organized the navigation–from distinctions between organizational models down to the structure of the hierarchy. (What, for example, on my own site, is the difference between a “category” and a “tag”? And why is “Humor” under “Poetry” but not “Technology” or “Life”?) I got to thinking about how to break down the artificial barrier between content tags and content categories, as well as how to organize concepts in a more intuitive manner than nested lists–and came up with the following navigation system for my site (requires Flash):

Basically, the navigator places a central topic in the middle, and arranges related topics (either categories or tags) around the central topic, using both proximity and text darkness to signify how often the related topics have appeared in the same articles as the central topic. The navigator displays a maximum of six related topics at a time, with left and right buttons on the side to step through additional related topics. Click on a related topic and it becomes the new central topic. Then click on the (blue, underlined) central topic to go to that category or tag page.

I have placed a miniature version of this experimental navigational system in the sidebar. It automatically detects category and tag pages in which it finds itself embedded, and displays them as the central topic. Hopefully, this will prove a useful means for visitors to browse through related topics on the site, and find new information without having to understand artificial concepts like categories and tags, or some relatively arbitrary hierarchy.

Social Networking Curmudgeon

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After a brief experiment with Twitter, I concluded that the trend toward quantity over quality being perpetuated by social network status updates wasn’t for me. In fact, it seemed downright unpoetic. Then, thanks to Jeanine’s site, I discovered Goodreads. Finally, a niche network with a purpose I could get behind: discussing books. The only other specialized social network I had signed up for in the past was LinkedIn. But that was about work. This is about books. Delicious books!

I even went so far as to set up a private group for other students, faculty and alumni in the Pacific University MFA program. I figure this could help provide an outlet that is missing from the low-residency format–the opportunity to chat throughout the semester with other students about what we are reading. The results of that experiment remain to be seen.

Shortly after that, however, softened by my recent joinerism, I caved in and signed up for Facebook. It seems I am of a certain generation such that if I want to keep up with some of my friends, I need to be on Facebook. So, there I am–to the chagrin and relief of my wife, who has been reconnecting with friends overseas for some time through Facebook and and attempting to impress its wonders upon me (“Look! I gave someone a garden gnome!”), and a number of friends who have invited me to join up at various times. OK, OK, I’m on–happily reviewing books, posting photos, and turning friends into zombies. How did I ever live without this? Curmudgeon no more.

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Linux Not on Board

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Our Air New Zealand Boeing 747 came with an in-flight entertainment system, including movies-on-demand and arcade games. A few rounds into Tetris, I managed to crash the system, complete with the classic Windows “application has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down” message.

I switched to chess, and beat the system on its “difficult” setting in about twenty moves. Apart from its opening book, the system was pathetic–it couldn’t spot a simple fork or think more than a few moves ahead. During the rematch, I got it into a somewhat complex situation, likely a forced checkmate in about ten moves. It hung there with an hourglass for a good twenty minutes, then coughed up a dialog box asking me which part of the system it ought to shut down in order to conserve memory. Honestly, some are incapable of accepting defeat.

After I selected the default option, the entire operating system crashed hard into a black screen and began rebooting. Not surprisingly, the boot screen proudly proclaimed Windows CE circa 2004, then began loading up files using the ancient Xmodem serial protocol. Finally, it booted itself back into friendly pictures of New Zealand coastline. I spent the rest of the flight hoping Microsoft hadn’t won the bid on the flight controls.

Bertrand Gugger: Qu’il Respose En Paix

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I was shocked to discover today that French PHP programmer Bertrand Gugger passed away last week due to a heart attack. Bertrand was co-lead on the Net_Monitor project with me, and contributed many valuable additions to the project, including all the SMS messaging support and end-to-end testing of European SMS messaging providers.

Bertrand was a character, to say the least. He was passionate about PHP and often had very strong opinions about how to write code well. This, combined with an imperfect grasp of English, often got him into trouble on the Pear Developer lists. Still, in the end, Bertrand and I always got along really well and he contributed some very valuable code to the Net_Monitor project as well as many other Pear projects. Whatever he did, he wanted to do right, and this commitment to writing high quality code–as well as a voracious interest in contributing to PHP development–will have implications and benefits for other PHP programmers for a long time to come.

Reading the news a week late on the Pear website drove home how little I have been involved with a community that used to be such a big part of my life. After James’s death, I began to refocus my life (and this website) on one of my original loves: poetry. And, with the growth of the company and my development team at work, I rarely delve in to actual PHP code these days.

That said, just the other day a new programmer signed on to the Net_Monitor project, and I am happy to see this work continue. Coding for love instead of money, giving something back to such an amazing community of talented programmers who have made so much possible for me in my own career and life–is a kind of lineage I have been proud to take part in. Bertrand was an important part of that lineage, right up to the end. He is survived by wife and children, who have my deepest sympathies now.

Que vous reposez en paix, Bertrand. You will be missed.