Monday 28 February 2011

Code is not poetry, Wordpress

Wordpress.org has a slogan - Code is Poetry.
As a web developer, I thought that it was cool when I first saw it, then ignored it, pretty much.  But after writing a piece recently - a song - I started thinking about it.  I thought about all the poems I have written and then compared it to the code I have written.  I think I have come to my conclusion on the issue. Code is not poetry - but poetry can be code. The purpose of poetry is to encapsulate emotion. To create emotional bullets. Code does not. It does not contain an emotional punchline as you can find in most poems.  Songs can be poetry. Comedy can be poetry. Rants, rhymes and curses can all be poetry.  Code can be concise, precise and efficient - which some people may call beautiful, but it does not evoke an empathetic response in the reader and enhance the sense of human unity through shared emotional experiences - like poetry does.  Code is code, Wordpress, and even all your popularity and all the many pageviews by all your many daily users cannot turn that slogan into truth - or code into poetry.

Grateful Today: for the rainbow I saw through the rain while driving the highway to work. (Not a double rainbow, but I have seen one of those as well.  If you have never heard about the Double Rainbow YouTube thing, click here for more. )

Thursday 24 February 2011

Songwriting while driving?

I know you are not supposed to drive and talk on your cell phone, but
what about driving down the 401 singing and recording it on your
Blackberry? Well, I was only going 20 km in bumper-to-bumper traffic,
so it's not as bad as it sounds. Crows cawing as I write this, yeah.
So, I wrote these lyrics long ago and could never come up with a melody
to go with them - until today - and it happened to happen as I was
driving on the 401.
They go like this:
"Change is the only constant in life,
Forget the past, it only brings strife,
Move with the moment, learn how to dance,
Tomorrow's a dream. Today is your chance."
So, I had to record it before it got away - like the scent of a passing
woman's perfume.
No wonder I am not good at the high-profile jobs I always manage to get
myself into. When I focus on the job, I am great, "always on" and just
what everybody wants me to be, but as soon as I figure out how to do the
job and it gets to be second nature, I start songwriting in between
tasks and then juggling gets tough. But I can't help it. I am a
songwriter first. Everything else is really just the things I have to do
to maintain a life of status quo.