My compy returned home today

I know you have all been waiting in suspense for news of my computer.

(Except of course for those of you who hadn’t heard. A week ago saturday, shortly after posting those fascinating slides about discourse segmentation, my screen went fuzzy and froze. Upon rebooting, the screen went black. In anguish I cried, “Is there a doctor in the house?” To no avail. Alas! Monday, after the time of mourning had passed, I took it down to the local Apple Store, and sent it away for repairs. At least they were free. I have been alternating between an old 300MHz celeron tower I had almost sent to the graveyard, and the computers down at school.)

So, today my compy was returned to me. They reformated my hard drive, as they said they might. I had backed up a lot of things a month or so ago, and I had the forsight to backup my main documents before taking it in, but I have still lost many applications, a few photos, a movie clip or two, my mail history, my music, and sundry other bits of my life. The moral of the story is: do frequent backups, even if you’re not in the habit of killing computers.

Quote of the Day

This sentence appears without warning as if it there were no sarcasm involved:
“By eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the circumscriptional appelations are excised.”

Mann, W. and Thompson, S. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: Towards a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3):243–281.

This paper, unfortunately, seems to only dip into humor with this one line, and then continues on in language that one could mistake for obfuscatory verbosity.

planted things

humanity has subdued the earth —
plowed it under, paved it over,
permitted things to grow
only where they are planted.
trees, like fences and lane markers,
grow in straight lines.
cholla and yucca and poppies
grow only in forgotten plots
hidden in canyons, fenced off.
i ask you, who asked the palms
to grow where they do?
the eucalyptus trees and junipers?
no one.
each plant —
the eucalyptus and the poppie —
grows where it finds itself,
takes root in the dirt it’s given.
there is a certain wisdom there.
but i think i’m glad
i’m not a plant.