DrBacchus' Journal

A sestina is a poetic form. It consists of six-line stanzas, with each stanza's lines ending in the same six words, in a different order for each stanza. Then there is a final stanza, called the envoi, in which each line contains two of the six words.

You can see examples of sestinas here, or provide your own six words to see what form comes out.

It is incredibly hard to write a sestina that doesn't sound forced, and hardly anybody ever manages it. A really good sestina, when read aloud, is not immediately identifiable as a sestina. It just sounds like there's a rhythm in there, but you can't quite place it until you read it that third or fourth time, and see it on a page.

Most sestinas, however, work for the first stanza, and possibly the second, but after that you feel that the author is just saying any old nonsense just to stay in the form.

Sestinas work best when they are about a repetitive topic. Examples might be a child's game, or an addiction, or a daily event. So I thought that the latest topic on Inspire Me Thursday - Breath - would be ideal for it. Unfortunately, so far, it just sounds like, after the first stanza, I'm merely babbling to fit the form.

I've had a really hard time writing lately. Everything feels forced, both fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. I keep hoping that if I force it long enough, it'll start to flow. But the pump refuses to be primed.

The longer I work in software, the more convinced I am that the term "computer science" is mostly hogwash, as it applies to software development. Writing software is a lot more like writing a story than it is like baking a cake or doing qualitative analysis of soil samples. Given the same task, 3 programmers will do it 5 different ways, and each will have its unique beauty, its unique ugliness, and its unique ways to solve the tricky problems that come up along the way.

I'm lucky enough to work with some folks who have very creative ways to solve problems, rather than cut-and-pasting someone else's solution.

And it never ceases to amaze me how every industry, no matter how stodgy or boring of itself, provides opportunities for unique creative expression. And no matter how much experience I have, I keep encountering folks with far less experience, but far more creativity and talent. I firmly believe in the old adage that one should hire people smarter than oneself.

The Wilmore Daily Photo is now on City Daily Photo.

While the Jeep was getting fixed, someone went into it and forced open the center console where I had, among other assorted junk, my ancient GPS receiver. I bought it in the early days, when GPS technology was first available to civilians. I paid an enormous amount of money for it, and, by today's standards, it hardly did anything at all. But it kept me sane for a couple years, giving me something to do in those endless days and hours.

This weekend, we went up to spend some time with Skippy, and while there, I found a refurbished TomTom One for about half of what they're going for new, and we snapped it up. I'm completely blown away by what a low-end device like this can do. It's got street-level maps of the entire USA. It does turn-by-turn routing, and reroutes if you choose to ignore its advice. It tells you where the nearest restaurants are. And all sorts of other useful things.

So, today, after more than 3 years of not Geocaching at all, we went out and found four caches, and did maintenance on one of mine that's been disabled for a while. It looks like we might get back into geocaching again, which would be cool. I've enjoyed it for a long time, just my schedule the last few years has made it very difficult to make time for it.

Yesterday I took off work a little early and we drove up to Columbus, OH, to have dinner in Skippy's back yard. Everyone else there was folks from the area - folks that he's known for many, many years. Bob said he'd known him since he was three. Some of the other folks were friends from college.

I always love visiting Columbus. It is an enormous place with a small town feel - restaurants and stores within walking distance, friendly neighborhoods, and such great people.