Binding a Shropshire Lad

Impaled Reader,

While on your way to hospital for what surely is an extravagantly acquired wound, allow me to blog a little.

I have for some time needed a pocket-book of poetry, something that I could have at hand to read when I had a moment. For some time I’d had it in mind to bind myself a small copy of A Shropshire Lad and leave it at that, but I ended up creating a slightly more eclectic volume.



In the end, I used a lovely piece of soft blue leather that, if the receipt pasted on the back was anything to go by, is already almost two decades old. A perfect mixture of a soft, thin leather with a very light grain. The binding itself, detailed with gold tooling, is very reminiscent of the plainer bindings of the 1730s and 40s that followed the fall in popularity of colonial paneled bindings of the previous forty years. (I plan to make a colonial binding very shortly, kindest reader, and that may certainly appear here at some point.)

It also turns out that my phone does not have a great camera.

Some Prose for Those who Suppose that Programmers are not Verbose

Gleaning Reader,

Verbose by no means equates to good, enjoyable, or interesting.

I wrote this close to 1am as an exercise in prose, and if it needed an apology then I wouldn’t post it, so I shall make none.

Some Prose for Those who Suppose that Programmers are not Verbose
Written shortly before a dose.

What is the point in programming? It often strikes me just how temporary a thing programming is, an art form that is gone and forgotten far easier than any other creation I can really think of. It is also such a fast paced thing, a piece of code you write in the morning could be out of date by the end of the day, and that’s if you’re lucky. Imagine an artist at his easel with his paints dulled before he could finish his canvas, or a rhetorician unable to finish his speech, for the practice and customs of his language had changed since he began.

That is the excellent thing about programming, but worse – far worse – for the artist at least has a dulled painting that shall stand the testament of his day spent working upon it. And a man gifted in rhetoric shall have his words remembered and one day enjoyed again. What, then, is the testament of programming?

Has a programmer created something that will stand the test of time? Surely not, the great world of excellent work will quickly turn over and bring up better things and forget what was there before. There is no store cupboard filled with dusty lines of code, no collectors nor museums for bits and bytes. There are no ruins, no ashes, no shards to reflect upon. A great architect may be remembered by the tumbled stones of a mighty abbey, some sculptor recalled in the shattered ashes of ancient Pompeii. The trophies of thousands of lost hours that could be recalled, if one could but reminisce over the delete button.

But then, what is programming? Do we program to create beautiful lines of code to be adored and remembered? Surely not. Programming is the expression of an idea, the creation of a solution. Programming is one of those excellent practices that can help many, that can freely be shared with any, something that is bound only by the hardware it resides in; in a world where hardware is as common as software, or where they may become one and the same thing, information could be entirely free.

Programming, then, may not be a long standing art form, nor one that anyone is likely to care for beyond its useful lifetime, but it is a step to freedom where in the past the cost of materials have blocked access for so many. Hardware may not be free, but programming, the truly important heart behind a million new innovations every day, is free, and by this freedom anyone can create an idea and build one more better thing in the ever turning world, and hopefully make it turn that little more kindly.

That, surely, is reason to program, even if the particular lines of code spent muddling over for hours, the brush strokes of software, are themselves in moments forgotten.

Yep, I made a CV Generator

Discerning Reader,

Unaccustomed as this misguided space of internet may have been to blog posts these last few months, I just gone done me something, so I pray, kind reader, you enjoy:

Recently I decided how excellent it would be to convey to employers just how great you are. Yes, kind reader, you may be great, but how does one show off that greatness to others who will pay you to stand there and continue being great?

For such an excellent purpose, I built my new and illustrious CV Generator, which, after no more than a moment’s work, will generate a CV that will doubtless lead you to success*.

> > Generate Me a CV < <

*any success you may experience may or may not be related to the Illustrious CV Generator™. By ‘doubtless lead’ it is purely suggested that you may one day end up at a moment further ahead in time than this moment, nothing more.