new toy

SOA, Virtualization, and Exteria

This is a great quote from Information Week that relates to one of the products I sell, an integration/soa platform:

"What virtualization does for hardware, SOA does for software. Programmers need no longer develop each application separately; SOA lets them build apps from simple services that can be used over and over. Those programmers are, increasingly, business analysts who use model-based development environments and never have to write a line of code."

The Bear, a poem by Galway Kinnell

"The way upward and the way downward are the same."
1. p.89. Fr.60

Diels: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Herakleitos)

a nice quote from the beginning of Four Quartets. Here is a great poem:

The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
1 In late winter I sometimes glimpse bits of steam coming up from some fault in the old snow and bend close and see it is lung-colored and put down my nose and know the chilly, enduring odor of bear. 2 I take a wolf's rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears. And when it has vanished I move out on the bear tracks, roaming in circles until I come to the first, tentative, dark splash on the earth. And I set out running, following the splashes of blood wandering over the world. At the cut, gashed resting places I stop and rest, at the crawl-marks where he lay out on his belly to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice I lie out dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists. 3 On the third day I begin to starve, at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would at a turd sopped in blood, and hesitate, and pick it up, and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down, and rise and go on running. 4 On the seventh day, living by now on bear blood alone, I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled, steamy hulk, the heavy fur riffling in the wind. I come up to him and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes, the dismayed face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils flared, catching perhaps the first taint of me as he died. I hack a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink, and tear him down his whole length and open him and climb in and close him up after me, against the wind, and sleep. 5 And dream of lumbering flatfooted over the tundra, stabbed twice from within, splattering a trail behind me, splattering it out no matter which way I lurch, no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence, which dance of solitude I attempt, which gravity-clutched leap, which trudge, which groan. 6 Until one day I totter and fall— fall on this stomach that has tried so hard to keep up, to digest the blood as it leaked in, to break up and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze blows over me, blows off the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood and rotted stomach and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear, blows across my sore, lolled tongue a song or screech, until I think I must rise up and dance. And I lie still. 7 I awaken I think. Marshlights reappear, geese come trailing again up the flyway. In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear lies, licking lumps of smeared fur and drizzly eyes into shapes with her tongue. And one hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me, the next groaned out, the next, the next, the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?
From A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, published by Houghton Mifflin. © 2000 by Galway Kinnell. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

a song

A great song, maybe it's about me right before this latest breakup:

New Order, Regret

Maybe Ive forgotten the name and the address
Of everyone Ive ever known
Its nothing I regret
Save it for another day
Its the school exam and the kids have run away

I would like a place I could call my own
Have a conversation on the telephone
Wake up every day that would be a start
I would not complain of my wounded heart

I was upset you see
Almost all the time
You used to be a stranger
Now you are mine

I wouldn't even trust you
Ive not got much to give
Were dealing in the limits
And we don't know who with
You may think that I'm out of hand
That I'm naive, I'll understand
On this occasion, its not true
Look at me, I'm not you

I would like a place I could call my own
Have a conversation on the telephone
Wake up every day that would be a start
I would not complain of my wounded heart

I was a short fuse
Burning all the time
You were a complete stranger
Now you are mine

I would like a place I could call my own
Have a conversation on the telephone
Wake up every day that would be a start
I would not complain about my wounded heart

Just wait till tomorrow
I guess thats what they all say
Just before they fall apart