repeating descending sounds

I had this terrible dream, it must be because I had seen a bit of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory the day before, but I dreamt that the entire cast of the film were chasing after me, it was terrible, I must have been in a cold sweat, they were all running after me and trying to catch me, when suddenly I woke up and sat straight up, boy was I glad that I hadn't been caught by the oompah loompahs.

I've decided that there needs to be some more humour in this blog, so if I can think of any good jokes then I'll be sure to put them in.


One thing that I have been thinking about recently is that often poetry can have a sort of internal melody, if you take a line like
tyger tyger burning bright
and you check where your tongue is as you pronounce each syllable, then it is
high low, high low, high low, high

so even beyond the simple rhyme that you can have between lines, you can have an internal repetition.

Of course this probably quite a poor example, in that it repeats the same word twice, but one of my favourite lines of my own is
we passed quiet cities in the night
which I would translate as
middle low, high middle, high middle, high middle high

which is a sequence of repeating descending sounds.


I'll not elaborate any further as it does rather hurt my head to figure this out, and there is unfortunately no easy way to cheat and look it all up on the internet. Anyway it is something that I thought that it might be worth noting.


Going round the usual circuit of my favourite topics, I have been spending more time with Devonthink Pro, and experimenting with DevonAgent.

By way of clarification Devonthink Pro is difficult to describe, it could support a paperless office, or act as a personal wiki, or even just a repository for writing. It does actually combine a number of features from shareware products (do they still call them that) that I actually use, and have paid for,
for example
I could use it as a sort of wiki - like voodoopad
or to provide a whole screen solution for typing - like Writeroom.

On the other hand, DevonAgent will intelligently aggregate the results of internet searches from a number of search engines, weeding out duplications. It has a variety of different scripts for searching. It was dreadfully slow, and seemed rather pointless, but I figured out that I had it on the wrong one of these scripts, there is a pull down available at the start of the search box. Once fixed, it seemed to run just dandy. What with the recent MacSanta and sundry other online software purchases though, I'm trying to cut down, so I'll just let the very generous free tryout period for DevonAgent play out, and see if I still want it then. I have discovered that even if you don't actually cut down on your expenditure, if you can just manage to postpone it for a while, then it is almost as effective.

So I am now wondering whether I should spend my time aggregrating various writing into a Devonthink Pro database, rather than the current rather haphazard scheme where it is split up between various software applications.

However to be honest, I suspect that little of this stuff is so dazzzling that it worth adding yet more faffing about organising it, instead of just actually writing anything.

Accordingly, I'll probably just push on for the moment as is.

Work wise, I have been tidying up from my old job, ready for a new job. It is amazing how brutal one can be about handing over and deleting stuff when you know that you are moving on. The fact that we had a change of government has also meant that a lot of stuff from before May, is really of no use/interest any more.

Anyway, new job on Monday, so new challenges ahead. I guess that new challenges keep you young, or like new children, just perpetually knackered.