Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to skydancer!!! Have a great one!!

Songs for Saturday (a little late): The Rose

I'm not sure when or why I fell in love with The Rose; I was reminded of it about a year ago, when I followed a link to LeAnn Rimes performing "The Rose" with The Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles.

I quickly followed more links, and found these performances by Judy Collins and Joan Baez.

And, just for completeness, here's Bette Midler singing the version from the movie that everyone else thinks of. But the song wasn't written for the movie, and it was never sung by Janis Joplin.

Here's the real story, in songwriter Amanda McBroom's own words, and here's Amanda herself singing it. And here's a live performance. I think I like that one best.

Done recently (20110930 Fr - 1001 Sa)

Kind of a mixed couple of days -- a memorial service and a post that gets me all teary-eyed can do that. So can a defunct disk drive. On the other hand, I have a final determination on my current job title: Sr. Software Architect.

"Architect" makes me happy and comfortable, both because I consider programming to be one of the Useful Arts, like architecture, rather than an engineering discipline like civil engineering or a scientific ones like physics or materials science. Also, because I'm not really all that good a programmer anymore. I don't think I ever was. Sure, I can get programs written, but lots of other people are faster and more accurate at it. What I'm really good at, IMNSHO, is designing software systems in the first place, stringing existing programs together Unix-fashion with scripts and makefiles, and debugging (especially debugging other people's code).

The memorial service? Paul Metz (kshandra says it better than I could). The article that made me tear up? DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #44: How You Get Unstuck.

As an experiment, I'm putting the notes at the bottom so that if you follow a link directly to the post, you won't have them at the top of the page. Let me know what you think of that.

( raw notes )