POEM OF THE WEEK

Sleep, Darling

Sleep, darling
I have a small
daughter called
Cleis, who is

like a golden
flower
I wouldn't
take all Croesus'
kingdom with love
thrown in, for her.

Sappho

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TOOL REVIEW

I read that Ray Ozzie has called Google "the command line of the Internet" in comparison to Microsoft's Live.com. As a reviewer of tools for writers,I decided to take each for a spin.

Using the key word "fairy", Google came up with 31,200,000 entries for a search and 718,000 for images with a strict safe search. Live.com came up with 16,536,053 results in search and 510,604 in images. In terms of flexibility, Google has easier search perimeters if one wants to search for black and white, or colour, or grayscale images. Live.com does not have the same focused search. Furthermore, Live.com has a scrolling bar that is clunky to use. There is a feature of dragging and saving to a scratch board but I usually save the images to my hard drive and use Picasa web albums or copy and e-mail the images.

In Live.com results for fairy related books, I obtained 9,353 results. In Google,3073. I still had to deal with the scrolling bar which is annoying.


In the final analysis, Google gets the thumbs up. For Live.com:Ctrl, Alt, Delete.

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POEM OF THE WEEK

Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day

My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.
The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves, beneath them, are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.

I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing
The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;
I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,
And hear the wild roar of their thunder today!

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Anne Bronte

TOOL REVIEW

PLEASE SEE MY UPDATE ON THIS REVIEW

I have a new web tool that I am testing to write this blog. It's called Performancing and is available at the Mozilla Add-On Site.

Excellent! It's a simple WYSIWYG blog editor and works like a charm. Much better than anything that I have done with WordPress which can be a pain.



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NECESSARY THINGS

NATIONAL COALITION
AGAINST CENSORSHIP

This is one of the organizations necessary to our survival as writers. We may write but the words are in limbo if no one may read our novels, our essays, our poetry, or our plays.

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WHAT I AM READING NOW

On occasion,I'll share what I am reading off-line. More fodder for my book diary.

The Original Jesus: The Buddhist Sources of Christianity by Elmar R. Gruber and Holger Kersten.

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FROM THE BOOK DIARY

The Pillow Book

(Author: Sei Shonagon)

On occasion,I'll share what I have read off-line from my book diary, sometimes with additional commentary.

Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book/Penguin Books 1967. I found this in an old books store in Vancouver BC. Had been looking for this for AGES.

Original Commentary: "The Pillow Book is an interesting bit of Heian court life, albeit not representing the larger culture of the time".

Additional: In other words,The Pillow Book was basically like when I went to an exhibit of Hermitage art at the Frye Gallery a few years ago. I went there to see the Vigee Le Brun paintings but was very disappointed. It was patronage art which was stilted in its composition, stuffy in its muted stately colours of ermine and regal blue, and altogether soulless in the attitude of the era's pre-revolutionary smugness. I much preferred the work of Zhi Lin an artist who painted life under early Communist China. He captured on the canvas the horrible atrocities that still happen in China today. The work was alive and realistic in its pain and blood, not posed and sanitary like the Hermitage paintings or The Pillow Book

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USEFUL THINGS

LinkedIn is a business networking site that offers job searches and international networking.

I use this site frequently to make employment and business connections, to keep up with present clients, to find employment, and to exchange knowledge within my specialties of freelance writing and education.

LinkedIn is a must for business owners and prospective employees.

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FAVOURITE THINGS

I decided to pull a post, Diary of a Young Girl, because when I began to read latter portions of the book, I found passages that were anti-Semitic. I could have left the link as a historical artifact, but I do not feel comfortable in promoting even historical hatred. I will find a substitute in the following weeks.

NOTE: DATED JULY 2, 2008: The book was written by a Viennese psychologist, Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth not by a teenager.



A French Wiki entry definitely states that the book is a fake.

---Anne

USEFUL THINGS

Harvestfield.ca is one of my favourite sites for clip art.

I must admit that I am addicted to this site. It is very useful for black and white clip art. I use some of the graphics on this blog and highly recommend it for design use.

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BEST THINGS

Freelance Writing.com is a great site for many links to a variety of freelance work opportunities. Sign up for their Tuesday Morning Coffee which is a digest of current jobs.

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KNOWING YOUR LIMITS

Wise Moves In The Profession

Recently, I turned down a gig to translate a lifestyle entrepreneur's fifteen page manuscript from English into French. I am not having much of a go with the translation business. Sigh... It was one of those dubious health and wealth peddlers whom I do not trust to have my best interests at heart. Especially after I did a little research and the person's website was down. Yeah.

Part of writing is giving oneself a good pace. It is also important to reflect on what creates moral value and what does not. Is it more important to push a dubious product or to create something poetic? In the long view, poetry or a finely crafted novel is of more ethical value than a get-rich-immediate scheme.

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