19 Jul 2005
By German poet, Georg Heym, written at some point in the early 20th century (or maybe very late 19th C.), that doesn’t appear to be anywhere online (despite being on several university reading lists).
The midnight cities cower underfoot;
The demons trample through the urban graves;
Their skipper-beards, a sprout of smoke and soot,
Bristle like chins of Charons needing shaves.
Creeping on fog-shoes where the pavement drowses
And crawling forward slowly room by room,
Their shadows waver over waves of houses
And gobble street-lights in the black gulps of gloom.
Their knees are kneeling on the city towers,
Their feet make footstools of the city squares,
And where the rain strews down its bleakest flowers
Their stormy pipe of Pan rears up and blares.
Around their feet each city’s dark refrain
Is circling like a rondo of the waters.
An ode to death. Now faint, now shrill again,
The dirge ebbs into darkness till it falters.
The stream they stroll on is a snaky glow,
Its dim back speckled by the yellow glimmer
The lanterns – blanketed in the black-out – throw.
The melancholy reptile wallows.
Their weight falls heavy on a bridge’s railing
Each time their hands fall heavy into swarms
Of urban flesh, as if some faun were flailing
Across a slimy swamp his outstretched arms.
Now one stands up. He hangs a ghoul’s black mask
On the white moon. The leaden heavens spill
Down darkly from a heaven darker still,
Crushing the houses in a jet-black cask.
A snapping sound. A city’s backbone splits.
A roof cracks open, reddening its rent
With arson. Demons squat on it like cats
And ululate into the firmament.
A spawning mother bawls where midnight billows;
The steep crescendo of each labour pang
Arches her brawny pelvis from its pillows;
Around her the enormous devils throng.
She’s tossed yet anchored. Overhead, her bed’s
Whole ceiling shakes with howlings of the tortured.
Red furrow – redder; longer. Now the orchard
Brings forth the fruit. It rips her womb to shreds.
The devil’s necks are growing like giraffes’.
The baby has no head. The mother lugs
It with her till she faints; a devil laughs;
Her spine is tickled by cold thumbs of frogs.
Tossing their horns, the demons grow so tall
They gash the very sky for blood to plunder.
Through laps of cities roars their earthquake-thunder
While lightning sizzles where their hoofbeats fall.
Another version reads thus:
They wander through the cities night enshrouds:
The cities cower, black, beneath their feet.
Upon their chins like sailors’ beards the clouds
Are black with curling smoke and sooty sleet.
On seas of houses their long shadow sways
And snuffs ranked street-lamps out, as with a blow.
Upon the pavement, thick as fog, it weighs,
And gropes from house to house, solid and slow.
With one foot planted on a city square,
The other knee upon a tower, they stand,
And where the black rain falls they rear, with blare
Of quickened Pan’s-pipes in a cloud-stormed land.
About their feet circles a ritornelle
With the sad music of the city’s sea,
Like a great burying-song. The shrill tones swell
And rumble in the darkness, changefully.
They wander to the stream that, dark and wide,
As a bright reptile with gold-spotted back,
Turns in the lanterned dark from side to side
In its sad dance, while heaven’s stare is black.
They lean upon the bridge, darkly agog,
And thrust their hands among the crowds that pass,
Like fauns who perch above a meadow bog
And plunge lean arms into the miry mass.
Now one stands up. He hangs a mask of gloom
Upon the white-cheeked moon. The night, like lead
From the dun heavens, settles as a doom
On houses into pitted darkness fled.
The shoulders of the cities crack. A gleam
Of fire from a roof burst open flies
Into the air. Big-boned, on the top beam
They sit and scream like cats against the skies.
A little room with glimmering shadows billows
Where one in labor shrieks her agony.
Her body lifts gigantic from the pillows.
And the huge devils stand about to see.
She clutches, shaking, at her torture-bed.
With her long shuddering cry the chamber heaves.
Now the fruit comes. Her womb gapes long and red,
And bleeding, for the child’s last passage cleaves.
The devils’ necks grow like giraffes’. The child
Is born without a head. The mother moans
And holds it. On her back, clammy and wild,
The frog-fingers of fear play, as she swoons.
But vast as giants now the demons loom.
Their horns in fury gore the bleeding skies.
An earthquake thunders in the cities’ womb
About their hooves, where flint-struck fires rise.
19 Jul 2005
Just to get bandwidth utilisation back to normal, or something ;) The file is 14424 pixels wide, and 407 high. It’s been manually stitched, and isn’t too bad, given I shot the sequence in under two minutes with no great degree of accuracy. 623KB JPEG. Click the image above to be taken to a full size version of the photograph.
If you do happen to click through, note the cloud of smoke spreading from the bushfires! It looks even cooler in these photos:
This one reminds me of the spreading cloud of darkness around… that bad place in Lord of the Rings (I’ve read it, but only endured the first movie–no, I’m not a fan, sorry world). Only it’s not quite so dark. But it reminds me of it anyway. Picture Lord of the Rings with an ugly damn and some sheds in it, or something (I couldn’t satisfactorily crop it, sorry!)…
I’m convinced it looks like there are mushroom clouds in this one… but… there’s not. Looks like explosions in the distance, but the colour (once tweaked a bit) comes out nicely in the photo, in my opinion.
18 Jul 2005
At approximately 22:09, web services came back online near-completely. This weblog should be functioning perfectly, though there’s a few quirky things happening around the place which will be attended to as quickly as possible.
Hi again. Glad I figured out how to take off that lens cap… (and thanks, Michael, for getting stuff sorted out!)
Update, July 19: Michael has posted briefly about it, apparently there’s more to come, though.
…And I’ve learnt to use the <code><INS></code> tag!</ins>
Now, we’ve got (slightly less pot-bellied than the one pictured) VIKINGS to protect us with their <abbr title="Redundant Array of Independent Drives">RAID</abbr>!! Tis exciting times indeed! Yarrr!
Okay, so we don’t have vikings. We do, however, have a redundant array of independent drives, which is <em>nearly</em> as exciting as those piratical Scandinavians…
17 Jul 2005
This message was originally posted on a temporary “outage” page, hosted at an alternate location. It is retained here for archival purposes. The timestamp has been altered to reflect this fact.
An update
Sun, 17 Jul 2005 11:15:27 +0000
There is now a server back up, official status updates can be found here.
It turned out this wasn’t the normal server–I’d assumed it wouldn’t be–but Michael did provide updates online from that point onwards (though mailing list reports were both more comprehensive and frequent).
15 Jul 2005
This message was originally posted on a temporary “outage” page, hosted at an alternate location. It is retained here for archival purposes. The timestamp has been altered to reflect this fact.
Technical Difficulties
Due to a hard drive failure at approximately 5AM EST today, this website will be offline for a period of at least two days.
The web server is maintained by Michael Dale, and the hosting of this website is provided free of charge using his own resources. My personal website has been hosted there since the end of February 2004, and for nearly a year and a half uptime has rivalled that of servers sitting in datacenters.
This, in and of itself, is hardly unimpressive. However, when you consider this has been achieved with only a “consumer-grade†ADSL connection and open source software, the quality of service—especially a service provided pro bono—is brilliant.
StreetComputing will return shortly, with the same host, running the same software.
In the interim, this holder page is temporarily being hosted by base10solutions, a web-development and multimedia company for which I work.
What does this mean for this website?
As stated already, this website will remain hosted by Michael for as long as he is willing. However, as a result of the failure of a hard drive, a small amount of information has been lost.
Whilst database backups are automatically made by the server daily, I have been a little lax with backing up files. Consequently, a small number of images assoicated with posts have been lost. This only affects some posts, identified as the following:
- Why not to use prebuilt templates;
- H.264 scares me;
- If I swam, and;
- On rails
I hope to have replacement content for these posts in the near future. Until this content is prepared, the posts will continue to be available (when the server is again live), albeit without visual content.
Michael’s announcement
The following was sent via email to web hosting users.
Subject: [dg-support] Hard Drive Failure
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 06:56:54 +1000
The hard drive in the web server (metro) died this morning at about 5am. Unfortunately I am leaving to the Hunter Valley in 10 minutes and do not have time to look at it. I will be back on saturday and will start looking into the problem then.
I do not know what the state of the drive is. I’ve never had a Seagate drive die on me.
The last backup of mysql databases was today at 3am and home directories on the 8th of this month. I do not know if I can recover any data from the hard drive.
Please expect the webserver to be offline for at least 2 days, although a full rebuild may take much longer.
Very very sorry about this.
During this time email will continue to work as it is handled on a different server.
Please email me if you have any concerns.
Thank you,
Michael Dale
