Randomly through my searching last night, I ran across an old gem in Barry, Wales
Which leads, appropriately, to this:
Run – Stephen Fretwell
Category: love
Verses Three
Il Dolce Suono
Italian
Il dolce suono mi colpì di sua voce!
Ah, quella voce m’è qui nel cor discesa!
Edgardo! io ti son resa. Edgardo! Ah! Edgardo, mio! Si’, ti son resa!
fuggita io son da’ tuoi nemici. (nemici)
Un gelo me serpeggia nel sen!
trema ogni fibra!
vacilla il piè!
Presso la fonte meco t’assidi alquanto! Si’, Presso la fonte meco t’assidi.
Ohimè, sorge il tremendo fantasma e ne separa!
Qui ricovriamo, Edgardo, a piè dell’ara.
Sparsa è di rose!
Un’armonia celeste, di’, non ascolti?
Ah, l’inno suona di nozze!
Il rito per noi s’appresta! Oh, me felice!
Oh gioia che si sente, e non si dice!
Ardon gl’incensi!
Splendon le sacre faci, splendon intorno!
Ecco il ministro!
Porgimi la destra!
Oh lieto giorno!
Al fin son tua, al fin sei mio,
a me ti dona un Dio.
Ogni piacer più grato,
mi fia con te diviso
Del ciel clemente un riso
la vita a noi sarà.
English
The sweet sound of his voice struck me!
Ah, that voice has entered my heart!
Edgardo! I surrender to you, oh my Edgardo!
I have escaped from your enemies.
A chill creeps into my breast!
Every fibre trembles!
My foot falters!
Sit down by the fountain with me a while!
Alas, the tremendous phantom arises and separates us!
Let us take refuge here, Edgardo, at the foot of the altar.
It is scattered with roses!
A heavenly harmony, tell me, do you not hear it?
Ah, the marriage hymn is playing!
They are preparing the rite for us! Oh, how happy I am!
Oh joy that is felt but not said!
The incense is burning!
The holy torches are shining, shining around!
Here is the minister!
Give me your right hand!
Oh joyful day!
At last I am yours, at last you are mine,
A god gives you to me.
Let me share
The greatest pleasures with you,
Life for us will be
A smile from merciful heaven.
Invictus
Out of the night which covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
The Destruction of Sennacherib
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.
O Fortuna
Original
O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem,
egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.
Sors immanis
et inanis,
rota tu volubilis,
status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,
obumbrata
et velata
michi quoque niteris;
nunc per ludum
dorsum nudum
fero tui sceleris.
Sors salutis
et virtutis
michi nunc contraria,
est affectus
et defectus
semper in angaria.
Hac in hora
sine mora
corde pulsum tangite;
quod per sortem
sternit fortem,
mecum omnes plangite!
Translation
O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.
Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.
Fate is against me
in health
and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me!
Wikipedia, oh Wikipedia
Over the years whenever I have a pending question I typically consult with the one true book of user-engorged world knowledge: Wikipedia.
Some things are just too awesome to keep around as tidbits of knowledge.
List of jōyō kanji, Clint Mansell, Dunning–Kruger effect, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Defence mechanisms, Utilitarianism, Japanese honorifics, Oxytocin, Scala & Kolacny Brothers, Rule 34, Cambrian explosion, McGurk effect, Trilateration, Net (polyhedron), Deus ex machina, Dolce Vita. Mpemba effect, Benford’s law, Ignorantia juris non excusat, Miller–Urey experiment, Drinking Bird, Traveler’s diarrhea, Sisyphus, Food Play, Kopi Luwak, List of highest-certified music artists in the United States, Mount Roraima, Scopolamine, Surrogates, Tila Tequila, List of Metalocalypse episodes, Jennifer’s Body, Lists of Colors, Doraemon, My Neighbor Totoro, Grave of the Fireflies, Godannar
Upgrades and good grades
What is now:
15:39:17 up 5:27, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.01
Ah, the uptime. One of the things we aspire to make as large as possible, and love every minute of it.
I did do a reboot today due to a mass of updates that I’ve lacked to do for 250+ days. Regardless, it’s a fresh uptime, and i’ll go with that.
With all these mass updates included SSL attacks such as poodle and heartbleed. I don’t typically run my server on https for public facing stuff, but right now I do for specific URLs and all that is presented is a self-signed certificate. You can go ahead and try https://www.unliterate.net to get the typical browser warnings.
So, with all the updates ssllabs SSL Server Test has given me a “T” (or A-), which I’m pretty proud of after reconfiguring. Maybe I’ll end up buying that cheap SSL cert and going for broke.
What used to be:
I happened to get really curious and find out if some old websites and documents existed from when I was originally fumbling around computers myself. Lo and behold, yes, I found ’em.
RBIL / Ralf Browns Interrupt List (wikipedia, cmu)
The de-facto bread and butter of my machine language learning. For every piece of hardware that downloaded its ROM into RAM, or any software that made hooks into the IVT, this list was just awesome.
I can’t recall how I located it back in the day, but what I do remember is that I was excited to get the updates to it online. Back in the modem days i’d wait upwards to 5 minutes to download 1 of the zip files, and then maybe an entire minute to load one of the text files into Windows 95’s notepad.
This list also got me into direct port access programming. Some of the interrupts and combinations needed for RS232 programming seemed slow to me, especially when trying to go faster than 9600 baud, so I had to turn to a different reference to learn to actually drive the serial controller.
Beyond Logic (retired)
Craig Peacock wrote awesome manuals on how to talk to the RS232 controller (specifically the 8250 and 16450/16550 UARTS), and also the Parallel Ports as well. It wasn’t until I read his manual about the parallel ports that realized that the bidirectional capability had quite a faster transfer rate over the cable than serial. His manuals helped deepened my knowledge on “how things worked”, cause who wouldn’t wanna know how things worked.
PHG Opcode (phg.chat.ru)
From Ralf Browns INTERRUP.LSTs came OPCODE.LST, which was a separate list created and maintained by Alex Potemkin. This list itself, when read entirely, gives you so much in-depth knowledge on how a processor works. From Intel and AMD, to Cyrix, you got instruction times, bugs, incompatibilities, and more than the whole nine yards. It was from this that I understood that 0F A2 means “Identity Yourself!”
From my memory this actually used to be at www.chat.ru/~phg, but as times change URLs have to change.
In a nutshell:
It’s been 20+ years that I’ve been using a keyboard and digging into computer guts, both software and hardware. I’ve been in and out of technology-related occupations, stepped into many hats, and accomplished so much, and I feel good about it.
Sometimes it feels good to take a step back and wonder how you got there, cause all you see is the progress you’ve had and know there is more to accomplish.
Numerical Nuptuals
I’ve been known for knowing when things have some rhythm or pattern to them.
#1 was 10/23/04 to 7/8/9, all unnaturally sequential in the sense of m/d/y
#2 was 1/15/14 to 2/29/16, the leap year Divorce, a 1:1461 chance every 4 years. And yes, there is also the “15 minus 1 equals 14” equation, too, but I believe that’s a pick-and-choose.
now, #3, occurring on 3/11/17, is all riddled with primes:
- 3, 11, 17 are all prime numbers
- The combinations of 311, 113, and 1117 are prime numbers as well.
- albeit 31117 is not prime (29 2 • 37, the m/d/y format), 11317 is prime in the ordered set of d/m/y
The “prime” wedding, to say the least.