Day: February 7, 2007

1849
by Kelly Chapman (copyright 2007) 🙂

It was in 1849
that the miners went to mine
they lived in camps
on the river banks
And there they mined for gold. For shining, shimmering gold.

Then blow ye winds hi-ho, they sang
For Californ-i-o, they sang
There’s plenty of gold so I’ve been told on the banks of the Sacramento.
And then they mined for gold. For shining, shimmering gold

And there in the old boom town
they grew old, stooping, brown
with large straw hats
and red bare backs
But still they mined for gold. For shining, shimmering gold.

Some did not find their prize
In it’s gold-yellow guise
But “I’ll always” said they
above the donkey’s bray
“I’ll always mine for gold. For shining, shimmering gold.”

It was kind of a corny poem you know? But I liked it. So in my poetry yesterday I was learning about titles and how they work with the poem and I read a poem called Dream? It was really cool. And then I had to write a poem. They gave me several choices on what to write it on but the one I chose was: A. Write a poem that is hard to understand without the title. Maybe my poem is pretty easy to understand. It’s not really deep or anything and you can rhyme just about anything with ‘ing’. So here’s the title: Neighborhood

Here are the last two lines. I made another one up this morning. Be warned. Its rather cheesy. I couldn’t find anything good that rhymed with neighborhood:

These are the sounds of a Neighborhood. Some are bad and some are good.
Hear them well or hear them not. But I will hear them, it’s all I got(have). 😀

Maybe the last line was…different but… I liked my poem. No one should contradict me in this. You eventually hear anyone of those sounds or see those actions in a neighborhood. But right now it is quite outside and I need to get to work. Does anyone have any inspirations for a new poem?

Some of you know that Christian is studying C# programming.  He has finished his first tutorials and is moving on to a book called Beginning C# Game Programming.  In the past, I have talked about boolean algebra with him.  Ever since he heard the term, he has wanted to know about it.  Well, last night, he wrote the following as a blog comment:

In my programming, I am starting to run into things like And, For, Or, and Xor. Can you explain these please, dad?

AND, OR, and XOR are logic operation used extensively in computer programming and generally taught as a topic in boolean algebra. So I guess now is the time that we should start learning about these operations. They are really very powerful for lots of different reasons so this should be lots of fun.

Kelly, please tell us about your poem.

If all goes well I will be back in Albany tonight!