Even more poetry - I'm hoping to put together something worthy of final submission within the next couple of weeks, so comments are appreciated. (Also, this will give me third-party confirmation that my hacked-together reCAPTCHA comment form WordPress theme magic actually works!)

Winter

Snow and sleet sweep silent streets sucked dry
whose sole crime is crossing space and time to appear - here,
in frozen climes,
at this slumbering somber time of year
when frost strikes fear into hearts that yearn
for summer sun, a sun scarce found amidst the hail and mist
that still song and dance this time of year,
this slumbering somber time of year.

A thousand faces peer through ice-glazed glass:
eyes gloomy, full shivers dispelled
in huddles by heaters that glean heat from wire or gas
and lend it to frigid floors;
what need for the warmth of friends drawn near?
Chimes of clocks tick seconds away in the empty space
of solitary wait, each second another step away
from water's weighty solid form
that presses on eaves that creak and sway
this slumbering somber time of year.

Cold wind clenches its wintry hold,
clasping shut spirits with closed fist,
its howl a clamorous dirge both ancient and bold
that clings, its clarion call crisp
as crunch of crystal under frost-numb feet
in boots that clamber through thick of white.
Treacherous, this trudging over bank and pile;
each face filled with fright at the absence of birds' trill.
Rare the smile that pierces long whiles spent in
company of fire, a last defense against the months
that separate more favoured climes from this time of year:
this slumbering somber time of year.

First things first: happy 21st!

Those irrevocably consigned to the nine circles of geekdom will be pleased to know that Google has officially beta'd Chrome for Linux. In other news, you can now post comments to the new quizzical quincunx; simply visit the post page and fill out the handy comment form. In the process of hacking this together, I finally became frustrated enough with the WordPress API to toss this gem into my functions.php:

function trap_output($function, $args = array()) {
  ob_start();
  call_user_func_array($function, $args);
  return ob_get_clean();
}

Also, I've decided to go with reCAPTCHA instead of post moderation; I'll be interested to see if this is sufficient to defend against the spammer hordes of the Internets.

So - test it out, and let me know if you find any problems!

It's official: quizzical quincunx is moving to its new home here at blog.evanstratford.com. Why the sudden shuffle?

• Incompatibilities between Blogger's draft editor (which I use) and its regular editor (which pops up anytime I follow an edit link from the blog page) butcher my formatting with unsettling regularity. I've had enough.
• Hosting this blog myself means I have complete control over design, blog post/comment data, and deployment. If the blog goes down, I have no one to blame except myself. If I want to add cool homebrew widgets or features (post clustering? user-based post targeting? easter-egg blink tags?) I need only hack something together in PHP; no more working around Blogger's platform.
• I've been meaning to try out WordPress for a while; this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

My overall impression of WordPress is mostly favourable. More details:

• Writing your own theme is a relatively painless process, thanks in part to the excellent documentation. I had the current (admittedly incomplete, but mostly functional) theme together in roughly 2.5 hours.
• Half the WordPress template tag hooks echo by default; the other half return rendered strings. Why? Is it that hard to agree on one? (Personally, I think they should all return strings - this makes it easier to process the text and add filler without turning the PHP code into a mess of <php? /*...*/ ?> tags.
• The Blogger importer imports tags as categories. Why? What's the difference? Should I care? This seems like an unnecessary source of confusion.
• TinyMCE is immeasurably superior to the Blogger editor, albeit somewhat slower.
• Some serious design effort has gone into the WordPress admin console. There's five metric whackloads of functionality, yet it still doesn't seem overly cluttered.

I'll leave the old blog site up for a while, but all new posts will go here - enjoy the ride, and keep posted!