I certainly share the concern that blogs might not rearrange cultural capital, but I would imagine that I would be saying nothing new to say that such a concern haunts most of what we as poets fill our days up with. More importantly, I am not sure the direct--one to one--rearranging of cultural capital is the point of our activities. Which is to say that I do not often, on most days at least, worry about that fact that my neighbors are the only ones reading. I do not worry, mostly, because I find that it is my neighbors and what they say and write that helps me make sense of the world, in particular what is happening in it, how it is happening and how I might be able to live in, even act on, that world. That is why I moved into the neighborhood. I need the blogs and the poems so I am not confused, so I know what is happening, what people think, so I have a context to think and act in. One of our Administration’s major failings is that they do not think they are confused. I do not want to make the same mistake on the other side, and these conversations I hope help me to see both how I am confused and how I might resolve that confusion. Although my participation up until this point with blogs has been as a silent reader I have found, especially in the last few months, that it is the mad rush, the urgent blogs, the people talking sometimes too fast past each other, that has helped me to understand what it is I could do and what it is I believe. A sort of becoming clear in the crossfire. This is something akin to what Brian wrote bellow to Kasey Mohammad, the sense “that a new sort of running commentary has to be created, a new aesthetics.” Today anyway, I would say that some of these blogs and poems help me make sense of my own body and it is this making sense that allows me to enter the world as something more than an observer.

for those of you interested in the technical aspects of the blog, you'll want to check out the current issue of Linux Journal, which features the phenomenon (yeah, i subscribe to it -- so what?!).

you might also visit www.technorati.com for blog-related tools, including cosmos, which "allows you to find what's new in the blogging universe, and find out who's linking to whom. Simply type in a URL of a blog, website, or interesting article on the web, and Cosmos will tell you which bloggers are linking to the URL."

Well, I run a blog, but I am by no means a blogaholic.. Although, I find it fascinating that some of the overly-caffeinated are awake during the wee hours of the night reading my work and my webzine...

However, I believe that there are some very interesting blogs out there right now that push the envelope, whose authors are creating some very new and interesting things, challenging what art is... I think that in the air right now, at this point in time, something is happening, what it is I don't know.......but it is exciting!

-Andrew Lundwall

Note first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.

When compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.

This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of

The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.