Some Google searching, and I didn’t come up with much. Until I ran across a Google book result for William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols:

“Some persons of a scientific turn were once discoursing pompously and, to him, distastefully, about the incredible distance of the planets, the length of time light takes to travel to the earth, &c., when he burst out, ‘Tis false! I was walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the sky with my stick.’” In this he was bolder than Sappho, if we may credit her choriambic quoted by Herodian: “I do not think to touch the sky with my two arms.” Possibly Blake had been reading Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana (II.5): “A man who has his station upon this vast and mysterious engine ought to express clearer views about heaven and the sun and the moon, which I dare say you fancy you could touch with a stick, from our vantage of proximity to yonder heaven.”

I quite like that whole excerpt, but the term “this vast and mysterious engine” really captures my imagination. That seems to put the right spin on software, as the source code is hidden from most people.

So I registered The Mysterious Engine, and will start setting up the journal there soon.

I’ve done this about 6 times before, and each time I dump all the old content, since I am not all that happy with it. Only in the last year have I really discovered what I want to do with blogs and related media. So I expect this iteration to hang around longer than the other versions.