I’ve been listening to the debut album of David Lowery’s second band, Cracker. I can confirm that nostalgia has not colored my impression at all. It is astounding. Faux leather seats from Juarez.

Firefox’s spell check doesn’t know “faux.”

After spending a lot of time simply not being willing to set up a PHP sandbox (because seriously, it’s way more trouble than it’s worth), I’m getting pretty tired of the blog themes here and on FN. I have a copy of MAMP again, but no promises.

(N.b.: Link to post where Jason Kottke’s Spock analog, Aaron Cohen, describes the results thus: “Basically, yogurt turned these mice into Kanye.”)

I also performed the massaging mentioned in the previous post. The probability table now goes between the Ruby backend and the Javascript frontend without trouble. Here was the first success:

“What do you pretend not to like excitement. But it had always made the keeper of the sunken eyes seemed to find this answer in the restitution of the dead of night yet before us.”

“I have invented this definition, this last phrase the Minister of the upright judge. Let me take him into a wall of the seizure of the windows. In the distance was answered by the side of the oppressed, of the approaching end, she had not heard a short intoxication, whose delight one remembered with profound attention. “You have got a priest for me to shame,” he said.

The chairman of the curse of death and putting our trust in God. Were not the heart having no concern with the Gould silver mine, which by every law, international, human, and divine, reverts now to hush Mrs. Gould. “But, my dear mother, for a moment with the fatal spell of an experienced woman. She was, before all these things (which were accessible to His Excellency’s intelligence) in a black grating upon a drum. After listening for a long time he could say. They drove him away with my profound studies in Belgium and

After having a delicious hamburger I came home and wrestled with Markov Garden. Things were going okay until I realized that something’s off with the JSON that I’m getting from the parser, and it’s deserializing into something other than what I want. Here’s how I expressed that in a commit message.

The table that we’re getting turns into something a little off, so I think it’s going to have to involve more explicit hand-massaging.

So. . . that was pretty dorky.

So I cut some of it off.

Later I got dressed. This is the latest in an ongoing series called “Joaquin looks like either a settler or a skinhead, depending on when he shaved last.”

So vanity, but also change. I’ve really kind of gotten into a rut in terms of my relationship with time, and I’m looking for excuses to kind of jar myself into shape. Aside from Temboo and yard-work I’m so scattered that I’m better off avoiding doing anything, rather than starting it and then forking off onto some other activity (which form Markov Garden inevitably means stupid distraction-oriented internet use.) I need to figure out some way to make myself feel more monastic. If only I had a bell!

Assorted thoughts:

Pinterest is great. Despite initial reservations, I think I’m getting more out of it than any other internet service these days. After my initial reaction to the information flood my impulse was to stop following everyone to whom I was automatically subscribed when I created my account. Luckily I didn’t do this, and instead starting dropping individual boards in which I was clearly not interested. The result is that I avoid being inundated with crap, but I’m still seeing a lot of things that are very cool that I wouldn’t have found left to myself.

In the olden days that doddering old fools like me only barely remember almost all personal web presences included a substantial link section. People would use these to collect lists of pages that they wanted to keep around, and there was a sort of discovery process whereby you would find someone’s homepage and follow their links, learning about various corners of the web as you went. Traditionally-minded bloggers like Warren Ellis still frequently post entries that are lists of links, but in general this process has moved within the silos of social networking sites. Of course, Pinterest is a social networking site too, but it’s very easy to get stuff into it and (and really, this is the most important thing) one doesn’t have to be logged in to view content.

I’ve been really scattered. I’ve always tended to be this way a bit, but it has accelerated lately. I think. I definitely feel like I am less able than usual to determine what I should be doing next, which often means that I waste time doing nothing. It is also the case that my attention span has been really dismal. I’m not positive what that is about.

The most obvious victim of this has been Markov Garden, which is currently pretty dormant. It is very hard for me to decide what to do about that. Part of me would like to really focus on how I can get organized in such a way that a next step is either obvious or discoverable when I find myself wondering what I ought to do. Part of me thinks that the most important thing is to finish what I’ve started and trying to organize myself more effectively ought to wait until after that has happened. If you hadn’t guessed from the previous paragraph, the outcome of this conflict is always that I don’t do anything worthwhile.