Spitz: Misoka (3.2M mp3)  

This week this seems like the quintessential rock song to me. And it's only more quintessential if you don't speak the language.

If nothing occurs to you, open the tiniest window to somewhere else.

Stochastic in our causes, patriots in a republic of disingenuity, discarders of our angels, prophets of the silently unwound, we cede imbalance to inertia and the slow wind to the quickening hours. Give us reticence to the measure of our tolled waiting, and open ways that we may be escaped by the enchantments we helped tether. And we kneel in parted seas, shelter us with black clouds and the sinuous disenfranchisement of sand. When we stray from the islands of your tenuous grace, lead us to half-hatched disarray and limn our scars in the exhalations of convulsive repose. Give us panic for wakefulness, and tiny hatreds for eyes. Place our souls in the thick throats of lost doves, and our doubts in the deepest vaults of your sightless candor. Lead us to webs of dread and the shut exits of last year's mice, and let their thinset tremors smooth us as we diminish. We are the unmoved and the yet to know; we are the hollows of the bled and the disintegrated confidence of our practice. We are always here, and we are nowhere found.  

So we are undone.

I periodically find myself with small amounts of tabular data that I want to share, and hand-building HTML tables each time is tedious in repetition and awkward to instrument. I have finally amused myself by writing a simple server-side perl script that renders data from a csv file into an HTML table, and you are welcome to it if you have similar needs.

Dublin/Pleasanton BART platform

1. This terrible town in which my employer is sub-headquartered has the tedious contours of a Sim City game played with dogged consistency in place of any shred of imagination. Numbingly uniform tiles snap together with cultivatedly anonymous diligence. The streets have individual names, but absolute characterlessness, and preferring one over another would be like having a favorite ounce of hypoallergenic hand lotion. If the question of whether there should be a picture-framing outlet every 2.79 miles or every 2.83 fascinates you, you'd love it here.  

2. The wishful insistence that two numbers constitute a trend or an anomaly based on whether the second one is more or less desirable than the first.  

And I'm still allowed to hate a third thing today, so the service at dinner better be good.

I have decided to limit myself to disapproving of no more than three things each day. Today's are:  

1. The pointless hubris of claiming superlative excellence in activities which should not be done at all.  

2. Any article of clothing which appears to have been made from the pelts of characters in the original Planet of the Apes.  

3. Coffee which is neither palatable without sugar, nor appreciably improved by it.  

For the remainder of the day, I am at peace with all other folly.

It is impossible to feel comfortable with yourself in the wrong shoes.  

Until you feel comfortable with yourself, it is difficult to recognize the right shoes.