Apologies for the brief hiatus in posts. You may notice this becomes blog becoming a bit more rapid-fire and stream of consciousness. I'm starting to try to use the blog as a public whiteboard of what's on my mind, so please excuse the half thought-out and rambly things that are more likely to start trumping what were, by comparison, individual pieces with discrete focus.

What I'm thinking about today (in no particular order):

• self-realization as everyday practice
  
• Elizabeth Shin
  
• education in America and how to make it better, from grade school to college and beyond
  
• affecting Long Now scale effects in human evolution in one's own lifetime as regards the collective benefit for humanity (i.e. "what can I do today to improve tomorrow a hundred years from now? A thousand? Ten thousand?")
  
• REST v. SOAP
  
• web apps
  
• why my newsreader on Windows exhibts odd (read: non-functional) socket behavior when trying to connect to my provider's NNTP server unless I jolt NDIS somehow (like starting and quitting a host-based firewall)
  
• my on-going job hunt, and things that go with it
  
• Eire/UK wanderlust
  
• PHP, due to some work I need to finish
  
• The Middle East, but only in the broad sense of the woefully uninformed (note: I tend to think anyone living in North America having not lived in both a piece of Israel and Palestine with both Israeli and Palestinian friends, for a long time at each location, is uninformed as well).
  
• Toronto
  
• Symbolic and numercial mathematics software