Today ended up being an input day, a lazy trying-things-out day. I want to go outside and walk the town at some point, so I'm clearing house a little so I have that calm, scrapbooking bits I don't want to forget so I can let go of them in my mind.

Found a lovely poem called "Mastery" by W. H. Auden.

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation.

You have only to watch his eyes;
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

Auden also once said this:

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

Somehow related in the fragments of my mind: the Technium has some short pieces on wisdom for the digital age, the sorts of things I imagine great-grandchildren of today's teenagers chuckling over the same way my generation read the "Little House on the Prairie" series with the fascination kids have of a bygone era.

Klaatu showed me ownCloud, and I am enthralled.

Trying to find copies of the International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes to read somewhere.

I started reading c-base materials written in German and can now make out fuzzy outlines of meaning without a dictionary. Yes, I'm working through grammar books and going through translation exercises in reading class where we do pull apart sentence structures with a fine-toothed comb and debate which vocabulary word maps to what phrase. Once in a while though, it's fun to just read something normal at a normal pace and see how I've progressed; what looked like gibberish to me before is now a story painted in broad strokes, with blurs. No details yet, no exactness; I need to learn more words before that. But I'm learning.