In the interest of keeping you, my loyal and extended reader base, from becoming too bored, and to validate your checking up on me, I have written a short albeit very boring post. It teeters slightly on the technical side. Please excuse me. I promise a post of worth in the immediate future.

Tonight my father and I discussed some of the merits of XML (extensible mark-up language) with extensions to telephony, public switching, and the .NET standard. This, in turn, prompted me to look up more on XML, and a little about SGML (standard generalized mark-up language). XML is a meta-language and fits nicely in my present trek into meta-physics. Of course, my goal is ultimately in meta-cognition. In the meantime, I should work on some practical skill sets. Hence the computerish talk. Since graduation, I’ve taken on a lot of academic goals for myself, programming being among them.

[Other resolutions include: reading a book I should have already read every two weeks — not the same book — Someone is mugged in Central Park every two hours, and he’s really sick of it; working through the proof of the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem; learning more relativity, more developmental psych, more epistemology; applying to graduate school.]

In addition to my light XML reading, I decided to check out, on Divia’s suggestion, the Apple Human Interface Guidlines. Mitchel Resnick, my professor at the Media Lab over at MIT for a class on technology and education, would be glad to know that his class had a lasting effect on me. [In his class, I wrote a design brief for a software package to impart a particular mode of thought while developing a geometric intuition. In the conclusion I urged the reader never to implement my design lest it be used irresponsibly. The moral: technology, like alcohol, can be a valued servant but terrible master. Teach first, dazzle the kids with blinking lights later.] If I’m very lucky but not very careful, I’ll end up with a D. Ed in math and cognition.

Also I went to Tracy’s with DJ to hang out with them, Michelle, and some of Tracy’s friends from, as I understand it — and I’m making this part up based on imperfect data — Legal Seafood. Michelle brought me my GameCube power cord, The Twenties by Edmund Wilson, and the navy fleece all of which I had left her place the night before.

In the morning my sister, a handful of her friends, Michelle, and DJ, if he wakes up, are heading Downtown to Filene’s to celebrate the liquidation sale.

Paper Mario may be the end of me.