Political theory and, often, religion share a common interest in dealing with the tension between the good of the group and the good of the individual. Freud's Civilization and its Discontents is a dangerous opening of the door -- evolutionary psychology with group selection provides glasses that bring the taboo into focus. Pessimists and fools refuse to see that we must be dwelling between the two, or that there are two at all. Would that their lungs decide to split with their liver, or their mother have denied them any care! Human progress comes from an increased ability to pare back apart the material and other parts of the personal good, and to reestablish and resuffice appropriate levels of each. Wealth beyond that is a distraction, power and status poisons.
I am now in the midst of rewriting the work website in mod_perl, and I realise now the magnitude of the project. The code will be clean, concise, and nice when I'm done, but it will take me quite some time. I might use wiki-like ideas to try to make it easy to edit any 'page' on the site without editing code. Because I configure mod_perl as a directory handler for my projects, the code I write is for most intents and purposes its own webserver with most of the uninteresting stuff (like managing ports and threads) hidden away. This has its plusses and minuses.
I've been having issues with my glasses -- I get headaches more often with them on, but I get a lot of headaches in general, so it's not a big change. I do feel that I have more eye strain -- my eyes feel strange and tired fairly often now, but my vision is so much clearer with them that I now can't really bear to go anywhere without them. Maybe that's what I should expect when going from moderately worse vision than most people to getting somewhat better vision than most people with lenses -- the extra useful visual information is probably tiring on a high level too.
For this Saturday, my plans have gotten a possible wrench in the works -- I was going to go to Ceremony, but I got a rare party invite which I might attend instead. I could possibly do both, if I leave the party after 3 hours -- I suspect this is one of those really long parties. Of course, there is the off chance that my jury duty tomorrow will run all the way into the weekend, but I really doubt that will happen.
