Enjoying the fruits of being moderately literate in technology, the new Radiohead album on the hi-fi and a new whisper-quiet 120GB drive in my cube. I'm rebuilding my development environment and gettng ready to get back to work on some kick-ass social software.

Last night played some scrabble with Sasha. She kicked my ass by virtue of her preternatural ability to place three letters and make four words simultaniously: 30-point bonanzas made of words like "pa" and "at." I bang out "tarrif" and "query/zesty" for 18 and 36 points respectively, go down in flames in the endgame. Afterwards we talk about life, the universe and everything. It's interesting, she being on the tail end of Generation X -- sarcastic, ironic, not too hopeful about things -- and me being something different alltogether. Our parents are about the same age, so we figure it has a lot to do with gaining political awareness in the age of Regan vs. Clinton, respectively.

In the course of my trying to explain emergence and railing against corporations and other inhuman forms of organization, I struck what I think might be a deep new vein of thinking ore. Institutions pervert ambition. That's the summary. Maybe more on that later.