On May 24, 2013, I finished with the last hardcopy chapters of the Scala Cookbook. I put all of the chapters next to the paper shredder as a way to show what I had just done. The final edits would be finished with a copywriter over the next several weeks, and I signed off on the final edition while I was at Virginia Beach.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 1)
Young Buddhist monks in flight training school. :)
(Sorry, I don’t remember the origin of this photo.)
“The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way, as if you were a beginner. Not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention, as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing. This is the way of practice, moment after moment.”
~ from the book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
As I noted before, IMHO, Twitter/X and its “algorithm” has become a place that makes racism, sexism, homophobics, and hate speech a welcome place, and I have absolutely zero interest in being anywhere near that toxic swamp.
Conversely, this comic from this Bluesky page explains what makes Bluesky different, and better.
TechCrunch is a good name for this page, because they are now tracking layoffs in the technology industry. This is from their page:
“The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has more than 130,000 job cuts across 457 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether.”
As I became lucid in a dream this morning, I ran into Ram Dass. He was wearing a long-white outfit that I have seen in pictures of him, he was healthy again, with a big beard, and was much taller than I expected — significantly taller than me. (I later looked this up to find out he was 6’3”.)
He was standing next to a doorway and gathering people together for a seminar that he was giving, and asked if I wanted to attend. I said yes, and he said I was welcome if I could be like “The Lamb of God.”
I thought I knew what he meant by that, but just to be sure I asked him what he meant.
In case this might help anyone else, I thought I’d share this information. I was having a weird problem where some mornings when I woke up my blood pressure would be really high, so long story short, I did an at-home sleep study a few weeks ago, and went over the results with a doctor this morning. I’ll include the doctor’s notes with each image.
Image 1: The “A+H” metric
In the first image, “A+H” is the main metric they use. It measures the average number of apnea events that occur per hour while you’re sleeping.
In my case, a 19.4 overall average means, “Yes, you have apnea.” The 36.8 value means, “you have really bad apnea on your back, don't sleep there.” Interestingly, 0.7 means “you have no apnea when sleeping on your left side, so sleep there as much as possible.” I’ve known for years that I sleep better on the left side, so the doctor encouraged me to sleep on that side as much as possible.
If you are interested in connecting with me, here are a few places you can find me in late 2024:
Please note that I have abandoned that toxic cesspool of racism, sexism, and hate speech formerly known as Twitter.
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
~ Carl Jung
As a quick note today, here’s a list of my currently-free books and online video courses about the Scala programming language and functional programming (as of October, 2024):
This is another in a series of articles I call “Conversations with robots.” In this article I did into the style of meditation taught by one of my favorite Zen, Zazen, and meditation teachers, Katsuki Sekida.
This Ram Dass definition of the word “namaste” is really wonderful:
I honor the place in you
Where the entire universe resides.
I honor the place in you
Of love, of light, of truth, of peace.I honor the place in you
Where if you are in that place in you and
I am in that place in me,
There is only one of us.
This namaste definition comes from the excellent Ram Dass book, Polishing the Mirror.
Namaste. :)
GraphQL FAQ: What are the benefits of GraphQL, and how does it compare to competing technologies?
This is another blog post in my series of “Conversations with robots.” In this post we look at GraphQL, and the pros and cons of how it compares to REST and gRPC.
May, 2024: Here’s a summary of my current free online Scala and functional programming training courses:
- Introduction to Scala 3 video course
- Introduction to Functional Programming video course
- Advanced Scala 3 video course
- Advanced Functional Programming video course
If you’re interested in 100% Free online Scala and FP video training courses, I hope these online video courses are helpful.
From the movie Insomnia, this is a great quote from an Alaskan resident to a visitor:
“There are two kinds of people who live in Alaska: the ones who are born here and the ones who come here to escape something else. I wasn’t born here.”
A nice thing about most hotels in Santa Fe, New Mexico is that they treat water like you’re living on the Space Station. They have signs like, “You may have noticed that there’s not a lot of water around here. Please don’t waste it!”
At restaurants they usually only give you water if you ask for it, and I remember one time a waitress asked if I was really going to drink it or just look at it. :)
One thing I learned from my dad: The harder you try to control other people, the more they resent it and pull away from you. You gotta let other people be who they are.
“The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.”
~ An old Zen poem from Li Bo (Li Po, Li Bai)
I know that a lot of people devalue products when they’re free or inexpensive, and I know this sounds corny, but I always hope that somewhere out there in the world there’s a programmer/developer that works hard, but for one reason or another can’t quite grok Scala and/or functional programming, but then they find one of my books, and the light bulb goes on over their head. And then they start writing better code, and they’re happier with their work, other people are happier with their work, and they make a little more money than they might have made otherwise.
With that in mind, I’ve lowered the price of my Kindle books to just $2.99 (USD) for the 2024 holiday season. Here’s Learn Functional Programming The Fast Way, and here’s Learn Scala 3 The Fast Way.
Also, please note that the PDF versions of these books are FREE.
Enjoy, and I hope they help. :)
I use my favorite images as screensavers, and this “hoodie” image of Luke Skywalker from Star Wars Movie #7 is a recent favorite. I found an image online, then worked with it in Gimp to get a decent effect. This Luke Skywalker sketch shows another approach you can take with Gimp.
