Do you love
And then how am I to know?
If you don't let your love show for me
C’est la vie.
~ C’est la vie, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 11)
As a little Scala note today, here are a few links to some ZIO — ZIO 2 — training videos I have released recently:
- Video: ZIO 2: A Small Application
- Video: ZIO 2: From flatMap To for Expressions
- Video: Getting Started with ZIO 2
- Video: ZIO and the Power of IOs
I’ll release an entire ZIO 2 video training course soon, so please stay tuned for that.
I’ve written before a friend battling addiction, and today I remembered another thing she told me:
I don’t remember her exact words, but her point was that some (or many) people may think that addicts don’t want to recover, but once they get to a point where they DO want to recover, it’s still a very difficult battle because the chemical addiction is so strong. She mentioned several times that she felt nearly suicidal because she WANTED to stop, but could not stop, at least not without a lot of help and support. She told me this while she was crying so hard she could barely stop.
Fortunately for her, in those times when she did feel suicidal but couldn’t stop on her own, she did reach out for help, and eventually made it past that point.
On a personal note, my friend was a very nice person; she just didn’t have a good situation growing up, and made some wrong turns on the road of life. My experience with her opened up my eyes about people battling addiction.
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
~ Alan Watts
If you’re ever in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, one of my nieces owns a used bookstore named Mooncat Book Company, and she now has three signed copies of the Scala Cookbook. :)
I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own.
~ from Chasing Cars by Sarah Bettens (originally by Snow Patrol)
My free “Introduction to Functional Programming” video course is almost complete. Today I released 12 new lessons, starting with for Loops, Generators, and Guards, and ending with Lessons Learned.
After this there are about five final lessons (depending on what I decide to include), and by the end of the course we’ll start writing some ZIO code.
As always, many thanks to Ziverge’s Scala and Rust consulting services for sponsoring the creation of these “100% Free” videos, with no ads and no firewalls!
I’m pleased to announce that my 100% Free “Introduction to Scala 3” video training course is now online. I say it’s 100% Free because there are no ads and no paywalls — just free Scala 3 training videos.
This video training course is free thanks to Ziverge, which is sponsoring my work.
I basically gave up my life savings to pay for my mom’s caregiving needs, and as a result, I’ve had to make payments to the Boulder Community Hospital for the last ~24 months on an installment plan for my own medical needs. Today — ten months after I last lived in Colorado — I finally made the last payment on that installment plan.
(Part of me feels like there should be a little celebration for this, but for today, a larger part of me isn’t feeling any joy.)
If you ever drive to Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, when you turn around to drive back to Fairbanks, you’ll see this sign.
Here’s a little macOS shell script I created to text myself a “mindfulness reminder” at random times during the day. The file named quotes_sorted.txt contains about 300 mindfulness-related quotes, and this sends me a text message with a random quote.
This is a photo from somewhere on the Dalton Highway, between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. I drove up to Prudhoe Bay in an August many moons ago.
[This is a story from a book that I have, but unfortunately at the moment I can’t remember the name of the book. I just typed this by hand from some images I have of the original story.]
One day during a speech Hakuin said, “They say there’s a pure land where everything is only mind, and that there’s a Buddha of light in your own body. Once that Buddha of light appears, mountains, rivers, earth, grass, trees, and forests suddenly glow with a great light. To see this, you have to look inside your own heart.”
An old innkeeper who had meditated for many years was sitting in the audience, and when she heard this, she felt a strange understanding of his words. She later told her family, “I feel that happiness is as near as my skin.” When she was awake and asleep she kept his words alive:
In the book I’ve been reading lately, meditation master Daniel Ingram makes it clear here (and other places) that interacting with others makes practicing at deep levels basically impossible. I always thought that’s why retreats are silent, and it’s nice to confirm that.
“Books are the training weights of the mind.”
~ Epictetus
January 15, 2024: I just released 15 new videos for my free “Introduction to Functional Programming” video course. The new videos start with this Try, Success, Failure video, and get into developing the second application
If you’re ever at the SBT command line and want to limit the number of compiler errors shown by the compile task, this command sets the maximum number of errors outputted to 5:
Cats sit on the window sill
Children sit in the show
Why do I feel I don't fit in
Anywhere I go
Thunder clouds have their lightning
Nightingales have their song
And don't you see I want my life
To be something more than long
Rivers belong where they can ramble
Eagles belong where they can fly
I've got to be where my spirit can run free
Gotta find my corner of the sky
~ from “Corner Of The Sky,” written by Stephen Schwartz (sung by the Jackson 5, Dusty Springfield & Petula Clark, and others)
You go through a lot of strange things when you meditate deeply. One time I was talking with a friend and then I just started bawling my eyes out, and I was finally able to blurt out, “I don’t even know why I’m crying.”
“Perfected beings are pure awareness.”
~ Ram Dass, as I write about here