This is a photo of the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, in Palmer, Alaska. It used to be on my bike-riding path when I lived in Palmer.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 26)
This is part of a little log cabin church that used to be on my walking/biking path in Palmer, Alaska.
Dateline, 2015: I really like this quote about “paying attention as if your life depends on it.”
One night last spring I laid in bed, unable to move because of severe pain in my chest. Any time I tried to move the pain got worse, so I laid as still as possible. I was laying on my right side, looking at a bedside table, and all I could do was breathe and look at that table, what was on the table, and see the light coming in from outside and shining on the table.
I didn’t get to spend much time with her, but I met Kate Johnson at the 2013 Buddhist Geeks Conference and she seemed like a very nice person. I love this quote: “Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet,” which originally comes from Alice Walker. There’s a little story about Kate Johnson here on LionsRoar.com.
I saw Ender’s Game at the movie theater and thought it was a good movie, but given its dark nature I never expected to watch it again. But after buying a new television — my previous tv was smaller than my iMac, and so old that it didn’t have any HDMI or USB connections — I saw the movie marked down to $5, and it now has the distinction of being the first movie I watched on the new tv. Kudos to Asa Butterfield (probably 15 years of age at the time the movie was made), he pretty much carries the entire movie, with a little help from Harrison Ford and a few others.
This is a favorite “gratitude” quote that I keep in my Just Be “mindfulness reminder” app.
“There is nothing intrinsically problematic about this ordinary perspective. The problem comes when it is the only perspective available to a person, which unfortunately is the usual case.
Enlightenment, or freedom, comes when we also have a complementary perspective that we can access at any time. To have this complementary perspective, we must come into direct contact with the third level of consciousness, the Source.
When we are in direct contact with the Source, self is not perceived as a separate particle, objects are not perceived as solid, and space becomes elastic and can collapse to a dimensionless point, taking everything with it to the Unborn. And time is cyclic — self and scene arise from and return to that unborn Source over and over.
“In the beginning, meditation is something that happens within your day. Eventually, the day becomes something that happens within your meditation.”
When I first learned about Scala I lived in Talkeetna, Alaska, population ~876 (in the summer). Talkeetna is mostly known as a base for expeditions to Denali, and for possibly inspiring the excellent tv series, Northern Exposure. Some of my first Scala blog posts were written while sitting in this cafe. :)
The image shown comes from this Flying Squirrel Bakery Cafe Facebook page.
Can you grow the size of your brain through meditation? This image comes from a story titled, “Mind of the Meditator,” in the latest issue of Scientific American.
If you’re looking for the Fringe episode with the song, “I’ve Seen All Good People”, by Yes, it’s the Season 2, Episode 4 episode named, “Momentum Deferred.” It’s just before the 20-minute mark of that episode. It’s the one where Walter starts playing the song, hits the table, and Peter starts putting the wires on Rebecca Kibner (Theresa Russell). “I’ve Seen All Good People” is one of my favorite songs, so it’s great to see it and other Yes songs featured on Fringe.
As a brief note, at the time of this writing, SQLite doesn’t have date/time (datetime) fields, so when you want to use a datetime field with Flutter and Dart, you have to do something else.
Solution: My choice was to store my date/time data as a SQLite INTEGER field. I did this so I can query and sort that field easily myself. The benefit of storing a datetime field as a TEXT field is that you can read it easier, but I think an INTEGER field is a little easier to work with, though YMMV.
If you have ever known anyone with schizophrenia, this scene with Walter Bishop on Fringe — and the scenes leading up to it (particularly the one with Broyles) — will strike very close to home. (See Fringe, Season 4, Episode 3, for more details.)
“We talked because talking tells you things, like what you really are thinking about. But sometimes you can’t find what you’re feeling till all the words run out.”
~ Harry Chapin, Sequel
Back in the day I had a concussion, and for a year or two afterwards I was able to open my physical eyes while I was asleep. Sometimes I could just do that intentionally — I would plan to do it — and other times it happened by accident, as in the case shown in this image.
This page is my personal “cheat sheet” of stock market, investing, and business/accounting definitions. I don’t offer many explanations of things, but I generally link to the Investopedia and other sites for more details.
As a brief note today, I just wrote a Scala collect function for my free Scala video training courses, and wrote it as shown in this code:
September, 2018: Before doctors figured out that I have a rare blood disease called Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), I went unconscious nine times, typically vomiting while I was unconscious. The first three went like this:
- During the first event I stumbled around my apartment like I had been poisoned, splashing cold water on my face, and generally just hoping I wasn’t going to die. Despite those efforts, I went unconscious. I only knew that because I threw up on the floor while I was out.
- At the beginning of the second event where I felt like I had been poisoned I thought, “If I live through this one, I need to update my will.”
- During the third event I thought, “Apparently I’m going to die soon. I just want other people to be happy, and if I live, I want to help them however I can.”
After that, for events #4 through #9, along with four subsequent cases of allergic angina — what I call “fake heart attacks” — I had no significant thoughts in my mind, just peace.
These days when something bad happens I recall those nine syncope events and four heart/cardiac events, and know that I could have died during any of them. When I think that way, all of today’s little problems seem insignificant.