A favorite quote:
“She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’ve mentioned before that at the Providence Zen Center, when you meditate, you are told to constantly ask yourself, “What am I?” And when you’re doing some action, such as driving a car, you ask yourself, “Who is driving?”
I’ve also mentioned that these days the most popular mindfulness practice is to “note” what you’re doing, moment by moment. So when you’re eating you say, “eating,” and when you’re washing your hands you say, “washing,” and so on.
Tonight I was re-reading Ram Dass’s first book, Be Here Now, and found a section where he talks about developing the “witness” in yourself by narrating your life: “Oh, he’s heading to the refrigerator now. It looks like he’s going to get some ice cream. Yes, he’s picked up the ice cream container...”
The thing about these techniques is that (a) they come from three different types of spiritual practice, but (b) although their words are different, their intent is the same: They try to get your attention/awareness aligned with what your body is doing in the present moment.
Just a quick note today that the “noting” and “witnessing” styles of meditation are basically the same.
When you practice noting, you note everything the body does as it’s doing it, so as the body does things you say walking, picking up, hearing, etc.
Similarly, when you practice witnessing...
“Proper meditation is so intense it doesn’t even allow thinking, ‘I am meditating.’”
~ Ramana Maharshi
I try not to do this too often, but here’s a currently-incomplete list of ways to define ZIO HTTP routes. I start with some of the simplest examples, and then make them more complicated as I go along:
Well, if you’re going to ask for someone’s DNA, this is a nice way to do it, play to my ego. :)
I got this in an email back in the day when I first learned that I have mast cell disease.
A HUGE benefit of Bluesky social network is that you can choose from a wide variety of feeds — think “algorithms” — rather than one feed being forced upon you by “the man” (Facebook, Twix, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.).
Indeed, this feature is SO BIG that I imagine all other social networks will soon have to copy it to stay relevant.
I just ran across this image. I created it way back when I was first learning how to create artistic effects with Gimp. I don’t know for sure because I didn’t save the working file, but I suspect that I created this image by starting with an image from a YouTube video, then blurred it a little bit, then applied the “oilify” effect to it one or more times.
P.S. — If you’re old enough, you can identify the pitcher and the batter, despite the Gimp artistic effects. :)
Without much explanation, the purpose of the following ZIO 2 + Scala 3 code is to show the absolute basics of a working ZIO HTTP + MySQL application. In this case I use the Scalikejdbc library, but as you can see from the code, you can use any Scala, Java, or JVM SQL library you want.
This is almost the “simplest possible”, “Hello world” application that shows all these features.
Very soon I will have a much more complete example including the use of packages, configuration, repository, service, api, and logging, in my free video courses at LearnScala.dev.
Here’s the code:
“When I observe myself, I am really forced to admit that every day I am a prisoner of a thousand unsatisfied desires, or desires whose satisfaction brings me no permanent bliss.”
“So it seems that instead of endless running from one desire to another, it would be better to stop and examine the true nature of desire. If this investigation is successful, you will penetrate the nature of the true aim of all desire. What any desire really aims at is a state of non-desire.”
~ Jean Klein
I came across two quotes recently that seem related ... and not necessarily just in a spiritual/religious way:
“The devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you’ve ever wished for.”
AND:
“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”
Lately I’ve been thinking about how some people get to a certain point and then never mature any more. It’s like maybe they get everything they ever wanted, and they stop there. They become comfortable or complacent, and in doing so, they create their own prison.
“Never be a prisoner of your past. It was a lesson, not a life sentence.”
~ possibly from Anna Grace Taylor
“All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude.”
~ Richard Rohr
I am a fan of some of the guided meditations in the Brightmind app. These are my adapted notes from the sixth and seventh meditations in the first “Core” group, by Shinzen Young:
Hate-speech people on X: “Bluesky is an echo chamber!”
Our Reply: “Echo chamber? Nah, we prefer to call it ‘surround sound for facts.’”
A great quote from this Bluesky post.
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.
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.
