From this tweet, this is a photo of Albert Einstein’s office on the day he passed away (April 18, 1955). Which reminds me of this Zen-like letter that Einstein wrote to the parents of a child who died.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 68)
Broomfield, Colorado: Somewhere during the evening of April 16, 2020, I woke up and noticed the bright snow-white tree outside my window being lit by some outdoor lights, and my favorite star (Venus, actually) in the sky. For the record, we had about six inches of snow during the last 24 hours.
Back in the 1990s I was fortunate enough to work for a smart, energetic man. In a way, working for him — or at least in the position he gave me — helped change the trajectory of my career into what I wanted it to be.
Skipping 99% of that story ... one thing he did exceptionally well was troubleshoot problems, and troubleshoot them very fast. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was using something called The Scientific Method. After observing him for a while, I saw him repeat these steps so precisely that I thought he must have them on a tattoo on the inside of his eyelids:
- Observe some feature, in our case, a bug
- Hypothesize a model consistent with the observations
- Predict future events the hypotheses should yield
- Verify the predictions by making further observations
- Validate by repeating
“If you want to understand all the Buddhas of the past, present and future, then you should view the nature of the universe as created by mind alone.”
I have often wondered how you should interpret this quote. This article titled, Created By Mind Alone, provides more hints on how to interpret it.
Despite all the bending, stretching, balancing, and breathing exercises, it turns out that the most difficult yoga asana is “letting go.”
The quote in the image comes from this story on the kwanumzen.org website.
The Anchorage Daily News reported yesterday that about one-half of the cruises to Alaska have been canceled so far. As you can see from this image, all of the news is about the coronavirus. You can see more coverage at this Twitter page.
My mom is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, and she can also be funny at times.
Her memory is a little worse now, but a couple of years ago she was in a wheelchair and I went over to hug her. When I did, I accidentally kicked her foot with my foot.
I said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”
She replied, “Don’t worry, I won’t remember it.”
#dementia
If you like sappy love stories, Cousins is an underrated movie. Released in 1989, Ted Danson’s wife (Sean Young) and Isabella Rossellini’s husband (William Petersen) have an affair, which sparks a special friendship between Danson and Rossellini.
I was just reminded of a line from the movie that goes something like, “Don’t you know? Men and women who are married can only be close friends in large groups.”
I don’t know the original source of this image, but it reminds me of Easter colors and vice-versa.
Way back in 2015 when I was going through the worst of the MCAS problems, I was getting incredibly painful headaches and had all sorts of brain-related problems, including shaking, an inability to hold things without dropping them, brain fog, etc. This MRI image showed the problem: There was a screaming moth in my brain. :) It reminds me of The Mothman Prophecies.
If you like Sherlock Holmes, in my opinion the Jeremy Brett version is far and away the best. Amazon has this DVD box set for about $31, and this Complete Granada TV Series for about $113.
This is a poem by the seventeenth-century monk Yinyuan Longqi. I just saw it in this LionsRoar.com article about a Zen teacher who had a panic attack.
This is an interesting quote: “I practiced in the midst of a pounding heart, with crazy energy running through my body and a strong aversion to these feelings. In the midst of panic, I could feel that it was fundamentally a physical sensation of hyper-arousal and that if I allowed that energy to course, with attention and a minimum of aversion, something interesting happened.”
“Eventually we develop a continuity of awareness that allows us to maintain full awareness during dream as well as in waking life.”
~ from the book, The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep
(I’ve had lucid dreams since I was a teenager,
so I can confirm that statement)
This website used to be based on Drupal, and as a result I have a bunch of URLs like this in my Firefox browser history:
- alvinalexander.com/node/add/blog
- alvinalexander.com/node/add/photo
- alvinalexander.com/node/add/misc
Since this blog is no longer based on Drupal, having those pages in my history is annoying, so I wanted to delete those individual URLs from my Firefox history.
Deleting individual URLs from my Firefox history
The steps to delete individual pages from your Firefox history aren’t obvious, but they aren’t too hard either:
If you ever need a Linux/Unix shell command to download and install another command using curl and sudo privileges, I just used this command to install a command-line tool named Ammonite:
sudo sh -c '(echo "#!/usr/bin/env sh" && \ curl -L https://github.com/lihaoyi/Ammonite/releases/download/2.0.4/2.13-2.0.4) \ > /usr/local/bin/amm && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/amm' && amm
I show the command on multiple lines, but you can also make it a one-line command, as it is on the Ammonite page. As shown, this runs the sudo command, which requires your admin password, and then it runs the curl command inside a Unix/Linux shell environment, writing its output to /usr/local/bin/amm.
I call this one, “Up With the Sun, Gone With the Wind.”
(April 13, 2017)
When I lived in Palmer, Alaska I created a business named Mat-Su Valley Programming, which I quickly changed to Valley Programming. I did a lot of research on local businesses and then started mailing out postcards like this one. Years later I still don’t like the postcard, but I do like the logo, which I sketched on an iPad when I was on short vacation in Seward, Alaska.
(I have this theory that things like postcards should be like art, where the person receiving it thinks, “Darn, I hate when people mail unsolicited crap to me, but I just can’t bring myself to throw this one out because I like the way it looks.” I’m not an artist enough to pull that off, but that’s my theory.)
While I’m writing about art in business marketing materials, this was my attempt at designing a business card for my Zen Foundation business (charity). This design doesn’t blow me away either, but I enjoyed drawing the image and struggling with the fonts and alignment.
FWIW, I sketched this image during the same vacation in Seward where I sketched my Valley Programming logo. I’m not sure why exactly, but on that trip I “got drunk on art,” then thought I was a great artist and started sketching things.
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
~ Albert Einstein (software testing is like that too)
I was just reminded of Rubber Duck Debugging. From this Wikipedia link, “The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck.” For me, my rubber duck is Albert Einstein.
