The cabin I lived in, in Talkeetna, Alaska. This time of year — late winter — I always find myself wanting to move back to Alaska.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 79)
Wednesday Zen:
One time an employee came into my office, closed my door, and said, “How are you so calm? I’m going nuts!” As I would learn, he had some stress from work, but even more from his personal life. I tried to help him slow down, breathe, and talk, but he was frantic and almost impossible to help.
The thing about meditation and stillness of mind is that you can’t just start it one day in the middle of a crisis, like when you feel a sudden twinge of chest pain or you’re laying in a hospital bed with a virus trying to suffocate your heart. By then it’s too late.
“Do not fall in love with people like me. I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth. I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people.”
If you want to see a somewhat larger example of Dotty source code than I’ve shown before, I just took a little time to convert a small Scala 2 project over to the new/current Dotty syntax (i.e., the Dotty syntax supported by the Dotty 0.21 release, circa January, 2020).
This is a view of some mountains (whose official name I don’t know) from my apartment in Palmer, Alaska, in January, 2011.
Back on January, 20, 2011 I came across this moose statue inside Krazy Moose Subs, Wasilla, Alaska. Seems fitting to go along with my previous moose in Rocky Mountain National Park.
The Washington Post has a touching story titled, What schizophrenia does to families.
Now this mountain I must climb,
Feels like the world upon my shoulders.
Through the clouds I see love shine,
It keeps me warm as life grows colder.
~ from the song, I Want to Know What Love Is, by Foreigner
If you’re into streaks and records, last night (January 17-18, 2020), was the first time I slept without pain since November 3, 2019 (thanks to the pericarditis and subsequent angiogram). I have no doubt that I snored a good snore. :)
Slid sideways through an icy intersection just in time to see a helicopter lift off from the ground with a sunlit mountain range as its backdrop ... pretty awesome.
(A Facebook post from December 19, 2010, when I lived in Alaska.)
Day 3: Yesterday I had way too much energy, but today’s mood is frustration, agitation, and impatience. Like this meeting tonight, I am not in the mood to be here. The part I hate is that I can’t be comfortable and happy with the people here. We’re all interested in the same thing (finally, people I can relate to!), and they’re all open and supportive. I hate that about myself.
Day 4: Arghh. I have way too much anger (rage!) right now. Everything here is so damn vague and the answers are #!$@ elusive. I just need to get out of this gathering and hit something. What am I really angry at? Where is this coming from?
Day 5: I would have left yesterday if it wasn’t for C stopping me at my car. I don’t know if she knew that she stopped me, but she did. Evening: Long talk with P. She spoke of giving fifteen years to her family, and while she doesn’t regret it, she expressed some remorse at giving up her career. But tonight she was dancing, and said I looked much happier.
Day 6: Last day. Long goodbyes with everyone, including C, I, F, J, N, and more. Asked N about something that happened last night at the rock, and she said I was very fortunate, it’s very rare. Leaving here is hard, it feels like graduating high school, knowing you’ll never see these people again who have been friends through all of this. I’m so grateful that C stopped me from leaving. Lots of tears all around.
(A few notes from a retreat I went on in 2006. I wrote a lot that week, and some of the notes get very personal, and it’s time to shred those, but I thought I’d share a few here.)
This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but Sri Argala Stotram by Krishna Das is the prettiest song I’ve heard in a long time, and I didn’t even understand the first two-thirds of it.
Back on November 12, 2019, a Twitter user named Jomboy demonstrates how the Houston Astros were stealing signs against the lowly Chicago White Sox in a 2017 game. The interesting part here is that nobody was on second base, this video seems to show that they were stealing the signs from the catcher to the pitcher using the center field video feed.
I’ve written this before, but when I saw this “pseudocode to Scala code” example in the book Functional Thinking, I thought it was worth mentioning again: If you have trouble grokking the Scala map method, think of it as being named transform instead. It transforms an input collection to an output collection, based on the algorithm you supply.
For those coming from the OOP world, I think “transform” is a better word because it is more meaningful, at least initially.
“Thoughts are not facts.”
~ A quote from a local psychologist on the radio.
It seems that people who worry, worry about thoughts, not reality. I remember worrying a few years ago about doing a dance at a wedding, and in the end the reality was that I never had the chance to dance. What a waste of time that worry was.
Here’s a little lesson on empathy, from the movie 13 Going on 30.
“A lot of people think that, if you’re writing about something, it’s because you’re an expert on the topic and want to impart your expertise. But sometimes you’re writing about it as part of your attempt to immerse yourself in it and understand it.”