“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
~ Pablo Picasso
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 93)
“Meditation practice brings our neuroses to the surface rather than hiding them at the bottom of our minds. It enables us to related to our lives as something workable.”
~ Chogyam Trungpa
“When you are able to stay perfectly clear by cutting off all thinking and yet not falling into a trance-like sleep, this is sitting.
When inside and outside become one, and no circumstances can hinder you, this is Zen.”
~ Zen Master Seung Sahn (image from the Kwan Um School of Zen Twitter account)
Here are a few images from a road trip I started on September 10, 2018. These are pictures from eastern Colorado early that morning, taken probably anywhere between Limon and western Kansas.
“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”
~ Mother Teresa
Now you’re punching and you’re kicking
And you’re shouting at me
I’m relying on your common decency
So far it hasn’t surfaced
But I'm sure it exists
It just takes a while to travel
From your head to your fist
~ from the song, People Are People
Back in 1912, a little newspaper article warned people about global warming. Per Snopes, the original story was written a year before this one.
I wanted some specific features in a “find” utility, and when I couldn’t figure out how to get them with combinations of find, awk, and other Unix commands, I wrote what I wanted in Scala. Those features are (a) showing matching filenames, (b) showing the line that matches my search pattern, and underlining the pattern in the output, (c) showing the line numbers of the matches, and (d) showing an optional number of lines from the file before and after each match.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
~ Maya Angelou
From LoriDuffWrites.com:
“One thing (Lisa) Scottoline is very good at, is something that many authors are not, and it is a pet peeve of mine. There is a rule in writing – if you put a gun on the mantelpiece in a scene, sometime later that gun needs to be fired. Red herrings are ok, but you can’t have irrelevant details or facts. Scottoline fires every single one of her guns, and that makes me happy.”
I didn’t like parts of Lisa Scottoline’s earlier books because she actually violated this “rule” quite a bit, but in her book, Killer Smile, she keeps the action moving and eliminates at least 90% of the “irrelevant details or facts” that I didn’t like in her earlier books. (Killer Smile is really good.)
I just saw this scene on the first episode of Season 2 of Longmire. I felt that way once or twice in Alaska, but never did what Vic did in the second image, or what she tried immediately after that.
When using Unix or Linux, if you ever need to find all files that contain multiple strings/patterns, — such as finding all Scala files that contain 'try', 'catch', and 'finally' — this find/awk command seems to do the trick:
find . -type f -name *scala -exec awk 'BEGIN {RS=""; FS="\n"} /try/ && /catch/ && /finally/ {print FILENAME}' {} \;
As shown in the image below, all of the matching filenames are printed out. As Monk says, you’ll thank me later. :)
(I should mention that I got part of the solution from this gnu.org page.)
Update: My File Find utility
For a potentially better solution, see my File Find utility, which lets you search for multiple regex patterns in files.
As someone who has made baked goods the olde-fashioned way more than once, I like this “Whip it good” image.
(And if you’re not aware, that phrase comes from Devo’s “Whip It” song. And while I’m in the neighborhood, Dazz Band’s Let It Whip is also a fun song.)
Thought of the evening: People go through tremendous personal stress (distress!) when the way their life is turning out doesn’t jive with the mental model of who they think they are (i.e., the “little ego”).
As just one example, my father always talked about opening up a hot dog restaurant. “Hot dog joints” were a big thing in northern Illinois, and they still are. He was a social person who ran projects, and I thought that was a great idea for him.
But he had a mental model that he was an engineer, so even after he was laid off from an engineering job he didn’t like, he kept trying to pursue engineering jobs rather than his dream. He never could break through that, “I was trained as an engineer so I’m supposed to be an engineer” mental model. As a result he became angry, and his life didn’t end well as a result.
In my own case, for many years all I wanted was to be a professional baseball player, and it took several injuries and many years before I finally had to accept that it wasn’t going to happen. Sadly, those were lost years in many ways, and all because I couldn’t let go of the old mental model I had of who I thought I was supposed to be. And because I couldn’t let go of the old model, I couldn’t see the new opportunities that were staring me in the face.
But finally I reached a breaking point. Everything literally came to a head and I said, “F*** this. This is not how I want to spend my life.” To this day I remember that moment.
Some time later I would look back and think, “OMG, why did I waste all those years?” But I understand, even when everyone around you can clearly see what needs to happen, when it’s happening to you — when you’re in the middle of it — it’s a big, ugly, emotional mess. Something is trying to crack your cosmic egg, and when anything tries to destroy the little ego you’ve spent all your life building up ... well, it’s insanely stressful. You’ve spent XX years building up this mental model of who you are, and now something is trying to destroy that model. (A model which I should add exists only in your brain.)
All I can say is that in my case I found a new way to live, and indeed, many of the happiest years of my life.
I used to live next to a big, open field in Broomfield, Colorado, and used to enjoy listening to the coyotes at night. Eventually they got their own sign.
I had a little problem with my grippers this morning and breakfast ended up sunny side down.
Most of my life is work, meditation, yoga, and doctors’ visits, so I have to confess, it’s fun every once in a while to watch a show like Hart of Dixie. I’ve only seen the first two seasons, but it has a lot of funny moments in it.
Yesterday’s regex - Was I drunk, or a genius? From Geek & Poke’s cartoons.
