Posts in the “personal” category

“Long, uninterrupted, alert practice is the firm foundation for restraining the fluctuations of the consciousness.”

~ Patanjali (via Iyengar)

If you like my books and want to earn a little extra income, I just started using the Gumroad “affiliates” program. Just sign up with Gumroad, link to one or more books, then hopefully make some sales and earn a little extra money.

I’m starting with a 30% commission, so if you sell a $10 book like Learn Scala 3 The Fast Way! you’ll earn $3, and if you sell a $20 book like Functional Programming, Simplified: Updated for Scala 3, you’ll earn $6 (USD).

If you’re interested, start the process here on Gumroad.com. You’ll also want to read their help page for Affiliates.

I’m spending my weekend moving the HTML version of my book, How I Sold My Business: A Personal Diary, over to this website. I had it on a separate website, but I’m trying to simplify my life, and I also like the idea of having all of my content searchable on this site.

(If you’d like to read the paperback version of the book, you can find it here on Amazon.com.)

In December, 2022, in Winchester, Kentucky, the Clark County Public Library Board of Trustees took up the matter to potentially ban a book in the library they oversee. The book is an award-winning LGBTQ+ memoir that was already located in the Adult section of the library, but that wasn’t enough for the “conservative” trustees. While the library has many other sexually-explicit books (think Fifty Shades of Grey), the trustees singled out this one book, eventually voting that this award-winning book “is restricted to individuals over 18 unless a parent or guardian gives written consent.”

I was going to share my opinion on censorship when I saw the quote in the image I shared (from this article): “Censorship is like a forest fire. It begins with a single ember, and if it is not extinguished at the outset, it becomes a raging conflagration that consumes everything in its path.”

This is a poem titled, “If I Had My Life to Live Over,” by Nadine Stair. I found this poem in the book, Polishing the Mirror, by Ram Dass.

IMHO, the song, Anchorage, by Marian Call, is a great song, probably one of my Top-100 songs of all time, maybe Top-50. Of all time.

Last night I had a dream in which a woman picked up a stone, turned it over, and showed it to me. A burning image of Jesus on the cross was on this other side. Skipping over some stuff, it eventually reminded me of this Gospel of Thomas quote: “Jesus said, ‘The Kingdom of God is inside you, and all around you, not in mansions of wood and stone. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me.’”

This morning this makes me think of the song, Minutes to Memories, by John Mellencamp. (I used to link to the video on YouTube, but it has been removed.)

Once upon a time there was a dog named Zeus. Before we met him, Zeus had a very difficult life, having been abused by two different owners. When my wife saw Zeus on a local tv station, and they said the Animal Care Society was going to be extremely careful about who adopted him next, she seemed to know that she had to take care of him.

As you can see from the following pictures, when we first adopted Zeus, he was very sick, with a horrible case of mange.

The tv series Becker was one of my favorites back in the day, and I always wondered why it wasn’t available on DVD. I just looked, and it’s now available at Amazon, just released in 2018.

A favorite episode that helped me snap out of a personal funk was when Becker finally got to be with his long-lost love, a woman he pined for for many years. When he finally had a chance to reunite with her it turned out she was wild, crazy, ran up his credit card bill, then took off. In its own way, that episode helped me get over someone I had felt the same way about. (It was like seeing a comedic version of your own life that turned out to be a great slap in the face moment for me.)

I drove through Chicago recently and with my crappy old phone’s camera I got this photo of the pink and orange Moon rising over Greater Chicagoland. It was a clear night and the Moon was visible for the entire drive.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong woman stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”

“The credit belongs to the woman who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends herself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

~ “The Man in the Arena” speech by Teddy Roosevelt, with a few minor changes, which I was reminded of by this article

At some point somebody was like, “Let’s get a mast cell — a type of white blood cell — from a bone marrow biopsy, magnify it 1,000 times, piss it off, and see what happens.”

The result? Ka-boom! It looks like a little firework went off when it released its histamine, tryptase, serotonin, superoxide, heparin, thromboxane, PGD2, PAF, and other granules.

That’s pretty much what it feels like, lol. I used to tell doctors that it felt like I had been drugged, and indeed, I was.

(Image from this nih.org research paper.)

“Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.”

~ from the movie, Top Gun

I don’t agree with everything Nathaniel Hackett has done to start his tenure with the Denver Broncos, but I do agree with this quote about trying to create a good and happy work environment:

“You want them to feel an environment that they want to come into, and they’re excited to come into. That’s all you can do, that’s what you’re trying to create.”

I had the movie Michael on last night while I was preparing dinner, and when it came to this “Battle!” scene it reminded me of my friend, Jim Kimmel. We used to say “Battle!” at work from time to time, sometimes as we were about to do something, and other times for no reason at all.

“Yet when consciousness and the body are brought into union with one another, the energy of consciousness becomes still, and when the energy of consciousness is still, consciousness too is still, and the soul pervades the entire body.”

~ The Tree of Yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar

Good writing, from Wheeler and Logan on Law & Order: Criminal Intent:

“So you're a glass half-empty kind of guy?”

“Depends what's in the glass.”

“You’ve got a new face, new fingerprints, even a new name. Williams. Remo Williams. A lot of thought went into it.”

~ a little humor for those in the know

July 15, 2018: A little less than three weeks ago I had a type of surgery known as a colectomy, a procedure where a portion of the colon is surgically removed. The background of the story goes like this: Because of pain I was having whenever I tried to eat, I haven’t been able to eat solid foods since October, 2017. After eight months of hoping the problem would heal itself, I was finally forced to give up that hope when it became apparent that surgery was the only hope for a relatively normal life.

This is a favorite song of late, The Rise, by Lisa Guyer and Sully Erna.