Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/06/12/true-giving/
Eknath Easwaran:
The Buddha is sometimes quoted as saying that desire is suffering. A more accurate translation is that selfish desire is suffering – in fact, the source of all suffering. But desire itself is simply power, neither good nor bad.
Without the tremendous power of desire, there can be no progress on the spiritual path; there can be no progress anywhere. The whole secret of spiritual transformation is turning selfish desire into selfless desire, transforming personal passions into the overwhelming desire to attain life’s highest goal. This is not repression; it is transformation.
I would say, that it is best if your desire is to give. And the real trick here is to give selflessly. I read recently about true giving, which is the process of learning about what is needed, and trying to give that. So often, we give someone what we want to give. We give what we would want to have. True giving is more interesting. I think it is tricky for people in our culture because we tend to live our lives in peer groups. If everyone is mostly like us, where’s the mystery as to what we need to give? But ask a parent, and they can tell you its pretty obvious that your personal needs differ from those you love the most. You give children what they need to grow.
As we practice true giving, then we don’t have to be as concerned with our own selfish desires. We have friends, family, lovers, who want to know us enough to provide what is needed when it is needed.
And when we lack for these people, we start with ourselves.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/06/05/suffering/
This morning at church I was talking to Aiko, who had heard through Yayoi how much I had enjoyed Dave Sammons’ May 7 sermon on Suffering. I had been especially attuned to his words that day given how much I had happened to be suffering at that time. Aiko had said that she had not enjoyed the sermon as much. She felt that when it came to understanding suffering, the Buddhists were better at it than the UUs, because after all, suffering is central to Buddhist philosophy.
Anyway, Dave’s sermon was, in a way, akin to a blog post, in which he reviewed, quoting at length, the work of Gerald Sittser, who, in his book A Grace Disguised, narrated his own confrontation with suffering from the death of his family in a car accident. So, here I’ll share some of Sittser, some of Sammons, and some of Howard.
(more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/06/04/wine-faith-yoga/
Well, things have been busy. Saturday Duncan took me out to a winery shindig in Mendocino. He had originally planned to go with a beautiful woman named Janey, but this beautiful woman had some personal sympathy for my present situation, and was happy to send me along instead. I have not yet retrieved my fedora from the city, I might do that tonight, and since Duncan’s ride is a Porsche Boxster, he grabbed me a hat at Long’s drugs. “Originally I was looking at the baseball caps, but then I remembered Danny’s style!” It was a good trip, tasting wines. I grabbed a couple at this one very off-the-track winery that Duncan loves, because the wines have such excitingly distinctive tastes!
Today, I walked down to church, wearing a new shirt I had bought at Target. The farewell sermon from the outgoing intern minister, Lisa Sargent, was off the hook and beautiful. The congregation gave her a standing ovation! It was about going “off the map” into uncharted territory, in life. This is something she has done in her life, something I have done in mine, and something a lot of us tend to do at the end of Spring. So, it was apropos for so many people. One of the important themes she described was faith, and what faith is. She said “belief clings, faith lets go.” And that is how I feel . . . I have faith in myself, in my world, in the people. I have faith in my own future, however unknown it has recently become. I have faith in Dad, and his recovery. And I have faith that Yayoi . . . she will live her life, and I hope in time she will better know herself. Too bad that one had to be let go. So, I can not cling to the life I had even a few months ago, but I have faith in the new life I am leading.
I stopped by the bookstore, and got what looks to be a very good cookbook “for two, or for one.” I look forward to trying it out and eating well, on my own and I hope, on occasion, with some company. I also grabbed a yoga video. Yoga? Well, I remembered reading on Hiromi‘s blog somewhere that she used to be like me: so inflexible she couldn’t touch her toes, but thanks to yoga, life’s a lot more “wow.” There’s a class at Heather Farm later in June I might go for, but I don’t know how long I’ll keep to living in the ‘Creek, so I figured a $15 in the DVD player is worth more than an $88 class in the uncertain future, let’s give it a shot.
I also grabbed an amplified radio antenna at Radio Shack, and after a bit of waving around, have found solid reception for KQED! So, I have some interesting human voices back in the house with me!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/05/17/advice-avoiding-divorce/
Some time, sooner than you may think you will, you may find yourself in a situation where your marriage has turned inside out. It’ll hurt worse than you’ve ever known before and you’ll try desperately to hold on, only your initial reaction may in fact be exactly the wrong thing to do. And you’ll step back and try to figure it out, and nothing will make any sense, until you swallow your ego and look back at yourself from your spouse’s eyes, and get some sound advice from friends, therapists, or in this case, perhaps by reading a blog entry that quotes a book.
The following are some of my dog-eared passages from “The Divorce Remedy” by Michele Weiner Davis. I’m transcribing them here since they strike me as sufficiently interesting to share, and because after I transcribe them I can flatten out the pages. A nice book shouldn’t live its life with permanant dog-ears. In all likelyhood, you are not in a crisis at the moment, but if the poop ever hits the fan, maybe you’ll recall that there’s some knowledge to turn to . . . (more…)
14 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/05/15/colorado/
Hello,
Last Wednesday around 8PM, my Dad experienced a stroke. I flew out here to Pueblo, CO on Thursday. He is getting better, but there’s plenty of rehabilitation ahead. My better half is back in California doing finals week. We have been having a rough time the past couple of months, to say the least. While things have tended to look pretty bleak, I continue to learn new strategies I can follow to effect positive change. I continue to be driven by the image of a better marriage. We shall see if that vision can be attained . . . for now, it is nice to be around family, where I can be a positive influence. It builds hope.
I haven’t been doing nearly as much computer stuff lately. Instead, I have been spending much more time working on personal concerns and talking to friends and family. My employer has been good about giving me some space to work things out, as well as some time off to visit Dad. All the same, I like to update the “blog” every once in a while. There is some entertainment to be found in pictures.
Regards,
/danny
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/05/02/google-subscribe-button/
I was talking to a co-worker about how awesome the Google Personalized home page is. There’s an advanced interface where you can paste in just about any URL and get it aggregated on the page. How neat is that? Well, it would be even neater if there was a button in the web browser, so you could just visit a web site, and add it to your Google Home Page.
Well, I have done this before … I didn’t invent it, but this little JavaScript bookmark does the trick: (more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/05/01/day-without/
My my what is in my Netflix queue today?
How topical! Honestly, I did not set this up: that’s just how the queue shook out!
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/04/21/ms-walk/
After seeing Jeff’s post, I decided I’d truck down to Los Gatos this weekend to take a little 10k walk. The big benefit should be getting to see Barry, who should be walking in his wheelchair.
I never got the point of raising money by asking people to give you money for walking–I walk for free. I mean. Well, so I’ll donate my own money, but if anyone wants to make a contribution, your generosity would be appreciated. Jeff notes that donations are acceptible after the walk has happened, if you are reading this after the fact.
If any of my 408 peeps want to get together Saturday afternoon / evening, gimme a shout!
-danny
4 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/04/18/1906-earthquake-dst/
So, today is the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake which leveled much of San Francisco. To mark the occasion, people got up as early at 4:30AM to attend the festivities, held at 5:17AM, the time when the earthquake struck. Just yesterday I started thinking “but San Francisco didn’t practice Daylight Saving Time in 1906. Are they making the centenarians get up an hour earlier than the actual event?”
Yes! Somebody more insane than me has already written about this, thus justifying the entire blog-o-sphere, in my mind. The sun rose at 6:31AM today, in San Francisco–just fifteen minutes after the actual centennial of the Earthquake. But, thanks to Daylight Saving Time, very old people were forced out of bed at what would have been 3:30AM, to celebrate an hour and fifteen minutes before sunrise.
“Oh, the humanity!”
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/04/15/abortion/
(Addressed originally to my wife, mother, and grandmother, but why not share?)
http://mad-eponine.livejournal.com/23305.html
Tom has two links about South Dakota. The state outlawed abortion pretty much entirely. They only had one abortion clinic anyway. So, a chief of an Indian Reservation, is trying to open her own family planning clinic. And since Indians have limited sovereignty, she would (hopefully) be able to provide abortions on her own territory within South Dakota.
“Only in America.”
Also, I read somewhere that while the new Supreme Court is culturally conservative, they are also judicially conservative, meaning that they are more likely, most of the time, to defer to precedent, rather than to change laws based on their personal beliefs. The South Dakota thing is aimed squarely at a Supreme Court challenge to overturn Roe v Wade. Of course the trick is that the court could go either way — social conservative or judicial conservative — and if they go the latter, there is a SECOND Supreme Court precedent affirming abortion rights.
Which would pretty much make anti-abortion impossible without an Amendment.
OR, if we lose Roe v Wade is becomes a State issue . . . from the first article:
Aguilar: Tell me about your reservation and the realities women living in rural areas face in this political climate.
Fire Thunder: My reservation is 50 miles by 100 miles long. It’s a large rural community of 40,000 people and 60 percent of our people speak our language. Half of our population is under 18.
In a perfect world, if a woman is raped, she will call the police, and the police will take her to the emergency room. The emergency room will have components in place to help this woman, including the morning-after pill to prevent the pregnancy. In rural America, that doesn’t happen. Many places in rural America do not know about the morning-after pill.
On the reservation, we have to take a look at the high rates of alcohol and drug use. More often than not, young women who’ve been raped while under the influence will be blamed for being drunk. If someone is raped, especially out in the rural community, they may not report it. After three days, they’ve passed the cut-off point for taking the morning-after pill.
How many babies are conceived during the act of violence? We don’t know.
Interesting times. If we lose Roe, we will all be in the fight. And even with Roe, there is still a lot of work that needs doing.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/04/12/dst-energy-conservation/
Hello,
I have no empirical evidence, but since the clock was shifted, I can report that I have found it harder to get out of bed. As a consequence, I have been missing the cut-off time to access the bus and been relying on a personal automobile to get to work. My personal energy consumption has seen a substantial increase as a result of DST.
I had weird thoughts about this problem this morning. There have been reports lately that more and more Americans are working earlier and earlier hours. Record numbers of people are now up at 6AM, 5AM . . . imagine all that energy they are burning in the morning, turning up artificial lighting and climate controls because they are up before the sun! And then going to bed when it is still light out!
Perhaps, perhaps, we would save daylight if we moved everyone’s clocks backward! We could measure average working hours each year and then adjust the DST offset so that no matter how much earlier or later people were working . . .
Of course, this stupid idea would never get enacted. Er, well, DST got enacted! How was that? Business concerns–golfers, sporting goods, and others figured than an extra hour of daylight in the afternoon would bring them greater profits. So, if we were to reverse DST . . . perhaps McDonald’s and Burger King, IHOP, Starbuck’s coffee . . . the longer the morning . . .
Anyhow.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/04/10/fun-with-ip-mapping/
We recently set up an old machine at work to play the part of an “ops warboard” . . . basically, a Firefox session with the tab-slideshow module, paging through screens of Big Sister status lamps. I got to thinking, that one very cool thing to do, is to set up a map, with little dots on it that light up when people log in to our web application.
There is a web site to map IPs to geographic information: hostip.info. I yanked IPs from web logs, and wrote a script to query the web site for Latitude and Longitude, and then delved into the complexities of xplanet.
To prove my own understanding, I hacked up this:
WARNING: Do not visit this link! Some Hungarian asshat linked to it in a message forum and stole a bunch of server bandwidth so it is currently serving alternate content. (Sorry.)
http://dannyman.toldme.com/scratch/animated.gif
That’s a 24-frame animated gif of hourly hits to my web site from last Wednesday. I’m hoping to write a script to generate such things automatically. For a “real time” deal it is a matter of getting the IPs you want to map from the web logs to the mapper. I’m thinking some minor daemon who tails logs and perhaps send RPC pings when it sees a “new” IP address. Where “new” is “new within the past five minutes” . . . that gets converted into geo coordinates, and the map is refreshed every so often. Not quite “real time” but close enough to look cool.
4 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/04/06/error-25090/
So, here’s a neat bug:
Customer reports she can’t export her contacts from Outlook to Excel. “Why,” says I. But ours is not to question why . . . so, I fire up Internet Explorer (for good Microsoft Karma) and type kb.microsoft.com. Nope. microsoft.com/kb. Nope. But then it suggests support.microsoft.com. Okay. And I search for error code 25090, and voila:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827467/en-us
The solution? Go get the Office 2003 Install disk, and make sure it starts to run setup.exe, and then hit Cancel. Because by merely initializing setup.exe your computer system will be fixed.
I give the support folks points for documenting this fix without falling over themselves laughing. Problem solved, as I walk away from the scene chorlting “this is so going in my blog . . .”
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/04/04/benefits-of-dst/
I got up at 6AM today, which is what I do on my good days. Not only was it rainy and cold, but since 6AM now comes at 5AM, it was fricking dark too. So I went back to bed, got up at 8:30, and drove in.
So, uhm, no daylight here, and increased fuel consumption. (If I wake up at 6 or 7, I have enough time for breakfast at home and a walk to the bus station.)
But I am just a crank.
This crazy mega-rain chaff my hide.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/03/31/freebsd-howto-fix-indiana-dst/
Nominally, you would fix a FreeBSD server by supping to stable, and running:
cd /usr/src/share/zoneinfo && make clean && make install
Though, you may have a valid reason for not doing all that. You could instead do this:
~> ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Indiana
Indianapolis Knox Marengo Vevay
~> fetch ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2006b.tar.gz
Receiving tzdata2006b.tar.gz (149555 bytes): 100%
149555 bytes transferred in 2.6 seconds (55.68 kBps)
~> tar xfz tzdata2006b.tar.gz
~> sudo zic northamerica
~> ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Indiana
Indianapolis Marengo Vevay
Knox Petersburg Vincennes
A tip-of-the-hat to William Computer Blog and participants on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list.
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