More quotes for Quotes to Make You Think collected over the past year.
“Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for fewer problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom.” — Earl Shoaf”I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly.” — Captain Jack Sparrow
”Counting time is not so important as making time count.” — James J. Walker
“The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade…
Here is the progress made on my 2010 New Year’s Resolutions.
What is interesting is the more others talked about my goals, the stronger I pushed on them….
I recently completed my first resolution for the year 2009: Read 12,000 pages. pp
Check the Reading page for the master list.
Titles in bold are the ones I recommend. (They also are probably the ones I quote the most.)
There’s a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable. You can see this even in insects and animals and birds. All of us are the same.
A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is.
” —Pema Chodron (via psychotherapy)There’s a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable. You can see this even in insects and animals and birds. All of us are the same.
A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is.
” —Pema Chodron (via psychotherapy)Blackboard seems to be straining under the weight of its own bloat. Its omnivorous business strategy and its tin ear regarding educational technology trends is leading institutions across the country to reassess its usefulness vis-a-vis the tremendous cost.
What do you think?
I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values where there is an interesting delving into the idea of whether machines are good are bad. This was written in 1974. Computers, I think, still fall under the idea of machines.
Anyway, good machines foster tranquility. Our troubles are removed. Bad machines disturb our lives causing stress. The general impression I get is Blackboard software fosters much stress.
What are the better alternatives? Is there any software which does not cause stress?
A security guy at a campus wanted our web server log file in the CSV format. The original file has lines which look something like:
machine.usg.edu: webserver.log13646,2010-11-30 11:08:32 0.0010 999.999.999.999 b7tPM1hTgGYMn90bLTM1 200 GET /webct/urw/lc987189066271.tp1333853785371/blank.html - 262 “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.19.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.3 Safari/533.19.4″ username:0:0
Turns out I only need three sed edits to make it look…
WordPress has neat new functionality to notify about and easily update templates. Apparently some of mine are so old they can no longer be updated? The result of trying was not removing the “.maintenance” file resulting an inaccessible blog. Easy enough to remove it once I looked up the problem. However, annoying that I was not given an error notice or anything useful.
This mention reminded me of a study where men experienced difficulties remembering the news when the speaker was a beautiful woman.
Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive female opponents, even though the risk-taking didn’t improve their performance. Social Science Palooza | NYT
My experience is…
What are the questions you would bring up to Ray?
In 2000, science fiction author Neal Stephenson gave an inspiring talk at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) conference. He entitled it “Zones of Domination.” In the talk, he told the story…
Found a Backupify blog on controlling employee access to social media odd. Preventing employees from discussing work on social media may help, but really you need to operate like the Manhattan Project. Sequester them in a town you build in the middle of nowhere, go through all of their correspondence paper or electronic, and control who they can physically see. People are going to talk about what they do.
Really, the issue is a business whose existence relies totally on secrets is one…
