Wanderings and Musings

Meditation

A friend of mine asked if I could post some meditation links for him, so I thought I’d explain a little more about what type of meditation I am trying.

I have tried meditation off and on, but never stuck with it for very long. This month I am doing it for 20 minutes every day and recording more about what happens or how it affects me, so I’ll learn a little more.

The first 2 weeks I’ll be doing “Deep Meditation”, the second two weeks will be “Connecting with the Inner Body” explained below. Both styles are about quieting the mind and finding the stillness within you.

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Drawing

Meditation

Workout

For the month of January I have chosen 3 places to focus my efforts on my 30 day trails. Usually I would want to focus on just one item, but I’ve done these 3 before. Namely: Drawing, Meditation, and working out.

I want to really establish these activities as part of my daily practice, along with testing out what kind of physical shape I can establish with a full 30 days of working out.

I’ll be consolidating the reports on each day into batches of 5 days or so.
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Contemplation

Although I don’t do the standard “New Years Resolution” each year, I have been doing something similar but much more limited in scope and more often. It’s called the “30 day trial.” I’ve been doing this “30 day trial” for a couple of years now off and on.

This has included tons of various improvements in an attempt to either start a new good habit, or break an old bad one. Examples of ones I’ve already tried are vegetarianism for 2 months, writing daily in a journal, recording my dreams, morning exercise, getting up early, flossing, no alcohol, and more.

I’ve had some success and some were not so successful. Most of the unsuccessful ones were because I didn’t stick to the full thirty days and gave up. To help alleviate that, I am going to take the next step forward and publicly post my progress on my trials to hold myself accountable and keep a log of how well I did.

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I try to use a portable thumb drive with portable applications for all of my application needs wherever I go. This provides me with security with the fact that none of my data is left hanging around on any machine, security also with the fact that I use an SSH tunnel for my internet needs thus avoiding someone snooping my traffic on the network, and ease of use as all of my programs are accessible anywhere I am at as long as I have a windows computer to plug my drive into.

I’ve had a few requests from people to give them a copy of all the programs I use… however, this isn’t quite what I want to do as my personal data is often saved into the application folders of those programs. So I decided to create a post about the items I use and provide links.

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Hard times are coming… the only question is: How hard will they be?

The financial meltdown was predicted a few years in advance along with the mortgage crisis that precipitated it, and even though the majority of people want to remain positive (or blind) and turn their head from the coming years of hardship, the fact remains that there is no good news on the short term horizon. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

I just don’t know how far “worse” goes down the ladder at this point. I mean, is this a worse as in gas costs $6/gal and people have to start tightening their belts, or is this a worse as in complete financial collapse and another great depression, or is this a worse as in zombies rule the world and you’re the only remaining human alive?

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Update on my Asus eee PC 900: (Note- I’m typing this post up on my Asus eee )

After traveling around with it for two months I really appreciated it’s size. It fit perfectly into my motorcycle tank bag and at less than 2 pounds it’s practically not noticed when carrying it around.

The size of the screen is actually not a problem at all for using the internet or doing most other normal work.

The only thing I found myself disliking are that the buttons on the touchpad don’t always work, and the low powered CPU can at times be slow enough to be irritating.

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Update: A lot of fine people are working hard on creating subtitles in other languages for the movie. See their links below in the comments. And… if you watch the movie and agree with it. Do something! Anything! Even a small gesture. Spend a few hours contributing to the cause.

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I spent many hours transcribing the movie Zeitgeist: Addendum into text and marking up the quotations and speech with the speaker. I wanted to contribute to these ideas, and as I couldn’t find a full transcript online yet, I took it on myself.

This movie is phenomenal. Even if you don’t agree with everything in it, be open to the messages it has. Open your mind, think through what is and how it could be done in other ways. If you have questions or doubts… go research it, let others know about your research. Don’t react and yell and scream because it upsets you, give it some thought and some attention.

If you see errors in the transcript let me know. If you find references that I can link to within the transcript also let me know.
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For the last couple of days I’ve been having strange heart issues. My heart goes… beat, beat, pause… BEAT, beat. Maybe every 10 or 20 beats I get an irregular one. This has been disconcerting to me to say the least. Well as I’m driving in to work yesterday morning it was particularly bad and I was actually worrying enough to start some research into it.

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The features listed sold me on this unit as well as the very reasonable price offered at Costco of only $350, however after almost 2 months of constant companionship with it on my travels around the US, I’ve decided it isn’t the GPS for me. My review is more about what I didn’t like and got frustrated with than the specs, bells and whistles… as these frustrations can kill an otherwise very nice product. This may sound like more of a bitch session than a review, but I often think reviews sugar coat as most products have some great features (as this one does), but when you get so annoyed that you want to return the item I also think others would like to know about it to avoid the same issues.

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World of Warcraft is one of the most addicting, fun, entertaining, enjoyable games I’ve ever played… but in the end I had to quit because it was consuming my thoughts, my dreams and way too many of my waking hours.

Here is a short list of some of the things I learned:

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