I’ve had a busted Cuisinart esspresso machine laying around the condo for ages now. Not having to heart to throw all that metal in the trash, I decided to send it back with an amusing letter. Two weeks later, I had a refurbished machine delivered to me!
It was written rather hastily and I didn’t bother to proof read it all that well.
Many people probably know that I have just returned from a 10 day course on the Vipassana meditation technique (and now you do if you didn’t already). How I came about taking this course is a bit of a round about story, but I’ll start there to provide some background.
After I had completed my B.Sc. in Computer Science in 2003 I got a fairly decent job. The pay was satisfactory and the responsibilities where, for the most part, fair as well. I felt I should of been content with my situation at the time; but, as it turned out I was often restless and questioning what my actions where contributing to my community and the world at large. I took up reading and studying a selective set of religions, philosophies and self-help techniques in an attempt to make sense of my purpose. I had over simplified my expectations and as a result was looking for an easy way to accomplish my goal of finding purpose and living a purposeful life. In the process I had made an honest effort to practice Buddhism for about 4 months. Many things failed to reconcile with me at the time and I ultimately blew it off as a idealistic philosophy on life with some disagreeable dogma.
At the end of my explorations I arbitrarily decided that I should teach English overseas. Seemed like everyone was doing it and nearly everyone came back happy and rich. I figured my service to others in this way would both give me purpose and compensation. When the decision was made, I quickly became discontent with my present situation (which was still just fine). Still not experiencing what I thought I craved, I was eager to get this moving and made a few mistakes (burned bridges, etc) as a result of my impatience. Not too surprisingly, I got quickly distracted by a chance opportunity to work in the video game industry. I immediately dropped my previously “noble” plans and jumped shipped to Winnipeg. I was convinced I would derive my noble purpose by doing this.
Not surprisingly, I did not find much purpose in Winnipeg. If anything, things got worse very quickly for me. Ultimately the company couldn’t continue and I was out of the job. Longing for what I had previously, I made post haste back to Saskatoon. I spent 6 months collecting employment insurance and looking for a job. I eventually got one 2 hours south in Regina. This time around, I had resigned myself to just doing the best I can do at what I do. I would let purpose “find me”; and so I had given up. I dabbled and volunteered a bit in teaching English. It was enjoyable and rewarding, but not my “calling”.
I again grew restless and started to make plans to do something extreme. I thought perhaps I had misread/misinterpreted Buddhism and needed a more direct approach. I looked for monasteries that taught in English in Inda/Thailand. Found one and started a dialog with them to arrange my studies. It wasn’t long after I started that process that disaster struck and they were part of the collateral damage of a local terrorist attack. Shaken by this, I dropped the idea of being a monk for a month all together. So I again looked for something slightly less extreme and more “local”. I found a few retreats in North America, but they were often expensive and full. Most also seemed to cater themselves to hipster business people as more of an “experience”. I grew frustrated and stopped looking for nearly two years.
This takes us to about 8 months ago, I was randomly googling for guided meditation audio files and happened to come across the site for Dhamma. I read about it a bit on and off the site; but more importantly noticed they had centres all across North America. This set the gears in motion for me. The hardest hurdle for me to jump was to find 10 (more like 12) consecutive days off to take the new student course. As a partner in a company, I felt I couldn’t take myself out of the operating picture for that long. In retrospect that was a silly notion to have, but it did drive me to do a few exciting things in the mean time.
While on vacation with my fiance and parents in Hawaii, I set in motion (mostly with resolve) three things:
All three if these events came to pass around the same time. I had to resign to feel like I could take the 10 days was the biggest part of all this. Again, in retrospect I could of done it without resigning. Starting my own company had motivations of it’s own as well, but ultimately the end result was that I felt I had enough control of my life to take 10 days off. That’s how I ended up going to a Vipassana meditation course.
My better judgement tells me that the best details of my experience of the course should be told in person. As a new student in the technique I’m not fully able to explain the more subtle aspects that are also the more profound. I should mention my state of mind immediately before entering the course, since I believe it played a very important role in the end results. I consider myself a skeptic about most things I haven’t witnessed first hand, so coming to this course I decided to come with not expectations and an open mind. By open mind I don’t mean willing to listen, but willing to following immerse myself in the instructions of the technique. Turns out in the first discourse video your highly encouraged to do this anyways, but I think I helped set myself up for the best possible experience.
Having grossly overestimated the travel time, my ride share companion and I arrived many hours early. Fortunately, there were many people already there. Any interesting tension was in the air, many of us were new students and were not quite sure what to expect. It seemed like all the old students and originally taken the course over seas and had very interesting experiences to share. This fueled the general anxieties, but also removed some of the unknowns for us new students. Once registration was done, diner was served. A pleasant vegetarian meal (all the meals were vegetarian, since you take a precept not to harm another being while taking the course). The course technically starts on day zero, after taking 5 precepts as a group.
I won’t bore you with the details of the schedule, but I will mention that this is no “vacation” or “retreat”. It’s a course and it has long hard hours. You essentially are meditating 10 or more hours a day. The first three days you practice a through the nose breathing meditation that trains your mind to be aware of the subtle sensations you are capable of feeling. This got painfully boring for me by the third day, since I’ve already done this form of meditation for years. I had convinced myself that if something new didn’t present itself on the fourth day I’d leave the course. The evening discourse presented what we would be doing the next day and it was surprisingly not what I expected.
During day 0 there was a brief mention of “Sittings of Strong Determination”. Turns out today was the day you start those (actually it could of been day 5, I wasn’t keeping the best track of days). I was once again tested in my resolve to stick with the course. My advice to anyone on their first sitting of this type is to keep your mind busy with the technique as much as possible. Your given just enough instructions up to this point to know what to do, but the evening discourse pulls it all together. Every sitting afterwords was a cakewalk compared to the first and I learned a few interesting things about myself as a result.
Practice, practice, practice. There is a very strong emphasis in this course to practice seriously and diligently. I took it to heart on all but the 8th day (my snow day). As each day progressed your use of the technique is expanded in small ways. The discourses generally pull together the theory of the technique and impart general nuggets of wisdom to you. There was a few Buddhist dogma’s brought up that seemed out of place in a non-cecular course (mostly about reincarnation). The instructor and assistant instructor both urge you to think for yourself and ultimately told me those parts of the discourse were not important to leaning and applying the technique. Generally time went fast with the exception of the 8th day. For whatever reason on the 8th day my mind insisted that I purge all the creative ideas that had accumulated since the start of the course. I basically wrote the first 1/4 of an amusing sci-fi in my head most of the day. I thought of a few interesting products for the iPhone and Wordpress as well during the day. The down side was that my sittings dragged on because of my distraction.
Letting myself go on day 8 turned out to be the best thing I could do. With my minds buffer emptied I found a new found resolve to concentrated and apply the technique. The day literally flew by and I meditated for about 13 hours this day alone. I experienced the more advanced stages of the technique multiple times and came out of meditations with swells of emotion and tears. It was this day that many insights about life came to me. It was also the day I acknowledged the value in practicing Vipassana, even if I don’t currently agree with all of the topics brought up in the discourses.
After mid morning meditation we are released of our vow of noble silence. It’s somewhat ironic that after 9 days of not talking you have nothing particularly insightful to say. The men exited the hall and kinda cheered (one of those lame half hearted ones). The ladies had a much more emotional exit from the hall with hugs and tears. It didn’t take long for everyone to do introductions again (how do you remember the names of people you can’t talk to for 9 days?). During rest periods everyone would form large groups and talk about their experiences so far in the course and the usual mixer conversations. We were warned meditation would be hard now that our minds had this extra source of distraction, but I actually found my meditations where a nice break from all the chit-chat. We learned the last and final step of the Vipassana technique that day, which is a little hokey to be honest; but at this point I couldn’t say it wasn’t worth doing based on my experiences so far.
This day starts like all the others, but they throw in an audio discourse in the middle of morning meditation. At 7:15 or so we were “free”. Breakfast was served and volunteers had started to tear down the site and pack things up. I left with great feeling of rest, joy and general balance.
If you are interested in more details about the course or my experience, just ask me in person. So far I’ve been a very passionate about in sharing my experience to the people I’ve seen. Jolene has noticed a “glow of joy” about me. I generally feel “better” both physically and mentally. Most importantly, I don’t have this yearning for something more or feeling that I have no noble purpose.
I’m not against UBB. I think it’s a very reasonable way to charge for what will eventually be considered a utility. Like all the utilities we currently pay for, we often pay a connect/service fee and then a reasonable rate for resource being used. It’s actually a great model to use and this is why.
If you look at current UBB for utilities, the connect/service fee goes to various aspects of operating that utility. Usually maintaining the infastructure, improving infastructure, equipment given/leased to you, service and support and all the other aspects of managing that utility. It works particularly good in Canada because it allows a company to spread the cost of providing service to hard to reach areas out amongst a larger demographic. If you look at the utility rates these companies charge, it’s usually a fairly marginal markup on the costs. They do build some of the “service” related fees into that price at times, but generally it close to the “bulk” or “market rate” for the utility. (For an example, go digging here: SaskRateReview )
UBB does solve a problem ISP’s have faced for more than a decade (maybe even two). When you give unlimited, some people try to actually use it as such. You might say, why offer it if you were not prepared to service it. It’s a fair question that I’m sure some marketing departments would attempt to explain. The reality is that ISP’s have been playing the averages for ages now. It wasn’t until recently that the average consumption of bandwidth has been accelerating. A fair reaction to this is placing limits on packages at fixed prices. Many ISP’s adopted this ages ago, mostly because the infastructure was not designed to handle a few people with huge appetites for bandwidth.
There are two cruxes to the problem that I see here. One is the ISP’s claiming infrastructure can’t keep up with their customers growing demand. Funny, what were the big three spending their profits on all these years. Rogers, Shaw, and Bell have all recently (and historically for that matter) had very successful years. Apparently they didn’t think to spend any of that money on improving infrastructure to keep up with growing trends of more people using the internet and more people streaming media on the internet.
Second crux is that the ISP’s immediately when to what is an utility model, but didn’t switch to utility pricing. Many people have mentioned it before, but $1.50/GB is far to much to charge as a utility. Look at the price U.S. resales it at: SliceHost, Amazon and RackSpace. Between 30 cents and 10 cents? Surely, it must be more in Canada right? Nope, take a look at hosting pages and how much transfer they include: eHosting, Cirrus Tech and The Wire. All these companies host geographically in Canada. For whatever reason Canada covets the $/GB numbers, but the numbers are interesting regardless. eHosting is ~ $1.09/GB and that includes fully managed dedicate server (actual hardware) on the other end. Cirrus Tech includes 2,000GB a month for their hosting which works out to $0.095/GB. Again, that includes hosting on a machine. The Wire sells dedicated co-location with 1 Mbps connection for $129, which typically gives you ~300GB a month. $0.43/GB that includes rack space and power.
To be fair, some comparing hosting provider charges for bandwidth isn’t 100% fair. They are usually right on top of a few trunks and often negotiate peering agreements (if they are large enough to do so). So that’s the price when your at the doorstep. In theory, in a utility market where there is a service fee plus UBB, the cost of brining it to the door is either all in the service fee, or wrapped in to the metered rate. In either case, if the ISP’s in Canada are claiming it costs an order magnatude more to provide internet service to the door. You have to wonder why electrical companies are not going bankrupt left and right. They provide a far more reliable service to nearly EVERY possible place in Canada.
The solution is not clear at this point. These ISP’s clearly want to make money and there is nothing wrong with that. UBB, if done fairly, would not be putting us in this uproar we are in right now. It seems like most Canadians get that UBB is like moving to the utility model, but they also recognize the rate is not well connected to the costs. That’s something economics would usually fix over time, but perhaps the meddling of the CTRC and government is preventing such an event to take place. There are broader concerns that the big “three” are going to generally match that each other do as well. So if one does it and makes money, why not the rest of them. If that’s the case, perhaps government intervention is required to break those companies up into something smaller. Or, god help us, regular internet services as utilities (a last resort IMHO). What I do know is, the current UBB pricing is not reflecting a fair rate, something we should definitely be doing something about (preferable with your wallet and voice).
If your working with Magento and have to move an installation, you will want to make sure it’s locally installed PEAR repository is updated as well. It stores a bunch of first install paths in a serialized PHP file. Instead of manually editing them, you can simply run this from the root install of your Magento:
./pear mage-setup
That should update everything to work as expected for updates and the like.
By request, my 5 minute chili recipe.
Ingredients:
Directions:
5 Minute Chili ready to serve
So, if your a paypal user like me, you may of added your chequeing or saving account for direct withdraws and deposits. Makes sense if you do large online purchases and occasionally sell something as well. They make this “convenience feature” very visible and push it for EVERY transaction. Every time you buy something the default is to use you cash accounts, not your credit card. They tout it as “Safe, Secure and Easy”. Well, I’ve go news for you… it’s not.
Seems like people are upset about Kiva providing micro financing to Americans. I guess all American’s got a bad rap sheet because of that hold botched financial crisis thing. Sure, you could generalize all American’s as if they’re all a bunch of imbecels when it comes to money; but, I don’t think that’s very fair. Lots of America’s do know how to save, invest and plan. That’s what Kiva is all about people!
I came across this today: Working With Default Constraints
Basically, if you script any sort of table changes in MSSQL you will eventually need to use this code. In MSSQL’s infinite wisdom they made default values on NOT NULL columns occasionally have a mysterious constraint. Ordinarily, constraints on fields on tables are easily found in INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS; but, these particular constraints are hidden for whatever reason.
This makes removing them programmatically very difficult, since they insist on putting a timestamp/guid on the end of each auto-generated default constraint. SO, this useful page on the MSDN provides a way to query the actual name of the constraint given the table name and column name. This, allowing you to remove it before you do something completely crazy like delete the column.
Of course, if your not in to scripting your database migrations then you can just use Management Studio and delete the column.
I was out shopping for valence lighting today. Just your plain old fluorescent bulb under the cabinet sort of stuff. I went to the two “big” place in town after giving up on the box stores. First store didn’t impress me much on price and the second was even worse (and this was the store I bought all my fixtures at…). When the sales rep asked why I was so perplexed; so, I explained…
Last week I headed to Regina to work on-site for one of our clients. The last time I was in Regina I booked myself into a hotel with no pool/hot tub. Since I’m half-fish that didn’t work out so well for me. This time around I got it right and booked myself into the the Ramada. This is where my story begins…
