Month: April 2004

Fractal beauty in the countryside

I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday when I went for a walk in the beautiful sunshine after work. I was thinking about how there seems to be a lot of special days in the Buddhist calendar, you know, auspicious days and not. If everything is empty then why is any time or space any more auspicious than any other? I need an answer to this, I think.

That said, I can see that movements in the sea of karma means that there are times when a little push or touch would have a big effect and others where massive effort would have no effect but why would it necessarily be every so many days in the lunar month? There is a kind of odd rigidity in this which I don’t think Buddha would have wanted. I need to talk this through again.

As I came back from this walk, talking to myself as usual, the whole of the world around me seemed to pulse and move with fantastic detail. I wanted to lie down on the gravel path I was walking on and swim in it. Very odd, beautiful moment.

As the Buddha said: The end of all gathering is dispersion; the end of all building is ruin; the end of all meeting is parting; the end of all birth is death

Funny Pecuiliar

I went to Lama Jampa’s Easter teachings in Flumseberg, Switzerland. I really liked Switzerland and the Swiss, I think their taciturn reputation is undeserved. I liked the way everything was so clean, even the smokers would stub their cigarettes out in ashtrays and put them in metal bins. It isn’t perfect, nothing is, but maybe I’m just tired of the UK.

Lama Jampa’s teachings were, as usual, extraordinary and very deep. I can’t discuss them here because the Vajrayana is a hidden teaching. He described it as being like electricity. You can be properly instructed and plug the teachings into your life, or you can try it without guidance and stick your fingers in the socket.  I know which I would rather do!

Work’s been a bit weird because I’m leaving but still have a load of things to do. While I was away an emergency patch was done to one of the modules I was working on and I had to reverse engineer it into my changes. I couldn’t start up the test environment, which was working fine when I went on holiday, because of an extra row in a table causing configuration problems. Never use dates as part of your primary key, children, at least not if they have a time stamp (mind you, any kind of primary key on the table would have been good). Lost a day over a one-line change because of this.

I am underwhelmed by the umbrella company I am working through at the moment. They have switched to a web-based system for entering the expenses with about a day’s notice. They forced me to use it and it didn’t work. Then when it was fixed they didn’t bother to drop me an email saying it was. I was probably a bit agressive because they were wasting my time. The other thing is, of course, this system will reduce their costs considerably by making me spend more of my time on it; so are they dropping the proportion of my cash that they are taking? Well, what d’you think?

Rather than name them or slag them off I would rather say that most of the people I work with use Parasol, and they are very good, also charging a fee rather than a percentage and if I am forced by circumstance or choice to freelance I will try them next time.

Winbiz

Making some progress towards signing some people up. Just persist, the rewards are there if you believe and persist.

Books

Just finished reading Robert Kioyosaki’s The Business School for People who like helping people which is about the Network Marketing way of becoming free. For those of you who recognise his name he’s the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Highly recommended and easy to read. I think you have to order it from his website http://www.richdad.com/, or through me.

Just finished Conspicuous Compassion by Patrick West (ISBN 1-903 386-34 9). Very interesting and sad as well; his thesis is that in Britain we are becoming serial grief junkies, trying to forge some common bonds where none exist at the moment by insincere and selfish public grieving for celebrities and royalty. I recommend this book for a sobering take on the tabloid hysteria and the nonsense of apologies for historical incidents. One of the points he makes is that the nearer it gets to the present the less likely there is to be an apology. He writes a column in http://www.spiked-online.com/, as does Mick Hume, a writer I respect as well.

Nothing like closing on an apparently contradictory note.

Escape to Warrington

Had a couple of jobs in the pipeline. One with a very interesting IT based company in Warrington, the other with a bank in central Manchester. The bank were going to pay more but we seemed to have some kind of mismatch on the 2nd interview; I am glad that I didn’t have to make a decision in the end and got the Warrington one.

I’m going to be much happier with fellow technologists. The bank also lend money to high risk people and have a debt collection arm. I wasn’t too happy about this. Not that I don’t think people should pay their debts but that I don’t like usury and poverty as a kind of norm. This is better, methinks.

I’ve been playing with thinlet technology as a possible replacement for something like Oracle Forms, but not yet managed to get it to talk to a database properly. Mostly my problem, just finding the time to join the bits together.

Have fun and don’t eat too much easter chocolate.