Author: francis

Really

How little it all matters

The petty pains and frustrations of the day

Your little micro world measured against the macro

The machine suffering of millions

Against your angst or love’s distress

How little you matter

We get ground like corn

Dust between the stones of circumstance

Each a little micro

How would we ever know or understand the macro

The general hidden in the particular

Riffing outwards into others’ pain

How could we ever love

Each drop that falls

A thousand lives

Or none

Nothing ever satisfies

Like the princess and her pea

Always something

Let go the micro, the particular, yourself

Freedom lies in losing other and self

Melting the ice of me

Just got a list of names from a fellow ex-Oracle bod. About 15 or so, most of whom I knew. It’s rumoured that they’re going to quarterly reviews of staffing levels.

So much for vision. I’m glad I jumped when I did.

Just to rub salt in, Oracle skills were placed on the UK work permit list when there is no shortage. I wish we had an opposition in this country.

Posted against http://www.sys-con.com/Java/articlenews.cfm?id=2094

“manage the secure distribution and monetization of digital content”

Meaning what? Ensuring people pay for content and can’t copy it? “Monetization”, is it any wonder most of us hate suits?

Just been going back to using mind maps (MindManager) to compress lots of complex information into a small space. Have a go, its at http://www.mindjet.com

. I needed to summarise our team’s work for our new manager and managed to get it all on one page. You can then export the map to a website or word document. It’s really easy and very productive.

I have used this tool a lot in the past to plan reports etc. and got out of the habit because my old manager didn’t like it. Rather stupidly I have only just realised that a lot of the problems with cross linking leaves between major topics can be solved by colouring the leaves and using coloured lines.

Just discovered that I can use colours in Outlook too, to mark mail from particular individuals or groups. Much easier to sort things out now.

I don’t know, probably showing my monochrome Unix heritage.

Discovered that our Oracle Partner agreement had been lapsed in March, this means that we should licence all of our dev software and databases. The partnerships costs about a tenth of the licences and we are a small team – redoing the partnership ASAP. Not sure this would work for the big corporate Oracle shops ’cos you need to sell something based on Oracle to become a partner. But if you are a small shop look into it.

Ah well, back to planning a migration schedule of work. Much easier with MindManager.

Well, J’s docking station finally recycled after 5 weeks. Still got N’s hiding away on a spare desk.

Went to the Crosby coast guard last night for a chat about what they do and so forth. Pretty interesting evening.

Having my usual hate relationship with HTML. Did some refactoring today to put some repeated code where it needed to be so that I could fix the HTML once, but it still isn’t right. Probably need to create a little sub-table and format each bit in its’ own. Gah, crappy

Managed to get Palm to synchronise using the IR port (you need to disable the picture sending capability) see http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alanjmcf/comms/infrared/IrDA%20FAQ.html

. Many thanks to alanmjc and google.

Have a vague plan to start writing a commentry on Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men from a UK perspective but it would probably get me feeling angry and helpless.

I am becoming extremely irritated by the lack of discussion about the education funding mess since it was first raised some months ago. Why aren’t you asking some questions about it? Why has it been forgotten?

Weapons of mass destruction is an interesting debate, as is the disposition of buffoons on wool sacks, but why are all of the teaching assistants in my children’s school being made redundant and why is one of the teachers joining them in September? I would like some answers.

Please, was the minister right when he said the LEAs had misappropriated the money or was it all spin? Could one of you get out there and do your job and find out?

In the mean time stop letting the politicians set the agenda, trust me, they aren’t that interesting.

Many thanks

Francis Fish

37 Practices of a Buddha’s Child

Went to a teaching from my Dharma teacher on this text. It’s amazing how so short a text can hide so much information. The whole of the philosophical sweep, including the refutation of the mind-only schools, is in those verses. A profound and excellent teaching.

Keswick

Went to a party near Keswick (Lake District UK). Very pleasant place. Got talking to an engineer who still writes in assembler, working on process control systems.

Paddling

Very tired after 6 weeks of Nomads. Won’t go paddling this weekend, probably bike it with kids.

Irritations

Still can’t get Palm pilot to work, and it won’t use the infrared either. Palm tech help NFG. It looks like I’ll have to track one down on EBay to get the disks and then resell it.

Death

Some friends lost their son (24!) in a road traffic accident on the M6. What can you do or say but be there?

Laptops

Never change your laptop without expecting to lose at least 3 days. Everything almost there now except I can’t get my Palm m505 to synchronise. It’s acting like the device isn’t there. For once reinstalling the Oracle software wasn’t too hard.

Depression and one taste

Not me this time. I was thinking about how in the Mahamudra view, where everything has one taste this is like a condition that depressed people get where they can’t taste their food. A lot of the higher (Buddhist) medative states sound like symptoms of mental distress but approached from a different angle. I wonder if depressives have reached some higher states and then fallen back in past lives because of the difficulty. It may explain why they see the world through such bleak eyes because without the compassion and wisdom that go with it it would seem so hard. This is just speculation on my part, I have never experienced one taste myself. I had a look on google to see if I could give you some URLs to point to that explain the idea of one taste, I’d stay away from the book with that title (one taste), the reviews make me feel like Weber doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There’s a good explanation in The Secrets of the Vajra World.

Wisdom and justice

This is a story idea I’ve had:

Human systems are always imperfect. As experience builds up they modify themselves. How do you guarantee that a decision will always be just and as fair as possible. Simple,  breed judges, make sure that all of their environments are identical as they grow up and then freeze them. Use them once to make a decision and throw them away. It’s a bit macabre, and, of course, like all systems it won’t work, genetic determinism is not the force everyone thinks it is (there’s the rest of the story). It needs a Cordwainer Smith or PKD title like Justice 3423 and the left left egg. (Don’t ask me where that came from)

Anyway, if you want to use this idea, all I ask is an acknowledgement.

Paddling

Swapped the Inazone 242 for a Dagger Redline (losing about £50 in the process), much better boat that behaves itself and will attain and ferry glide properly, lovely old-fashioned adjustable fittings instead of gluing in foam like the Pirhana boats.

Had a serious go in a Liquid Logic Skip which ate my feet. Tried the Wavesport Transformer but in fact it’s not much better than the EZ. Loved loved loved the Riot Air but I think I’d get creamed on big water. Looking for some coaching to help me get off my playboating plateau. Waiting for a call, in fact.

Blessings upon you all.

Well then, well then.

Went to the Everyman to see a production by Broads with Swords

who are an all-female company that do lots sword fighting and so on. The play was about Shakespeare’s female characters always killing themselves and Tara Loft (sic) getting mixed up with them and persuading them not to do it. Lady Macbeth managed to gain control and get herself a better ending at the expense of the others so reality had to be restored. If you didn’t know Bill’s stuff you’d have found it a bit confusing. Also they could have tried saying the blank verse rather than shouting it, which may have helped a bit. I still enjoyed it but the first 15 mins or so were hard work. Ophelia sticking her head in a bucket (which was then used to wash Celopatra’s asp) was very funny.

Werk like, la

Finally know who our manager is, and it is in fact a very intelligent choice. Our group is being realigned with one of the other departments and it all makes sense. Good. Getting down to some solid code delivery, always a nice feeling when things haven’t been going well.

Didn’t get paddling this weekend, still too tired. Don’t know what’s the matter with me, this keeps happening.

Changed something – unit tested it and surrounding code. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t, desk test the code, it works. Chop out driving queries and replace variables with constants, they work. Still the view I’m trying to get working doesn’t. My brain hurts. After 5 hours I think I’ve got a handle on it. It was the test, I think, where I was reusing some historical data and making a change (laziness, I confess) to run it in the new environment. AAAAAARRGGGHHH an’ stuff. I will revisit my test harness on Monday and do something else today that needs doing – had enough testing for a while.

Finally got my hair cut – no longer look like escaped wild man of Borneo from a travelling show. Regrew beard recently, not sure if it’s here to stay but Rosie and the kids prefer it because it doesn’t scratch them. I tried slicking hair back until I could get it cut and looked like Nicholson in The Shining

coming through the door with an axe, had some fun with crazy eyes and loud voice.

We had a survey from the council recently, didn’t have a chance to vent spleen at the 10 ft bus lane that will cause an accident one day because R filled it in. Wanted to put something like the person who put in the 10 foot bus lane at the library should not be allowed near sharp objects and only let out of the rubber room very occasionally. NBD.

Yesterday at Nomads went OK. Difficult to do too much because I didn’t want to scare the little ones. D&J good (hurrah and lawks a mercy).

J at child and family today, still working on difficult behaviour but he’s doing well (and so are R & I, it takes 2 to have a scene).

Tomorrow busy – R running bellboat session at Chester for Cubs and Guides. Me running round taking D to ballet and tap. Sunday off paddling, I think.