Author: francis

Went to see REM at the Old Trafford Criket ground on Sunday. They were headlining the final day of the Move festival.

Oranger.

Pretty predictable stuff from the USA. The Foos have already done this and done it better.

Athlete. An English Steely Dan (or a new incarnation of the Jam). Eclectic and competent. Listeneable but I’m not sure I could be arsed buying their album.

John Squier. Ex Stone Roses guitar player. Really good, did some old SR stuff, heavy R&B/Stones feel but still sounded original. Has influences but not a slave to them.

Idewild. Dull stuff played well. Sounded like a poor man’s REM at times (Stipe said he liked them). Other times just thrash.

Badly Drawn Boy. Interesting and has a brain. It’s a shame that he had to light a ciggie every number. I liked his stuff and will probably buy some.

REM. Well, one of the best bands in the world and it shows. Did the old favorites and the new stuff had plenty of juice. Supposed to be a best of coming out soon which I will probly buy because I’ve got most of their stuff on tape or vinyl which I can’t cope with these days.

Struggling to test stuff because things are buried very deep in the database. Very excited because broadband getting installed tomorrow (well ISDN ceased).

Roger recommended that we use an old box as a firewall http://www.smoothwall.org/

, wire it to the ADSL modem with a network card and then wire that out to my home network. Smoothwall will do the DNS/MAC firewall crap. They have a (highly recommended) version that runs for the corporate market. Roger is very kindly going to set me up a machine with the GPL on, me not having any old kit to reconfigure.

Going to set up a wireless network, recommended USRobotics, apparently you can just get a firmware upgrade and go straight to 802.11g! UK bods have a look on scan http://www.scan.co.uk/products/wireless.htm, LN4501 etc.

Had to fill in a half year review form, expressing my goals and wants for the next six months. Very worried to discover that I just don’t give a toss and don’t want anything either.

Just discovered Rage Against the Machine – like it, but then I always was a metal kid and still have a lot of my own anger to work through anyway.

Onward and backward.

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.