Author: francis

I seem to have spent the last couple of weeks tired out of my mind. I have been keeping up my buddhist practice and it has been hard. Today I had something of a breakthrough, although like all of these things it is essentially empty and you can’t break through to what isn’t there.

There is a fundamental view that we are conditioned by our ignorance of our buddha nature that causes the split between subject and object. This separation breeds fear, and the like/dislike/don’t care about the “other” which in turn breeds anger and the other mental defilements. I was fighting with my anger today (won’t go into why) and pushed hard at it. Pushing doesn’t work because if you suppress something you make it stronger so instead I imagined it being transformed into the base nature that it comprises of. The black anger was siffused with rivers of gold that changed it back into the open space behind it. So what happened? There was all of my fear hiding behind it. This was indescribably shattering and liberating, but like my teacher says, practice every day and don’t worry about what happens – the important thing is to be consistent. The practice is for the benifit of all sentient beings and if you feel better because of it then OK, but others still come first. This is why you dedicate the virtue you may have accumulated doing the practice to the benefit of others. That said, it still felt like I had been hit by a bus.

April dawns

Well, we’ve done a lot of things. Been to the Aztec exhibition at the Royal academy, very interesting, they had some serious insights into the world. Sad that their conclusions were so bloody. Did the tourist bus thing afterwards, which I’ve never done before. London is an interesting place. Had a conversation with a cabbie. Apparently central London is rubbish for secondary schools if you don’t have money. I am glad that I live in the North of England, near to beautiful Wales and its rivers.

Been getting into Pearl Jam (yeah, I know everyone else has already done this).

Bought some Sennheiser PMX60’s today. They are the neck mounted type. Very good. My old ‘phones are OK but the foam has gone and they were eating my ears. Not sure about the neck mount yet.

Competing in a kayak slalom at Marple on Sunday. 1st time I’ve ever done this, should be a laugh.

Having a tooth out tomorrow morning – not looking forward to this. Last had teeth out when I was 9 or so and it was nasty and traumatic. I remember coming round from the gas and my mum wasn’t there. I called for her and frightened my sister who wouldn’t go. I remember being sick and scared was somehow my fault because my sister wouldn’t go. Funny how these things sometimes never leave. Must be karma.

Blessings upon you all, if anyone ever reads this!

Opinions

Well, I’m against this ridiculous war. Personally couldn’t care less about UN legality or whatever. Taking life is wrong, the deeper teachings say one should give up one’s own life rather than take another’s (it’s more subtle than this, but it’ll do here). What is needed in these situations is wisdom and I don’t see a lot of it.

Just think:

If I hit you then it’s OK for you to hit me, it legitimises it. The war “proves” all of the allegations of bias and mayhem that the Arab nations have been making against the west for all these years. It insults the dead and recruits more extremists. Education and attacking poverty are the only answers to terror. One life is too many, and no, before you start on that worn-out rubbish, I’m not defending Saddam, get a grip. Two wrongs do not make a right, never have, never will. I lack the vision to see where the ultimate good may lie, I’m only a simple human being and won’t pretend otherwise.

If it’s OK for “us” to effect regime change using violence then it’s OK for “them” to do the same to us. So watch out Tony, George, and co. you’re making terror legitimate. Have you thought about that?

Music

Listening to Fishbone, Truth and Soul is pretty accessible, The Reality of My Surroundings quite hard – I found Junkie’s Prayer very sad. If you believe the web guide to the band they haven’t got the success they deserve. I can half see it because they are so eclectic, still interesting.

23 Mar : Buddha season on BBC2

Not bad, I liked what Richard Gere said but noticed that he still has ego to call his foundation that helps displaced Tibetans the Gere Foundation. I suppose that the celeb name helps raise money. I can’t fault the motivation though and I’m glad someone with the power has helped others. I have heard that the foundation also helps the diaspora’s neighbours so that there isn’t any resentment. I wonder if the politicians in the UK and elsewhere have the sense to learn from this example?

23 Mar : Llangollen : Mile end mill

Borrowed a Perception Amp to try. Not what I’m looking for, a little more interesting than the Big EZ but not enough of a difference. Borrowed a Transformer and fell in love with it. Would like to try it with the medium end caps. Got talking to an owner who said the long end caps are like clown’s feet and very tippy. Fran, the manager, recons that it might be a bit long with the caps on for the famous summer rivers in England. Nose wouldn’t bury without the caps unless there was a lot of current.

22 Mar : Thornberry’s Movie

Took the kids to this. Very good, very moral, lots of jokes and of course the bad guys lose. Gentle entertainment.

16th March Outdoors show : NEC

First time to one of these events. It was interesting if very tiring. They had a pool with a waterfall so that the play boaters could compete. It looked good except that they kept being driven to the sides and running out of space. I wonder if we could put something like this at Merseysport in the Albert dock in Liverpool to add some interesting paddling. I may have a think about this.

I sat in various boats, still looking at Liquid Logic, but I really liked the Wavesport Transformer. It has different length end fittings depending upon what you want to do in the water. They guys from Pirahna wanted me to get their Sub 6 200 and dissed the Transformer.

15th March : Diary of an Action Man : Unity Theatre, Liverpool

Took Jon and a friend to this play. Very well done, some of the actors had disabilities and there was signing throughout but they did it so well that it worked and wasn’t a problem. The plot revolves around a small boy who wants his dad to come back home, his dad was a soldier and he has fantasies about him being action man. Well acted and put together without being worthy. I didn’t realise (but it’s obvious) that deaf people use mobile phones to communicate over distance using texts. One of the irritating blights of modern life actually has some kind of upside.

Frogg Manor

The meal was every bit as good as I hoped. It’s a really civilised place as well, no hurrying, no crowding.

Liquid Logic Session

I loved the kayak when I tried it on moving water but it was a little sphincter clenching at times. I remember going over a drop that I normally bounce straight through and it just stopped and then sucked me into the (playable but not in a difficult boat) stopper. I thought I was there for the duration but I got a front ender and rolled up out of the stopper. The curved ends made it interesting if you wanted to force your way across the eddy fence into the current. Unfortunately the guy selling the boat was harassed by one of the teenagers and gave in for a quiet life.

River Leven (16th Feb)

Took a group from the club. Rather large (15) but I had plenty of cover from experienced paddlers. Only one swimmer. Poor Greg rolled up to find that his wooly hat had fallen over his face and, of course, he had to keep bracing so he couldn’t push it out of the way. Fortunately he didn’t panic while the rest of us couldn’t stop laughing. A paddler from another group was playing in the wave and pushed him out. Paddled the Big EZ.

UML Course

We did a week-long UML course using Rational Rose. It was very useful and I’ve finally found out how to use Rose. The UML bit made sense of those millions of books I’ve been reading for a while. It’s interesting to realise how much people have been bullshitting me. Rose is still a bit primitive for drawing things but if you use it properly it gives you traceability end to end from analysis to design, right through to implementation. I also like the ability to save shared packages and version them independently.

Pen Pads Ceildh

We had a very successful Ceildh at the club, everyone dancing, people getting thanked for their contributions etc. My favourite moment was Len getting an award for least improved forward paddler, when he teaches forward paddling to the point of obsession (how can you improve on perfection?). Rosie was awarded club member of the year, quite rightly. The kids had a dance, Deb really enjoying it.

Forms 6i

Installed latest patch (dated Feb 2003!) and the problems I’ve been having seem to have gone away.

River Lune (again) 1st March

5 of us from Friends of Allonby and Pen Pads. Nice paddle. One of the people from the club’s beginners class, good to see her improving. I will probably run an introduction to white water group in the next month or so. Rosie managed to get out too, which was great, she doesn’t believe her own ability which can be a bit frustrating. One (very embarrassed) swimmer, who wasn’t the beginner. River level lower than last time.

Fitness campaign

I’m going to the gym again and trying to cut out the fat and chocolate. The older you get the harder it is, I think the old metabolism slows down. There’s an athlete hiding behind this growing gut, if only because you have to have muscle to move the thing about.

Tom Lehrer

Go out and buy some Lehrer if you don’t own some. A friend bought the complete CDs and gave me his duplicates.

Books

Got a lot out of Agile Software Development Ecosystems (skim read it and read the interviews more carefully). Interesting book. Want to work in that kind of environment, which we are trying to do. Borrow it or get work to buy it for you, though.

Was recommended Building Web Applications with UML – good if you don’t know what a web application is but do know UML. I skimmed 2/3 of the way through to find anything new. Borrow it or get work to buy it for you.

A nasty experience

An acquaintance of mine visited a porn site 5 years ago and paid his $5 to view piccies of people doing whatever it is they do. It turns out that more recently the site has been used for rather nasty stuff and he’s been accused (by the cops) downloading questionable material. It would be laughable if he hadn’t been hounded out of his house and home because somehow the information got out. I hope he gets some serious compensation from them. I’d want the cop’s testicles on my wall as a trophy if it was me (that’s very un-Buddhist of me, but you know what I mean). So the moral is – stay away from those internet porn sites, you never know what the evil bastards might get you into. Then the superzealous cops come knocking on your door and ruining your life. Hey, $5 (5 years ago) to screw your life, very cheap.

Blessings upon you all, even the superzealous.

Burrs Weekend 1-2 Feb

We had a club weekend at the Burrs activity centre. Ran the gorge section but not a lot of water in it. The first day was OK. Second day weather freezing and Deb didn’t want to paddle. The kids from the club were cajoled into doing a race which I couldn’t be bothered with (let’s all do something competitive for the sake of it when most of you are in play boats and want to play ‘cos granddad knows best, yeah right).

Work

Fighting with Oracle Forms 6i. A lot of the bugs I thought had gone have come back. Weird stuff like triggers not firing so you copy the text, delete them, recreate them, paste it back in and then it works OK. Errors appearing that don’t show in the debugger, all that kind of crap, my favourite is pre and on-insert triggers crapping the whole form out until you recreate the trigger. I revisited some of the forms from the beginning of the project and they can never have worked in places but no-one said anything. I took the pragmatic approach and hid the parts that were broken – what the eye don’t see the heart don’t grieve over.

Play

I’ve been learning Ruby. I wish Java were Ruby although I’m still trying to get my head round what some of the constructs mean, especially things like yield. The language is taking shape in my mind and I like it. There will never be any opportunity to use it seriously, I think. It needs a decent editor with code completion because it has so many methods, it probably has one and I don’t know where it is (as usual).

I tried a Liquid Logic Session http://www.liquidlogickayaks.com/products/session.html. Seriously easy to finally get the moves going. Going to borrow it at the weekend and try it on some tame moving water.

I’m selling one of my guitars, my TexMex Fender Stratocaster so I can fund buying the Session if it works out. (have a look on preloved if you’re interested).

I replaced the feet on my Thule roof rack ‘cos the current ones seem to be worn and come undone the best part of £60, that Thule stuff ain’t cheap.

Music

Been listening to the Foo Fighters almost continuously. Got into them via the One by One but the rest are damn fine too. One of my dear friends bought the complete Tom Lehrer and sent me the duplicates seems very contemporary satire but was recorded in the 50’s and 60’s – politicians are still warmongering undemocratic tossers so I suppose no change there. I’m currently listening to Temple of the Dog’s eponymous CD, my kind of blues rock – not wildly original but got that vibe – singer like Coverdale before his voice went, overloaded strats with a lot of trem. Almost makes me want to get a band together again.

Religion

Went to see my Dharma teacher. Very good session but I can’t discuss details here. I don’t know what I’d do without him and my daily meditation practice, it keeps me sane and I haven’t needed antidepressants for a long time now. If you want to find out more see the Dechen link on the right. I don’t know if I’m a better person but Buddhism works for me on every level and the best bit is you don’t have to take anything on faith, you take teachings, try them out and then report back. You walk the path, no-one else does it for you, others may help you find your way but you are responsible for yourself. Very adult, can’t blame anyone else, not very new age passive.

Coming up

Taking Rosie to Frogg manor for a birthday meal on Saturday. http://www.froggmanorhotel.co.uk/One of the best restaurants I have ever been to and it’s not in the South of England.

Paddling the river Leven on Sunday. Looking forward to it. Looking forward to playing with the Session (very sensibly taking by Big EZ to the Leven, I’d get eaten alive in the Session).

Blessings rain upon you all. Happy Valentine’s day – I got a cake from my son, I nearly cried, soppy soul that I am.

Another week over(ish).

Still hacking forms merrily. Off to the Burrs activity centre this weekend with the club for a weekend’s paddling and having general fun.

River Lune

We paddled from Rigmarden bridge down to Devil’s bridge at Kirkby Lonsdale. Grade 1-2 water with enough features to keep the more experienced people interested. Plenty of features to work your way back up etc. Novices had a good time breaking in and out. This is a good paddle but restricted to 8 craft at a time under the access agreement. The only tricky bit is right at the end where the river bends sharply and offers some interesting currents. I’d be a little careful about tackling that in an open boat.

Oracle Forms

Revisiting some old stuff in Oracle Forms. I had forgotten how rich an environment it was, even though totally proprietary. The Java world has a long way to go to even get close. Open source, forget it, unless I write something myself.

Fun with OBE

This is the workflow engine I found on sourceforge. I need to spend some time working with the examples, it uses an XML-based open standard for the workflow definitions which are very heavy. The design tool seems weird to me. I can’t work out how you would attach a step outcome to a joining arrow. The XML has some worrying stuff that looks like someone has been reading a textbook on petri nets, so you get things like definition of graph edges rather than simply transitions. Looks like an academic purist has been having fun. I think I might resurrect FWE. There is another engine on sourceforge that I downloaded but haven’t had a chance to look at yet.

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I had a look on sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/

)for a workflow tool and found Open Business Engine. Looks like it has a design tool and all of my other requirements. http://sourceforge.net/projects/obe/. I’m enjoying writing my own very primitive engine though.

My next fun thing is trying to make stateful portlets, I just can’t wait.

Going for a paddle on the River Lune this weekend, should be good.

Had a laugh on a link I found from the Register http://www.theregister.co.uk

.

The Rockall Times : http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk. I particularly liked the jubilee section which points out that Britain holds the record for the most people killed in transport disasters. Typical of this half-assed country. The want ads for Conservative Party leader and so on very good too.

Writing

Fairly busy with one thing and another. Wrote some more of the System Error story (will be up on http://francis-john.freewebspace.com/system-error.pdf). It’s coming along now, I feel a lot happier about it.

A new skunkworks project – Francis’ Workflow Engine (FWE)

I need a workflow engine that allows reporting of statuses across workflows. I’ve started a draft design in my own time. I think I want everything to be done in XML DOMs, rather than inventing my own data structures, which is perversely satisfying, this will make branching decisions a bit interesting. Of course, I’ve jumped to code and XML straight away in the best agile tradition. I’ll start putting specs and stuff up for people to see. I had a look on the web and the only thing I could find was werkflow, but all of that petri net/rules engine stuff seemed way over the top for what I need and it’s not there yet. I do like the philosophy expressed on the website tho’ http://www.werken.com.

Anyone out there know of a working J2EE workflow engine, preferably with a design tool? I know about Oracle workflow and it’s too heavy and PL/SQL based, but I do like the design tool (assuming you don’t mind using Mess 2000 or NT).

Went to the Museum of Liverpool life’s exhibition about the Indian community in Liverpool. It’s a bit sad when all of the biographies of the people are reduced to three or four paragraphs. These people worked hard to escape difficult lives.

We went to a workshop on Indian costumes and dance afterwards which was a lot of fun. We did a morning dance and a stick dance.