Comment left here.

After WW II there was a specific ban on people joining or organising fascist groups, for obvious reasons. AFAIK this ban has’t been appealed for public servants and it is a serious issue for them, I think you sign a piece of paper saying that you will not join such an organisation when you take up employment – you certainly used to in the olden days.

A lot of the anti-nazi types used to try and use this law to stop NF/BNP/et al from organising or speaking in public, but of course the slightly calmer view was that these idiots should be allowed to speak because it becomes very obvious that their opinions are valueless when they open their mouths.

I’d rather have an open debate with these folk than allow them the veneer of respectability a ban gives them. There’s an old quote “I disagree with what you say, but I would die in order protect your right to say it” (wording may not be right). I agree with this view, personally, and it is the exact opposite of what many NuLabur and BNP people believe – in fact, don’t forget, Oswald Mosely (pre-war British fascist leader) came out of the Labour party.

I honestly did’t know Wacky Jaqui was in any political party of note – she certainly acts like no-one else in the universe exists and would doubtless be very keen to ban any speech she does’t like. Be careful what you wish for, it might come true. There’s a sad example of a big campaign against porn somewhere in the antipodes in the 80’s where the first thing the cops did when the law was introduced was raid the left-wing book shops and confiscate all of the literature aimed at lesbian and gay people – be VERY careful what you wish for, they might take it down as evidence and use it against you.

http://www.wisdom-books.com/ProductDetail.asp?PID=6370

Buy lots and sneak around car parks sticking them on bumpers, particularly beemers and mercs (heh)

You know you want to

But of course I can’t condone lawless behaviour

WARNING: Rails techie stuff

if you keep seeing this

 NoMethodError (undefined method `[]’ for :update:Symbol):
    /vendor/plugins/princely/lib/pdf_helper.rb:11:in `render’
 

when your controller is doing this:

render :update do
…
end

It’s because of a bug in the Princely plugin when it wraps the standard render method. I have emailed the maintainer (the bug tracker is broken and I did mention it in the email too) but he never bothered to reply. For the record you need to tinker with your plugin code:

Go to the offending line (11) in the plugin code (as per the error message) and change it to

     if options.nil? or ( not options.is_a? Hash ) or options[:pdf].nil?

This stops it assuming that the options is necessarily a Hash and getting upset. Probably a more elegant solution out there in Ruby land but it works for me.

I’ve been ridiculously busy and ill for most of the last month.

Had a week off work with a migraine-giving virus that still has its claws in me.

Lots of things going on and ideas bubbling.

Currently looking at an essay on Buddhism and Depression from the inside, I was making comments on a site and had my comments pulled two or three times so decided I was’t going to bother trying to help people there any more. I will create a platform where I can share my own experiences and hopefully help others without being censored.

I also think that someone who has taken the prescription drugs may have things to say that others can’t see from the outside.

Other stuff in the pot is a site to learn the Tibetan alphabet and another essay on Buddhism and Science (half wrote the introduction a while ago).

I’m trying to clear the decks and finish the beta Pharmarketeer site – it’s not far off, I just need to rekindle my enthusiasm long enough.

Got myself a Jesus Phone (iPhone to those who have’t read the sarky articles). I quite like it but the mail client is awful and wo’t display conversation threads like gmail does, so you keep reading the same mail over and over again – very annoying if you  are a member of a discussion group. It also wo’t go to wide mode when you turn the device. I got round this by loading the free Google application and using Safari to save the gmail bookmark it creates onto the desktop. Now I read my mail using that bookmark, Google have kindly set it up to work well on an iPhone and it will go wide.

Other things I have discovered is the free Stanza app, that lets you read e-books and will download them from various free sites. Almost all the way through the whole Oz series (as in the Wizard of Oz etc.). There are about 12 of them. 

Trying to learn Tibetan again, 3rd time lucky, maybe. Went to a class at Kagyu Ling last Saturday. It’s fun and mentally stretching without being work. So I think I will stick with it now. Interestingly they’ve kept the spellings from when the writing system was invented, so a lot of words are spelt with, say, g’s but pronounced with d’s. Plus the usual slurring and removal of s’s over time as happens with all spoken languages. Quite a few letters sound the same to a European ear – interesting and useful for my Dharma studies. This is like English-speaking people keeping spellings from Chaucer.

It was also my 49th Birthday last month – not sure how I feel about that, to be honest.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of podcasts – really recommend those by the Venerable Robina Courtin – several hours of explanation of some basic Buddhist ideas in her own inimitable style. She is’t in the same Tibetan school as me, but really knows her stuff. Have a hunt on iTunes for them.

Better get back to living a life!

Blessings to all.

Meditation is strange and powerful medicine. I recently had an experience where I was confronted by memories and experiences from a long time ago. Not anything specific, just memories of pain and discomfort from when I was a kid. It kept me awake all night.

Strange thing now, is that I don’t seem to have any fear. I mean, I would’t drive my car into someone or get myself killed. Not even put myself in the way of things – that would be stupid. But I just have’t got that fear of dying I used to have. I don’t feel like nothing can touch me, but just that whatever does I can handle it and get past it. A feeling of great calm.

We all have defilements in our minds that make us see things wrongly. They are usually translated as fear, anger and craving (actually there are a lot more based on combinations of them). You tend to have one defilement that appears to be the one you have to deal with and that’s what you work with first. In my case I thought it was anger. I work on this all the time. But in fact it is fear. Fear has ruled my life until now. In fact the anger is a way of coping with the fear by pushing things away. Now the fear has gone. I don’t know if this will last, but it is a good feeling.

Still have further to go than I can even imagine.

Because you’re worth it

Just fuck off Loreal!! Right now!! This should really read: You’re such a loser that the only thing you can do to make yourself feel better is slap some expensive stuff on your hair. Every time I hear this advert I feel insulted, I feel it belittles people. Sick of that Latin American lass with the nice bum telling me I’m worth it. I’m a bloke and my hair is getting thinner by the day. Go away. And you are’t worth it – you are better than it, much better!!! It’s worthless, just some stuff to make your hair and skin look nice.

I think I’ve been watching too much Channel 5.

Anti ageing creams

These do work, in fact the technology comes from some stuff that was created to help wounds heal more quickly would you believe. But I’m tired of worn-out actresses with too much foundation on in direct bright lights pretending they have no wrinkles at all shouting “I love you” into phones and running badly across cheesy film sets. Oh, yeah, and the the one where the very attractive dark haired woman plays with rubber balls while pretending to be too stupid to understand what the too-clever male voice is saying – why did this actress let these jokers belittle her sex like that? Money probably.

All of the smelly clothes stuff

Simpering women sniffing their clothes as they walk through streets – what do diamonds smell like anyway? 

The one where the woman books herself into a hotel and rolls around in her own clothes – weirdo.

The animated Bold ads – I just want my clothes to smell clean. And I hate the grinning animated figures – the look drugged out of their minds on something – your life is complete and happy if you stink of our weird chemicals that make you act like you’re about to orgasm – go away!! Don’t think so!!

Concentrated washing stuff

I’ve been a distributor for a well-known multi-level marketing company for years. Our stuff was always concentrated and has been for ever. It’s nice that you idiots have realised what damage you were doing to the environment but so what?

It does as much as a bottle that’s twice it’s size. Pardon? Not if the other bottle’s got the same stuff in it. Gibberish, unless it does exactly nothing.

The shampoo that’s got cashmere in it

Cashmere comes from shaving a goat; it’s used to make wool. How can it possibly be in a shampoo? What part of the goat is in it? Does it make you smell like a goat, or maybe its urine? Just another advertising lie. Stop it.

There’s more but that’s my top few.

Had a guy from years ago ask to connect with me on Linked In.

Thing is, he played practical jokes on me and doctored the screen of the person sitting next to me (who was an employee of the company we were working with, the bully and I were consultants). The screen had a “brown eye” on it. Put it this way, we’ve all got at least one brown eye even if our eyes are blue. The military in the UK have the term “brown eyed boy”, this means someone who curries favour. I leave you to work out what it means. The guy who sat next to me probably thought it was me doing this, and if he had complained it could have got us all sacked with no references – quite rightly. I regret to this day I never stood up to this bully and his little clique of giggling nitwits. I have no idea what this very quiet spoken decent guy had done to the bully to make him do this thing. I suspect nothing other than look like the kind of person who would’t complain – that’s all these idiots need.

I did’t want to link with him, as you can imagine. I pointed out all the things above and said if he had grown up then great, but I was’t sure I could be bothered finding out. He sent me a mail saying “other people” had said he should’t bother with me, I replied that if these other people were his little gang I could’t care less.

This is one of the problems with the all-male IT gang, there is sometimes bullying in large projects and it needs to be stepped on hard. This guy is one of the milder ones from this time, at least one other once squared up to me because I’d dared to change his (not correct) design while he was on holiday. Seriously sad. Nearly asked him to put his bits away.

I am not so naive these days. 

I enjoy the works of Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon and others. The technology in these books consists of a stack that sits in the back of your brain and registers what happens. If you are killed or even badly injured you can go into another body. Criminals have their bodies confiscated and others, the sick or the wealthy, can use them instead. Criminals even have their bodies taken away and come back after a time – not imprisoned but everyone you knew or cared about will be dead.

Faster than light space travel is’t possible in this milieu but other worlds have been populated. Minds can be transmitted between places and used to populate bodies and fight wars. Custom bodies are grown and synthetic ones manufactured.

This is all irrelevant to the point I’m trying to make here. One of the characters says that sometimes you have to “get to the next scree”, just like you would in a game. This technology allows you to almost live you life like a game and take insane risks, because you can always be installed in another body.

What has this got to do with anything? Well, if you believe that we are but an aggregation of habits and circumstance, a heap of choices and causes and conditions then why not try to get to the next screen, only perhaps a bit more carefully. You don’t want to die, of course, not having any means of resurrection.

But I am becoming so tired of repeating the same things over and over. Each weekday is the same old journey, each payday the same. Each argument, each sleep, each waking. Each everything is becoming nothing more than tracing the same steps I have already made thousands of times. It is beginning to make me so tired.

I usually fight this by moving to another job, but I like the job I have and there are’t any around that are anywhere near as interesting.

So “getting to the next scree” may be putting up with this shit for another twenty years. I’m beginning to wonder if I can do this. Everything is just more of the same. I might be depressed but don’t feel down or despairing. Just a terrible sense of being stuck while my body wears out and eventually kills this particular set of aggregates and causes. My buddhist practice is maybe even making this worse because it is making me intensely conscious of the collection of habits and circumstances that make up this body – it is no different, better or worse than any other. It is’t any more special than any other. Like all human lives it is the result of the workings of chance and karma, of need and ignorance, of defilements and buddha nature.

But I am so tired of everything at the moment. So tired of not getting what I want, and of even wanting, because wanting is the cause of all our pain. Ignorance makes us split the world into two: things we like and don’t like, fear makes us push the things we don’t like away and desire makes us pull other things towards us. Suffering is what happens in the middle, all this wanting and hating pulling us everywhere – then, of course, nothing lasts. So if you find some kind of temporary release in drugs or sex or whatever you need it again, so you start wanting even more, the groove wears ever deeper into your heart.

I am so tired of the whole thing, the game of me and you, of living and shovelling crap. I feel like I could sleep for a month.

What is it for?

Rather than storing a list of things in the database as strings, e.g. Mr, Mrs and so on, instead we store an integer value that we can look up to get the true value. This is done for a number of reasons, e.g. it is easy to change the meaning of a code without having to update large tables, storing an integer is a lot less space than a string and so on. It is also easy to translate a site if needed, but this plugin is’t sophisticated enough to do that.

It does have some disadvantages in that you need to know what the magic number means and it can make writing queries a pain. The plugin has methods that will help with this.

I have put this into a git repository http://github.com/fjfish/has_lookup_extension/tree/master, the git pull url is

git://github.com/fjfish/has_lookup_extension.git

I can’t work out how to make the script/plugin install command work with it and have’t got time right now.

To install call the repository down into vendor/plugins/has_lookup_extension in your rails app.

Go to the root of the rails app and type in

ruby vendor/plugins/has_lookup_extension/install.rb

run the migration. The documentation is’t extensive but should be enough, I hope.

If anyone wants to get it installing using the proper rails command, or tell me how to get it doing so, gimme a shout, or I can add you as a collaborator.

Have fun

Oh little one
You walk so far alone
Carry things from long ago
Knives of memory and gentle strangers

Don’t they always say:

You can’t buck that feeling
Can’t escape what you were
Not escape tomorrow
Because of yesterday

Turn again
See the keys of happiness
Once again that golden thread
Live without regret

Don’t they always say:

You can’t buck that feeling
Can’t escape what you were
Not escape tomorrow
Because of yesterday

You have the key,
You have the key my darling
You have the key, little one
Let go of yesterday

Don’t they always say:

You can’t buck that feeling
Can’t escape what you were
Not escape tomorrow
Because of yesterday

Fingers slip on precipice
Now falling far and fast
All your lessons done
Learn to smile

You have the key,
You have the key my darling
You have the key, little one
Let go of yesterday

You have they key of happiness