Six Kinds of Loneliness | Pema Chödrön
Reading this on Friday has been helping me over the weekend to see loneliness and boredom too as just passing clouds. I was already making some progress on doing that for anger, but I wasn’t doing so well on life dissatisfaction on a wide scale; that is, dissatisfaction with job, living standards etc. rather than dissatisfaction with the present moment.
There’s a lot of good things about being a Korean bus driver that make me want to be one.
In South Korea, contemporary history is omitted from the national school curriculum. The modern era (”geundae”) begins in 1876 with the “opening” of Joseon Korea to international trade and international market forces, and the contemporary era (”hyeondae”) begins in 1945 with liberation from Japanese colonial rule. Arguably the most diligent students in the world study everything except the entire history of their own republic, founded in 1948, and the entire history of the division, which was applied in 1945. Not one but every generation of South Koreans lacks the formal education to understand the historical context of the republic or the division beyond personal experiences and emotional expressions. Ignoring the past and reveling in economic success has been the national agenda set by dictators resistant to critical reflection.
I’d like to know if this is true.
(source)
What were you doing on February 14th of 2007? On which tasks were you working on that very day you met your girl friend? When was the last appointments with your dentist? Who called you on telephone during that meeting with your customer last month?
Most people can not answer such questions. With Memacs you can!
Memacs extracts metadata (subjects, timestamps, contact information, …) from many different existing data sources (file names, emails, tweets, bookmarks, …) on your computer and generates files which are readable by GNU Emacs with Org-mode.
This might be useful for some people. But for most of us we don’t need to know this stuff and it can pay to forget it. The idea is that you’re offloading memory load into the computer but actually you’re increasing your load because you’ve got to keep some kind of handle on what information you have. And it’s very easy to offload too much that you should have remembered.
High School Students Dance to HyunA’s Red
This thread’s got a lot of comments about extremely sexualised dancing on the part of women being ubiquitous in Korean schools, from high school through middle and even elementary. My grade five eight or nine-year-old girls will put together a sexy dancing routine for the various ‘talent shows’ that my school is fond of organising. They move their bodies much more impressively than any of my peers when I was that age, I think.
One commenter on that thread points out that this is so normalised and widespread that it might be thought of as harmless: my students don’t have very much in mind when they’re doing these dances, they’re too young to: they’re just doing what they think is the expected thing to do in response to this kind of music.
I’m undecided.
A typical use case is the following: You have a notebook or a workstation without a full-fledged MTA (e.g., postfix) installed, but something like msmtp, esmtp, or ssmtp, which only forward the mail to an SMTP server. Such lightweight SMTP clients typically do not feature a mail queue. In case that your SMTP client cannot connect to the SMTP server, the mail is lost.
[..]
msmtp … ships shell scripts that implement a simple queuing mechanism around msmtp. However,
/usr/sbin/sendmailis still a symlink to/usr/bin/msmtpand, thereby, Unix-type software like cron would trust that msmtp queues mails that cannot be delivered right now.
The second paragraph is the critical advantage for me. I’ve lost a lot of e-mails from cron this way. So this script looks killer. Planning to try it out tonight.
I’ve been using the Propellor configuration management system for the past month or so for my laptop and desktop, for three reasons:
- It’s elegant and cool for a lot of use cases, although some stuff (e.g. a whole Postfix config file) seems awkward.
- It’s a chance to learn some Haskell by having a real project to try to hack on, and just general syntax practice.
- I want a formal description of how my machine should be set-up, rather than scribbled instructions that I make for myself on how to get it to that point.
(3) is much more important to me than (1). I reinstall my machines roughly once every 18 months to two years, so there’s inevitably drift between (a) what my instructions say I need to do to set things up; (b) how Debian is to be set up; (c) the actual state my machine is in as I make small tweaks and forget to document them. Propellor doesn’t fix any of this, so it only saves me a very little effort in between machine reinstalls by being elegant and cool per (1). But the work involved in reinstalling a machine is much easier thanks to (3).
When I am better at Haskell I hope to extend Propellor to work as a non-superuser to provision shell accounts for me.
Looks nice.
In the mid 90s I had bad hand pain, so bad that most of the day I could only type with one finger. The FSF hired typists for me part of the day, and part of the day I tolerated the pain. After a few years I found out that this was due to the hard keys of my keyboard. I switched to a keyboard with lighter key pressure and the problem mostly went away.
My problem was not carpal tunnel syndrome: I avoid that by keeping my wrists pretty straight as I type. There are several kinds of hand pain that can be caused by repetitive stress; don’t assume you have the one you heard of. (source)
Most programming languages are line-oriented and Vim’s visual-line mode
suits this very well. In Vim I can press V and then j three times
and I will have selected three whole lines for acting upon. In Emacs I
have to first move to the beginning of the line with C-a, then start
selecting with C-SPC, then go down three lines by pressing C-n three
times, and finally press C-e C-f to move to a position such that three
complete lines are selected. This is uncomfortable.