A quaint clip from yesteryears! I really like the “innocent” discussions about internet and email. 🙂
I really like that duo of Gumble and Couric. Of course, for me it was late-night TV (Australian time) instead of the morning show in USA.
Adversity
Something that I can relate to personally, in recent time.
At a certain moment in Nietzsche’s life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate.’ Whatever your fate is, whatever the heck happens, you say, ‘This is what I need.’ It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment – not discouragement – you will find the strength is there. Any disaster that you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not.
Joseph Campbell, 1904-1987
American Mythology Professor and Author
The beauty within
A lovely story.
The public relations department of a beauty products company asked its customers to send pictures along with brief letters, describing the most beautiful women they knew.
Thousands of letters came in. One caught the attention of the employees and was passed on to the president. It was written by a boy from a broken home who lived in a run-down neighbourhood. With lots of spelling errors, an excerpt from his letter read: ‘A beautiful woman lives down the street from me. I visit her every day. She makes me feel like the most important kid in the world. We play checkers and she listens to my problems. She understands me. When I leave she always yells out the door that she’s proud of me.’ The boy ended his letter saying, ‘This picture shows you that she is the most beautiful woman in the world, and one day I hope to have a wife as pretty as her.’ Intrigued, the president asked to see the woman’s picture. His secretary handed him a photograph of a smiling, toothless woman, well advanced in years, sitting in a wheelchair. Sparse grey hair was pulled back in a bun. The wrinkles that formed deep furrows on her face were somehow diminished by the twinkle in her eyes. ‘We can’t use this woman,’ said the president, smiling. ‘She would show the world that our products aren’t necessary to be beautiful.’
Timelord relief
Hilarious comic relief from two of my favourite characters during David Tennant’s tenure as the Doctor!
Documenting Linux
Have not been very active on this blog of mine for quite some time, opting to write more about my thoughts on tango. A case of “writers’ block”!? 🙂
Well, anyway, given that I spend reasonable amounts of time on fine-tuning my Linux system and preparations to build an “economic” Hackintosh, I will instead try to document some of the useful things I have discovered about Linux over the years – for the time being at least.
My basic system configuration is as follows:
- CPU: C2D E8400 (not overclocked, because my RAM can’t support it 😉 )
- Motherboard: GA-EP45-DS3P
- Graphics: XFX GT8500 (fanless)
- RAM: 4 x 1GB
- HDD:
160GB250GB SATA (/, /swap) + 1.5TB RAID-1 SATA (/home) - Optical: 2 x DL DVD Writer
- OS: Debian Squeeze
Anyway have been spending the entire weekend trying to recover from a supposedly failed drive in my RAID-1 array. By the way, with hard disks being as cheap* as they are now, it’s almost criminal not to get something ridiculously large… 🙂 The net result: I upgraded my original 1TB RAID-1 to 1.5TB RAID-1!
* As of today, 1TB Seagate drives are SG$79 whereas 1.5TB Seagate drives are a mere SG$115 or about US$88!
One day at a time
Life is lived one day at a time, and the best way to prepare for tomorrow is to live at your very best today.
Author Unknown
The adventure of life
A beautiful “mantra”…
The adventure of life is to learn.
The purpose of life is to grow.
The nature of life is to change.
The challenge of life is to overcome.
The essence of life is to care.
The opportunity of life is to serve.
The secret of life is to dare.
The spice of life is to befriend.
The beauty of life is to give.
The joy of life is to love.
William Arthur Ward, 1921-1994
American Author and Poet
Open-source social network
Diaspora, something to keep an eye out in the near future!? As indicated on its website the aim is purportedly to provide
The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.
More about the potential upheavals to spring out from a startup of 4 young people here. These are exciting times.
Gadget year
The times we live in are shaping up to be more and more heavenly for gadget geeks, not that I am one of course. 🙂
Nevertheless, I have upgraded/acquired a few items in the last 6 months.
- LG PJ350 42″ plasma TV: Despite plasma being a relative older technology and perhaps out of fashion given the flood of low-energy LED TVs in the market, this relative economical plasma TV (with the lower 720p resolution) has excellent picture quality to rival many of the more expensive (and larger) LED/LCD TVs, and very comfortable on the eyes too.
- Sony PS3: I never thought that I’d succumb to the computer games bug but once I got this console (with the intention of using this as a BlueRay player at some point), I am hooked on some of the beautiful game titles available! I will try to review some of the games I am playing now at a later date.
- AC Ryan PlayonHD: What can I say, a media player that can be easily upgraded (essentially a Linux machine) to play multiple formats, combined with network storage means the ultimate in convenience – watching movies on TV in the living room or on a laptop via Wifi.
- Network storage: Although I am mainly using network harddisks made by Buffalo, there are certainly quite a few budget choices to choose from these days.
- Panasonic Lumix LX3 (2nd hand): This was more or less an impulse decision. After being somewhat frustrated by the quality of videos on the equally good Fujifilm F200EXR (the low light department is excellent), I decided to give the reputed LX3 a try when I saw the quality of videos to be had with this camera.
The wonder years
The Wonder Years that I ordered last week has arrived today! All of 6 seasons, spanning from 1988-1993, crammed into 8 DVDs!
The Wonder Years was about the growing pains and uncertainties of a teenager Kevin Arnold, with the turbulent 60s-70s US as the backdrop. There is plenty of nostalgic and contemplative music from that period, which I feel was also a big drawcard. This TV series will always have a special place for me (along with Happy Days as a matter of fact) probably because I had recently completed high school and was fresh into university and was still able to relate to some of the issues portrayed in the series. The quality of the video is actually not very good, seemingly recorded directly from normal TV broadcast. But heck, I will take this bootleg collection any day since it seems more and more unlikely that this series will to ever be officially released the entire series because of licensing rights for the numerous songs (more than 200 according to a reviewer on Amazon) used throughout the series.
A quote from the show sums up the trials of growing aptly.
When you’re a little kid you’re a bit of everything; Scientist, Philosopher, Artist. Sometimes it seems like growing up is giving these things up one at a time.