Category Archives: Life

Good Times

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This year has been a nice for socializing with nerds. Attending conferences is something that can get tiresome, if the content is something you do not find interesting or stimulating. Thankfully, I have no required conferences, so I can be choosy (schedules permitting). Naturally open source and languages would top the list of places to attend.

First off, was hanging out with the KDE folks in San Francisco, CA for CampKDE – April 4,5 2011. There were a number of good talks, and a great opportunity to shake the hands of names that I have seen around, as well as meeting many new folks. The kde-promo team has a YouTube channel, that they have published all the talks and interviews to. http://www.youtube.com/user/kdepromo
The talk I gave there is titled “Slackware: Quickly and Easily Manage Your KDE SC Hacking.” You can get the slides in [PDF] or [ODP], plus the videos posted on the kde-promo channel have the full talk (youtube.com/watch?v=Qs7vR3POHeo), as well as an interview afterwards by Wade Olson (youtube.com/watch?v=YIpUmPul1i4).

Next, was down to Spartanburg, SC for the SouthEast Linux Fest (SELF) – June 10-12, 2011.
This is the third year that I have attended SELF, and second time to speak, but what differentiated this year from any other speaking engagement (in the past, or distant future), was that it was a talk title “Slackware Demystified”, and none other than the founder of Slackware Linux, Patrick Volkerding was not only in attendance, but sitting on the front row! The slides from this presentation are available in [HTML] or [PDF]. Unfortunately, the videos have not been published yet. Hopefully they will actually get them published, unlike the previous two years…

Lastly … so far, was a local conference, that I did not speak at, only attended. JrubyConf – August 3-5, 2011. While I use MRI Ruby much more than JRuby, this conference was a great way to be around and hear from many brilliant folks (Like Wayne Seguin, Charles Nutter (headius), Nick Sieger, and Jim Weirich, to name a few), plus I felt that I needed to make up for missing out on RubyConf taking place in Baltimore, MD.

The KDE folks strongly encouraged making it to the DesktopSummit, which was hosted in Berling, Germany this year. While it was surely appetising to think of attending, it did not work out this time. It would have been nice to shake hands with some fellow contributors, like Eric Hameleers (alienBob). Better luck next year.

All good times, I look forward to next year, or event the rest of 2011.

Feel free to leave feedback on the talks.

Take care,
vb

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Candle in the Darkness

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A simple candle-flame meditation:

Light a candle in a darkened room.

Move about two feet away from it and sit down, facing the candle flame.

Get comfortable.

Then begin breathing in and out quietly through your nostrils.

Let your body relax. Let your breath relax.

Just concentrate on the candle flame.

Watch it for several minutes.

Don’t think about anything in particular. Let your thoughts go; let them settle.

Watch the flame. Let your mind go into it.

Suddenly blow out the candle and close your eyes.

See the image that forms on the inside of your eyelids.

Meditate on that light.




Nice clip brought in the book Awakening to the Sacred – Lama Surya Das

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so long twitter

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last night, while sitting on the couch with my wife. we had a brief discussion on the instant, constant, and far too imediate communication that comes with a service like twitter. so i absolve, so long world of twitter. today i deleted my account entirely. micro blogging is too much. i enjoyed getting to know people, real people. not pretending to be associated with a cluster of people, just to say that i’m a part of the pulse of the world. this lonely blog gives me more than ample outlet to voice myself. and much more realistic pulse of connection to the heartbeat of the world.

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Update: April 2009

i would almost delete this post completely, since i have resended my decision on twitter and re-activated my vbatts account, except for i am not going to deny that i did at one point delete my twitter account.  i have heard enough of the various news and current event sources that i listen to, announce that they to have a twitter account.  it is like an interactive news feed.  further, i have official heard of some good that twitter served.  with the recent policy changes, the twitter-verse started chatting up a storm to the extent that corporate executives and publisher advocacy groups took notice and began making imediate corrections to the tag filtering, within 48 hours of implementing the new change.

other links

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