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    Meditation: Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

    Two lessons learned yesterday: It’s hard to express super-crunkedness about meditation, and it’s hard to meditate for an hour. I went to this group meditation thing last night, and holy crap. I’m a novice (again) at meditation, so I’m normally working in, like, 10 minute stints. How about 25 minutes sitting, 10 minutes walking, then 25 more minutes sitting? Three years ago, I could almost do that. I knew enough this time to get a chair. I have subpar leg circulation, so sitting cross-legged–even on a cushion with butt elevation–would end in tears and a desire for leg amputation. I’d like to want to keep my legs, thanks. So, sitting…

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    What Is This Thing Made of Paper and Glue?

    All the reading I need to do can happen in Google Reader, right? I read a lot of books last year. Like, maybe 50. I didn’t post or write about many of them, because plenty were über-pulpy and just time-killers. All but the couple of technical books were electronic. Being unaware of what I was reading made it pointless. Why’d I pick those books? What’d I learn from them? Meh.

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: the TSA, Microwaves, and “Dot Dot Dot”

    This week’s internet cruising: Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else – WordPress, Multisite and BuddyPress plugins, themes, news and help – WPMU.org – I'm not at all surprised by the hackery going on in free WordPress themes. YouTube – Brick in a washing machine – I've always wanted to do this! Twitter’s Response to WikiLeaks Subpoena Should Be the Industry Standard | Threat Level | Wired.com – "Twitter introduced a new feature last month without telling anyone about it, and the rest of the tech world should take note and come up with its own version of it Twitter beta-tested a spine."…

  • On Life and Love

    Untenable Workplace Hotshots

    “When Smart People are Bad Employees” offers up three types of hotshots in the workplace: The Heretic: “However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company. Rather than identifying weaknesses, so that he can fix them, he looks for faults to build his case. Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons.” The Flake: “Then Roger changed. He would miss days of work without calling in. Then he would miss weeks of work. When he finally showed up, he apologized profusely, but the behavior didn’t stop. His work product also degraded. He became sloppy and unfocused.” The Jerk:…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Google, Politics, and Bees’ Knees

    This week’s internet cruising: Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google – Jeff isn't the first to point out the problems with Google's search results lately (the content mills are clearly winning, and I swim through a lot of mess to get good results anymore), but he's done a lot of due diligence to try to improve Stack Exchange's rankings over the content scrapers, with mixed results. Excellent post. Sphinx – A better way to write your docs – This looks like an awesome doc writing/management system–I struggle with how much documentation to produce for the internals of a system (i.e. not a publicly exposed API), but I'd definitely…