So I decided to get a jump on my Plan for 2017 and "read" a book well outside my usual wheelhouse. A little background first, before I get into the meat of my thoughts on this book. Firstly, as I noted already, I've begun studying buddhism recently. I've thus far found it an interesting perspective on life. The Dali Lama said it best. I'm not studying buddhism to be buddhist. I'm studying it to have another tool to be a better me. But that's not _really_ the point of this post, since I've mostly covered that already. Its relevant because the book I'm reading is about Mindfulness and meditation. Its called Mindfulness for Beginners by John Kabat-Zinn. So far I have very mixed feelings about this book. While I find his points on the benefits of midfulness and mindful meditation insightful, its couched in very new-agey language. Its focused a lot on spirituality, and that's not really a thing that I'm looking for. The most amusing part its, several times in the portion I've already read, he's implied that this isn't "just some new-agey mumbo jumbo", and then turned around and sounded exactly like what he says he isn't.

UPDATE: I was unable to listen to much more of the book. The second half was a collection of mindfulness meditations that did not fit with my goals, nor how I consume my books.

So I've never really been one for New Years resolutions or setting goals, and that's probably not a good thing. It likely shows a lack of forethought and willpower. But whatever. Just because I haven't done so in the past, that doesn't actually prevent me from doing so moving forward (while that seems obvious, that occurred to me fairly recently). I've been doing a lot of introspection recently, and have come up with some things I want to do in the next year. To help me stick to that, I'm going to try to write about it more often (actually, that's also one of the things I want to do, but I digress). So, without any additional preamble, here are at least some of the things I want to work on, and hold myself accountable to, in 2017.

• Spend more quite time alone
  • Why: I spend a decent amount of time alone, with nearly an hour commute each way for work. Along with other household responsibilities, there's plenty of time there for some reflection. But I'm not reflecting. I spend all of this time consuming things. Audio books, podcasts, music, etc. I keep jamming new thoughts into my head, without giving them the space to roll around and resolve.
  • Tangible Goal: Spend at least one commute each week with nothing playing.
• Meditation
  • Why: In the few months I've been dabbling in sporadic medidataion, I've found that the times I do it, its very helpful. It helps me be calm, and more with the introspection. I feel better and more in control of myself when I do this.
  • Tangible Goal: Meditate for at least 15 minutes, at least 3 days a week.
  • Tangible Goal: Practice Mindful Meditation at least once per week.
• Read different things
  • Why: I read (and listen to audiobooks. Which, while very different, I'm going to call the same thing here, because I really mean "consume books") quite a bit. But its a lot of the same kinds of things. SicFi, Cyberpunk, Fantasy (a lot of Urban Fantasy recently). While any of those genres has enough sub-genres to produce more than a lifetime of entertainment, its not doing a lot to make me well rounded.
  • Tangible Goal: At least one of the books I "read" each month should be something outside of my usual selection. Mysteries, Noir, Religion, Non-Fiction, Historical Fiction. Anything other than "more of the same"
• Professional Development
  • Why: I've never really given much thought to my career path. I've just kind of taken things as they come. I feel that I need to start being a bit more active in directing my professional development. This way I can do more than be what my employer needs me to be. I can star being what I want to be.
  • Tangible Goal: Achieve at least one professional certification in 2017
  • Tangible Goal: Come up with 5/10/15 year goals before the end of 2017
• Fitness
  • Why: I've never put much thought into being healthy, long term. I don't eat that well. I'm not very active. I really should do something about that
  • Tangible Goal: Go to the gym at least 2 days a week.
  • Tangible Goal: Get to or below 250lbs (I am starting this at 270lbs)
• HPR
  • Why: HPR is a fantastic podcasting community (seriously, if you don't know them, go check them out). I want to contribute more to them
  • Tangible Goal: Release at least 2 HPR shows in 2017. (Solo shows, if doing collaboration shows, do more!)
• Write more often:
  • Why: Since I started this site, I've found that writing really does help me sort through my thoughts and put the into some kind of order. Its yet another excercise in introspection.
  • Tangible Goal: Post at least one reflection every week.
  • Tangible Goal: Post monthly on my progress with these goals.

So I've never really been one for New Years resolutions or setting goals, and that's probably not a good thing. It likely shows a lack of forethought and willpower. But whatever. Just because I haven't done so in the past, that doesn't actually prevent me from doing so moving forward (while that seems obvious, that occurred to me fairly recently). I've been doing a lot of introspection recently, and have come up with some things I want to do in the next year. To help me stick to that, I'm going to try to write about it more often (actually, that's also one of the things I want to do, but I digress). So, without any additional preamble, here are at least some of the things I want to work on, and hold myself accountable to, in 2018.

• Spend more quite time alone
  • Why: I spend a decent amount of time alone, with nearly an hour commute each way for work. Along with other household responsibilities, there's plenty of time there for some reflection. But I'm not reflecting. I spend all of this time consuming things. Audio books, podcasts, music, etc. I keep jamming new thoughts into my head, without giving them the space to roll around and resolve.
  • Tangible Goal: Spend at least one commute each week with nothing playing.
• Meditation
  • Why: In the few months I've been dabbling in sporadic medidataion, I've found that the times I do it, its very helpful. It helps me be calm, and more with the introspection. I feel better and more in control of myself when I do this.
  • Tangible Goal: Meditate for at least 15 minutes, at least 3 days a week.
  • Tangible Goal: Practice Mindful Meditation at least once per week.
• Read different things
  • Why: I read (and listen to audiobooks. Which, while very different, I'm going to call the same thing here, because I really mean "consume books") quite a bit. But its a lot of the same kinds of things. SicFi, Cyberpunk, Fantasy (a lot of Urban Fantasy recently). While any of those genres has enough sub-genres to produce more than a lifetime of entertainment, its not doing a lot to make me well rounded.
  • Tangible Goal: At least one of the books I "read" each month should be something outside of my usual selection. Mysteries, Noir, Religion, Non-Fiction, Historical Fiction. Anything other than "more of the same"
• Professional Development
  • Why: I've never really given much thought to my career path. I've just kind of taken things as they come. I feel that I need to start being a bit more active in directing my professional development. This way I can do more than be what my employer needs me to be. I can star being what I want to be.
  • Tangible Goal: Achieve at least one professional certification in 2018
  • Tangible Goal: Come up with 5/10/15 year goals before the end of 2018
• Fitness
  • Why: I've never put much thought into being healthy, long term. I don't eat that well. I'm not very active. I really should do something about that
  • Tangible Goal: Go to the gym at least 2 days a week.
  • Tangible Goal: Get to or below 250lbs (I am starting this at 270lbs)
• HPR
  • Why: HPR is a fantastic podcasting community (seriously, if you don't know them, go check them out). I want to contribute more to them
  • Tangible Goal: Release at least 2 HPR shows in 2018. (Solo shows, if doing collaboration shows, do more!)
• Write more often:
  • Why: Since I started this site, I've found that writing really does help me sort through my thoughts and put the into some kind of order. Its yet another excercise in introspection.
  • Tangible Goal: Post at least one reflection every week.
  • Tangible Goal: Post monthly on my progress with these goals.

I've gotten into several chats about what audio gear I use for Urandom (not because it sounds so good, usually just other folks looking for inexpensive but functional audio kit), so I decided to put a list together.

• Microphone: Samson Q2U USB/XLR
• Mixer: Behringer Q802 USB
• Stand: Neewer Mic Stand
• Windscreen: This cheap one

Mostly this post is just so I can always have a single page to link folks to.

Hit me with questions or better suggestions

/x1101

Taking a Facebook break

Starting today, I'm taking a break from Facebook.

I've found that I spend too much energy on it, without getting anything in return. My newsfeed seems to be filled with nothing but political name calling, negativity, useless articles, advertising for random junk that I don't want or need in my life, and the endless crush of narcissism. With a smattering of garden variety foolishness on top.

We all have a finite amount of energy each day/week/month/whatever, and I've been spending some of mine recently in considering where I've been spending the rest, and what I'm getting back in return. One of the biggest costs without much return is Facebook. As most of you notice, I don't post much. As many of you know, that's rarely because I am want for something to say. I've just found that Facebook isn't where or how I want to say it. I don't feel like I can take the time to reflect on something and order my thoughts while participating. And I know that when I don't I often say things without being informed, or considering them. And I'm making an effort to be more deliberate with what I say, as well as what I do.

I'm not pulling away from being social. I'm just choosing to focus my energy in different ways. If you want to talk with me about something, and don't mind the friction of leaving Facebook to do it, I'd be glad of it. I'll keep messenger installed, as well as hangouts, email, SMS, Twitter, and good old fashioned face to face chats. I want to talk with you. I'm sure you have something to teach me, if I'm willing to empty my cup and listen. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I hope that I'll be writing more here in the time I'll get back, but only when I have something to say.

/x1101 (Lyle)

So I've been spending some time learning about Buddhism. Not really because I'm interested in converting, or even really defining any religious association, but because its an interesting lens to view the world through. A lot of the things I've heard or read so far have aligned with my core beliefs, and provided a useful construct to analyze things. Do I expect to become some enlightened yogi by next week? Not a chance. What I do hope for is a new way to think about my interactions with others.

While my views on this might change as study more, here's how I see things. Most religions claim to teach truth. I don't get that from my study of Buddhism. What I'm getting is one guy telling folks they way he found truth. Making suggestions on what path to take, and how to stay on it. This strongly appeals to the free thinker, and pragmatist in me. I'm not trying to grapple with questions like "does god exist?" because the answer to that has no impact on the choices I make on how I live my life. I'm doing good because its good, not because I'm looking for reward / fearing punishment later.

The Buddha's first truth is that all life is / contains suffering. In the world we live in, that's as plain as the nose on my face. There's small scale suffering with people being unhappy / stressed about work, and large scale suffering up to and including genocide. I'm seeking to reduce the net suffering in the world. One day, one choice at a time. Not because someone/something tells me to, but because I see my fellow humans in pain and I want to do what I can to make that less. If this road leads to Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Stovokor or a clay urn on my kid's mantle its all the same to me. I want my journey from now to then to be on a road worth walking for its own sake.

So, be kind to eachother, try to listen to what the people around you say, hear them from their own perspective. Its a long road, and we have no idea where it ends. Think about your actions, and make up your own dammed mind.

/x1101

I haven't written in a while. And not because I don't have much to say. I've just been too busy to say it. But something happened today. Not even something that unusual. But it happened to me, so that's something. One of the things that's happened that I haven't written about has been another project. I started a podcast with some good friends over at urandom-podcast. Because of the communities we frequent, some folks have asked for an ogg feed of the show as well as an mp3 feed. Because that site is also running nikola, I was sure I could make that happen. The question was how. So I dropped into #nikola over on irc.freenode.net and asked for some help. After some chatting about what I was trying to do, and how nikola might address it, we found a solid solution.

What I wanted was to take my existing rss feed, and duplicate it, replacing all occurrences of "mp3" with "ogg" to convert this to an ogg feed. So, based on suggestions from irc'ers ralsina and ChrisWarrick I created a local deploy command to do some sed'ifying to get it done. Code below:

DEPLOY_COMMANDS = {
    "default": [
        "rsync -qr output/ my_server_url",
    ],
    "local": [
        "rm output/rss-ogg.xml",
        "cp output/rss.xml output/rss-ogg.xml",
        "sed -i 's/mp3/ogg/' output/rss-ogg.xml",
        "sed -i 's/mpeg/ogg/' output/rss-ogg.xml"
    ]
}

The reason I felt like I need to write about this was because there aren't enough people talking about the good experiences using free and open tech. I had a need, I did my best to articulate it, and I got help. People took time out of their day to think about an issue I was having and help me solve it. This doesn't always happen, and it does mean you have to do a few things.

• Go looking for help
• Articulate what you need
• Be patient (folks are doing this because they want to, nobody is obligated to help you)
• Try to think of a possible solution
• Be willing to try things out
• Be grateful when you get help

So to the folks over on #nikola, and open scorers everywhere, thank you for your time and talent. Thank you for caring about your community enough to take a few minutes and help people out. You're all the real hero's of the internet, even if nobody else is saying it.

-- UPDATE --

So, while the above _did_ work, it didn't work well. So, with even more help from the same folks I ended up creating a whole new rss parsing plugin for Nikola to generate ogg feeds. I needed to do this because it wasn't enough to change the files the xml was pointing to, I also had to update the enclosure-length value to reflect the size of the ogg file. So, rather than even more hackish shell commands, I wrote a custom plugin and some custom metadata. Much better.

/x1101

In the spirit of openness, I'd like to document what I'm using to publish this site. And its my site, so I'm going to! Here's a list of my tool chain.

Nikola - A static site generator. Turns rst files into the beautify HTML you see. I first heard of this on HPR 1577 and I've used it for a few projects since. I really like the idea of static site generation. No databases, no vulnerability filled front end. Just a text file, a web server, and a browser.

Vim - My editor of choice. Or maybe its a lifestyle. Either way. About 15 years ago I put some time into learning vim. I don't even remember why. But now that I have, I know how to use it fairly well (thou not more than a few days go by between instances of "wait, Vim can do that too?"). At this point, I'm not changing because I have editor inertia.

Git - Distributed version control. Git is just cool. I am probably just scratching the surface of what it can do, but I like it, and it makes me less dependent on a specific computer.

Rsync - For rapid deployment. Nikola has a built in process to deploy sites from your PC to your server (if you're not doing this all in one place. I use rsync and ssh keys for this.

Apache - Web service. Its old, its well known, and it's already running my my VPS

Linux - Because its gotta run somewhere. Linux is my operating system of choice for everything. No surprises here.

Now, lets break it down into how I combine these tools.

I have a directory on my computer initialized as both a nikola site and a git repository. When I got to create a new post, I use nikola to create the appropriate file, then open it up with vim and write what I have to write.

These files are in rst, a simple markup language that nikola can compile into HTML. This allows me to quite clearly divorce the content of the site (these files) from the appearance of the site (the theme, containing CSS, layouts, etc). HTML was always designed to be able to do this, but rst does it better.

Once the page is done, I test it locally. If I'm satisfied, I'll commit it to my local git repo, then push it upstream just before I'm ready to publish. In my git repository I have several branches. One for content, one for configuration changes, and one for theme work. And 'master' which is the special "production" branch. Working in 'master' is usually considered poor practice, so I don't.

Deployment is built into nikola, with a bit of configuration. I have it setup to rsync the files to my server directly. It works well. Apache & Linux are really just the platform for serving the files up. It could just as easily be running on ISS (well, easy for some people, probably not for me), or Nginx, running on Linux or Windows. I use Linux+Apache because its the stack I have, and I've used.

So that's how thoughts go from my brain to yours.

/x1101

I recently listened to the unabridged audio of Robert Heinlein's "For Us, The Living", which I got from my public library. Some things struck me as profound, while other either through the lense of nearly another century of history, or possibly logically failings of my own, struck me as overly simplified.

Lets start with the profound. This was, at least on its face, a Sci-Fi novel. But looking at the things Heinlein assumes we will and will not be able to achieve in 150 years (from 1939) struck me as odd. Flying cars common place, but no space travel. World wide face to face comms, but no internet to speak of. This perspective is obviously informed from nigh a century of extra history, in which we've solved some of the "impossible" issues, while we're still struggling with some of the "simple" issues. I guess these disconnects do more to illustrate the thinking of the 1930's and the views of what was and was not possible than to show what we have and have not done. My explorations in Sci-Fi from the first half of the 20th century show this as a constant.

The other thing I fond both worth writing about was the approach to social and economics issues that Heinlein proposes. My first reaction to is that it seems to be some strange, and yet functional form of Libertarian Socialism. The blending of the two ideas seems inherently impossible, and yet this society he creates appears to work, and well. I think even my categorization of it is unfair to most involved. I think that most Libertarians would object to being associated with this, because of the ongoing reliance on handouts from the government, and the rather high taxes. I think most Socialists would object because of the ongoing existence of private property and the seeking of individual wealth. But I those are likely folks attached only to an ideal, not the objective behind it. Would not the Libertarian be happy with how restrained the government is in how it regulates individual freedoms? The only crimes being direct harm to another. Wouldn't the Socialist be happy with the standard of living created for all? Healthcare, food, education, all provided to anyone. But this is also where I start to get fuzzy. I follow the logic that any currency not backed by something (gold, diamonds, turkeys, whatever) in inherently fiat. I also follow that it makes more sense to let an actual government do the printing of money than to let the banks do it. Maybe if someone had read this novel 25 years ago, the current state of the US could have been avoided. But I doubt it. The thing I have a hard time swallowing, outside the confines of the story, is that a government could be intelligent enough, and benevolent enough to actually pull of the controlled infusion of currency he describes. But it makes a good story. [Update 1]

Over all, I liked this book, and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys socio-political fiction, and classic Sci-Fi

/x1101