Going back to the Bhagavad Gita… I don’t have my copy handy to quote from, but it also talks about following your duty in life… I emphasize “your” there because it’s easy to find yourself doing the duties of another, in the pursuit of wealth. Your duty is determined by your inner nature, and going against it is the path to unhappiness.
I am rather literally doing the duties of another right now - the guy before me who retired. Writing convoluted programs in archaic languages to update mundane databases was this man’s nature. It is not mine. I’m being paid rather well to maintain these programs, but I am rather unhappy right now. It is my nature, and therefore my duty, to produce work that is substantially more elegant than this.
There is hope, though - evidently support for this old language might be going away, and that’s creating a drive in the organization to rewrite everything in a more modern language. It’ll be Java, of course (yech), but anything’s better than the mess we have now. My schedule’s a bit packed to be doing full rewrites, but I can barely motivate myself to keep working with the old stuff. I think I need to be looking very hard at reimplementations.
Read more...Scratch
Reminds me of Logo, but the turtle can be any sprite you want, there can be any number of turtles, and there’s sound support and collision detection. The language itself is cooler, too: I don’t remember Logo having event handlers.
Lenny wants to program a game with me, and I think this is what we’ll be doing it in.
Read more...“Desire for the fruits of one’s actions brings worry about possible failure… When you are preoccupied with end results you pull yourself from the present into an imagined, usually fearful future. Then your anxiety robs your energy and, making matters worse, you lapse into inaction and laziness. … The ideal, Arjuna, is to be intensely active and at the same time have no selfish motives, no thoughts of personal gain or loss. Duty uncontaminated by desire leads to inner peacefulness and increased effectiveness. This is the secret to living a life of real achievement!” -Krishna, The Bhagavad Gita chapter 2
Read more...Oh, the irony...
I tossed out all my anime posters when it became clear I wouldn’t be a bachelor much longer. After all, surely no woman would tolerate them decorating her house…
Well, guess who just got an Inu Yasha wall scroll from a relative for her birthday? She actually intends to hang it, too.
Read more...Went shopping for a birthday gift today, and realized a few things…
-I haven’t been to a shopping mall in about a year. -The main purpose of malls seems to be for teenagers to walk around trying to look pretty and/or tough. (This is common knowledge, of course, but it only sank in today.) -Malls contain things I don’t want to buy at prices I’m not willing to pay.
This year, I’m gonna start my Christmas shopping early enough that I can just order everything from Amazon.
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