Category: Life
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In A Silent Way
A short while back, I had the opportunity to go on an 8-day meditation retreat. This was at the American Bodhi Center (ABC), which is affiliated with the Jade Buddha Temple which I regularly attend, and was led by visiting monk Venerable Kai Li. I thought it would give me the impetus to re-commit to my practice – especially meditation which, sad to say, I wasn’t doing regularly at the time. The retreat was advertised as a ‘silent retreat’, so I took the opportunity to completely disconnect from work and social media, going so far as switching my phone off… Read more
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Availity suck, and there’s nothing you can do about it
So I’ve got something weird going on with my blood. The doctors keep taking samples and telling me my “numbers don’t make any sense”. I’m not overly-worried, but their final attempt to find out what is going on is to give me a colonoscopy (and I’m glad they left this as a ‘last resort’…). This was scheduled at my last visit a couple of months back, and the procedure day is now rapidly approaching. In preparation for this (I assume) the service provider (my doctor) contacted my medical insurance provider (Aetna) to confirm I was still covered, and hadn’t changed… Read more
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Try tri, and tri again
Late last year, a good friend of mine took part in her first (sprint-distance) triathlon, and being the good friend I am, I went along to cheer her on. It looked like a lot of fun, and when she said, almost immediately after finishing it, that she’d do another, and asked if I was interested in joining her for the next one, I said, “Sure!”. I don’t know if it was over-confidence in my own level of fitness, or just that I didn’t want to lose face and admit I am old and ‘past it’, but I figured if she… Read more
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Buddhism and 12 Step Programs
A few weeks back I was attending my regular Alanon meeting, and the person who led it asked the question “Why are you here?”. They were thinking more of “Why are you here at Alanon?” with the point being: are you here for the alcoholic or for yourself? (Spoiler: it should be for yourself.) But as a broader question, that’s something I have been mulling over for a while now. Why am I here – on earth, living this life? I can’t honestly say I enjoy life – or at least not taken as a whole narrative arc. There are… Read more
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Further adventures in music management
For a while now, I’ve been using a re-purposed Dell PowerEdge server as a home media server. I had all my music ripped to it, and linked it to my Sonos system so I could stream to anywhere in the house. It worked pretty well for almost 10 years, but it was running Windows Home Server 2003 and was slowly dying. I couldn’t install the latest version of the Sonos controller, periodically lost internet connectivity, and everything was just getting slower and slower. So I decided to upgrade. I settled for another Dell (after a temporary defection to HP before… Read more