The Mad Philosopher

My favourite song of all time is “The Christmas Song” as arranged by Shigeru Umebayashi. It comes from the soundtrack of the brilliant film 2046, whose story takes place in and around Christmas.

Listening to it really makes me happy. It’s light and bouncy, and really swings.

I hope you enjoy it too!

“The Christmas Song” by Shigeru Umebayashi (4.5 MB ogg)

To hear this song, copy the URL below into your browser, but replace the X with the number 686. Then you can download it.

http://madphilosopher.ca/darren109/X/the_christmas_song.ogg

Note, the above file is in Ogg Vorbis format, which is like MP3. All my media players can play ogg except for iTunes. If you need an ogg player for Windows, Winamp 2.91 is a good choice.

I just learned tonight that Wil Wheaton has a new podcast out, called Memories of the Futurecast.

The podcast is a promotion of his latest book, Memories of the Future, Volume One, which is Wil’s going-down-memory-lane review of the first 13 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I listened to the first episode of the podcast already, and I’m looking forward to hearing the rest (12 of 13 have been published so far, as I write this). I enjoy everything Wil Wheaton does.

Check it out.

The autosave feature in recent versions of WordPress (versions 2.5–2.7) is actually a misfeature:

… A misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a simple unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the feature in question was carefully planned, but its long-term consequences were not accurately or adequately predicted (which is quite different from not having thought ahead at all).

The improper functioning of the WordPress autosave has bitten me several times. It’s supposed to prevent you from losing work by periodically saving your blog edits in the background, when in fact it has caused me to lose work by its very operation.

Basically, the most recent edits made to a blog entry often get dropped when you go to “Preview” or “Publish” the entry. In other words, during either of these two operations, it reverts you to what it had autosaved in the past and the new edits are lost. The frustrating thing is that most users would expect the “Preview” operation if not the “Publish” operation to properly save what’s in the edit box. So often, you might end up publishing an incomplete or incorrect version of your blog entry without even knowing it.

This is madness. Let’s stop it.

Find the following four files in the wp-admin/ directory of your WordPress installation:

1. page-new.php
2. page.php
3. post-new.php
4. post.php

and comment out the following line:

wp_enqueue_script('autosave')

by changing it to:

//wp_enqueue_script('autosave')

This will disable the autosave feature in the WordPress user interface.

A secondary part of the solution, too, is to always hit “Save Draft” before hitting “Preview”. I’m not sure if this is strictly necessary, but now I’m paranoid.

Thanks to Allen Day and William Lone for showing me how to do this.

Thoughts are Energy

Have you ever had that feeling in your gut when someone close to you is about to tell you bad news? Or what about the pit in your stomach when you know you have to face something that you know you don’t want to face? Well, behind these feelings and physical sensations are thoughts. These thoughts are sometimes conscious and oftentimes subconscious, but they are there.

These feelings and the thoughts behind them demonstrate that thoughts are energy. The thoughts that we hold in our consciousness, and those that lie below the level of consciousness, have an effect on our emotional lives. Through them, we can be lifted up and “energized” or be brought into states of fear and anxiety. Where you end up on this scale depends on the level of spiritual consciousness of the thought itself.

A Way to Relaxation

Along these lines, then, we can find way to achieve relaxation and calm the body through conscious thought. Basically, ask yourself the question, “What does gratefulness feel like?” Now, this is not a question for the intellect, to be mulled over and processed by the thinking mind. No, hand your awareness over to your body as you enter the state of being grateful.

How do you do that? Well, this may be slightly different for every one of you, but I start by thinking about things I am grateful for. That is, I enumerate the wonderful things in my life, from the exceptional to the mundane. But the key is this: I don’t stay at the level of the thinking mind. Instead, as I bring each thing into conscious thought, I start to pay attention to how I feel—in my body. In other words, I shift my attention from the mental image to the sensation in my chest (or in my heart or in my forehead). For me, this immediately shuts off the thinking mind and allows me to enter into the awareness of who I AM—the thinker behind the thought.

Experiment

Now, as you read this, I encourage you to give it a try. Examine for yourself what gratefulness feels like and where it shows up in your body. How does it differ from the feeling of universal love? Which emotions work best for you as a way to connect with and relax your body?

As you practice and become increasingly familiar with this method of relaxation and meditation, you can start to use it in your daily life to change how you feel in any situation. You can shift your thoughts to what you want to focus on and to the emotional state you wish to achieve in any given moment.

In the spirit of minimalization, I’ve decided to greatly simplify the look of my blog. So I’ve adopted and slightly modified the White as Milk theme (v1.8) designed by Azeem Azeez.

Some of the modifications I made include:

• Set page width to 95%.
• Set posts as justified text.
• Set the <blockquote> text colour to #777 (grey) like the original WordPress Kubrick theme.
• Disabled the underlining of hyperlinks.

I like the cleanness of the design, and it looks good in text-based browsers (and on mobile devices). Importantly, it puts the blog’s navigational elements after the main text on each page. I’m not sure about the right-aligned sidebar on the left, though. For one thing, it doesn’t show the hierarchy of my categories at all well.

There is some colour to this theme, but only if I post some code:

/*Background Color of the page*/
    body {background-color:white;}

/*Body text color*/
    body {color:#333;}

/*Text color of the blog title in the header*/
    #header h1 a {color:#3b6ea5;}

/*Text color of the blog description in the header*/
    .description {color:#333;}

/*Links color*/
    a {color:#0066CC}

/*Links hover color*/
    a:hover {color:#333}

/*Headings color*/
    .post h2 a, #sidebar h2 {color:#333;}

/*Headings hover color*/
    .post h2 a:hover {color:#0066CC;}

/*Width of the entire page*/
    #page {width:95%;}

Also, in this same spirit, the sidebar now only shows the Search box, About text, a greatly reduced set of Pages, an Archives dropdown, Categories, and two bits of syndicated content that I produce elsewhere (the RSS feeds). The WordPress (v2.7) Widgets functionality made it super easy to set up and arrange these elements on the sidebar without requiring me to edit the sidebar.php code as in the past. It is very slick.

Does the following dialog box make sense to you? That is, are you able to answer the question it asks?

Think about it for a bit, then see the comments for this post for the answer.

Interestingly, Python was first released when I was in Grade 11. Via xkcd.

© 1984 Saskia Davis

Be on the lookout for symptoms of inner peace. The hearts of a great many have already been exposed; and it is possible that people, everywhere, could come down with it in epidemic proportions. This could pose a serious threat to what has, up to now, been a fairly stable condition of conflict in the world.

Signs and Symptoms of Inner Peace

• A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on fears based on past experiences.
• An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.
• A loss of interest in judging other people.
• A loss of interest in judging self.
• A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.
• A loss of interest in conflict.
• A loss of the ability to worry. (This is a very serious symptom.)
• Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation.
• Contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature.
• Frequent attacks of smiling.
• An increasing tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.
• An increased susceptibility to the love extended by others as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it.

WARNING: If you have some or all of the above symptoms, please be advised that your condition of inner peace may be too far advanced to be curable. If you are exposed to anyone exhibiting any of these symptoms, remain exposed only at your own risk.

– Saskia Davis

(For permission to reprint, write to Saskia Davis, 10640 Exeter Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98125.)

Hey, it’s the First of May y’all! And you know what that means…

First of May, by Jonathan Coulton (4:10, 4.8 MB)

Thanks, Jonathan!