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quotes

No pain in love is so hard to bear as that which comes from the impossibility of doing any service for the well-beloved, and no service is so repulsive that love cannot make it delightful and easy. -Somerset Maugham, The Hero

“If you choose to read a book today, it’s not like a hundred years ago, when that was your only option. Today, when you read a book, you’re making a conscious decision not to play a video game, not to surf the web, not to watch a movie, not to turn on the TV. It does require a certain discipline to make that decision.” Neal Stephenson

Anger, resentment, envy and self-pity are wasteful reactions that greatly drain one’s time and sap energy better devoted to productive endeavors. Of course it is important to be a good listener — but it also pays, sometimes, to be a little deaf. - Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Voltaire: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

you don’t get healthy self-esteem from constantly telling yourself how great you are, or even from other people telling you how great you are. You get healthy self-esteem from behaving in ways that you find estimable.  - Gretchen Rubin, http://www.happiness-project.com

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quotes

What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.” - Gretchen Rubin, http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/

“A man gets an immense amount of satisfaction from the knowledge of having done good work and of having made the best use of his day, and when I am in this state I find that I thoroughly enjoy my rest and even the mildest forms of recreation.”
“One always has to spoil a picture a little in order to finish it.”
“A man does not work only for the sake of producing, but to set a value on his time. We feel more satisfied with ourselves and with our day if we have stirred up our minds and made a good start, or have finished a piece of work.”
- Eugene Delacroix.

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classics and cookbooks

Gutenberg FREE BOOKS:

Coming Home by Edith Wharton http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/24349

White Fang by Jack London http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/23976

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/23979

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/23975

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/23980

365 Luncheon Dishes by Anonymous http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/24384

The Community Cook Book by Anonymous http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/24387

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quotes

I’ve been saving these up. In random order, uncategorized, just throwing them out here… 

It is not that science disproves — or tries to disprove — the existence of God. The acts of a transcendent creator are simply outside the realm of anything that science can examine…Ability to explain things without reference to God does not prove or even indicate the nonexistence of God.  … The concept of “good” recedes infinitely, resisting noncircular definition. Even when you find a good definition of “good,” you can’t say why it is a better definition than any other. But people of faith in a normative religion have decided and committed themselves to a code of decent conduct, not because it has been scientifically proven to be “better,” but because they believe it to be better on an admittedly unscientific basis. - Orson Scott Card, author http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-05-04-1.html

 ”I have learned that people put in a corner must fight or crumble, and the rightness of my position can be lost in the defeat of a person.” Bill Pollard, author The Soul of the Firm

Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.” — Montaigne

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. - Voltaire”

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
“Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.”
“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.”
- Bruce Lee

Someone who walks into Best Buy and pays for a 47-inch plasma television with a credit card does not comprehend the difference between an asset and a liability. -Robert, Flimjo.com

people are made anxious by free-floating blame that hasn’t settled. Once someone says, “I messed up,” “That was my fault,” or “I’m sorry,” everyone can relax, forgive, and move on. - Gretchen Rubin, http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/

It is always a mistake to wait passively for bureaucracies and government agencies to “save” us.
Jerry White, co-founder of Survivor Corps (formerly Landmine Survivors Newwork), & author of “I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis.”

“The steam that blows the whistle never turns the wheel… ”
“Most people would rather die than think. Many often do. ”
“Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets replaced.”
-Dave Northrup http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/15/our-daily-bleg-got-anything-else-like-sht-happens/#comment-570358

…how much security do we want? …A world without failure is a world without freedom. A world without the possibility of sin is a world without the possibility of righteousness. A world without the possibility of crime is a world where you cannot prove you are not a criminal. A technology that can give you everything you want is a technology that can take away everything that you have. At some point, real soon now, some of us security geeks will have to say that there comes a point at which safety is not safe. - Dan Geer’s remarks at Source Boston 2008:

The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created–created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination. - John Schaar

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awesomely free summer reading

The following are all now sans-copyright, freely available, no DRM, etc. offered by Gutenberg.org. Since they offer txt format, you can download it in a way that makes it readable on most platforms, and easy to  transfer to another platform if you need to. Plus, the below were probably on some reading list you were supposed to read at some point anyway…besides being touchstones of our culture. 

Common Sense by Thomas Paine http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/147

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/175

The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3186

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/174

The Arabian Nights by Andrew Lang http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/128

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free books

GUTENBERG PROMISING looking books:
Egocentric Orbit by John Cory
The Capgras Shift by Sam Vaknin
The Aliens by [pseud.] Murray Leinster
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/24518
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca by Homer : http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/24856

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quotes 03/24/2008

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought –Henry Bergson.”

it is intrinsically easier to compromise an organisation’s security where that organisation has chosen to entrust its data to a third party - Chris Linfoot

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catchup post

Bad, bad bloghostess. It’s been a month since you’ve posted. What have you been up to?

  1.  Painting a surf mural
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrs_helm/2360168752/
  2. Celebrating Easter
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrs_helm/2359320497/
  3. Not Christmas
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrs_helm/2360137784/
  4. Raising the bars
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrs_helm/2359317085/
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrs_helm/2359315327/
  5. Looking at cars (mine’s on the right)
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrs_helm/2360144666/

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valentines2008




valentines2008

Originally uploaded by mrs_helm

This is our Valentine’s Day 2008! Alex got me he big bunch of flowers (which he rarely does). He knows I like daisies. The boys each made me a card. Aidan’s, on the left, has a little “pocket” message. Leiham’s, on the right, has a cut out heart and a message under a heart door. Then there are the 3 cards I got for each of my guys. I wrote a long sappy letter for Alex. Alex said to get the guys “good chocolate, not Valentine chocolate”…I couldn’t get to Wilbur’s, so I got them big Hershey bars. (I figured if they don’t like them, they can make Smores.)

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automated traffic systems

http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/dn13306-could-smart-traffic-lights-stop-motorists-fuming.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

traffic lights were fed the position and speed of all vehicles on nearby roads and programmed to calculate how to phase colour changes in order to optimise traffic flow

THAT sounds good.

If a set of lights told drivers when they were about to change, “drivers [could] adapt their speed accordingly to avoid useless accelerations or react faster on green,

a. Isn’t that what the yellow light is for? To tell people when it is about to turn red?

b. We don’t necessarily want people jumping the green light. That’s a safety issue. It’s bad enough people try to beat the red by zooming thru the yellow. (I’ve been guilty of it - hasn’t everyone?) But what if people were also beating the green? (It’s about to be green, so no need to brake…)

For this to work, vehicles must transmit data to the computer system that controls a city’s lights.

And how long after we are transmitting that data to the city’s system will it be before law enforcement figures out they can use that to determine who is running a red light? Speeding? Tailgating? Shouldn’t do those things anyway, you say. Well, how about being investigated because you’ve supposedly been stopping at questionable street corners? Cruising low income neighborhoods? What if you were just handing out information about the local homeless shelter?

I have misgivings enough about putting my car on a traffic network or relying on one for information.  (I probably don’t have too much to worry about, since I live in the sticks and see less than 20 other cars on my way to work.)  But I have even bigger misgivings about what other people could do with that information.

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