Second meditation class tonight

So tonight was the second class in meditation from the nearby Buddhist centre. It didn’t go as well as the first class because a guy’s phone went off during the first meditation, then another guy was super fidgety and scratchy and coughy and…well to make it simple he was really distracting.

We got through it OK, basically you have to accept that not every meditation session will be quiet and peaceful and all that, some people are just fidgety and, well,  annoying.

But like any distraction or thought during meditation, you let it pass, gently bring your focus back to your breathing or whatever you’re meant to be meditating about, and you move on. Like someone replied on a forum thread I started, you treat the distraction or thought like a puppy that wants to play: you acknowledge it and then let it go on its way. I really liked that way of putting it.

Still, I found it difficult to meditate properly, but that is part of it anyway.

Today’s teaching was on giving, and how much happier you can be if you give as much as you can. It was a good talk, and afterwards in the discussion I brought up Freecycle, which I participate in, and of course the amount of ’stuff’ I’ve ended up getting from it as well.

Apart from the distractions it went fine, but I have to work on the whole focus thing. And giving more stuff away!

Favorite memories, pt 1

staying up the first night I met my girlfriend, talking about everything and anything

driving back from mountain biking with my friend Robert, with our bikes in the back of his Isuzu P’up, rocking out to White Zombie on a crap stereo system

playing Quake for hours every night with my friend James and his son Steve, then watching Seinfeld reruns at 10:30 after the nightly news

sleeping under the stars in Joshua Tree National Park, watching stars and satellites pass overhead

seeing my car in the parking lot at the start/finish point of my first overnight backpacking trip

Meditation class tonight

I went to an evening meditation class organized by the local Buddhist center, it was very mellow, instructive and quite nice.

I guess this is kind of long but maybe it will help some folks to google ‘(local area) meditation class’ like I did:
There were just 3 other people plus a helper from the Buddhist center and an actual monk (in robes, etc.). After initial greetings from the helper everyone sat down and the lady went through some of the courses and things the center is doing soon, then the monk came in. A young woman, probably 30 or younger, which was a little surprising since ‘every Buddhist monk is Tibetan, of course’. She said hello and we went almost right into a nice breathing meditation which I want to write down because it was very useful. Basically we sat in our chairs (which were kind of uncomfortable, I’d rather sit on the ground) and she talked us through focusing on the room, then seeing ourselves in the room, then seeing ourselves floating and relaxing all the muscles from the top of your head to your toes. Then breathing out our bad thoughts and worries as black smoke, which dissipates to nothing. Then breathing in white light, then maybe doing both (light/smoke) at the same time instead of concentrating on just one or the other.

After this there was a talk from the monk. I was still getting used to the idea of the whole thing so I didn’t absorb it all and just checked out her shaved head, hand-knit robes, etc., but she used a book called The New Meditation Handbook, written by a Tibetan monk who’d moved to the UK some 30+ years ago, and read some passages from it to us between just talking about the feeling and purpose of meditation.

There wasn’t any evangelical ‘join Buddha’ talk but there were many references, but it certainly wasn’t a sermon in any way (I was raised Roman Catholic). There were some concepts such as meditation can cure or fix anything, and stuff like that (I may be remembering it wrong, forgive me). There were points I was thinking ‘if this person were older I’d feel more confident in this advice’ but basically I felt that was skepticism and tried to ignore it.

After the talk we had a focused meditation, I forget what she called it but it was about feeling love for everyone: we were told to concentrate on the breath coming into our nostrils and the breath going out, and then concentrated on someone who’d given us love and affection. After we concentrated on them we also concentrated on someone else and then tried to spread that love to everyone. I guess this is a ‘basic’ meditation but I got the idea. It was nice.

Afterwards we had tea & coffee and shared what we were trying to get out of meditation. One woman was trying it for the very first time and has an autistic teen son. Another woman is a stressed IT pro who’s tried all sorts of things from Daoism (sp?) to who knows what. The last guy had been to several classes previously and works as a home carer for autistic and sick people and was the most ‘experienced’ of us there, other than the monk. We all agreed that CDs and books are good but a ‘formal’ meditation with an actual person was great, and this one in particular. I think the main reason was because you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get with a meditation CD, whereas I was pretty sure with a Buddhist monk leading the way I wasn’t going to get some strange crap thrown at me.

Anyway, I quite liked it, will be going again next week.

If you’re feeling stressed or want to focus on something or anything like that, I’d recommend giving meditation a try!

The bike list

So a post on a bike thread over at the Something Awful forums asked how many bikes the regular posters have. I have three at the moment:

1. a circa 1998  Giant hard tail mtb with good components that I got off eBay which I ride few times a year at the moment;
2. an older steel frame Raliegh hybrid (I think) from Freecycle that is the exclusive commuter;
3. an even older Criterium brand (I think) road bike from Freecycle that I want to do up as a road bike but it needs some tune-up work and tires. To give you an idea, it’s old enough it has double brake levers up front… Supposedly it’s a French bike but there are a ton of bike brands and models called ‘Criterium’, plus it doesn’t help that a criterium is a type of bike race!

I’m hoping to get a new road bike (for exercising) through a gov’t cycle commuting plan but that’ll probably take a while to work out. This would be one of those serious ’starter’ road bikes that’s about $800 or £650.

I’ve had a couple other bikes off Freecycle that I’ve nicked parts off of (forks for truing mainly) or just looked at, and then given away again. There’s just not enough room to have more than one ‘project’ bike, so at the moment that will be the road bike (mainly just to get it rolling reliably) and any bikes I get will either be whole or used for parts.

My next project – the Barbour jacket

So I got this classic Barbour Border jacket from Freecycle and instead of paying £70 or more for repairs to a few tears on the sleeves and other fixes, I want to see about doing the repairs on my own and saving a bundle.

The style of the jacket is ‘vintage English country gentleman’ and comes from the Barbour ’shooting’ range of clothing – it’s meant to be something you go out walking the countryside with, a shotgun under one arm and your sheepdog (or a selection of your well-heeled aristocratic mates) at your side.

This is an example of a waxed cotton jacket (just happens to be the same one I got), you can see it’s a fairly expensive jacket, they run from £160 to £200 new! Waxed cotton jackets have been popular since at least WW2, many retro motorcyclists use them for riding.

This is the official price list for patches, repairs and reproofing from the original company…£10 for a patch, damn

So there are two stages of things to deal with…

The first thing to deal with is a bunch of tears, this jacket has been well-used inside and out:

• multiple tears on the lower sleeves (there is a full-length sleeve patch where it’s been repaired before, it must have been sent in at some point)
• the lining has big tears in a few places
• one of the handwarmer pocket flaps is starting to come off (there is another patch on the other handwarmer pocket)
• the hang tab is torn
• a few small holes elsewhere on the outer fabric
• fraying around the sleeve cuffs

A few evenings of hand-sewing will take care of these I think, except for the cuffs, I’m not sure how to deal with those. If you send the jacket to the company they give you the option of adding cotton cuffs to cover up the fraying/holes, I don’t know how to add these at this point. The first step here is to get some matching fabric (tight-knit dark green cotton) and thread.

The other issue I have is reproofing the cotton with wax. As I understand it, each company that offers waxed cotton clothing uses their own blend of wax, so you’re meant to use their own. (If you’re just waxing a bag or pair of jeans, I understand beeswax works pretty well, although it might not be as long-wearing.) I’ve got my eye on an eBay auction of some Barbour ‘Thornproof Dressing’ so I hope I get them, then I can try reproofing the jacket after I’m done patching it up. Apparently reproofing involves warming up the jacket, heating up the tin of wax and using tightly rolled-up rags to apply the wax, then using a hair dryer to melt the wax in and let the cotton absorb it. With daily use you’re meant to reproof approximately once a year.

So, I’m not sure how long this project will take, but it’s something that can be done while watching TV or listening to music, which is pretty cool.

31 things every guy should own…

from Esquire (loaded with ads, full list below)

full list:
Cast-Iron Skillet – yep
Valid Passport – yep
Multipurpose Tool – yep
Waiter’s Corkscrew/Bottle Opener/Knife – yep
Ax – yep
WD-40 – yep
Cordless Drill – yep
Weekend Shoulder Bag – yep
Giant Wool Blanket Never Removed from the Trunk of the Car – yep
Chain Saw – no…maybe I have to work on this one
Work Gloves – yep
Carpenter’s Level – yep
Boots for the Shop
Boots for Everywhere Else – yep
Jack – yep
Claw Hammer – yep
Lantern – yep
Chef’s Knife – yep
Flying Disc – yep
(U.S.) Road Atlas – yep
Air Pump – yep
Jumper Cables – yep
Charcoal Grill – yep
Card Holder – yep
Pocket Knife – yep
Grease – yep
Lucky Charm – yep
$1,000 Hidden in Your House – ha!
LED Flashlight – yep
Money Clip – I gotta wallet
Joy of Cooking – yep

29 out of 31 ain’t bad

Latest & current hobbies

I change hobbies like other people change shoes or jackets, so I’m just curious with the weather/time change what hobbies people do regularly. I could list backpacking, writing and a whole host of things that I don’t actually have time for, but what I actually make time for are:

• computer games (Fallout 3 at the moment, but also Call of Duty 5 online)
• Formula 1 and Moto GP watching and discussing on the web
• role-playing games (yep, Dungeons & Dragons, been doing it since I was 13)
• just getting into gardening again with the warm weather, want to keep it up this year
• reading

what I want to make time for include:

• cycling
• sewing projects (with that sewing machine I got last year)
• trekking (multi-day walks like when I did Hadrian’s Wall)
• writing (this is a very long-term goal)

I’ve tried to pare down the number of things I try to do because there’s not 36 hours in a day and I need to keep my job

Timeline of a PC upgrade

The last upgrade: late 2004, when I was given a development AMD FX-53 CPU. I had to get a new motherboard because at the time I was using an older AMD CPU with a different pin configuration. The new motherboard (an ABIT Third Eye with on-the-fly overclocking ability) featured then-new DDR RAM, so I got new RAM as well: 1GB of OCZ Platinum Edition with a lifetime warranty so I could overclock the CPU safely. I kept my current AGP video card. Several months later, I upgraded the video card to an ATI X1600 Pro and have had this setup ever since.

I ended up never overclocking the hardware.

Fast-forward to several months ago, when I started detecting a dangerous feeling of inadequacy as my computer gaming friends were upgrading their computers. Previously, I’d been the owner of the fastest computer at our LAN parties, but I’d fallen well behind the times. Losing the bragging rights didn’t bother me much, nowhere near as much as knowing I was basically unable to play the latest computer shooter games like Crysis and Fallout 2. So when the mediocre reviews came out for these games I felt a bit justified in waiting so long.

In the meantime, about a year ago, I’d bought a faulty (RRoD) Xbox 360 off eBay, plus all the cables, etc., to make it work. Microsoft told me it’d never been registered, so they fixed it for free (yay! very cool). I’d purchased a grand total of two games for it (Forza 2 and Colin McRae: Dirt) but that was it, I hadn’t played it for several months by the end of the year.

Towards autumn I decided I’d have to start doing a bit of research to find out what was going on in the world of PC upgrading. This is when I found out about DDR2, DDR3, AM2, AM2+, socket 775, i7 and much more. I already knew about PCI-E so hey at least I could skip learning about that.

Basically I found out that I couldn’t upgrade just the CPU because the 939 chip die was basically obsolete now. Upgrading the DDR RAM would cost 2 or 3 times as much as getting new DDR2 RAM, and there was no way I could upgrade the AGP video card to a PCI-E…it became clear that a completely new set-up would be required: RAM, CPU and motherboard, plus video card. Luckily I already had a PCI-E video card from a home theater PC that never got finished, but it’s only as fast as my current AGP card – but it’ll do until I could afford a whiz-bang PCI-E card.

After carefully considering things, I came up with a long checklist of features:

• best bang-for-the-buck CPU (fastest for the money)
• dual- or quad-core (didn’t matter which, I do enough multi-tasking to justify a quad-core)
• 4GB of RAM that’s safe to overclock
• PCI-E 2.0 spec, for a bit more PCI bus speeds
• easily overclocked and updated motherboard
• ATX size to fit in my current case

Not a terribly long list but some of these requirements would push up the cost from what could have been quite cheap.

Finally, the time would come. Just a couple of weeks ago, I decided to trade in my unused, dust-collecting Xbox 360 and get store credit from a nationwide chain of stores that buy and resell video games, consoles, hardware, etc. The £120 I would get (according to their site) would pay for an Intel Core 2 Quad processor (used) – ideal!

So…here, the story truly begins:

Friday, the 19th February: pop down to the local mall to trade in the 360 console, hard drive, power adapter, video cable, wireless joypad, headset and some games. I’m told they can’t take the console without an official Microsoft video cable, so I hand over everything and say fine, just give me the credit. £64 store credit, to use online or in the store. Cool. I go home, get on the store’s website and order a video cable – £1.50 but the minimum purchase is £2 so I order a PC copy of Colin McRae: Dirt for another £6.

The following Tuesday I receive the replacement video cable.

Thursday, the 27th of February: pop down to the mall (again paying £2 for parking) and hand over the console with new (used) video cable. Am told the store can’t take consoles without the controller. To avoid strangling everyone in site I ask to talk to ‘the tall guy’ who is the store manager. He remembered me from the previous week and sorts out something so that I can trade in the console and they use a wired controller from their stock. I forget about reminding him that I traded in a wireless controller to avoid any further pain. I walk across the street while the console is tested. I come back 15 minutes later to the news that they can’t take my console because the video cable doesn’t work. To avoid strangling everyone in site I mention the cable came from the store’s online site and I’ll just have to deal with returning it to them.

The next day, Friday, I send an email to the company telling them about the faulty cable and I get a reasonably quick reply telling me their returns policy. They’ll even pay for the return postage, which is nice of them. I decide that since today is payday I’ll go ahead and order the 4GB of OCZ Reaper RAM (with not just aluminum heatsinks, but heatpipes with additional heatsinks) and a Gigabyte motherboard, plus a PCI-E power adapter for the future video card purchase. Total cost is about £160 from ebuyer. Later that day, I receive an email saying my order is processed and ready for delivery, expected delivery date is Monday.

Monday, the 2nd of March: receive the motherboard and RAM, woohoo! A fire alarm forces out of the building and I regret not taking my fresh new parts with me to the safety area, just in case it was a real fire. I decide that I’m getting a bit impatient so I decide to use my credit voucher to order the Core 2 Quad CPU from the exchange store site, but the buggering thing is out of stock. Besides, in order to claim the voucher online, one must order the part online then MAIL the voucher receipt to the company for a credit to the order. How Web 0.9! I go back to trusty ol’ ebuyer.com to place an order for a new CPU.

Tuesday, the 3rd of March: send off the faulty cable with all the documentation the company require and sit and wait.

Wednesday, the 4th: receive the new CPU and a couple of other small bits, but I have no time to work on the new build after work as I have to go gaming (actual, face-to-face gaming). I start transferring the last MP3 files to spare hard drives and set off. When I return I find that there’s some problem and only about 25% have transferred. Great. Start the transfer again.

Thursday: wake up, only about 20% of the remaining files have transferred. Try transferring again. Do some quick addition and subtraction and realize I don’t have enough hard drive space to do the install. Ack! Let the computer rest for the night while I think and scheme. Borrowed an SATA to USB adapter from work to hopefully speed up things. Meanwhile, I’m told that if I really want to use the 1GB video card I want to get, while still utilizing the 4GB of RAM I have now, I’ll need a 64-bit OS, meaning buying 64-bit Vista. That’s another £80 or so of unexpected spending there.

Friday: Get home from work and the laptop is now full to bursting with MP3s. The 20GB drive won’t fille up more than 10GB for some reason and the 120GB drive that could be my saviour isn’t getting recognized by my laptop or the desktop. Decide that I could try transferring the files at work or try temporarily installing XP to the 120GB (if it is recognized), transfer files to it and that would be fine. I also decide that instead of ordering the 8-pin 12v plug adapter I need to get the motherboard to work I’ll just pop into an electronics store during the weekend.

Sunday: get the power adapter while out of town. Get home, and can’t find it. Dammit! Where the hell is it?! Hook up the new motherboard to the 120GB drive just to have something to do.

Monday (today): look one final time in my room and the car…no idea where that damn cable is!! If I left it out of town I’m considering buying a whole new one (just £2.50) so I can at least have something to work with on my half-day holiday this Wednesday. And I still haven’t heard back from the shop with my faulty video cable.

Jade Goody

Am I the only person in the UK that doesn’t really care very much at all about this whole story? I realize the irony of saying anything at all about it, but making the round of sites in the States? Really? I do my very best to avoid celebrity news but I couldn’t escape the ‘Perfect Day’ headline on my housemate’s copy of The Sun.

I do feel sorry for her and her kids, it’s never a good or happy thing for anyone to die, esp. a parent, and I’m not saying good riddance to Jade Goody, but this series of stories is only really lining the pockets of the papers. There doesn’t seem to be any highlighting of causes such as the MacMillan nurses, cancer charities or anything like that – it’s just a way for the papers to make money and people to say goodbye to a comic/tragedy/love/hate figure from a reality show. If any of the probably huge amounts of money she’s being paid for the photo rights are going to any sort of charity, then my bad.

Just had to get that out!

Argh. Dentist visit

I appreciate the skills and training of the dentist, but isn’t it just frustrating when you go, it’s the end of the month so there’s not much money in the ol’ bank account, and they poke around a little and tell you everything looks OK?

If I could be paid £25 every six months to go to people’s homes and have a nosey, then tell them everything looks fine and you’ll see them in a few months, thanks for the cash…I’d be so into that.

Anyway, went today to have my first check-up at this private (not state healthcare) dentist – so it cost me more, by the way – and had to pay for an x-ray of the tooth that had the root canal done on it.

Turns out that the German dentist had done a partial root canal, there was still some work to be done, and it would cost me £332 to complete it. And hey, that’s with a savings of about £100 because some of the work’s already been done. Yay. On top of that, to get a crown to pretty much assure there wouldn’t be any more problems with that tooth, that’s another £375, thanks a bunch.

Or I could get it extracted for £72 and risk misaligning all my teeth for the rest of my life.

What the hell.

Yeah, I know I should have gotten the cavity sorted out years ago when it first popped up, but dammit it wasn’t bothering me much then. I suppose dental visits and financial matters are two of my worst habits, overall. And hey, I added it up: with £25 check-up twice a year, that means I’ve ’saved’ about £700 by not getting checkups all this time (yeah…about 12-14 years), so I’m about even, financially.

Still sucks to pay it all at once like this.

What I’ll probably do is get the root canal done next month, because they have to do a temporary filling anyway and check it after a few weeks, then get the crown the following month.

I looked into it and basically any type of dental work is fully custom (matching color, shape and bite of your teeth, etc.), which is why everything costs so damn much.