Month: December 2012

Source: In Memoriam: 9 Tech Titans Who Died in 2012 | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

He was just one of several tech titans who died over the past year. None had the name recognition of a Steve Jobs — who passed in 2011 — but they may have moved our world in bigger ways. Among those that passed in 2013 are the IBMer who invented the bar code and the Zenith engineer who devised the first wireless TV remote — not to mention one of the physicist who helped built the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Click on the images above to remember them all.

I know I have a few techie friends out there who read my blog so I thought I would pass along this article about nine innovators who died in 2012. Its worth the read if only for old time sake.  It is amazing that most of them were about 90 years old. Maybe being a techie is healthy 🙂

Dexter, our cat has been chasing a mouse around the house for the last few winter days. When he does he gets Beulah our sixty pound basset hound all excited and involved in the chase. It is funny to see Beulah with her tail wagging a mile a minute sitting next to Dexter staring at the bottom of the refrigerator where a mouse is currently hiding.  When I started this post that picture came to mind but that is really not the topic at hand. Instead it is about giving up my computer mouse.

I started out my computer life with a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer in the 1980s. It had no mouse or graphical user interface (GUI for all you techies). Everything had to be typed in on a keyboard and I spent hundreds of hours on doing just that.  I was hooked from the very beginning.

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Some time ago I came across a blog from a Romanian blogger named Cristian Mihai that got my attention. On many of his posts he seems much too mature for his twenty-two years.  But then other times he seems to fit right in to that bracket.  He is an ambitious young man who has totally conquered English as his second language. He is also a self-published author.

Below is one of the posts that seems almost profound to me. He is talking about what it means to be a writer:

Source: You either write or live « Cristian Mihai. You have to take a step back, see things for what they are, and then write about them. You have to become an observer, you have to put your life on hold. You have to spend a lot of time inside your head, a lot of time all by yourself, in your living room, scribbling down one word after another.

Simply put, writing is a solitary job. And the inexorable truth is that solitude transforms you. When you sit down at your desk, you’re on your own. There’s only one question that matters: are you willing to pay the price? Are you willing to become a shadow? I’m just now realizing how much I want to live. You know, to see the world, to do stuff. How much I need to fall in love. I spent a lot of time just writing. Because, to be honest, there wasn’t anything else for me to do. It’s sad, I know, but it’s the truth. If writing were as simple as putting pen to paper, we’d have lots of brilliant writers. But it’s not as easy as it seems. It’s not just about perseverance and hard work, about dedication and ambition. It’s not about some x-factor, impossible to define. Some God-given gift.

All of us bloggers are writers to one degree or another. I can see myself in his words. Being a blogger is to put yourself forward for others to see.  I do try to take a step back to see things for what they are but since we are all the products of our experiences that sometimes proves difficult.  I admit that I spend a lot of time “inside my head”. When I do the first write of a post I often times later scramble back to my keypad several times to tweak a word or two that I have been thinking about.

I know blogging is not up to the rigor of writing a novel or biography but there still is a price to pay. I too love to write and spend quite a bit of time on my ever growing blog lists especially in the winter months when there is little else to do.  Cristian now resides on my blogroll to the right. It is interesting to see the different thought process between me a senior citizen in the U.S. and a young man from Romania.  I follow him daily. Sometimes it is only a cursory look and other times, like the post above, I spend time to almost absorb each word.

You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger. Let a person overcome anger by love. Hate is never ended by hatred but by love. — Buddha —

These words could just as easily come from the mouth of Jesus as from Buddha. But in reality Buddha lived on this earth several hundred years before Jesus. It amazes me how similar the reported lives of Jesus and Buddha are. Here are some of those similarities as found at Wikipedia and other sources:

 Buddha is actually a title which means “the awakened one”, his name was actually Gautama Buddha. Traditional biographies of Gautama generally include numerous miracles, omens, and supernatural events. Buddha was never historically regarded by Buddhist traditions as being merely human Most of Buddhism accounts of this life, discourses, and monastic rule are believed to have been summarized after his death and memorized by his followers Various collections of teachings attributed to him were passed down by oral tradition, and first committed to writhing about 400 years later.

While there are great similarities there are also great differences: Unlike Christians, the ancient Indians were generally unconcerned with chronologies, being more focused on philosophy.f Unlike Jesus, Buddha was supposedly born to a royal Hindi family. Buddhist texts reflect what Gautama may have taught; they were not concerned with the dates of the events in his life. Unlike Jesus, Buddha lived for about 45 years after his great awakening Buddha never considered himself a god, nor do most of his followers. He was human but not merely human.

Even though Buddha is not considered a god he is as endeared by the Hindi religion as Jesus is to the Christian one.  I think that all of us should learn what we can from the various spiritual leaders.

Buddha’s words above inspire me. The anger itself is what punishes you and the way to overcome that anger is by love. This relates very closely to the words of Jesus.  I will have to learn more about Buddhism. It sounds like it could be a meaningful addition to most anyone’s life. I know there is a lot of pent up anger and hate in this world. We need to learn how to get rid of it.  A little more about that this afternoon…..

It seems we hear a lot about how the Republicans say they can’t vote for this or for that because they must “follow their principles”.  The trouble with all this is that they don’t want any government so blowing up the system IS following their principles.

Their hero told them that “government is the problem”. But what is a country without government?  That condition is called “everyone for themselves”. Is that what we want for our country? I think not; at least for 99% of us.

Is there really anything except shutting down government that can pass through a GOP controlled house of representatives now days? Are they really so head strong on eliminating their own jobs? That would be a first for any government employee wouldn’t it?

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