Mindfulness
As you have probably guessed, I’ve been having a bit of a hard time over the last few weeks. I think these dark times are at an end.
I read an article at a friends house over a game of Quizzit. It was entitled “Why It’s So Hard to Be Happy“, which given my mood grabbed me instantaneously. It had some very interesting and counter intuitive advice. I would have thought goal setting a good thing to do, but apparently a goal oriented life isn’t conducive to happiness because as soon as one goal is achieved another is set and so you’re always following the carrot. Time is never taken to sit back and really enjoy what was achieved.
They also condone mindfulness as a psychological technique that actually works. Mindfulness preaches that one must live in the present and not be concerned about the past or future. Apparently this is actually really good for well being.
Anyway, I read this article and looked at the last couple of weeks. I had been so busy over the last 5 weeks that I’d hardly stopped to actually live. And over the last 5 weeks I’ve been slowly getting more and more depressed. Don’t get the wrong impression – I wasn’t working, I was just busy. For starters, the aquaponics systems that I am setting up take up a large portion of my weekend. On top of that I play soccer. I attended a wedding last weekend. I’ve had parties and circuses and training and … etc etc
So on Sunday night I relaxed. I lay on the couch with Ele and cuddled. I smelt the air, felt the cold air and her warmth, heard the sounds of the fish tank and actually saw my surroundings – which is exactly what being mindful is all about. I was taking in the present moment with out the usual feeling that I was wasting time. And guess what? Today (Monday) I am far far happier than I’ve been in weeks.
So I’m going to schedule some time each day where I just sit and be mindful. I did it today in the lunch room at work – it was brilliant. I was living without the blinkers of consciousness. Thinking naught and experiencing the senses as if a newborn.
Meet my alter-ego: Gremwell
A good sleep brought me out of the last dark mood. So now I’m going to run a little experiment. When I’m in a normal or good mood, I’ll post as Gemmell. When I’m in my bad mood, I’ll post using the alter-ego Gremwell. After a little while we’ll see how many postings I have as Gremwell and how many I have as Gemmell.
From here on in, anything I do that is evil – Gremwell did it.
A Dark Theme
I’ve been sick the last 2 days and hence I’ve had time to finally upgrade to gallery 2.2 and wordpress 2.1.2. I’ve put on this nice dark theme. It reflects the mood I’m in more often than not these days. Honestly sometimes I feel so … so black … so dark and moody. Deep down I know there is absolutely no reason to feel this way, but none the less I feel frustrated and annoyed at my life, I hate it. In my good moods I love the comfort my life provides, in my bad I feel it’s stagnant. I feel I’m wasting time and not making any “progress” even though I don’t know what I’m supposed to be making progress on. Like there is something I’m supposed to be doing, and it doesn’t involve writing software.
There are a couple of things that can bring me out of these moods. The first is a decent nights sleep, but this only works sometimes. The second is a good dosage of loud classical music, but this can sometimes backfire and send me further into despair. The third is intense physical exercise, usually at soccer training, but sometimes I’m too apathetic to even try. Lastly, the sunny presence of my wonderful girlfriend chases away some darkness, but she’s susceptible to the same moods I am. Honestly though, I don’t know what I’d do without her.
I went to a friends wedding this week and it occurred to me that I’d thought more about what to say at my girlfriends funeral than what to say if and when I married her. Is that wrong?
I had a chat to my good friend, who is also a psychologist, about my thoughts on death. He made me seriously reconsider my standpoint. In his opinion it’s perfectly OK to be completely screwed up by an unexpected death. It’s a normal and natural human reaction and that in good time all will be OK. And that you’ll only get yourself depressed by dwelling on the early demise of all your friends and family. So I’ve changed my opinion and will endeavor to banish these thoughts when they enter my head.
Anyway, I feel a bit like a twat, so here’s a photo of the decorations catching fire at my friends wedding. They’re real flowers, who’d have thought they’d burn?
HotTop
Is it just me or do most laptops these days have the effect of burning your lap? I’ve used laptops which get so hot that the edge of the touch pad gets too hot to touch. Like it burns. Most laptops have the guts of the thing on the bit which sits on your lap and just the screen that folds out. Because the heat is being generated down there and it’s sitting on your lap, it makes it really hard to dissipate the heat and burns the user in the process. Even if it’s using a fan, if you sit the laptop on something with an uneven surface, for example a bed, it’ll be doing nothing at all. Meanwhile the back side of the screen sits out there in nice ventilated open space and does nothing to help dissipate the troublesome heat. If we can’t shift the processor up to the back of the screen, maybe we can shift the heat? It seems like a really simple idea, but we’ve seen some really simple ideas coming out recently which could change laptop computing forever. I’m talking about the ASUS XG Station and the ATI Lasso. It’s a really simple idea – make a dock with a powerful graphics card so you can satisfy the gamers needs whilst making the laptop light enough away from the dock to satisfy portability needs. Simple, but brilliant.
Sony have made the Panel Pc, which is the opposite of the normal laptop – the screen has the entire computer in it and the keyboard folds down at the front. It looks odd, and I don’t think it’s meant to be a laptop, but it seems to be on the right track. Surely, these heat issues can be looked at. Here’s an idea along the same lines as the external graphics card station: create a standard for a pluggable heat sink. Just a hole in your computer thats attached directly to the CPU heatsink. If you’re at home and you’re running processor intensive applications (such as games) you can plug in a nice big copper heatsink (and maybe fan) and it’ll lend a hand to dissipate the heat. When you’re on the run you leave it at home. If you wanted something portable you could have a little foldable piece of copper which plugs into the same slot. It’s small so you could take with you and use it when you feel the heat start to burn through your pants. It could fold out like an antenna to radiate the heat into the air as opposed into your pants.