Owain Glyndwr in Welsh History

"His grave is beside no church, neither under the shadow of any ancient yew. It is in a spot safer and more sacred still. Rain does not fall on it, hail nor sleet chill no sere sod above it. It is forever green with the green of eternal spring. Sunny the light on it; close and warm and dear it lies, sheltered from all storms, from all cold or grey oblivion. Time shall not touch it; decay shall not dishonour it; for that grave is in the heart of every true Cymro. There, for ever, from generation unto generation, grey Owen's heart lies dreaming on, dreaming on, safe for ever and for ever."

http://www.owain-glyndwr-soc.org.uk/history.htm

Order of Information

In today's excerpt--as discussed by political advisor Frank Luntz, the sequential arrangement of information often creates the very meaning of that information:

"[In film, when] two unrelated images are presented, one after the other, the audience infers a causal or substantive link between them. A shot of a masked killer raising a butcher knife, followed by a shot of a woman opening her mouth, tells us that the woman is scared. But if that same image of a woman opening her mouth is preceded by a shot of a clock showing that it's 3 a.m., the woman may seem not to be screaming, but yawning. The mind takes the information it receives and synthesizes it to create a third idea, a new whole. ...

"The essential importance of the order in which information is presented first hit home for me early in my career when I was working for Ross Perot during the 1992 presidential campaign. I had three videos to test: a) a Perot biography, b) testimonials of various people praising Perot, and c) Perot himself delivering a speech. Without giving it much thought, I'd been showing the videos to various focus groups of independent voters in that order--until, at the beginning of one session, I realized to my horror that I'd failed to rewind the first two videotapes. So I was forced to begin the focus group with the tape of Perot himself talking.

"The results were stunning.

"In every previous focus group, the participants had fallen in love with Perot by the time they'd seen all three tapes in their particular order. No matter what the negative information I threw at them, they could not be moved off their support. But now, when people were seeing the tapes in the opposite order, they were immediately skeptical of Perot's capabilities and claims, and abandoned him at the first negative information they heard. ... I repeated this experiment several times, reversing the order, and watched as the same phenomenon took place. Demographically identical focus groups in the same cities had radically different reactions--all based on whether or not they saw Perot's biographical video and the third-party testimonials (and were therefore predisposed and conditioned to like him) before or after the candidate spoke for himself.

"The language lesson: A+B+C does not necessarily equal C+B+A. The order of presentation determines the reaction."

Dr. Frank Luntz, Words that Work, Hyperion, Copyright 2007 by Dr. Frank Luntz, pp. 40-41.

http://delanceyplace.com/

Emperor Aurelius and the Buddha: An amazing affinity of thought

"Now for a word about Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180 AD) who wrote the "Meditations" among some 86 Roman Emperors: iron men, geniuses, madmen, sadists —- men who held awesome and unbridled power Aurelius was a most remarkable man. Looking at his life, work and thoughts, it may be said that he was one leader of men who came closest to that elusive phenomenon called "the philosopher king" as envisaged by Plato in his "Republic": as Emperor he brought much lustre and dignity to his office: as administrator, he brought peace and prosperity to his people and as military commander, he gave victory and glory to his armies."

The Island, June 2, 2002 (Republished by BNN)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DhammaTimes/message/1198


The Buddha

"The body is decaying a nest of diseases, a heap of corruption bound to destruction" "Dhammapada"; 11:148

"Even as a rock is not shaken by the wind a wise man is not shaken either by praise or blame". "Dhammapada". 6:81

Emperor Aurelius

"What do baths bring to your mind? Oil, sweat, dirt, greasy water and everything that is disgusting. Such then is every material thing in it.""Meditations": 8;24

"Be like a headland against which the waves break and break; it stands firm until the watery tumult subsides once more to rest." "Meditations". 4:49

Solar Panels

"Why not make use of the most abundant energy source available and charge the batteries of your 12v electrical device through solar panels. The solar panels begin working immediately once the sunlight hits them, absorbing the light and converting it into electricity to charge the battery.

http://www.electricfence-online.co.uk/ishop/1047/shopscr273.html

http://www.electricfence-online.co.uk/index.html

GooSync - Synchronise Google Calendar and Phone

"Synchronize your Google Calendar with your mobile phone or PDA.

GooSync will seamlessly synchronize almost any mobile device with your Google Calendar. It's quick and simple, sign-up and start syncing"

https://www.goosync.com/

Inquiring Buddhist - Buddhist reflections

"For many Western Buddhists it is difficult to imagine a collision course between science and Buddhism of the same magnitude as that which has had such an impact on the evolution of Christianity during the past century and a half. After all, most of the questions that scientists choose to investigate fall into the category of those questions that the Buddha said he had no interest in answering, for the simple reason that nothing that he taught would be affected one way or another by the answer that might be given to these questions. One of the questions that remained famously unanswered by Gotama Buddha had to do with the way the universe came into being, and another had to do with the temporal and spatial extent of the universe. Both cosmology and cosmogony were seen as studies the results of which could have no bearing at all on the bare fact of frustration (dukkha), nor on the causes of frustration or the means of eliminating it."

From: Dharma and Science

http://home.comcast.net/~dayamati/squibs.html

Linux Command Reference / Linux Tips

"This is a linux command line reference for common operations.
Examples marked with • are valid/safe to paste without modification into a terminal, so
you may want to keep a terminal window open while reading this so you can cut & paste."

http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html


"Linux is so powerful because it contains hundreds of useful tools that can be combined in a practically infinite number of ways to get the job done. But it can be hard to remember every switch of every command, especially if it is a command that is used infrequently. These Linux Tips pages help me remember the most useful incantations. They are published here in case anyone else finds them useful."

http://www.robfisher.net/linuxtips/

Getting Started with BASH / BASH Programming - Introduction HOW-TO

"The GNU Bourne-Again SHell (BASH) incorporates features from the C Shell (csh) and the Korn Shell (ksh) and conforms to the POSTIX 2 shell specifications. It provides a Command Line Interface (CLI) for working on *nix systems and is the most common shell used on Linux systems. Useful bash features will be the subject of the rest of this document."

http://www.hypexr.org/bash_tutorial.php



"This article intends to help you to start programming basic-intermediate shell scripts. It does not intend to be an advanced document (see the title). I am NOT an expert nor guru shell programmer. I decided to write this because I'll learn a lot and it might be useful to other people. Any feedback will be appreciated, specially in the patch form :)"

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html

Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 and SL-C3100

A useful page of information for those who have one of these palmtops

http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myZaurus/

Bid for powers over bus services

"What we could work towards with these powers are, first of all, integrated timetables, integrated ticket systems between buses and trains," Mr Lewis said.

"We could aim eventually towards a Wales oyster card, that sees you through public transport ticketing problems from Bangor to Cowbridge, right across the county."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7374499.stm

What is yungdrung?

"One of the most powerful and resonant words in pre-Buddhist Tibet was yungdrung (g.yung drung). It was a the key terms for the old royal religion, the mythological backdrop to the kingly lineage of the Tibetan Empire. For example, the inscription of the tomb of Trisong Detsen has the line: “In accord with the eternal (yungdrung) customs (tsuglag), the Emperor and Divine Son Trisong Detsen was made the ruler of men.” I discussed how to translate that term tsuglag in an earlier post. Here, as you no doubt noticed, I have translated yungdrung here as “eternal”. Eternity seems to be the general meaning of yungdrung in the early religion. In addition, the word was associated with the ancient Indo-European swastika design, which in Tibet was the graphic symbol of the eternal."

http://earlytibet.com/2008/04/30/buddhism-and-bon-iii-what-is-yungdrung/

Bourne shell idioms

"Here are some portable Bourne shell idioms that I find useful to remember for scripting. The Bourne shell does much more than most users realize, and the ksh and bash extensions are rarely essential. (From the command-line, bash and ksh are vastly more useful.)"

http://billharlan.com/pub/papers/Bourne_shell_idioms.html

For example

"
Loop over the elements of a PATH by tokenizing with the character ':'.

IFS=':' ; for dir in $PATH ; do echo $dir ; done

"