Life's Too Exciting Not to Be Awesome!
Archive for February, 2010
Zen Meditation Makes you Thick Headed
Feb 24th
ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2010) — People can reduce their sensitivity to pain by thickening their brain, according to a new study published in a special issue of the American Psychological Association journal, Emotion. Researchers from the Université de Montréal made their discovery by comparing the grey matter thickness of Zen meditators and non-meditators. They found evidence that practicing the centuries-old discipline of Zen can reinforce a central brain region (anterior cingulate) that regulates pain.
“Through training, Zen meditators appear to thicken certain areas of their cortex and this appears to be underlie their lower sensitivity to pain,” says lead author Joshua A. Grant, a doctoral student in the Université de Montréal Department of Physiology and Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal. “We found a relationship between cortical thickness and pain sensitivity, which supports our previous study on how Zen meditation regulates pain.”
As part of this study, scientists recruited 17 meditators and 18 non-meditators who in addition had never practiced yoga, experienced chronic pain, neurological or psychological illness. Grant and his team, under the direction of Pierre Rainville of the Université de Montréal and the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal, measured thermal pain sensitivity by applying a heated plate to the calf of participants and followed by scanning the brains of subjects with structural magnetic resonance imaging. According to MRI results, central brain regions that regulate emotion and pain were significantly thicker in meditators compared to non-meditators.
“The often painful posture associated with Zen meditation may lead to thicker cortex and lower pain sensitivity,” says Grant, noting that meditative practices could be helpful in general for pain management, for preventing normal age-related grey matter reductions or potentially for any condition where the grey matter is compromised such as stroke.
This study was supported jointly by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research and a Mind and Life Institute Varela Grant.
Weekend Update! 2/15 – 21st
Feb 23rd
Who I Met
Dan (passing through to New Zealand)
Accomplishments
Sent Dan to New Zealand
Had the first relaxing Day in 2 months woot woot!
Best Part
Dan coming in and staying over before his plane departed.
Review
Monday
- sweet cafe
- Dan gets done with work early
- go rock climbing
- make an awesome pasta dinner
Tuesday
- Leave back for work
- actually only takes me 5 minutes (no joke) to get from the airport to work
Wednesday
- Holy moly dan gets in tomorrow
Thursday
- Dan gets in
- go to the house of blues
- this is the night my back gets really fucked up
- in so much pain I can’t bear it.
Friday
- Take a half day
- drive around with dan to get a cannon power charger (matt let us borrow the truck)
- finally find a small camera shop and get one
- take dan to the airport
- Good luck in NZ buddy!
- fuck traffic
Saturday
- Go into work, get a lot done
- hahaha, crazy loco, keeps me going
Sunday
- Slept almost all day
- redunculous
- watched howard the duck and day breakers, both just horrible. haha
Weekend Update: 2/1 – 2/7: Snowboarding in Bend with the Rents!
Feb 23rd
Who I Met
Mom and Dad
Review
Went skiing with the parents in Bend Oregon. Watched the Super Bowl.
Best Part
skiing and hanging out with the parents!
What I Learned
How to do some sweet jumps on my snowboard.
Monday
Busy busy with work, Scare with Burr White that we might be fucked out of our deposit, but I’m sure that won’t happen. Finished our move out but its still up in the air. Worked out with Sean and Matt
Tuesday
Thank god for the bike when there’s traffic. I’m slipping on my diet, need to make sure I don’t give up. Need to get snacks for the office. Also woke up late, Need a way to get to the gym before work.
Wednesday
I have no idea
Thursday
Not a clue
Friday
Finally te day is here to go skiing with the parents! And I’m off to bend Oregon from lax. Met a cool girl going to Germany for a trade show. Armada was the nameof her company. Pretty small ( like 5 people) but they do 10k plus sales of skis. Wow sounds like fun.
The van driver was new. Had no idea what he was doing.
I left on my little plane ( pic) at night and got in to find my parents with some friends they had picked up in town (aquaintences from Hawaii) everybody was a bit drunk
The hotel was quite nice. Very large and we looked out over the water. We had a beer from deschutes and retired early in anticipation for the next day.
Saturday
We got up to the mountain at a reasonable time and met Leon there who was our official tour guide. He was very very nice but he loved to talk and obey the rules. As a result we didn’t get any real skiing in until we split ways and mom and I could take on the blacks and double blacks all by our selves!
Oh man did we have fun! Outback and northwest passage were the best! Got some great jumps and runs in despite my bindings being broken.
We met some avalanche dogs and bought their shirt because it was cool.
Dad turned out to go on a sled ride with some dogs and waited up there on the mountain because our tire went flat!
After we drove back he went out to go fix it at sears because he’s awesome.
Went out to deschutes brewery and got a 12 pack sampler! Awesome!
Sunday
Went out skiing again after we picked my board up from the shop. Got on the town bus to get up to the mountain.
An amazing day of skiing! Oh man. The skys were blue and the snow was perfect! The top of the mountain opened up and we got lost on our way Down but it was amazing! Had some great ten plus foot drops and some perfect snow! Very tiring but very worth it.
I totally felt more comfortable today and was taking larger and larger jumps!
Oh I almost forgot! It is superbowl Sunday!!! Go new Orleans! Woot! Awesome comercials. Cool bar at the hotel and good beers.
Went to bed early for my ass early flight in the morning.
Mount an FTP host as a Directory on Ubuntu!
Feb 20th
Let’s go little penguin save me again!
So I have all my music hosted on my home server, but I haven’t mounted that server at work yet! So I followed the instructions on the following page to setup my Ubuntu solution to mount the ftpfs (FTP File System) on a local folder so I can trick my music programs to thinking these files are local.
http://blog.damontimm.com/how-to-mount-a-sftp-folder-ssh-ftp-on-ubuntu-linux-using-sshfs-fuse/
Buzz and online privacy
Feb 17th
Honestly people, what the hell is going on with all these allegations that Google is spreading people’s privacy and they should be repremanded? For the love of god, if you don’t want to be social, don’t fucking join a social networking site! When you load up Gmail, it clearly asks you, plain as day, “do you want to use Google Buzz?” just say no and stop complaining. UGh. There’s even a setting to turn it off right from within Gmail, a one click, delete all button!
This goes double for those facebook users who made them rewrite their entire engine just so they could have the option of who to show their information to. If you don’t like a product (yes, its still a product even though its free and really awesome) then don’t fucking use it.
But chances are, if you don’t want to share your information and are just going to complain about it, then you probably don’t have any friends anyway, so you really don’t have anything to worry about because nobody will care. You could post all day, and still nobody would care about you, not even your own mother, who says she loves you, but really she doesn’t. Because you are annoying.
That was just a note to the complainers, everyone else is cool in my book, except for murderers, they suck too.
Obviously The Onion has a great solution to this
Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village
New Features in Old Apps
Feb 17th
So I was sitting on the can today and I was playing around with some old apps I had on my iPhone and I realized they had under-gone some major improvements! The two in particular were Midomi and Red Laser. First of all it is understandable for Red Laser to improve it’s product because it is exactly that, a product. They build something better to attract more customers. The cool part about the App industry is that you don’t buy upgrades, you just get it when the new version comes out. Unlike classical software, where the scheme is to up-sell on the new version to get users to switch for the new features (ie XP to 7), this industry’s standards have been set by years of solidarity in the markets that we were only able to update our software with some sort of hard good (ie cd or floppy disk) used by the user. This posed a cost to the company selling the product and so as long as we were being charged something, it might as well be an ass ton of money. Now with the advent of digital media and broadband internets companies are able to distribute for no cost at all. Which in turn allows them to prove their self worth in comparison to other companies by offering these upgrades free of charge. I like this new trend, and it is exciting that it is catching on so well.
Weekend update! The next! 2/8 – 14th
Feb 12th
Review
Oh man awesome week! went snow shoeing, climbing, the aquarium, Root DOWN!!! and much much more. All this right after I just saw my parents! pretty damn amazing!
Monday
Got in pretty early from my trip but I got back to work a little late because the super shuttle takes for ever! Next time I am definitely taking the Disney land shuttle.
Picked up my dresser from world market. It’s gonna be sweet!
Work went ok. But the awesome part of this day was going to the movie shoot for cannonball at mother fucking san Dimas highschool! omg awesomeo!
Met a bunch of cool people, friends of sean’s and randoms, and had a great time drinking the night away and fucking around in our undies all night in the pool
The premise of the movie / scene was that we were a bunch of highschoolers and we snuck into a country club to go swimming after a party. Met carl and some others. Frog boy was pretty funny.
Went home drunk and tired.
Tuesday
Work work work and ass tired… Ugh. Almost put together my dresser but didn’t.
Started rainig so I left my bike and went home with matt. We had some sweet lakes that we drove through! Omg water every where!
Purvis came over for some web help
Dano decided to purchase tickets. Which was awesome but hinestly how long can I last!? I’m going to fall apart soon!
Wednesday
Ok so mixed emotions today. Just found out that my collegue, mentor and close friend got laid off from our god forsaken stupid ass company! Really msc? The smartest and most brilliant person here and you decide to get rid of him?! What are you? Fucking retarded!!? Ugh fuck this company!
Ok so the end of the night went a bit better. We got to do another shoot at a skater’s sweet ass house. Met some more cool people and had a great time shooting the shit and laughuing and having a great time.
Had a greate dinner of Japanese food (which didn’t sit too well) and then jetted for home.
Thursday
Super tired. Finished my drawers. Saw sterling sulemon on vampire diaries! How cool is that?! Watched some more tv and went to the gym.
Friday
Woke up today in a super funk that I didn’t think I could possibly climb out of. I felt sooo stressed that I couldn’t really breath. It was really weird. The sticks were down, my good friend was axed. I felt pressured for no good reason. My mind was racing and I was pissed! Ugh I hate feeling like that. I took my pills and raced to work a little carelessly. I almost crashed a couple of times on my bike. But I didn’t care.
Got a breakfast burrito with serrano peppers and it was amazing. Really made my day better.
Work, I got none of you done. Instead it felt like I played words with friends forever. We got a lot done with application context however. So that was some awesome meetings.
I hated saying good bye to Boma 
Raced off to the airport! I’m finally excited about my trip. I know once I get there it will be awesome. In the air updating my weekend updates. Can’t wait to be in downtown Denver with dano. It’s going to be a great long weekend!
Bumpy ass plane ride!
I got a free drink because the server was hitting on me
Off the plane! went straight to the Mexican resuraunt where they have wicked awesome margs!
I need to learn how to take pictures of nouns during my adventures.
Then we went to Mallonies with their oversized beers, at which point we got a ride home and left the car down town.
Saturday
Got up, found an awesome sale at patagonia, caught a cab over there from Dan’s place with a cabbie that really hated when drunk girls got into his cab and threw up every where.
Met up with a friend Dan found on the side of a 14ner and we went snow shoeing out near where we went last year. This time kona got to come a long and we had a great time tromping through the snow.
Holy shit I almost forgot about the Greatest beer in the world that I have ever tasted! I can’t remember the name right now but it was totally like “holy fuck I will blow your mind from the inside out IPA” (i think that was the name).
Watched a movie called adam, it was pretty good, about a guy with assburger syndrome.
Sunday
Went to REI for Dan’s trip to NZ, talked more about making an adventure site. Pretty good Idea I think. We saw the aquarium and decided it was a great Idea to go! All in preparation for our amazing dinner at ROOT DOWN!!
Root down! ROOT down! ROOT DOWN!! omg soooo fucking good!
Google… Brilliant…
Feb 11th
“The word we use is Useful, we find that the signal to noise ratio makes facebook and other social networking sites less than useful. Hopefully Buzz has solved this with its algorithms of feeding out only the things you are interested in.”
Congrats Google for making my internet better
Google was right
Feb 3rd
Just an update, before I was convinced that Google’s decision to not do any iPhone apps for their services was merely in their own self interest of not wanting to code for multiple platforms. Now I understand. The reason they don’t want these web based services to be platform specific is because they then become inaccessible via web links. I stumbled upon this realization when writing an article for QR Codes and realized “Hey! how do I link to my yelp app on my iphone, if it exists? I CANT!” Damn.
Kudos Google for having foresight on this one. I can link to any of your local results and they are processed just for the iPhone. Good Job.
QR Codes
Feb 3rd
Ok, QR (Quick Response) codes are now officially cool, google says so. Google has a whole new campaign started for its Favorite Places initiative, where a business can post its QR code (see below) and someone with a phone can quickly get to Google’s service where they generate reviews and add their own ratings and what not. This was a brilliant idea!! But I think I can steal it and here’s why: QR Codes are completely text based! I had no Idea but this is amazing for the tech savy. Why not sell/suggest QR code stickers to businesses that will allow people to go to the Yelp site for their business! Increased traffic and (hopefully) increased good reviews from people who are in your store!
This is an interesting transition from just a couple months ago when QR codes were definitely for only the Techy elite (I’m a nerd and even I passed them off as being something not worth spending my time on). But, because Google is pushing this as a viable way for companies to push their online presence, and with the advent of the apps that come on phones now a days, I think we will see a lot more people who will have the capability to look up businesses online via QR codes. Also Japan, it appears, has completely accepted this form of augmenting reality so the adoption curve should be softened by this fact.
So, this is how it works: A QR Code is just a graphical representation of some number of characters of text, that’s it! It’s so simple and fundamental that the possibilities are endless, you can do messages, blurbs and probably most important, Websites! For more information you can check out the wiki article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code. The truth of the matter is, I didn’t know how these codes worked either, I assumed the image was linked to some database on the internet that round tripped the information to your computer of what the image was trying to say. This is not the case at all, in fact you can generate one that says anything at all at Kaywa! Try it out for your self.
Here’s a message I’d like to share with you:
Also try this out to go to this Yelp website for an amazing meal:
