This is yet another one of my favorite quotes from the Buddha.  I think at some point in our lives we all go through this “what is the reason I’m here”…and “what is to be my life’s mission?”…  After having a few conversations with friends, family and associates it seems as if this is likely one of the biggest questions we face in life.  Some questions that might be useful to consider:

1. What is is that you have great passion and enthusiasm for?

2. What has been a challenge that you’ve gotten through successfully?
(hint: so that you may help others in this way)

Ok, I’ll blog more on this topic later and want to leave you with one more quote on the topic of work from another amazing individual:

“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
- Albert Einstein

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Hope you all are having a great beginning of the week.  It’s been a while since I’ve posted and just wanted to share a few photos I took recently.

A few baby deer on the side of the road as I was driving home a day ago.

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Here are two shots of the lake that I took today as I was going for a jog:

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Spring is on the way…the blossoms are showing up.

Click for Larger View

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A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a set of related web pages containing content (media), including text, video, music, audio, images, etc. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet address known as a Uniform Resource Locator. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web.

A webpage is a document, typically written in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML). A webpage may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors.

Webpages are accessed and transported with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption (HTTP Secure, HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user of the webpage content. The user’s application, often a web browser, renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto a display terminal.

The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a simple Uniform Resource Locator (URL) called the web address. The URLs of the pages organize them into a hierarchy, although hyperlinking between them conveys the reader’s perceived site structure and guides the reader’s navigation of the site.

Some websites require a subscription to access some or all of their content. Examples of subscription websites include many business sites, parts of news websites, academic journal websites, gaming websites, file-sharing websites, message boards, web-based email, social networking websites, websites providing real-time stock market data, and websites providing various other services (e.g., websites offering storing and/or sharing of images, files and so forth).

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More Cowbell baby!

anthonybourdain:

No explanation other than awesomeness! 

I set this one up in about 45-60 minutes doing this demo.

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Just a picture I found that I took while living in Shell Beach, CA some years ago…

Love these sunsets…hope you enjoy the view.

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So today was one of those days.

Thank God for feeling ok in embracing being stubborn and wanting to just push through no matter what.  I was having some issues with plugins not working/connecting correctly on a client’s site and feeling the need to be more persistent than ever in getting these issues resolved.  Right now this post is testing out something to ensure all connections are firing and that it’s not the ‘other service/APIs’ having issues.

Anyways, caused me to have a reason to make a post, and cite to of my favorite quotes on the topic below…

“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
- Benjamin Franklin

“Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.”
- Napoleon Hill

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I was playing around with some photos I took on my iPhone and thought I’d share a few with you.

This first one I took and just emailed to myself.  Consider it the regular shot (with minor filtering in Paintshop Pro 7 — yes, I bring it old school).

And this one…also taken with my iPhone and used the Instragram iPhone photo app to give it it’s effect.

This last one, below, that is a little green looking I applied the Scratchcam iPhone photo app and there we have it…

Hope you enjoyed the photos, I had fun playing.

So you know I can’t just walk away from this post without throwing some hippie-mindset atcha.

Let’s talk filters on reality.  We start with input from our world but quickly put filters on things, events, etc until it becomes very different from ‘what is.’  How do we get back to knowing reality and ‘what is?’  One book I recently finished, the Discourse Summaries by S.N. Goenka, has you start with meditation on the breath.  I found it useful and here’s a short quote from it:

“On this path, whatever is unknown about yourself must become known to you. For this purpose respiration will help. It acts as a bridge from the known to the unknown, because respiration is one function of the body that can be either conscious or unconscious, intentional or automatic. One starts with conscious, intentional breathing, and proceeds to awareness of natural, normal breath. And from there you will advance to still subtler truths about yourself. Every step is a step with reality; every day you will penetrate further to discover subtler realities about yourself, about your body and mind.”

Of course it gets way deeper than that, but this statement gives some decent rationale as to why to begin with focusing on the breath when beginning a Vipassana meditation practice.

Anyways, I dig it, hope you dig it…and more importantly I hope you have an awesome remainder of the weekend.

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“You are your own master,
you make your own future.
Therefore discipline yourself
as a horse-dealer trains a thoroughbred.”
— Dhammapada, XXV. 21 (380).

I thought I’d share this quote I found in the back of a book I recently completed called the Discourse Summaries by S.N. Goenka on the Vispassana meditation techniques which I really dig.  Was a cool quote so I thought I’d share and HEY I had a picture of this giant horse that lives a few minutes up the street from me I thought I’d include so you don’t have to stare purely at text.  :)

Hope you’re having an awesome Wednesday…

PS:  For those of you interested in some pretty deep meditation stuff checkout that book
I referred to here:

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To all of my friends, family, clients, and acquaintances online…  I’m wishing you a blessed and very Happy Thanksgiving.  I’m lucky to have a lot of amazing people in my life.  Thanks for being awesome and giving me another reason to be grateful today.

Cheers!

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