Apple blossoms

Avian neighbors

I was able to telecommute today. The weather was perfect and the birds were active. I kept the window open and enjoyed the fresh air and bird songs drifting in.

I kept my camera by my computer and got a few photos of my avian neighbors on the feeder outside my window and in the tree.

Opinions

Thought for the day: "Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours." - François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, 1694 – 1778.

How true.  One of the things I enjoy about writing software is that it involves solely logic and math, in a highly creative manner.

The effectiveness of a UI is certainly subject to opinion, and the methodology used in coding could be debated as well. However, the inner workings of a program are immune to such problems. It either works, or it doesn't.

My work, in a way, is an escape from the pressures of society, in which ignorant prejudices frequently trump reality.

The waste of free time

I am currently reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It is very interesting - many things I have never thought of, along with many things that make me say "of course!"

Page 162 contains the most concise and clear conveyance of my views that I have ever seen. In part: "The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences... instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians...This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges...The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality...Mass leisure, mass culture... are parasites of the mind. ... Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks... 'The future,' wrote C.K. Brightbill, 'will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely'."

Thank you, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi.

As I reach the years of my upper thirties, I am increasingly needing to find ways to understand myself better. It is very helpful to find expressions of others who have already been in the place I find myself now.

Back to something more challenging than typing a blog post...