| Free teleseminar by Neale Donald Walsch, 6/15/2011, 8:30 PM EDT |
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Wednesday, June 15th, 2011 23:14:43 GMT |
Link |
Less than 1.5 hours from now, today, Wednesday, at 8:30 PM EDT (5:30 PM Pacific Time), there's going to be a free teleseminar by Neale Donald Walsch (author of the Conversations with God books). The teleseminar will be available for download afterward.
How To Have Your Own Conversation With God
I've never seen or heard a teleseminar by Neale before, so I don't know what to expect from this or how good this will be. However, I read some of his books, and though I was quite dubious about various things they stated, I nonetheless enjoyed reading them.
Best wishes and hugs to everyone, especially anyone who is having a rough day.
The MP3 of the teleseminar is about 14 MB and 77:34 long. (Edit, 2:48 PM. I'm not sure, since I didn't listen to the whole thing over again, but it sounds like it might have just as many annoying skips in the audio as the live webcast. Oh, well.)
I'm not going to thoroughly review it, but I enjoyed it. It was better than I thought it might be, and wasn't too sales pitchy.
Edit, 6/16/2011, 7:39 AM. The teleseminar is now available for immediate download after you fill in your name and email address at the page linked to above.
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| Ganesh Mantra |
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Thursday, June 9th, 2011 23:01:09 GMT |
Video Link |
Here's a link to a video from YouTube.
Ganesh Mantra - Obstacle Breaker (STROBE)
According to the video's description, it contains only 98 repetitions of the mantra, since 108 wouldn't fit in 10 minutes.
I don't know if mantras really have any genuine metaphysical effects. But the audio of that video definitely has the positive effect of relaxing me.
There are a lot of other mantra videos on YouTube.
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| Avoiding Distractions on the Web - How to Block Websites Using Your Hosts File |
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Sunday, May 24th, 2009 03:12:36 GMT |
Productivity |
If you're trying to get useful things done while you're on the internet, but find yourself habitually wandering over to distracting websites like forums, YouTube, or web-based email, you might like to use the following instructions (or an adaptation of them, if you're not a Windows user) to block any sites you want from appearing in your web browser even if you try to go to them.
The location of the hosts file can vary, but, if you're a Windows XP user like me, you might find it in this folder:
If the hosts file isn't at that location, you can look in the Wikipedia article Hosts file for some other possible folders/file paths where it might be. (Alternatively, you can search the web for a different source of info which is more trustworthy than Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone).
In Windows, you can navigate to the above file path simply and easily by opening Internet Explorer, copying and pasting the above file path into the address bar, and pressing Enter on the keyboard.
If your hosts file is set to be read-only, you'll have to change that before you can edit it. In Windows, right-click on your hosts file and choose Properties, and then make sure there's no checkmark in the box that says "Read only".
(You can put either spaces or tabs between the 127.0.0.1 and the domain name).
Save the file, and restart your web browser. Now, you won't be able to reach YouTube, because all your web browser's requests for anything at youtube.com or www.youtube.com will be redirected to 127.0.0.1, the localhost IP address - your own computer.
Unless you're running web server software on your computer for some reason (such as to run Astroblahhh Desktop or the Astrosorting Music Organization Database (AMODB)), you'll only reach a blank page.
Then, if you ever want to block YouTube again, you can just delete those pound signs.
In not only Windows but other platforms, there's something called a hosts file which allows you to block sites. The way it does this is by making it so any attempts to access anything at certain domain names are redirected to some other IP address.
C:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc
Make a duplicate of your hosts file, so you can put it back the way it was in case you mess anything up. (In Windows, this can be done by single-clicking the file, pressing Ctrl and C at the same time on your keyboard, then pressing Ctrl and V at the same time on your keyboard. A new file titled "Copy of hosts" should appear).
Next, open the hosts file with a plain text editor like Notepad. To block YouTube, add some lines like these.
127.0.0.1 youtube.com
127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com
If you want to stop blocking YouTube without deleting the above lines altogether, then, you can put some pound signs at the beginning of the above lines, like this:
#127.0.0.1 youtube.com
#127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com
Another tip - don't make it too easy for yourself to access and edit your hosts file. If you're using a particularly nice plain text editor like my favorite, NoteTab Light, you might be able to bookmark the hosts file. But, it's better not to, because that would make it too easy to unblock the sites you want to avoid.
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| Tapestry Analogy |
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 21:48:55 GMT |
Link |
At Donald Trump's blog, I found an encouraging analogy, comparing your life to a tapestry, in this blog post:
Why We Want You To Be Rich: Winners Take Control (5/15/2009)
I found it cheering, so, just thought I'd point it out.
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| Free Samples from PhilosophersNotes.com |
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Thursday, December 25th, 2008 08:40:31 GMT |
PhilosophersNotes.com is a website which provides very abbreviated summaries of popular self-help books in PDF and MP3 formats.
This appears to be a holiday gift, so I assume it's only a temporary offer. So, if you want them, sign up while you can. (Edit, 1/9/2009, 4:30 AM: Actually, they're still available now too). Once you sign up, you'll be able to download the MP3s and PDFs until the end of 2009.
(Edit, 4/26/2009: The original offer has been expired for a while now, but, happily, you can still hear the first few minutes of each MP3 and see the first page of each PDF.)
By the way, the MP3s aren't just a verbatim reading of the PDFs. There are often little variations thrown in.
I recommend getting both the PDFs and the MP3s - the PDFs are great for a quick overview or review, and the MP3s are great if you're working on some kind of mindless task like cleaning or driving but want to learn something at the same time.Currently, PhilosophersNotes.com is offering 25 free MP3s and PDFs. You can sign up to get those at this page.
| If You Can't Do Something Hard, Try Something Even Harder |
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Friday, December 12th, 2008 03:41:03 GMT |
Tip |
Programming is really difficult and tedious for me. It's often hard for me to do, and often hard to even force myself to start struggling to do. But one good thing about programming (aside from it enabling me to create unique and utterly customized tools I never could have obtained in any other way) is the fact that it makes a majority of everything else I might ever want to do seem tremendously easy in comparison.
For instance, years ago, I was interested in learning Japanese. Of course, I gave up on that - mostly because of losing interest, but also because of having too many obstacles such as little money for books, no computer with good Japanese dictionary software, no convenient transportation to the library, little internet access except at night and in the early morning when it wasn't clogging my family's phone line, etc. (I know it's pathetic that I let such things stop me, but my excuse is, I was a teenager who was not very resourceful and crippled with shyness).
And on top of that, Japanese itself was hard to learn. All those blasted thousands of characters, and multiple pronunciations for each. Arrghhh!!
Recently, though, something drew my attention back to the idea of learning Japanese, and I ended up looking through some of my old books. Whereupon, to my surprise, I discovered that just sitting there reading a book and passively absorbing even something as ridiculously overcomplicated as Japanese seemed blissfully, wonderfully easy compared to all the frustration and torment of having to constantly wrack my brain to figure out the next logical step in the process of writing and debugging a program. It was truly a nice change of pace - just reading stuff and not having to really think about it, just soaking it up like a sponge.
So, in summary - if you're having trouble doing something hard, force yourself to do something tremendously harder for weeks or months on end. (I recommend programming). You might end up running back to the original difficult task with open arms.
If I do start studying Japanese again, I plan on attempting to learn Chinese at the same time, because both use many of the same characters with the same meanings, and it appears Chinese might be less hard to read than I thought, because apparently, each character has only one pronunciation, unlike Japanese. Also, Mandarin Chinese is one of the most commonly-spoken languages in the world, so, it's bound to be useful. I always wonder what cool stuff in other languages I'm missing out on.)
(Not that I'm now studying Japanese again - not yet, at least. But, I really might go back to learning that, sometime. I already am dabbling in French again. Something language-related might actually be a much better career for me than programming. Learning languages seems to come more naturally to me, it's less of a struggle. I have never yet become fluent in any language besides English, but, I was good at French in high school, at least.