{"id":1872,"date":"2009-11-22T00:05:47","date_gmt":"2009-11-22T05:05:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/?p=1872"},"modified":"2020-05-01T19:18:16","modified_gmt":"2020-05-01T23:18:16","slug":"questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/2009\/11\/22\/questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

1) A djinn appears and tells you that you must give up your rock-star life and technological prowess, but in exchange can grant you a small, local, successful business doing anything else you want. What do you pick?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve got to work for a living? No caging out and cheating? I would open my holistic healing center. Healthy food, homemade beer, physical fitness, art, music, and self defense. Talk therapy available from the owner at any of these.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2) If you had the time and resource to produce one musical concert of your own that everyone you knew could come to see, what would you perform?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would play all of Bach’s cello suites. I would love to have the time to work all of them up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3) H. H. The Dalai Lama and a 2-year-old child you don’t know are dangling from a cliff. You’re certain you can only save one. What you do you do and why? (Sorry if that’s a little hardcore, but i had to balance the fate of humanity again raping and killing Sarah Palin, so i know you can handle it.) \ud83d\ude42<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Made me pause. There are merits to either, but I think that the odds are pretty good that even the 70+ year old Dalai Lama will help more people than a small child. Put it this way, change the question a little bit: I have to give my life to save one of theirs. I would save H.H.’s in an instant – but I would hesitate to throw myself under a bus for a random 2 year old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4) You’re being sent on a mission to a remote place for 10 years. You will have adequate food, water, shelter, power, and a high-speed sat-link to the internet. Specify the computer system you want along with you.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s get this out of the way first. You suck. No system that can play movies right now today is likely to function well for 10 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want something that will be cast iron reliable and let me VNC into some system back in Boston. I’m gonna do as much as I can by remote. That probably means a nice linux server, underclocked, with three solid state disks in RAID 1, dual power supplies, all 16 RAM slots populated (so I can pop them out as they fail) and so on. I’m not chancing a laptop. I want a long display cable so I can leave the beast in a hermetically sealed vault and type from out in my lair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Failing that, I want a DEC Alpha. Big blue pedestal. I know a few of those that have been running for 20+ years now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5) In your feeling, what stands most prominently between you and Enlightenment?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Habituation. I feel like I’ve got the best luck \/ karma that money can buy. I’m healthy, bright, and have all sorts of opportunity. I know basically what I’m supposed to do. However I have these *habits*. I keep looking up and saying “yeah, that thing that I just did – I should do less of that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s just practice. Word is that it takes “numberless eons” to develop the stores of merit required from where I am now. I’ve got to let all the previous karma from previous numberless eons dissipate. That will take some time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A wise man once said to me: Don’t worry about enlightenment. Enlightenment will come. Time is long. Worry about doing the best you can today. Today is nearly gone already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1) A djinn appears and tells you that you must give up your rock-star life and technological prowess, but in exchange can grant you a small, local, successful business doing anything else you want. What do you pick? I’ve got to work for a living?…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-bloggin","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1873,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions\/1873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}