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2024-09-29

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Covidiocy

It took better than four years, but COVID finally found our residence, just in time to knock everyone down over the Fourth of July holiday.

In my 2024 PMC Ride Report I talked about how it interrupted my training for the biggest cycling event of my year, so I won’t go over that again. But I haven’t felt quite as strong on the bike since then, so I wanted to take a quick peek at whether COVID had any long-term effect on my cycling.

I decided to run some numbers, and if there’s one thing I have, it’s numbers!

To be unbiased, I decided on my protocol without looking at things beforehand. I’d compare my statistics across three two-month time periods:

  • May 1 to June 30 2024: the two months just before I contracted COVID
  • July 16 to September 15 2024: the two months right after I recovered f »more

Book 'Em, Danno

The Experience of Samadhi: An In-depth Exploration of Buddhist Meditation

I’ve been burnt out on dhamma books for a number of years, feeling – justifiably – that after a certain point, reading about dhamma has diminishing returns, and what’s truly important is putting what you’ve learned into practice. But circumstances ensured that these five titles made my reading list. Here’s some capsule reviews of my dhamma reading from earlier this year.

Richard Shankman’s “The Experience of Samadhi”

The jhanas — esoteric states of heightened concentration – have perplexed me since my 2007 reading of the Buddha’s Middle Length Discourses. Although they are emphasized in a huge number of Buddhist suttas, there’s lots of disagreement about what they are, how to achieve them in meditation practice, and how important they are. Shankman’s book was recommended to me by Maripos »more

Binary Digits

Struble's Assembler Language Programming

Say you were a young college student taking a programming class, and your aging computer science professor’s first assignment was for each student to write a program to print out their name and telephone number.

That wouldn’t be the least bit sus, now would it?

Apparently, back in 1984 it wasn’t! Lemme tell you a story…

I was recently bedridden with both a back injury and my first case of Covid. And having already purged many of my old books, I really had to stretch (metaphorically, of course) to find something to entertain myself with.

One book that followed me through my migrations – from Maine to (five different locations in) Massachusetts, then Pittsburgh, and finally Texas – was a college textbook that was highly cherished by most of the CS majors I knew back then: George Str »more

Austin currently:

Clear 27°C wind NE 5 km/h
Air Quality Moderate (59)



Most recent blog post:

Book 'Em, Danno (2070 words)
I’ve been burnt out on dhamma books for a number of years, feeling – justifiably – that after a certain point, reading about dhamma has diminishing return…
Posted Mon Sep 2nd 2024

Most recent cycling post:

Covidiocy (839 words)
It took better than four years, but COVID finally found our residence, just in time to knock everyone down over the Fourth of July holiday. In my 2024 PMC Rid…
Posted Sun Sep 15th 2024