National Treasure No. 1 Burns
Namdaemun gate on Wikipedia

Unbelievable.

These use a board, obviously, but how they maneuver is different. Skateboarding uses wheels, snowboarding - no wheels but on snow, and ofc, surfing on water. They have two things in common - they require you to have a strong sense of balance and spatial direction - forward, back, left, right, and rotate. Without those, you can’t go anywhere.

For starters, skateboarding is ideal to start learning how to board because it’s most accessible - a board with wheels is all you need while you need a far more equipment for snowboarding and surfing. Snowboarding is the most expensive because you need to buy a ski lift plus insulation for cold weather. If you’re scared of water, forget about surfing! If you dig water and big waves don’t scare you (not scared of getting drown), surfing is fun but is the trickiest largely because it is unpredictable, you have to read/measure the waves right to make a good catch. To me, surfing is the most exhilarating because you get 100% immersed into nature by its body of water and if you get to carve the wave, nothing is greater than that and you can feel nature carrying/pushing you.

From the technical aspects, I’ve found skateboarding to be the hardest. You need to learn how to do an ollie, which in my opinion, is the hardest trick to learn but once you master it, tricks become much easier and you can go over any kind of step like stairs and how high you can jump depends on how fearless you are. Tricks add up there - kick flip, kiss on the rail, so on.

They’re all fun to try and involve different kinds of nature but one thing is that you gotta have a solid foundation - sense of balance and spatial direction, which is knowing where you go and to anticipate the next step/move.

Happy boarding. :-)

It’s a cool movie. Basically, they’re trying to change the misconception about deaf people being dumb because in the past, the word, deaf, was always associated with dumb and that hearing loss had to be fixed. They were tired of seeing how Hollywood movies would cast a deaf person to play a role of self-pity or some dumb person, so they used a good-looking deaf lady and made a sexy scene out of it in order to change the world’s perspective on deaf people.

I want to share something funny that’s happened at my work. Not a long ago, we hired a new co-worker and he sent out an intro email and I replied back to his email. Turned out that we have some similar interests and we chatted a bit. Then I went out on a vacation. When I got back, he IMed me that he had learned that I’m Deaf and he didn’t know that I was. So, we as deaf people have come a long way since then.

The five spiritual faculties - faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom - are our greatest friends and allies on this journey of understanding. These qualities are most powerful when they are in balance. Faith needs to be balanced with wisdom, so that faith is not blind and wisdom is not shallow or hypocritical. When wisdom outstrips faith, we can develop a pattern where we know something, and even know it deeply from our experience, yet do not live it. Faith brings the quality of commitment to our understanding. Energy needs to be balanced with concentration; effort will bring lucidity, clarity, and energy to the mind, which concentration balances with calmness and depth. An unbalanced effort makes us restless and scattered, and too much concentration that is not energized comes close to torpor and sleep. Mindfulness is the factor that balances all these and is therefore always beneficial.
~ Joseph Goldstein, in Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

link

from Flickr

Blank state
We need to output more

from Flowingdata

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I liked how this pic turns out.

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No Tags]]> http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/10/05/international-day-of-sign-language/feed http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/10/03/super-notice http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/10/03/super-notice#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 05:59:06 +0000 natech sign languagethoughts http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/10/03/super-notice Good article. On super-noticing.

Mr Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important! Or that they’re already doing it. It’s kind of like breathing—we’re not usually that aware of it. It’s much easier to recognize more “outbound” activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important—it’s really where everything begins. There’s a funny Zen saying about that: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.

I do believe that anyone who acquires sign language has this ability—to super notice, because we can communicate exclusively with our facial expressions and hands, with no sound.

I’ve found that once you learn a second language, learning a third comes much easier, as you become familiar with the intricacies of language patterns and sentence structure. But you’re still challenged to understand the how to turn all that into meaningful communication.

Awesome. I know two languages—sign language and English. I’m learning third language — hangul. :-)

The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.

That’s pretty much how I live, me and my curiosity.

Death anxiety.

The fear of death has been rated as the most common and the second worst fear that troubles us… …The fear of death is largely due to four reasons. Firstly, the fear of the unknown, secondly, the fear of losing our loved ones, thirdly, fear of pain and suffering and/or being alone at the time of death and finally, the fear of ceasing to exist or the finality of death.

Some quotes:

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” - Pubilius Syrus (100 B.C.)

“A well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death. Death is more universal than life, everyone dies but not everyone lives.” - Leondard da Vinci (1452-1519)

Steve Jobs had some words to say on the topics too. Read his commencement speech.

Often, how I make decisions is based on whether if I’ll have regrets. So, I ask myself, would I regret if I didn’t do this? if not, then I just do it. If yes, then I won’t. That’s the way I think.

With a limited auditory input (I can only hear low sounds with a db of about 70 in my left ear but profound in my right ear), I believe in this and thanks to technology we have like computers and the Web, we’re able to input a lot of information through our eyes into our brains. Thank god.

Tabula rasa (Latin: blank slate) refers to the epistemological thesis that individual human beings are born with no built-in mental content, in a word, “blank”, and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world.

This just inspired me to become a better blogger. Action coming soon.

Your keyboard is sadly imbalanced. Imagine that your chair’s legs are badly misaligned, that one side is higher than the other side. Your keyboard is like that. Other than the alphabets keys you’ve been pouncing on to do things on your keyboard like emails, browser URLs, coding, etc, the most frequent keys are your backspace key and enter key. Much to this misfortune, both of them are on the right side of your keyboard, giving imbalance on your hands just like that misaligned chair.

I’ve remapped my mac keyboard to use caps-lock as a delete key, giving me a balance on both sides of this keyboard and making a good use of both my pinkies. They equally need much love.

I just downloaded this keyremap4macbook. For Mac users on Leopard, you’ll need to set the caps-lock key to do nothing from the modifier keys in your control panel first. Then you can download the package, and after it’s installed, put a check on ‘change caps lock’ to delete. Your keyboard will be now balanced and you will get much joy in both your hands.

Happy typing.

Despite the iPhone’s latest popularity (over one million sold), I still find blackberry pagers superior in emails because at the end of day, reliable speedy communication is all what it matters and not to mention, blackberry does have a solid form factor that is tough, compact and uses hard keys, which is much friendlier for your thumbs.

If you’ve been using blackberry email address like johndoe@att.blackberry.net for your pager, you might want to consider setting up with gmail. Why is that? the backup. After you set your blackberry up with gmail, everything is copied to and you won’t lose your data, should your blackberry become missing.

Let’s get to it.

For AT&T users

Go to http://bis.na.blackberry.com/html?brand=mycingular

Create an account if you haven’t. It is separate from your billing account.

Click on ‘Set up Account’ under Add An Existing Email Account.

Fill in your gmail account and your password. There is no need to set up POP, IMAP or anything like that.

Your account is set up! but there is one more thing you might want to make. Sent messages will be forwarded to your blackberry every time you send a message. It’ll get annoying, so you will need to set up a filter.

So, after you set up an email account, click on ‘Filters’, then create a filter and name it ’sent’.

Change the dropdown to ‘From’ field. Put down your gmail address in the field after ‘contains’. Then click on ‘Do not forward messages to device.”

Click on ‘Save’.

Now you’re really all done! happy thumbing. :-)

via vladstudio