De-stressing

Hey Yaakov, make that four users once I’ve set it up, I certainly do like the looks of it. A good tool that makes any job easier is a winner in my book, and that looks like a good one indeed.

This weekend was a long one in my neck of the woods, being the Labour Day holiday.

Saturday was mostly a relax-around-the-house day, with a fairly quick and painless upgrade of my old doorstop-server (an old PII 233 that graced an ex-employer’s datacentre as it’s first backup server) – I’ve had mainly good experiences doing a  “yum upgrade” between Fedora releases (9 to 10 in this case) and this was even cleaner than last time (just remember to relabel if using SELinux per my last post, mkay? :-P)

The Drupal update for dotprofileconsulting.com went very smoothly too – but some attempts to streamline WordPress for thatfleminggent.com weren’t quite so grand, some of the themes I’d tried didn’t seem to like the 2.6.5 install (any chance of 2.7 for F9/F10?) so I stuck with the tried-and-true, even if it is a little “busy”

It was also the Buddha’s Birthday celebration here, so a stroll down to South Brisbane to see the sangha and what was on offer was in order. I admit not getting to the Zen talks this year but took in the opportunity for some zazen (sitting meditation), some much needed kinhin (walking meditation) as the old legs were a bit too stiff for the full lotus and even a bit of tai-chi (which I’m unused to as part of my practice but can certainly see the benefits of)

It’s a practice worth considering if you’re in a high-stress position (developers and systems people, I’m looking at you..) – even just sitting quietly, counting the breath and letting whatever thoughts come and go is a good start – and not complicated; you “just sit”. Sit often enough and the rest takes care of itself. ?

My friends and colleagues are still a bit mystified by a “taught to walk by a bald nun” (the kinhin practice mentioned above) Facebook update but I’ll let them ponder a bit more ?