Twelve Minutes of Zazen

Twelve minutes seems to be an odd place in the Zazen routine. As I meditate, I start to wonder when that damn doan chime (meditation alarm) is ever going to go off, and when it does I stop and think to myself, "Is that it?"

Next week, I'll up the rate to 15 minutes.

I don't think I'm doing it right. Yeah, I sit still and alternate between doing heavy visualizations and trying to do traditional zazen, but there's too much clutter in my head, too many characters and projects and tasks and distractions. Getting them to shut up is hard work.

You get what you pay for...

As it turns out, some of the performance problem with the video card were of my doing. I hadn't updated the X Server config, so it was incorrectly assuming that I only had 128MB of memory on the card. When I told it there was 256MB of memory, it started to behave much better. Not quite as nicely as the TI4200, but better.

And then, under heavy graphics loads, my on-board ethernet started to offline. It turns out the video card and the on-board etherner share an interrupt, and the ethernet on this motherboard (an ATI KV-85, in case anyone wants to avoid it) has a reputation for being flaky, which is odd because it's a VIA Rhine, the same kind I had in the previous motherboard.

Well, there's one more PCI slot free. I was going to use that for the firewire plugs. I guess I can swap as needed with the soundcard.

Sooo inappropriate...

I saw this on Google Adsense while I was looking for a wikipedia entry:

Satori
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www.eBay.com

I have to wonder exactly how much Ebay paid for that. I doubt I'm going to find satori on eBay!

She beat me? She beat ME?

Well, I disabled the on-board ethernet and put in an IBM E-100 card I happened to have lying around (doesn't everyone have miscellaneous parts lying in a big box somewhere?) and Omaha and I managed to get some quality time in killing each other-- in Quake 4 Deathmatch.

I seem to do better in small-box zones. We played in a big open field, and Omaha's love of the missle launcher outshone my one-shot-one-kill sniping with the rail gun. She actually beat me, 10-to-4.

I think I'd better practice some more. Or just not wander out into the open too often.