Site log / Geek – The Wild Things of God

Announcing Jedi Life

October 13, 2011July 2, 2021 Jon4 Comments

Dear Readers,

I’m happy to announce that Jedi Life, at http://jedilife.com, is now live. I’m excited about it. There are already several complete posts lined up,and I’m seeking guest posts as well. While Jedi Life is the successor to this blog, in some ways it is very different. The theme is “renew the body, free the mind, feel the Force.” Running, diet, nutrition, life hacking, all will be frequent subjects as will practical matters such as breaking bad habits, forming new ones, seeing through societal conditioning, and so on. Spirituality will be an important part of Jedi Life, but I intend it to be more accessible and actionable than my personal philosophical musings here.

I’m also writing an e-book, geared towards the completely out-of-shape, on how to get into shape, start running safely, and love it.

The Wild Things of God will remain here. At this point, I’m not sure sure how often (or if) it will be updated. I may continue to use it for more personal blogging, or just keep it as an archive of my life from 2004-2011. Keep it in your RSS, just in case. So what are you waiting for? Head over to Jedi Life, and give me feedback there! Also, I wouldn’t mind some free publicity. If you could “like” it or tweet it, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Thanks

Jedilife.com update

October 4, 2011October 4, 2011 Jon1 Comment

Oh-oh. I missed the August 1 date, obviously. However, I will have jedilife.com up and running on October 10. I’m really sorry about the delay. Thanks for your patience.

A New Direction

January 27, 2011January 28, 2011 Jon6 Comments

Le blog c’est mort… Vive le blog!

It occurs to me that my slowdown in posting over the last couple of years has been an effect of changes in my life, resulting in some uncertainty about the direction it should take. However, I’m gaining clarity in this.

What I’m going to be writing about more is the challenge of becoming the person I want to be, and being more authentically the person I am. I’ll be writing even less about spiritual “ideas” (of course, I already have been writing less about that), and more about challenges in living. However, I might expand and separate some of my preexisting material into ebooks.

I’ll be writing more on things I find helpful and interesting, rather than traditional reviews (those have been sliding too).

In short, this will be a new blog; it may have a different name (or not, not sure yet), but it’s going to be a bit different. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

WordPress woes

April 21, 2008April 21, 2008 Jon2 Comments

This is the second time in the last two weeks that I’ve lost a long post that I was working on just a bit before I was going to click the "Publish" button. Somehow, it seems to happen in between the auto-saves and, yes, I AM too dumb to remember to manually hit "Save" every 5 mins.

Also, the Akismet spam filter is getting annoying… I’m being asked twice a day now to manually flag absurd random spam posts which any spam catcher should be able to recognize.

WP and I have come a long way, but our relationship is going through some difficulties now. We’ll get through this, I’m sure.

Resurrecting WildWebWeaving

July 14, 2007 Jon5 Comments

Well, it’s never really died, but my “techie” site, WildWebWeaving is being resurrected. I realized that not only do I really want to share more of my thoughts on the Web, CSS, browsers, and Web programming, but doing so will help reinforce what I’ve learned and what I’m learning.

This will also probably siphon off a lot of my “geekstuff” posts from this site, which most of you probably won’t miss. But for the few of you who do want to track my tumultuous relationship with code, go ahead and be the first to subscribe to my RSS feed at WildWebWeaving!

Open Mind, Empty Mind

June 28, 2007June 28, 2007 Jon3 Comments

Well, I’m honored (and a little embarrassed) that Darrell Hamsa Grizzell has awarded me the Open Mind Blogger Award, a recognition of “respect towards others, research and consideration of opposing views, free-flowing conversation with commenters, and an overall spirit of civility and openness.” Well, I often lack those qualities, but I do deeply respect his initiative from Politics and Religion. And I can easily name five other people who deserve this recognition more than me:

(There are more of course, but most of the ones I would think of have already been awarded by Darrell.)

I’ve generally been growing indifferent, if not negative, to the “pass it on” memes that pop up on the Web, but this one means something. Regaining the open mind (and when we were kids, we all had open minds) I think is an essential part of Jesus’ “come as a child” teaching. It’s certainly an essential step in pursuing the “empty mind” of Zen practice. You can’t empty your habitual thoughts, identifications, prejudices and biases unless you’re first open to the fact that you might need to. And you can’t empty anything unless it has an opening.

These folks, and the ones Darrell awarded, definitely fit the bill–they show that wonderful quality of opening and emptying–presenting themselves to Isness anew, ready to engage the world as bias-free as possible. Thanks to you all.

Writing my first Firefox extensions

June 24, 2007June 24, 2007 Jon1 Comment

Firefox logo Okay, if you’re tired of hearing me tell you that you should get Firefox, don’t worry… that’s not what this post is about. However, if you do use Firefox, you probably know that its rendering is only a part of what makes it so great; the Firefox community has developed thousands of plugins and add-on tools to enhance the Web experience.

Among these are hundreds of search engine plugins. Besides Google, IMDB, and Amazon searches, I constantly use the Wikipedia search plugins. To aid in searching foreign-language Wikipedias, there are plugins available for most. (I’ve been using the Catalan, Spanish, and Esperanto Wikipedia search plugins for months now.) However, one huge problem with Wikipedia is that the Wikipedia search engine truly sucks. A slight misspelling of a word (even an accent) generally returns no results, and searching for a word or phrase that doesn’t match the actual title of the article usually returns nothing helpful.

Fortunately for English readers, there’s a wonderful plugin that allows you to use the Google engine to search the English Wikipedia. This makes searching for relevant articles in the English Wikipedia a breeze.

Tonight, I finally wondered: why doesn’t someone do the same for the other Wikipedias? Well, I’m someone, so I did. It was extremely easy; the guys at the Mozilla project did a wonderful job in making it a piece of cake to create them. Check out the list of Wikipedia search plugins, and note the big green ‘N’ for new by three of them, made by yours truly.

Blogs That Make Me Think

May 1, 2007May 1, 2007 Jon6 Comments

Kay just tagged me as a “thinking blogger.” The rules of the meme are that now I need to tag five other blogs that make me think. These are mostly chosen for their “seniority” on my blogroll. Since everything on my blogroll qualifies (as well as a couple of dozen other blogs that I don’t put on there because I simply don’t have time to read them all), I went with the “seniority” approach. I’ve been reading all of these for years now:

The Sound of Diesel Musing:: Trev’s blog has always delighted me with his insight, positive spirit, and beautiful acceptance.
The Blog of the Grateful Bear:: I’d been reading Darrell’s site for years before he even began to blog. A has been never-ending well of thoughtful writing on Spirit in the world and in his life.
Eternal Awareness:: Mark’s blog is unique for its tight focus on discipleship and the essential (though hugely neglected) role of the spiritual teacher.
Isaiah Knows Nothing:: Where else can you find posts like this?
Steve Pavlina:: Steve is more than just another self-help guru. What he is, I cannot say, but he always makes me think.

WisdomReading is back!

January 22, 2007September 24, 2009 Jon2 Comments

After a seven-month hiatus, WisdomReading is back. It’s now in blog / comment format. If you’re interested in reading any or all of these key Scriptures with us (The New Testament, The Gospel of Thomas, The Dhammapada, The Upanishads, The Tao Te Ching), email me, and I’ll send you the URL.