There is rumored to be a mythic state that meditating Buddhist monks can achieve, known as Satori, or flow. The outside world falls away, and time flows together as though it is a mere illusion, and a state of near perfect concentration occurs. I can’t know for sure, but I think I found it this week… or maybe that was just all of the sugar and caffeine I had. Anyway, it produced some pretty awesome results if you don’t mind me saying so. Whatever it was, it made my weekend a high point in more ways than one! You can read about it below.
Monday, March 25, 2019
- I managed to Bork my home network temporarily whilst making some adjustments to discover why my mom’s phone wasn’t connecting to my Wi-Fi. After several headache inducing hours, I can finally safely say that I have it fixed. I’m not going to bore you with the details, but this is a big reason why last week’s “weekly smile” was late. I’m not going to lie, that’s a little bit disappointing, but at least everything is back to normal! To celebrate the occasion I think I am going to do a war whoop.
- I discovered (quite by accident) that today, March 25, is national cerebral palsy day in the United States of America. I had no idea that my condition has a national day of recognition. File this one under interesting facts that make me smile.
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
- I found out today that my fax from last week has safely reached its destination! What a relief.
- It was movie Tuesday again today. We saw “Gloria Bell” this week. The soundtrack was smile worthy for its especially soothing quality.
- There has been ongoing parking lot construction at work for almost a month now, and I am happy to report that it is almost done now. The part that really makes me smile about this is that they are putting a new handicap ramp into the parking lot to make crossing safer. I love living in a neighborhood where keeping up with ADA regulations is taken seriously!
- This next one requires a bit of explanation. The operating system on my computer is called Linux. In order to dictate lengthy essays (such as this one) I use a program called Dragon naturally speaking. Unfortunately, Dragon isn’t able to run on Linux. To get around this, I use a piece of software called Virtualbox, which allows me to run programs written for Windows on my Linux machine. Unfortunately, the virtual machine sometimes has difficulty recognizing nonstandard hardware such as USB microphones. This has meant that until recently, I have been relegated to using a subpar quality analog microphone to dictate into. I say “until recently”, because I discovered that my virtual machine has received a few updates since I last experimented with trying to use USB microphones on it. Suffice it to say that this means that I can now upgrade to using my extremely good quality Snowball microphone for dictation purposes! I have never had a cleaner audio sample before. Forgive me for geeking out, but I just had to include this!
Wednesday March 27, 2019
- I met a lost husky canine on the way to work today. His personality was that of a typical Husky, which is enough reason for me to smile. I hope he was reunited with his owner. Good luck, boy.
- I got a sugar high at work on coffee and doughnuts today. It felt like someone was flooding my brain with static. Moral of the story: DON’T EAT THAT STUFF ON AN EMPTY STOMACH! It was hilarious afterwards though.
- I spent the workday doing IT work on my supervisor/friend’s Mac. I don’t own one, so This was my first time using OSX Sierra. I love exploring how software works!
Thursday, March 28, 2019
- I made it to work 15 minutes early today. No further explanation required
- I discovered that after 28 years, I still can’t laugh and walk at the same time. The result of my trying was… a face plant into a hard wood floor. Don’t worry, it was funnier than it sounds and I’m totally fine. I’ve known how to fall since I was in kindergarten, so that let me skip straight to the slapstick highlight of it all.
Friday, March 29, 2019
- We saw “Elvis & Nixon” today. Who would have thought that (semi) real life could be so funny!
Saturday March 30/Sunday March 31, 2019
- I’m going to need to cheat this time around because I’ve spent the last two days of my week doing the same thing. I took another deep dive into learning Kdenlive this weekend. The result is another Youtube video that you can watch here. It doesn’t look like much, but learning to do those timed scene transitions to a musical beat was an incredibly time intensive work. I worked on it for so long that I lost all sense of time for nearly two days straight. It turns out that I can get manically focused when I have a worthy challenge. Completing it sent me to new heights of euphoria! If anyone wants to know the secret to Satori, its simple. Force yourself to do a cognitively intensive task for a few hours that simultaneously involves loads of repetition. Be warned however that it can take several hours to “resurface” properly. The result will definitely make you smile though.
