Sometimes I wish I could let yesterday go up in smoke so there wouldn’t be any remnants of it, and then when I think of doing just that I realize all of what I am today comes from who I was yesterday. Those things of the past allowed me to have the experiences I have this moment…no matter how hard it was to go thru. So, let me focus on things I can change in this moment.

This is what I choose:

1. Instead of acting out of hurt, I choose to pray for someone whom I love that hurts me greatly.
2. Instead of acting out destructively to punish myself in some sort of fashion or way, I choose to treat myself with loving kindness as if I were someone else…not just someone who hurts or who feels like I am “bad.”
3. Instead of trying to stuff down the pain, I choose to feel it and let it go through the stages of grief, so I can move past the hurt and pain.
4. Instead of looking back, I choose to look forward and focus on what is happening this moment, so I don’t overwhelm myself with could have been or should have been.
5. Instead of me feeling ungrateful for the chance to love my loved ones, I can feel grateful I can choose to love beyond what another chooses for her/his life.
6. Instead of me defining myself on what happens, I choose to define myself by my character, the values and beliefs I uphold, and the love I have to freely give.
7. Instead of hating, I choose to have love for another even though I am hurt.

self⋅ish

/ˈsɛlfɪʃ/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [sel-fish]

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.

adj.   Concerned chiefly or only with oneself: “Selfish men were . . . trying to make capital for themselves out of the sacred cause of human rights” (Maria Weston Chapman). Arising from, characterized by, or showing selfishness: a selfish whim.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

Doesn’t seem to matter which dictionary you read,

‘Selfish is as Selfish does’

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22). This name introduces to us one of the most solemn and foreboding subjects in the Word of God. It brings before us one of the persons in the Trinity of Evil. At every point he is the antithesis of Christ. The word “Antichrist” has a double significance. Its primary meaning is one who is opposed to Christ; but its secondary meaning is one who is instead of Christ. Let not this be thought strange, for it accords with the two stages in his career. At first he will pose as the true Christ, masquerading in the livery of religion. But, later, he will throw off his disguise, stand forth in his true character, and set himself up as one who is against God and His Christ.

Not only does anti-christ denote the antagonist of Christ, but it tells of one who is instead of Christ. The word signifies another Christ, a pro-Christ, an alter christus, a pretender to the name of Christ. He will seem to be and will set himself up as the true Christ. He will be the Devil’s counterfeit. Just as the Devil is an Anti-theos—not only the adversary of God, but the usurper of the place and prerogatives of God, demanding worship; so the Son of Perdition will be anti-christ—not only the antagonist and opponent of Christ, but His reval: assuming the very position and prerogatives of Christ; passing himself off as the rightful claimant to all the rights and honors of the Son of God.

— A.W. Pink 1886-1952

As a self-proclaimed life learner, I cannot believe how the internet never ceases to amaze me. The depth of knowledge one can find at their fingertips is breath-taking.

But with the depth of knowledge, comes a caveat- all the clutter. With every web site worth going to, it seems that there are three pages worth of garbage. Now communicators who rely on the internet must become/create/use opinion leaders to help them sort through the mess. Here now is my attempt to participate.

Below are two sites that I wholly believe are worth checking out. One of these two is currently in its “soft launch” and the other one, though only a little bit older, has already received acclaim and promotion of the NYTimes writers of the FREAKonomics blog (so naturally I had to check it out).

Enjoy!

1. Open 4 Definition

How do you look at a word? What’s your definition of “expert”? I think your definition is different than mine, and that difference might be explained here.

2. The Book of Odds

Like statistics? Want to see statistics used in a cool way? This website compiled TONS of data and attempts to tell your life in a game of odds.

The C (and C++) preprocessor is a powerful but dangerous tool. For sure, it helps with a number of problems, from conditional code inclusion to explicit code generation, but it has a few problems. In fact, more than a few. It is evil.

The C preprocessor (hereafter CPP) should be used with extreme care. For one thing, the CPP doesn’t know about the language it is applied on, it merely proceeds to the translation of the input using very simple rules, and this can leads to tons of hard to detect—and to fix—problems.

There are at least two problems I can think of that renders the use of macros as function dangerous and annoying. The first is that since the CPP is basically a big find-and-replace machine, it is not particularly smart on how macros are expanded. The second is that since the CPP is basically a big find-and-replace machine, it’s not particularly smart on when macros are expanded.

Macro used as function are declared like this:

#define function(arg1,arg2) ...stuff with arg1 and arg2...

(and the number of arguments can vary, but two is a good example) and are invoked:

y = function(x+3,4);

As would be a normal function most of the times. The problem is, they’re not functions, they’re merely textual substitution patterns. The above will textually replace the values for arg1 and arg2 in the macro body and paste it at invocation point. The expansion is so basic that in most case, you will need to use extra parentheses to make sure that operation precedence is respected. For example:

#define function(arg1,arg2) arg1 + arg2
...

x=function(x << 3, 5)

will result in bad behaviour: the operator<< has a lower priority than +, so you’ll end up with x << (3+5) rather than the expected (x<<3)+5. The correct way is to define:

#define function(arg1,arg2) ( (arg1) + (arg) )

So to force the correct precedence of evaluation in the final expression.

This is a somewhat simple case and any programmer that had his fingers bitten once by that kind of bug knows to put parentheses and that’s about it. However, if adding extra parentheses helps with operator precedence, it has another problem. Consider:

#define max(a,b)  ( (a) > (b) ? (a) : (b) )

...

x=max(a[i++],b[j++])

In this code, you cannot easily predict how many times i++ or j++ are executed. Inspecting the macro expansion, we see that the code is now:

x=( (a[i++])>(b[j++]) ? (a[i++]) : (b[j++]) )

Which isn’t the desired result at all! In short, macro used as functions are evil. Because macro expansion is dumb, arguments may be evaluated any number of times. Because macro expansion is dumb, arguments may be evaluated in any order and maybe their expressions will be merged with another expression to yield an unexpected result—as in the shift example above.

*
* *

The other major problem with the CPP is that it doesn’t understand scoping or namespaces. For example, the following code spews compilation errors:

...

#define max(a,b) ...
...
class A
 {
  private:

    int a,b;

    ...

  public:

  int max() const { ... } // clearly a member function

  ...
 }

Because max() looks like a function, the CPP tries to match it with a macro and the compiler complains that macro.cpp:19:12: error: macro "max" requires 3 arguments, but only 1 given (why one and not zero? I don’t know! That’s what G++ returns). Even a non-function macro can be worth a lot of problems:

#define shift 3

int function( int a, int b)
 {
  int shift=0; // clearly a local variable
  ...more code...
 }

 ...

This time, it complains with:

macro.cpp:28: error: expected unqualified-id before numeric constant

Which is somewhat cryptic.

The same happens with namespaces. Qualifying a symbol with an explicit namespace doesn’t stop the CPP to expand macros whenever there’s something that looks like a match:

#include <algorithm>
#include <iostream>

#define max(a,b,c) ...stuff...

// ...lot more code goes here...

int main()
 {
  int a=0;
  int b=3;

  std::cout << std::max(a,b) // clearly NOT the macro
            << std::min(a,b)
            << std::endl;
 }

The CPP replaces the macro max( ) but the compiler encounters errors:

macro.cpp:12:28: error: macro "max" requires 3 arguments, but only 2 given
macro.cpp: In function ‘int main()’:
macro.cpp:12: error: no match for ‘operator<<’ in ‘std::cout << std::max’
-- follows 20 more lines of error --

*
* *

The first solution is to avoid macro as much as possible. In C++, prefer template and inline functions to macros used as functions. The first advantage of using a true function is that the arguments are evaluated only once. For example, if the macro arguments contains code that has a side effect (like i++, for example) it is not easy to predict how many times it will be executed in the expanded statement.

Inline functions (available in C++ and C99, and in C as a compiler-specific extension) solve all problems of macro as functions. First, they ensure that the parameters are evaluated only once. Second, they offer the complete function semantics which aren’t all available with macros. For example, you can’t build a local scope and return a value with a macro in a clean way. Third, they are always syntactically safe, yet another thing that is not ensured by macros, especially when used in compound statements.

The fact that inline functions are functions and may require an actual function call if the compiler can’t inline the functions should really not stop you from using them. First, if the function is big enough so that the compiler can’t (or wont) inline it, you certainly don’t want it as a macro. Second, the time for a function call is dominated by the time it takes to evaluate the arguments, so it is eventually negligible.

*
* *

Since not all code bases seems to be aware of the problem inherent to the CPP, you may have to deal with stupid macro names—even include guards. Paradoxically, a macro named max is a lot more stupid than a macro named my_max_macro, as it more likely to interfere with user code than the latter. The defencive solution to this problem is to undefine macros known to cause problems:

#include <some-header>

#ifdef max
 #warning 'max' is defined as a macro. Undefining.
 #undef max
#endif

...more code...

Or you can simply #undef it quietly. I do prefer warnings, because it informs the programmer/maintainer that this was deliberate and that he should not expect the macro max to be available in this translation unit.

The proactive solution is to use smarter names for macros. You can of course use BIG_UGLY_CAPS for macros, but you can also use the underscore to specify that this is a compiler- or library-specific symbol, as suggested by the standards. The macro _max is already much better than just max, even though it may still interfere with some naming conventions. Note that double underscores are reserved recommended mandatory for compiler-specific extensions such as __attribute__ and the like. A macro named __max__ would imply that the macro is somehow special and compiler-specific.

*
* *

So, basically, the CPP is a good tool for testing the environment, check for defined macros, and for conditional compilation but a very, very, very bad tool for code generation. I can understand that it is tempting to use macros in C (and C99) as a weak substitute for meta-programming as there are really no facilities provided by the language.

In C++, however, we have all the tools needed: function and operator overloading, and powerful meta-programming through templates. The careful use of C++ meta-programming can lead to very efficient, compile-time optimized code.

Delicate Flower’s site has the post ‘Without thinking too much’  and it’s basically a list of things that define you. She borrowed the idea herself from a blogging friend and I wanted to have a shot at it myself. I thought it really was a good idea (the credit for the idea should go to the two I mentioned as I would of thought of something far more idiotic had the idea popped into my head) so I gave it a moments thought and jusy fired out my answers as quickly as they came to me. 

Here’s the results:

Saying no to:

Smoking

Bickering

Saying yes to:

Watching movies until late

Dancing

Laughing at the most inane of things

Giddy about:

Penelope Cruz

Autumn

Electronica

Scared of:

Spiders

Women with big hands

Depression

Inspired by:

Thomas Bangalter

Cinema

My Mother

Obsessed about:

Films

Music

The perfect practical joke

In love with:

Uncertainty

Those moments of inner-peace

The still of the night

Haunted by:

Irreversible (Gaspar Noe’s film)

My Father’s death

Regret

Saved by:

Imagination

Love

Friends

How do you define “spirituality”

Spirituality for me is something that is very difficult to define.  I don’t know if there is really one thing that can define spirituality.  I think that this has such a different meaning to so many people, and nobody can really truly fully understand a persons definition and understanding of spirituality.  But for me, spirituality is having a kind of connection of some higher power, feeling or emotion.  That you have a feeling that can only be felt when this spirituality is happening, it can’t be recreated.   Something takes your body and mind over, and you just let your mind wonder.

Does spirituality differ from religion?

To be able to answer this question, I think we need to define religion first.  For me religion means believing in way of life where you believe in a higher power, and live your life for them.  I think spirituality is extremely different from religion.  I think a religion is a lifestyle that you live by, and spirituality is something that you know is there, have a belief in,  but don’t always think about.  For my dad, he is not a religious person, but he is spiritual for sure.  I think religion is something that you choose to do, and I think spirituality is something that can just happen.

How do you define “creativity”?

Creativity has no definition.  There are no limitations to creativity.  I think you have to have no boundaries for creativity, you have to think out of the box to be really creative.  You have an endless opportunity when you are try to create something.  Once you let your mind be free and just start to wander and create things, understanding that there are no wrong answers.  When you are creating you are just trying to let out as much as possible and then go from there.

What is the source of creativity?

Creativity is how you are expressing yourself at a moment in time.  Your creativity is an emotion that you are letting free, and expressing it in some way, shape or form.  This creativity has no one thing that defines creativity.  I do like how the reading talked about how creativity is a journey that we all take.  So I believe that creativity is a combination of the journey and the present moment all together that create the source for creativity.

It has often been said that Newcastle has some of the world’s best beaches. I wouldn’t know about that – I haven’t visited all of them.

What I do know is that having travelled around a lot of Australia, Newcastle is certainly up there with the best that Australia has to offer.

It is hard, in my view, to define just what makes the best beach. I imagine that someone who surfs would have certain criteria that differs from someone like me, who likes the natural beauty of a place more than anything else when it comes to liking a beach.

I think the beaches around the West Australia town of Esperance are simply stunning and I currently rate these as the best beaches in Australia that I have seen. There may well be better beaches, but in my opinion, those of Esperance are better than Newcastle’s beaches. But that opinion includes criteria such as seclusion, natural beauty, etc. For recreational use, access, etc, Newcastle has some brilliant beaches that the locals adore. They are certainly good for a walk along when it isn’t too hot and they aren’t too crowded.

• a natural and periodic state of rest during which consciousness of the world is suspended
• a torpid state resembling deep sleep
• be asleep
• a period of time spent sleeping
• rest: euphemisms for death (based on an analogy between lying in a bed and in a tomb)

from www.google.com