Ok, hi!, I’m Pieter, I’m a human. I haven’t been posting in a while, because bloooooog. ugh.
Firstly. Shout-out to the guys on #devops on zatech’s slack channel. Cobus is an awesome dude and one day my beard will be as long as his is. Dude, please let me buy you that beer :)
Also DevOpsDays in Cape Town was nice! @devopsdayscpt
I have a Linked-In now. There are some fancy Business People on there. It’s nice
Digitally, I’m still with keybase.io. They’re awesome! I have invites, ask me about them.
I work at Zoona now!. I’m helping them make it real!
The theme of the moment is Ask me how to make tech useful for you at Zoona.
Ok, that's it.
P
When the student is ready the master appears
I am finding myself drawn, more and more, into my latent spirituality. Everything is connected. There is no beginning and there is no end. However, one has to start somewhere. This introductory video is as good as any other starting point. Enjoy!
Come, Blessed One, we pray Thee, roll the wheel of the dew-sweet Law – which is excellent in the beginning, excellent in the middle, and excellent in the end! – Lotus Sutra
It is a great privilege to be able to share a few days worth of work.
The Nature of Mind
No words can describe it
No example can point to it
Samsara does not make it worse
Nirvana does not make it better
It has never been born
It has never ceased
It has never been liberated
It has never been deluded
It has never existed
It has never been nonexistent
It has no limits at all
It does not fall into any kind of category.
~ Dudjom Rinpoche
At first we did not come here clothed, finely adorned, with money in our pocket and with provision to travel. When we came into this unknown place, where we knew no one at all, we had nothing whatsoever - our only wealth was our howling mouth and empty stomach. Our mother gave us food so that we would not go hungry, drink to keep us from thirst, clothes to fend off the cold and wealth to keep us from poverty. It was not as though she just gave us things no longer of use to herself: she herself went without food, without drink and without new clothes.
Furthermore, not only did she sacrifice her happiness as far as this existence is concerned, she also deprived herself of using her assets (as offerings) to provide for her own prosperity in future lives. In brief, without regard to her own happiness, in both this life and the next, she devoted herself to rearing and caring for her child.
Nor was it the case that she obtained what was needed easily and pleasurably; to provide for her child she was obliged to sin, to suffer and to toil. She sinned by having to resort to fishing, killing animals and so on in order to care for us. She suffered because what she gave her child was the fruit of trading, labouring in the fields and so forth, wearing the late evening or early morning frost for her boots, the stars as a hat, riding the horse of her calves, beaten by the whip of the long grass, her legs exposed to the bites of dogs and her face exposed to the looks of men.
She also treated this stranger who has become her child with more love than her own father, mother or lama, even though she knew not who this being was or what it would become. She looked at her child with loving eyes, gave her gentle warmth, cradled him in her arms and talked with sweet words saying, “My joy, ah my sunshine, my treasure, coochi coochi, aren’t you mummy’s joy” and so forth.
Jé Gampopa – Gems of Dharma, Jewels of Freedom
I have been doing naughty things at great speed on the various highways that we have here in Cape Town. My recent purchase of an over-powered and over-powering "Commuting Bike" has been causing me to invent reasons for getting around Town. A lot. I also usually need to get wherever I need to be really quickly... Therefore, I notice that we have excellent roads with nice grippy tar every time I find myself entering some corner at an absurd lean-angle by accident.
I have been riding on some very nice roads recently and I am very, very grateful. The stack of speeding fines in my drawer carries with it a monetary value to my gratefulness.
ONE of those roads is called Helen Suzman Blvd and the thought has often entered my mind that I wonder who she was and what she had to do to have a nice road named after her in the New South Africa
I am also lazy and have left actually finding out to apparently right now.
I just saw this video courtesy of The South African.
It is interesting! The #DA made it and I have to say it is very, very self-congratulatory, but that's OK. I like it anyway. Enough to want to say "Ek stem saam!" out in public.
U edel-agbare. Ek stem saam.
Edit: You might have heard of the Helen Suzman Foundation, which has been in the news recently.
Ven Fifth Minyak Rinpoche visits Cape Town Kagyu in the beginning of August 2016.
Here is a link to the Cape Town Kagyu website with the details of the program.
I also went ahead and created a public google calendar for these events.
Do you remember the Sandra Bullock movie Gravity in which all kinds of shit goes down in space? Turns out, that actually happened.
But it wasn't actually Sandra Bullock, it was one NASA astronaut and two Russian Cosmonauts. And it wasn't the ISS, it was Mir space station.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine–36549109
They survived...
Linenger was succeeded by Anglo-American astronaut Michael Foale, carried up by Atlantis on STS-84, alongside Russian mission specialist Elena Kondakova. Foale's increment proceeded fairly normally until 25 June when during the second test of the Progress manual docking system, TORU, Progress M-34 collided with solar arrays on the Spektr module and crashed into the module's outer shell, puncturing the module and causing depressurisation on the station. Only quick actions on the part of the crew, cutting cables leading to the module and closing Spektr's hatch, prevented the crews having to abandon the station in Soyuz TM-25. Their efforts stabilised the station's air pressure, whilst the pressure in Spektr, containing many of Foale's experiments and personal effects, dropped to a vacuum. In an effort to restore some of the power and systems lost following the isolation of Spektr and to attempt to locate the leak, EO-24 commander Anatoly Solovyev and flight engineer Pavel Vinogradov carried out a risky salvage operation later in the flight, entering the empty module during a so-called "intra-vehicular activity" or "IVA" spacewalk and inspecting the condition of hardware and running cables through a special hatch from Spektr's systems to the rest of the station. Following these first investigations, Foale and Solovyev conducted a 6-hour EVA outside Spektr to inspect the damage.