Ronin.

"A lonely path we must cross"

It is preposterous to feel upset when you are offered ronin. Those people who served in the reign of Lord Katsushige never failed to say, "You cannot be real samurais until you do ronin 7 times. You must have seven falls and stand up eight times." 
Hyogo Narutomi, I hear, actually became a ronin seven times. You must understand yourself as a Dharuma doll. A Lord ought to give leave to his samurais to try the ronin way.

It is not possible to become a man before you have been disappointing or disowned at least seven times. We cannot expect to grow and become stronger if we are not willing to suffer. I am on my fourth.

Nostalgia: Level Snow

Throughout my travels, as far as I can remember one thing has always stayed the same...the snow that falls onto the ground. It reminds me of a place I like to call "home":

Google Street View: A rare insight.

Images captured by the Google Street View car:

To fall for the 7th time.

"七転び八起き"

In order to come to terms with one's mistakes, it's important to understand the meaning of standing up 8 times. A simple person would interpret the concept in a way where the number of times you can recover from any given situation is 8 times.

Then there are some...the one's who understand the meaning behind the number 8.

No limits, no boundaries - every fall is a new challenge which will develop understanding an experience. There is no limit as to how many times a person can stand back up. Only the weak willed have limits. We do not.

I will never allow myself to give up. No matter how much I bleed, suffer or get lost, I will stand up for the 8th time.

A new start. From Windows to Linux

I've been on and off with Linux and Windows throughout my years of trial and error. It was strange, I never felt comfortable with Linux and I always felt as if something was missing.

Today something funny happened. My laptop had turned sluggish and I decided to restart. I left the Fedora Core 17 image in the CD drive and when I came back up stairs from making a cup of tea...I saw the install screen. I thought fuck it why not? Everything I wanted to keep was already on the second partition of my HD so why not...[enter]

So here I am, setting up my distro of Fedora...

45 Lessons from a 90 year old - Repost

1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short not to enjoy it.
4. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and family will.
5. Don’t buy stuff you don’t need.
6. You don’t have to win every argument. Stay true to yourself.
7. Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.
8. It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for things that matter.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.
12. It’s OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don’t compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye… But don’t worry; God never blinks.
16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful.  Clutter weighs you down in many ways.
18. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It’s never too late to be happy.  But it’s all up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Overprepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important sex organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words, ‘In five years, will this matter?’
27. Always choose Life.
28. Forgive but don’t forget.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business.
30. Time heals almost everything. Give Time time.
31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
33. Believe in miracles.
34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.
35. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
36. Growing old beats the alternative — dying young.
37. Your children get only one childhood.
38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d
grab ours back.
41. Envy is a waste of time. Accept what you already have, not what you think you need.
42. The best is yet to come…
43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
44. Yield.
45. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.

Credit: kangalex's tumblr

Growing old on the Internet

I was browsing the MegaTokyo forums this morning and I came across a very interesting post which made me think back of how long I've been on the internet.
I got my first dial-up internet plan from my ISP back in 2001. The area I lived in was still unsupported and the internet would often have trouble connecting. When I did finally manage to make it work, I entered a whole new world.
I remember looking at the Netscape Navigator icon...it was strange double clicking that icon used to be an unfamiliar activity. Today, the first thing that I start-up is Google Chrome.
The first community I was ever a part of was Epilogue.net. I couldn't draw but I really appreciated the art work. I only ever browsed and left the odd comment and never really met anyone. Later on in the year, my friend introduced me to the MegaTokyo manga. I remember how all I could think of at school was getting home and carry on reading. By this point, I had around 800 strips to get through so I had plenty of reading material.
Shortly after, the MSN Messenger bug had hit everyone. Standard school day routine: come home, throw bag onto floor, boot up PC, log onto MSN, chat to girls. Most of us wouldn't even get changed or have something to eat, almost as if it was a competition as to who could log on first.
This was the first time I started mixing the internet and my real social life. In 2006, ADSL had finally arrived. The internet was now a normal everyday thing even for my Grandparents. They would use it to read the news, send e-mails and order for their business. It almost seems a century away...
Once I had a good and stable internet connection, I started getting into programming. I was always fascinated by being able to make a piece of software do exactly as I wanted it to.
I joined community after community. My favorite communities at that time was Astalavista and Elite-Hacker forums. They seemed to be the only ones that had reasonable and mature people on it. Usually you would find 13 year old 3L1T3 H4CK3R5 who would find you and kill you whenever they lost an argument.
By this point, no-body could track the communities and forums they had signed up for. The internet started become a mess of accounts that we were unable to keep track of. I remember having a pad with all the usernames and passwords I used.

This is when web 2.0 was born. I wasn't the only one having this problem, and it seemed that people had so many identities that nobody knew who they were talking to. Then came Facebook alongside OpenID. One account for them all. Everybody should easily be able to keep their accounts tracked and be able to publish contents onto the internet without needing the technical know-how. The result? Well what you see today.

Blogs, forums and a single sign-on service thanks to Google, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.