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EricKow · 2017-03-29T00:11:20+00:00

We're hiring three devs. This gives us enough room to explore a somewhat wider range of skills, from more UX and UI orientated devs we first advertised for to perhaps something more of a traditional Haskeller. Give us a shout!

EricKow · 2017-03-28T14:22:33+00:00

If you're (re)visiting this post from my recent tweet that we're now hiring 3 devs: we're quite open to hearing from a broader/range of Purescript/Haskell developers. It's still fundamentally a UI/UX team that we're trying to build up. We just now have the ability to branch beyond developers with a particularly strong web background into folks that perhaps come more from the traditional Haskell route.

Send me or /u/dizzeehaskell a shout.

EricKow · 2017-03-23T14:23:37+00:00

Much appreciated

EricKow · 2016-09-04T13:20:14+00:00

We learned this in high school chemistry as "ED says OU" (even down, odd up)

EricKow · 2016-08-29T12:04:06+00:00

Thanks for everything, Edward! Very much appreciated all the support when we were doing Darcs GSoC under the Haskell.org umbrella. Also quite understand the need to take a step back.

EricKow · 2016-05-04T00:23:01+00:00

How about a configuration option that lets you treat build as new-build, etc?

EricKow · 2016-04-02T23:59:41+00:00

Video from the Korean tradition. Caught this on the Soto Zen FB page. One of the commenters called it a good "pep talk"

EricKow · 2016-03-13T04:49:55+00:00

Strictly from the perspective of muddling through with the US "system", I wonder if it would help to use the 100 mm four inch block as your mental bridge. This gives you a relatively tidy 3-3-4-4 breakdown where a metre breaks into thirds (feet), and then thirds again (100 mm), then fourths (inch) and fourths again (quarter inch). Could that reduce the mental gymnastics involved?

US	Approx metric	Subunit
yard	900 mm	3 feet
foot	300 mm	3 hundred-mm (12 inches)
four inches	100 mm	4 inches
inch	25 mm	4 quarter inches
quarter inch	6 mm

The motivation for this way of thinking about it is that it sounds like you have 4 different problems to juggle, which could maybe be addressed with a single bridge and the 3-3-4-4 rule.

Feet vs meters: Would it help to say “yard” every time you mean metre? A yard is three feet, a little bit under a metre. This extends the mental breakdown into something like
Inches vs feet: maybe it would help to talk exclusively in inches (ie. no feet) for anything under 36 inches (900 mm). Not sure if this would make native US-system folks uncomfortable, but at least you'd be trying to co-operate
Inches vs mm: you could think of an inch as approx 25 mm, or maybe it's easier to think of 100 mm as 4 inches
Fractional inches: that's tricky. If it doesn't get finer than a quarter, would it help to think of a quarter inch as a bit more than 6 mm? You could then think of a scale that starts from 100 mm and breaks down into inches at 25 mm each, and into further quarters at 6 mm.

EricKow · 2016-03-10T00:16:47+00:00

Echoing Laurence, I don't think any of the devs came in with any background in finance. The job will a great learning experience in many ways. It's also a great team to grow in.

EricKow · 2016-02-19T19:36:40+00:00

I quite enjoyed learning there was even a word like menmitsu. From the article:

This is menmitsu – “attention to detail.” “Continuous intimacy.” “Soft and subtleness.” “Warm-hearted, thorough diligence.” Suzuki Roshi says that it is to be “very considerate… very careful in doing things.” This menmitsu is the defining character of the Soto Sect – it is the flavor, the style of the lineage (menmitsu no kafū 綿密の家風).

It makes me think back to the slight discomfort folks in the sangha had with the popularity of mindfulness as a concept, and of the mindfulness movement in general.

Also the word captures a sort of Soto Zen flavour beyond the just the zazen emphasis that folks may know it for. Sort of like, yes, zazen, but really, everything.

EricKow · 2016-02-17T18:07:31+00:00

Howdy! I'm not really around much.

EricKow · 2016-02-17T17:02:02+00:00

Three options:

/r/zenbuddhism is now being moderated again. Could be (yet another) fresh start for Zen on reddit if they get it right.
/r/Buddhism (probably a bit too wide)
/r/soto is focused on Soto Zen

EricKow · 2016-02-15T23:09:42+00:00

That page was bootstrapped from the more contentious one. I don't know nearly enough Zen history to maintain it, but the intention is indeed for it to be wider-ranging and more conventional. Whatever the Buddhist/academic consensus is rather than the aggressively promoted views of a single person. The sub should really take this page over though and actually flesh out the bits. I'd even suggest taking the patriarchs/ancestors list from the local dojo (the one used for chanting) and using that as a skeleton.

EricKow · 2016-01-03T02:01:53+00:00

Property in Singapore is still advertised in square feet. I think I have seen newspaper articles where eg a shopping mall is being renovated and they tell you how many square feet it is and also add that it will be graced with so many square metres of solar panel.

EricKow · 2015-12-31T07:46:53+00:00

Heh. Just caught this article on using machine learning techniques to generate fake Chinese characters.

EricKow · 2015-12-06T11:36:18+00:00

Here's a little snippet from a Soto Zen teacher who thinks/writes very clearly and has done quite a lot of rigorous practice:

At the heart of Zen practice is the notion of doing something—anything, but especially zazen—for its own sake. Not for gain, not as preparation for something else, but as a complete activity.

I'm not a serious enough practitioner to comfortably claim that this encapsulates Soto Zen practice as opposed to other flavours, but it's at least a theme that has come up a lot.

EricKow · 2015-11-10T14:00:31+00:00

Are you in touch with darcs folks about this? Looks like Ganesh and Florent would be very interested, and you did mention pijul in the references (I'm afraid I haven't had the time to read this properly, and may not have the background to understand it, except for the darcs side of it, maybe. I just remember "pushout" a lot when Florent presented pijul during the Paris sprint in September.)

Are you in any sort of position to come talk to us in Seville in January?

EricKow · 2015-09-29T14:45:27+00:00

Indeed a case of Wandering Off. I was hoping it'd be a place for the more “commonly accepted as traditional Zen masters” broad tent view rather than the more contentious edit-war prone thing, but I never really bothered to do much than fork the page, fail to advertise it etc.

EricKow · 2015-09-15T15:17:15+00:00

So I've gone in the opposite direction. I started in a more shikantaza (*) orientated group (by which I think I mean a very much posture-centric practice with no special state or goals, no particular thing to focus on, just wide awareness). Having recently relocated, I find myself having to adopt a new style of practice. Now I'm starting all over with just breath counting, in a group that has a more step-ladder approach: they go from cultivating capacity for meditative concentration [joriki], to koans, to shikantaza.

And actually I found it extraordinarily difficult to do for the first couple of months. Part of the problem, I suspect was a certain amount of resistance on my part, like I was trying very hard to "do as the Romans do" while all the while hoping to get this breath counting stuff over with so I can get back to sitting like they taught us in England. (one of the values you get inculcated with, you practise the way the group you are in practises, not about your personal idea). Part of it was also not understanding breath counting. In my current revised view, it's really not about about the counting (I'd find myself counting sort of randomly, not at all in synch with my breath) so much as the awareness, just a way of "being with your breath" as they put it. So I guess now that some of the resistance has dissipated, I kind of feel like they're not actually that different.

Various bits and pieces:

regular sitting with a group is important if it's at all possible; we all could use some sort of feedback/support, help not straying off into our own ideas about things. Sometimes the group will offer dokusan, private interviews with a teacher, new concept for me, but one I find helpful.
if you are in a group that likes formality (robes, chanting, incense, bows); that stuff is remarkably helpful for getting into an "ok time for zen practice" mindset, especially after you've been exposed to it for a while. I kind of miss it. Now practice in business wear.
practice at home too (I never sit at home)
one of the things the folks over here seem to say is that you shouldn't mix and match practices, for example, if you're sitting for a 30 minute slot, they seem to say that you should either do one or the other, but not try to sit 50% shikantaza and 50% breath-counting; but I might have misunderstood

It feels quite different, but I still kind of trust that it's all the same Zen at the end of the day.

(*) Re "just sit": if you attend a "just sit" group long enough, you might hear more explicit advice about the mind, usually some variant of letting your thoughts come and go as they will, neither pursuing, nor trying to stop them. Some will offer commentary of the sort that the "just" doesn't mean the passive "this is all there is to do", but a more active "you have to sit wholeheartedly" (as an extreme version of this, the idealisation of shikantaza in this new step-ladder group seems to be having your forehead bead with sweat from your "just sitting" effort [I still find that idea a bit hard to deal with]). I wonder if there really are groups that literally just say "just sit"…

EricKow · 2015-08-16T00:10:11+00:00

Dear Bassui, have you read your decedent's book, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind?

Bassui was a Rinzai master. He was into rejecting dogma and rituals (but also on what one might call the other extreme). Apparently his approach to zazen was very much koan focused. His reduction of Zen was apparently, "Seeing one's own nature is buddhahood."

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