Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

Engineering beautiful software jon aquino labs | personal blog

Friday, April 30, 2004

Three leadership books that I want to read soon: Success Bound: Breaking Free of Mediocrity, The 108 Skills of Natural Born Leaders, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.

And I definitely want to reread Nonviolent Communication.

But right now I'm working through The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People.

This is a stab at a mission statement, written in Sept 2003. It takes the form of an obituary that I'd hoped to have written about me when my years finally come to an end. Stuff I like: "gratitude to God", "enrich the lives of the people he met on the way", "source of strength for his mother".

Obituary – Jonathan Aquino. Born February 15, 1977. Died August 18, 2040.

Jon determined that his mission was to live a life of gratitude to God, and to continually seek ways to enrich the lives of the people he met on the way.

Jon was the music director of Sacred Heart Church in Victoria BC for nearly four decades. He helped generations of parishioners to pray their joys, pains, and hopes through song.

Since childhood, Jon had a passion for computer programming. He programmed many computer systems that helped Canadian businesses and governments to achieve their goals. Jon also assembled over a hundred personal computers to give to people free of charge.

Jon deeply cared for his family and friends, and was easy to laugh with, confide in, and approach for help. He was a source of strength for his mother Elvira, his father Frank, his brother Dave, his sister-in-law Pam, and his other family and good friends: Victor, Ninang Lou, Betta, Samuel, Tadahiko, Yong-Ho, Takeshi, Hyun-Pil, Katsuhiro, Carlos, Corinne, Dale, Alan, Nick.

Another thing to go into the mission statement: the BC-Ferries analogy of life, posted below.

For the mission statement: sharpening the saw so I will have energy/capability to help others -- something like that

Over the next few weeks (months?) I want to start hashing out a new mission statement. Rather than come up with one overnight, I'll be blogging various things that I want to go into it -- I'm hoping that there will be a point of culmination when I can finally coalesce all the ideas into a cohesive statement.

Some things I know I want in there: people who don't have what they need (food, clothing, and a home, especially), NVC stuff including the idea of "making life wonderful", Covey's stuff, ...

One of Stephen Covey's mission-statement exercises is to visualize your own funeral, three years from now, and listen to what the eulogists say about you. I tried this for a few minutes, and the first speaker is my mom. Among the things she said was that I was the best son in the world (with Dave), and also that I was very gentle, and very supportive of her endeavours.

Got to e-mail this one around work: project.jpg (JPEG Image, 800x600 pixels)

These leadership books look really interesting: GGGG.com - The Online Shopping Guide: Books - Inspiration - Necessities for Technical Leadership

Leadership book with good reviews: Amazon.com: Books: Success Bound: Breaking Free of Mediocrity

It's surprisingly hard to find a good Printable Periodic Table

Alhambra, Hansa, Goa, San Juan, Metro

RoadMatcher -- Options Dialog launched from AutoMatch tab -- make sticky (for the run)

RoadMatcher -- change "Show all confirmation dialogs" from toggle-button to checkbox or regular button

Thursday, April 29, 2004

Good Biology sample quizzes. Needs Internet Explorer.

Freeware mentioned on Slashdot: Slashdot | First Ten Programs on New Install?: "Windows"

Mike Skallas' Ad blocking hosts file

Good thing to add to the websites being downloaded to my PDA: BBC News Online | Home

Good chapter 1 quiz: Biology 12 - Chapter 1 Quiz

Ideas for music for upcoming Sundays:

May 2

*All People That on Earth Do Dwell
Around the Throne a Glorious Band
*Come, Rejoice before Your Maker
*Rejoice in God
The Lord's My Shepherd

May 9

Joyful, Joyful, We Adore You
Let All Things Now Living
To Jesus Christ, Our Sovereign King
*We Will Extol Your Praise

May 16

Come, Holy Ghost
Creator Spirit, Lord of Grace

May 23

Alleluia! Sing to Jesus
As We Gather at Your Table
I Come with Joy, v 3

May 30

Come, Holy Ghost
Creator Spirit, Lord of Grace

Useful command-line options for the AVG virus scanner:

"C:\Program Files\Grisoft\AVG6\AVGW.EXE" /NOSPLASH/PLAN/NTEST

"C:\Program Files\Grisoft\AVG6\AVGINET.EXE" /sched

Eclipse wishlist: that I didn't have to be on a blank line to get the local history for a class

RoadMatcher
Q: Why does the info tool show nothing?
A: It operates on the selected layers. Make sure the layer(s) of interest are selected

Eclipse wishlist: CodeAssist suggestions sorted by frequence of use (esp. classes to import)

I find eyestrain relief in looking away from the monitor and toward a light source like the fluorescent lights overhead or outside in the sunlight. Perhaps my brain needs the full spectrum of colours once in a while.

todo: resume studies of poetry and music

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

I've got TortoiseCVS on my home computer, tracking revisions of my text files. Cool! Wish my work box were as clean and neat.

todo: set up shaw account for jump mailing list

linksPerHour scheduled task: delete 7AM run time -- process doesn't end for some reason

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

todo: note new garbage schedule

todo: TortoiseCVS

todo: reread Covey

todo: oe: set return addr to gmail

Msgr M's homily: try it God's way, if you want fulfilment. (perhaps set =
your hearts on things above). God calls us to a greater life, and we are =
to call each other to a greater life.=20

Wh Hd idea: violin accomp

todo: get Mom back on MS-Word

blog mods: Amazon QuickSearch,

ideas: poor, gnutext

about.com tool

todo: join Monday night NVC group. See if Ji-Hwan wants to come.

the virus on my Gateway: Downloader.Keenval.B

Monday, April 26, 2004

todo: review Italic Handwriting book

todo: fix blog tool

todo: "Edit: Bookmarks" tool

todo: bookmarks: rename Groups to Google: Groups

WMS example: http://www2.dmsolutions.ca/cgi-bin/mswms_gmap

Sunday, April 25, 2004

todo - New Session dialog - drop table headings

gift idea: cheap scheaffer calligraphic pens -- they do the job well!

todo: blog graph: set min y to 0

todo: set MSN antivirus to avgse.exe

This is a little piece I wrote on September 22, 2003.

Life is like a BC Ferries trip. It has a beginning and an end; the whole trip takes 90 minutes. Some spend the trip reading; others, playing video games; still others, chatting with friends. Eating is a pleasure. Some sit with family, mostly in silence. There's a gift shop. There are lineups. You hear laughter, and grumblings. People usually don't talk to strangers, though it happens sometimes. A woman sorts her beads into pill containers. A man studies the behaviour of the people in his vicinity.

Then there are those who take on responsibilities for the good of all: the person vacuuming, the cashier, the cook. These have taken on roles above and beyond that of passengers. They sacrifice their entire trip for the good of others.

So how does one take a ferry well? How do I want to spend my trip? Definitely enjoying the scenery a bit, though not too much as it can become tiresome to do so. But mainly sitting in silence, ideally in the company of friends or family, merely sharing a word of encouragement or empathy once in a while. In any case, quietly giving thanks to God for the food, the fresh air, the peace, the beauty of the sea. Yes, I would spend my trip in peaceful gratitude, meditating on the good things I am receiving from God in the moment. And hopefully, by some stroke of creativity or circumstance, doing some good to some stranger, before the trip ends.

Near the end of our journey, we are tired, and we want to get off the boat as soon as possible. If it's nighttime, we ask, "Do you see the lights yet?" The ferry walls shudder during the last few minutes of the journey. Then silence. We leave the vessel and set foot on land.

From this meditation I suppose I have found my mission: To live a life of gratitude to God, and to continually seek ways to enrich the lives of people I meet on the way.

Open Source program for scriptable image manipulation (eg png => gif): www.ImageMagick.org

Firefox download manager -- I wish it would let me open up exe's that I download

Jon's web-surfing statistics for the past week:

http://blogger.com (1868 visits)
http://gmail.google.com (511 visits)
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com (421 visits)
http://myhq.com (208 visits)
http://google.com (206 visits)
http://jonaquino-bookmarks.blogspot.com (111 visits)
http://groups.google.com (108 visits)
http://webmail.shaw.ca (95 visits)
http://ad.doubleclick.net (89 visits)
http://wiki.codehaus.org (68 visits)
http://google.ca (67 visits)
http://jonaquino.blogspot.com (67 visits)
http://ask.slashdot.org (50 visits)
http://backflip.com (45 visits)
http://w3schools.com (37 visits)
http://directory.google.com (35 visits)
http://calendar.yahoo.com (34 visits)
http://mybookmarks.com (32 visits)
http://rb.superpages.ca (31 visits)
http://texturizer.net (28 visits)

To do: tell the people at work about the two ways to make their LCD's
sharp: image lock (it's a bit of an art) and once their screens are
crisp, they can turn on Microsoft's experimental XP ClearType
technology (if necessary, adjust with ClearTweak) to achieve a
theoretical resolution increase of 3x. I'd be happy to try tweaking
the settings of your LCD monitor if you're finding it blurry.

Saturday, April 24, 2004

Hard to believe, but Google employees get lunch for free: Google�Job Opportunities

Love the formatting of this blog: kadyellebee: "11 blogger tips" June 11, 2003

movie idea: the story of Einstein. Kind of like A Beautiful Mind.

todo: check out Blogger tips e.g. is there a seach bar we can add?

I'm quite proud of this homepage:

  • I use my homepage bookmarks on the left instead of my browser bookmarks. Thus, I get my bookmarks regardless of which browser or which computer I'm on.
  • The bookmarks on the left are in fact a separate webpage, which means I can load them into the sidebar of my Firefox browser (nice). I wish MyIE2 allowed custom sidebars like Firefox -- MyIE2 is a lot more responsive on my secondary computer (Pentium 166).
  • I can edit the bookmarks from any web browser because they are on a (dummy) Blogger blog page -- the Blogger tools make editing easy. And there is a neat Firefox trick to block the ads.
  • Some of the bookmarks are handy submit forms. My favourite is the one that posts to my blog. So much power in such little text boxes! I like how the submit forms are buttonless -- got that idea from BoardGameGeek.
  • Some of the more interesting links are: a link to TightVNC running on my secondary computer (I find that the Java client has faster screen refreshes than the native client?!), links to my favourite Yahoo services (calendar, address book, notepad -- all of which can sync with my Palm thanks to Yahoo), Gmail (I'm quite proud to be among the first users -- being a Blogger member helped here).
  • A recent addition to my bookmarks has been the BBC Week At A Glance -- the most important news from around the world for the past week, compressed into a single page, neatly arranged, with pictures. I'm impressed. As Edward Tufte says, "Maximize the data-ink."
  • I've set up a Groovy script to run every week, posting to my blog a summary of my web-surfing activity for the past 7 days. Wasn't too hard, with the help of jwz's mork.pl script for parsing the Firefox history.dat file. I hope to soon add a graph of links visited per hour, generated by gnuplot (haven't used this before -- scriptable charting, I'm hoping).
  • On a theoretical note, I noticed an interesting thing about my categorizations. Some of them work just as well inverted. For example, I started with "Mail: Google" and "Mail: Shaw", but then I found I would tend to look in the G's for Google mail, so I added "Google: Mail" (and "Shaw: Mail" too). There's something interesting going on here but I can't put my finger on it -- or maybe this is elementary set theory, which I haven't studied.

Here it is reduced to a single line:

perl mork.pl --age 1h "c:\Documents and Settings\Jon\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\Default User\ibe1qsso.slt\history.dat" | cut -f2 | gawk '{i=i+$1}END{print i}' | gawk "{print strftime(\"%%Y-%%m-%%d %%H:%%M\", systime()), $0}" >> hourly-statistics.txt

This little script will log the number of links you visit per hour. Makes for an interesting chart.

c:\cygwin\bin\date >> hourly-statistics.txt

perl mork.pl --age 1h "c:\Documents and Settings\Jon\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\Default User\ibe1qsso.slt\history.dat" | cut -f2 | gawk '{i=i+$1}END{print i}' >> hourly-statistics.txt

c:\cygwin\bin\echo >> hourly-statistics.txt

My first Blat script: c:\BLAT222\full\blat.exe exsultet.groovy -to "jonathan.aquino@gmail.com" -s "Test Blat"

Good stuff on dealing with stress at work: Appreciating Your Stressful IT Job?

Music at Sacred Heart for Saturday, April 24. With Bea Sheard.

47 Sing A New Song
395 The Strife Is O'er
394 The Light Of Christ
389 Jesus Christ Is Ris'n Today

blog ideas: add stuff from Yahoo Toolbar; review mru urls

Good stuff on the basics of chemical bonds: MIT Biology Hypertextbook: Chemistry Review

Friday, April 23, 2004

and here we see the distinction between polar covalent bonds and non-polar covalent bonds:

Excellent graphic showing the difference between covalent bonding (strong) and hydrogen bonding (weak):

Tips on using Eclipse

things to do with my brother #305: nerf hockey, with me in net


__________ NOD32 1.732 (20040422) Information __________

This message was checked by NOD32 Antivirus System.
http://www.nod32.com

Highly rated virus scanner: Eset Home

Thursday, April 22, 2004

A script for parsing Firefox's history.dat file.

Firefox history: chrome://communicator/content/history/history.xul

AbiWord Tips & Tricks (for Windows)

Mom found a trojan-horse virus with AVG. Hopefully the AVG scan we're running now will kill it; otherwise I'll need to try another virus scanner like Avast.

Todo: turn off Run Scripts in Outlook Express if possible.

MSRM data modelling standards

Ministry of Forests Integrated Data Dictionary: IDD Home Page

AVG's scheduled tests are not running (but its scheduled updates are). Probably because the computer is sleeping. Move the test time to 3:15 AM, when scheduled tasks run, to ensure the computer is awake.

William Head Notes: Bruce in 2 wks, Tim bass On Eagle's in D, Bill in 4 =
wks (give msg thr Tim)

Notes on today's music: Blest be the Lord - move flute harmony earlier, =
as we may not reach v 3; also guitar might add some desirable =
percussion. JC is ris'n - faster tempo (but keep the rich accompaniment)

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Interesting for times when I'm interested in history: Turning the Pages

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

Possible personal project for World Vision: internationalizing JUMP

Monday, April 19, 2004

Msgr M: Patron saint of questionerse

samtron sc-528UXL

stuff to do with my bro: eat Colby cheese

Sunday, April 18, 2004

Perhaps the convergence is thus: To be close to God and my family, and to be a part of making God's wonderful things happen. Or even more succinctly: To be a part of making God's wonderful things happen. It's got community, the connection to God, the "wonderful" things that NVC aims at, and the "missa est" that Sister Judi suggested.

A new mission statement? Tonight Sister Judi suggested this as a mission: To be the presence of Christ to others. In other words, ambassadors for Christ. I'll try to live by this this week. Previously I had taken my mission to be: To be close to God and to my family, and to be a part of making wonderful things happen. I sense that these two missions will converge.

Printed William Head transparencies in 22 pt Times New Roman. A bit bigger might be better tho.

William Head 2004-04-18


GP 11 And The Father Will Dance - strum 5, GP 4

G 189 Send Us Your Spirit - strum 5

Celtic Alleluia - strum 5, G

Holy - pluck 8, CBW 283A

Lamb - pick 6.5, capo 1, Dsus+Csap

(overhead) Alleluia Give Thanks - pick 6.5, CBW 383

Blessing - pick 6.5, G

(overhead) Sent Forth By God's Blessing - pluck 8, CBW 533


Master 2.9, Lo 15, Mid 15, Hi 5
Port 1: pluck 8, pick 6.5, strum 5

I've discovered the free Yahoo Photos service, which lets me store pictures that I can add to my blog like so:

Saturday, April 17, 2004

Todo: create a Family directory under My Shared Pictures, but make it accessible only to Jon, Mom and Dave.

Add to sitescooper: Yahoo Buzz

Sweet spot for adjusting scanned pictures: brightness 60, contrast 40

Good low-level freeware; not sure if I'd ever need to use any of it though: Sysinternals Freeware - Utilities for Windows NT and Windows 2000

Java code-comprehension tools: Juliet Competitors

Interesting: RoboType 3

Another good collection of free software: GNUWin II online Version :: Programs - List by categories

Good collection of open-source programs: The OpenCD

Good Slashdot freeware links: Free Software at the Local Library?

Met Tom on Government St (SMUS class of '95)

For me, what separates fun projects from drudgery is the language: I =
prefer Java, C#, Python and Ruby to PL/SQL, IMF (XML), data modeling, =
documentation, JSPs. In short, programming that's easy to run and easy =
to debug.

Mission: To be close to God and to my family, and to be a part of making =
wonderful things happen, with Jesus as my model.

The day
*Praying in a playground
* Hello te Michelle dropping Matt off
* Costco with Mom
* Farewell to Dave at the ferry terminal
* Tim Horton's with Mom and Dave. Relaxed.
* worried, stressed out about the Uri problem
* morning Mass

Future Exsultet singers: Angela, Rafael, Arlene, Megan

I regret complimenting H_____ on his singing. For one thing, it was a =
false compliment, and he knew it, so he probably felt embarassed and =
dejected; moreover, it wasn't said with meaning -- I desire meaning in =
everything I do. Resolution: express gratitude, not compliments:

Easter Sunday II Music:

* Which alleluia? Ask Bea which one we did.

Blest be the lord (10)
392 That Easter Day With Joy Was Bright
389 Jesus Christ Is Ris'n Today
Sing to the mountains (48)

Friday, April 16, 2004

Jason Ross recommends this board game: Hansa

Trim II Specifications

Useful plotting tool with command-line interface: gnuplot homepage

Thursday, April 15, 2004

We live in two realities. The first reality is the reality of work, TV, meals, books, sports, bills, appointments, missed appointments, and groceries. The second reality is harder to enter into. It sometimes takes a natural disaster, a major life trauma, losing one's job, losing one's home, losing one's brother or sister or child, before we can enter into this second reality. It is the reality of what really matters, and we usually don't live in this second reality. Most of our time is spent living in the first, the reality of mindless activity. It's easier to enter into; but in fact it is hard to live this way because it is living without meaning, and meaning is one of our fundamental needs.

I think about the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan -- a terrible natural disaster that compelled 2 million people to leave the reality of mindless activity and enter into the reality of what really matters. The reason Kobe sticks out to me is that some businesses actually continued to operate because they invested in sophisticated computer systems to back up their data. What's interesting to me is that while most of the population entered into the reality of what really matters, this privileged few remained in the reality of mindless activity. Is not the reality of what really matters the "true" reality: living in the present, painfully aware of one's mortality, free of hatred, only too willing to assist the people suffering nearby, suddenly prayerful?

After 9/11, people attended churches in surprising numbers -- they had entered into the second reality and realized what really mattered.

I want to live in this second reality always. I want to leave the reality of anxiety over bill payments, mortgages, job security, comparisons, what's new on the Internet, what the American Idol contestants sound like, what's new in the stores. I want to enter into the reality of prayer, closeness to my God, peace, living in this very moment, gratitude for having many of my needs met, closeness to my family, and meaning.

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

What I want out of life: a close relationship with God and with my =
family, and being a part of making wonderful things happen

Monday, April 12, 2004

Wish we had something like this for Canada: Project Vote Smart -

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Example of calling the Groovy interpreter: groovy/groovy-core/src/main/groovy/ui/ConsoleSupport.java - view - 1.3

Stuff I want to do for the Groovy project: write a better groovysh (in groovy, of course!); create a jEdit mode; create an XEmacs mode

Novena, day 2

When Father Sig learned that I was singing the Exsultet this year, he seemed a bit disappointed -- he told me he was hoping to have a different person sing the Exsultet each year. Perhaps what is important to Father Sig here is giving others opportunities to contribute. Now I'm disheartened because my need for support isn't being met -- I hope Father Sig will still fully support me in my singing of the Exsultet despite this situation (I think he will try). I was not aware of his desire to vary the Exsultet singer each year. I hope to have harmony in my relationship with him.

Resolution: Vary the Exultset singers yearly, starting next year.

Exsultet: sing "joice" on G

Easter choir members: Gonnie, Tilly, Louise, Nan, Rocio, me, Charlie, Megan, Arlene, Martin, Daphne, Rafael (organist)

"Remember Password" bookmarklet for FireFox: Form Bookmarklets

to do when Dave visits: things in the Sun, like a picnic; go for coffee =
with Mom; read in the park; McDonald's

If only money were distributed on a needs basis rather than a =
performance basis. We've got it backwards because those who perform best =
probably have the fewest needs. But I'm discouraged when I consider the =
effort to convince an entire nation of this.

Friday, April 09, 2004

todo: tell Ji-Hwan and coworkers about ClearType

Easter Sunday:

395 The Strife Is O'er (teach it?)
394 The Light Of Christ (in C)
Flute solo: Ash Grove (accompany with low violin, perhaps?)
406 Sing With All The Saints In Glory (in F)
389 Jesus Christ Is Ris'n Today

The day:
* good chat with Mom on how to pray. She suggests novenas. Today is Day 1, and I am praying for healing for Wil
* dinner with Ji-Hwan and Mom: Nong Shin noodles, and a delicious dish of scrambled eggs and hash browns
* Review PC World's article on the Top 100 Websites
* rehearse Easter Vigil music with Rocio
* Good Friday service. Moving violin piece: When I Survey.
* Stressed out as I quickly practice for the Good Friday service
* delighted with the result of Windows XP's ClearType
* thrilled to get jEdit's SuperScript plug-in working with Groovy. Post to mailing list: improvements to instructions.
* review today's Slashdot articles
* Wake up after 7 hours of sleep -- regret not going to bed an hour earlier

A better Yahoo? Librarians' Index to the Internet - lii.org

Another online dictionary with potential: OneLook Dictionary Search

Potentially good online dictionary: yourdictionary.com

Great online reference tools: iTools

An amazing animation of the universe: Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You - Secret Worlds: The Universe Within - Interactive Java Tutorial

Great summary of the best websites: CyberTimes Navigator

Goals for this Easter weekend:
* focus on nurturing my spiritual life
* consider how to balance the energy I put into my various roles: spiritual, mental, physical, social, family, music, computer programming
* spend time connecting with mom and bro

Interesting info on Good Friday: Lent

Home LCD monitor image-lock settings: coarse 1344, fine 0

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

idea for a flute piece for Ellena: Arirang

Mission: to connect with God, and to make life wonderful for myself and =
others

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Object Computing, Inc. - Java News Brief - February�2004: "Drools (an open source, object-oriented, Java rules engine)"

Good summary of Groovy syntax: Object Computing, Inc. - Java News Brief - February�2004

Sent to me by Jason Ross: SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit

Interesting idea: Prevayler

Things I really need to do: prayer, correspond with friends and family, =
music appreciation, emacs lisp

idea for ellena's solos: gregorian chant?

Monday, April 05, 2004

Msgr Michael's homily on Palm Sunday: Nothing should separate us from =
Jesus, not even death. Jesus gives us this mission: reach out to people, =
help them to find hope.

With the little time I have left, I want to live with integrity and =
generosity.

Games to read reviews on: San Juan, Clans, Industria, Settlers Card Game

Sunday, April 04, 2004

It's Holy Week, and there is lots of music to prepare and rehearsals to attend. I must say I'm a bit overwhelmed with these and other commitments this week. I'm hoping that I can get through the week with efficiency, effectiveness, and peace.

My goal this week is to stay connected to God each day -- through prayer in the morning and evening, and also throughout the day with spontaneous prayers and simply being aware of God's presence. May God help me to stay connected.

I also need exercise, and re-connection with some friends (Dale and Vic) and family members (Dad and Ninang Lou). A bit of professional development (music, programming) wouldn't hurt either. I'll take some time out early this week to plan some time for these things.

At William Head, I asked H_____ if I could sit with him, and he agreed. We were then silent -- him reading and me staring at the wall. This lasted for five minutes, when at last Fred joined us and started a conversation with H_____. I left, feeling rather embarassed. I regret remaining silent. I guess at the time I wanted H_____ to have space, but perhaps that is not what he needed -- perhaps he needed to be heard and understood. In a similar situation in the future, I will ask if the person wants to chat or needs space -- then I'll have the clarity I need.

The day:
* Set up script to download Dilbert and Astronomy Picture Of The Day
* Church service at William Head
* Visit two plant stores with Mom and Ji Hwan
* Farewell to my bro at the ferry terminal
* Lunch with Ji Hwan, Dave, and Mom at the Rumrunner's in Sidney
* Music at Sacred Heart -- Ellena played a contemplative flute piece without accompaniment

Disabled the HID Input Service to get Scheduled Tasks to work. If this works, then change the power configuration from Always On to Home and see if they still work.

Saturday, April 03, 2004

Need more exercise. Wish I still had PE class.

St. Alphonsus, quoted in Awaken to prayer: how to pray as a Catholic: "How many are there who, not having any better opportunity, raise their hearts to God and apply their minds to mental prayer, without leaving their occupations, their work, or who meditate even while traveling."

The day:
* Learn with Mom how to burn CD's
* Watch Canucks win the division title
* Eat Ali Baba pizza with my bro
* Watch boxing with my bro
* Window-shop on Government St. with Mom and Dave
* Stop by St. Andrew's Cathedral for a brief prayer with Mom and Dave
* Tim Horton's on McKenzie with Mom and Dave
* Streamline my My Yahoo page
* Lunch with Ji Hwan and my bro: salad, halibut, tomatos, and rice.
* Half-hour liturgical-music practice with Ellena, our flautist

Today I felt kind of disconnected from God -- I spent less than 10 minutes in prayer total. I want to spend more time in prayer -- and more time generally in meditation. I'm intrigued by the idea of "awareness meditation" -- I'd like to try that tomorrow for 20-30 minutes.

Someone's freeware list -- I was intrigued as I read it.

Seems like today is the transition day between cool and warm weather in =
Victoria (Mar 29).

Mods to Easter program: Agnus Dei: sins => sin; delete Springs of Water

Find out more about Ji-Hwan's poetry interests.

Monsignor Michael's homily. Jesus' judgement is an offering of new life. =
Our dignity comes from our God's love for us.=20

ideas for stuff to do when my brother visits: aquarium, art gallery, =
mall, ice cream, meals, park, rich neighbourhoods,filipino games, =
driving,hacky sacky, tnt, chinese, sushi, richmond, kitchen cabinet, =
scrabble,Jon_Aquino_Blog@shaw.ca granville island, memory box & =
photographs, farm, seaside, science world, hike, arm wrestling, walk =
along false creek, arcade classics, camping trip, yaletown window =
shopping

Notes for Sunday: print extra music, flute volume control

Saturday todos: register to pay bills online, prep music for next two =
Sundays, check out Chi-Hwang's home page, practice Exsultet

Thursday, April 01, 2004

How the day went:
11 PM - check out Yahoo Calendar sync'ing with my Palm Pilot
10 PM - prepare music for upcoming masses and communion services
9 PM - discussed with mom: housing a second Korean student
8 PM - Harry and Ron take on the troll
7 PM - watched Harry Potter DVD with my bro
5 PM - ate Nong Shin noodles, meatballs, sausages, and rice, prepared by mom
4 PM - browsed internet at home
3 PM - Tim Hortons with my bro
2 PM - exchanged computer monitor at Value Village
11 AM - arrived home
10 AM - left work early to be with bro
9 AM - arrived at work

What I'm most grateful for today is the will and the time to say a short prayer of thanks to God before bedtime. Let's do more of that!

A good thing to add to Sitescooper: Sacred Space

My picks for hymns for Easter Sunday:
389 Jesus Christ Is Ris'n Today
406 Sing With All The Saints In Glory

Good Friday music:
378 O Sacred Head
382 When I Behold
Violin during the veneration of the cross: Gift of Finest Wheat
Scrutinies

Hymn picks for Holy Thursday:
435 Lift High The Cross
68 Pange Lingua Gloriosi (need to make sure I get the Latin right)
Not sure if we need music for washing of the feet and transfer of the reserved sacrament -- might ask Raf to be ready to play interludes.

Raf's picks:
(During washing of the feet) Whatsoever you do (246)
The cry of the poor (93)
Only this I want (224)

My picks for hymns for April 4:
368 O Cross Of Christ (rehearse people before mass)
62 All Glory, Praise, and Honour
Raf's picks:
Glory and Praise (17)
Son of David (145)

Script for downloading Astronomy Picture Of The Day:
c:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i "c:\Documents and Settings\jon\My Documents\Programming And Computers\astronomy.sh"
lynx -source http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html | grep 'href="image' | head --lines=1 | sed 's#^.*"\(.*\)".*$#http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/\1#' | xargs lynx -dump > /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/Jon/My\ Documents/My\ Pictures/Astronomy\ Picture\ Of\ The\ Day.jpg