Five Tips to Incorporate Mindfulness Into Your Daily Routine

1.  Notice, don’t think.

Pretend you are a traveler or student encountering this activity for the very first time. Don’t judge, label, and think about what you’re doing. Just notice. Notice every detail with an open, beginner’s mind.

2. When in doubt, check your breathing.

If you feel your thoughts wandering from the present task, take a minute to hear and feel yourself breathe. Just paying attention to a few breaths will bring you back to the present moment. 

3. You have 5 senses, use them.

Mindfulness means truly experiencing what is going on right now. This is more than just noticing what something looks like. What does it smell like? Feel it with your hands. What is the texture? Temperature? What do you hear?

4. Have a strategy to handle nagging thoughts.

Occasionally we all have thoughts that won’t go away—so you need a strategy for how to handle them. I like to have a notebook with me at all times to write any nagging to-dos, ideas or issues. If you write them down, your mind can relax because it knows you can go back to them later.

5. It is what it is.

You don’t need to analyze your mindfulness experience. Don’t worry about what it all means or if you’re being mindful enough. Just try to be mindful every day. Come more fully into the present moment. Let the experience be what it is.

Tiny Buddha ™ 

Copyright © 2013

Rethinking Blogs

I was looking for a blog post for this class and ran across this article, "Rethinking Blogs at The New York Times."  The New York Times have redesigned their blogs last month, which was really a re-platform.  It meant moving from WordPress-only service to a WordPress as an app inside of the NYTimes platform.

In addition to learning about the re-platform (a behind the scenes look), the article discusses "how blogs used to work." 

In the past, article pages were generated into static HTML files when published. This was good because it was lightning fast, but bad because those files and assets were very difficult to change once they were published.

to how they work now.

The new platform has two main technologies at its center: a new PHP rendering framework and Grunt. Our codebase is a collection of repos that get built into apps via Grunt and deployed by RPMs/Puppet.

It's pretty technical, but some of you might find it interesting to know how large blog sites figure out how to move from old to new blog techniques.

U.S. 'Falling Way Behind' High Speed Internet

I mentioned this in class.  I heard an interview with law professor, Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the Gilded Age, who explains how we got to this point. "The [Federal Communications Commission] in the early 2000s really thought that competition would do the job of regulatory oversight — that that would protect Americans." [You can read the summary or listen to her interview - I recommend the latter.]

The idea was that cable, telephone and wireless companies would battle it out, which would yield low prices for American consumers. "As it turns out, they were wrong and we've come into an era where these markets have consolidated and for most Americans, their only choice for high-speed, high-capacity Internet connection is their local cable monopoly."

In her book, Crawford reminds us that the U.S. had some of the fastest speeds and lowest prices in the world for high-speed Internet access.

The nation was poised to be the global leader in the new knowledge-based economy. Today that global competitive advantage has all but vanished because of a series of government decisions and resulting monopolies that have allowed dozens of countries, including Japan and South Korea, to pass us in both speed and price of broadband. This steady slide backward not only deprives consumers of vital services needed in a competitive employment and business market—it also threatens the economic future of the nation.

"Americans aren't quite aware of it," says Crawford, "because we don't look beyond our borders, but we're falling way behind in the pack of developed nations when it comes to high-speed Internet access, capacity and prices."  At issue is whether the new jobs, new innovations, new services of the 21st century will come from the United States or they'll come from Stockholm, Seoul, Beijing, where there are kids already used to and playing in these very high capacity networks.