This post is to mark a point in time I want to remember and to make a public declaration of an insight I had while sitting on March 6th, 2007.

Any good buddhist will tell you that to be free from suffering one needs to be free from desires and ignorance. I’ve maintained a sitting practice for almost twelve years now and have yet to starve out desire and ignorance. As long as I’m human I’m going to roll around in my own misery and cause other people suffering every now and then.

So I sat with that. Rather then pretending to be a perfect practitioner, I let that part of me speak I always try to supress.

Why am I sitting?

• To become enlightened? Nope. I dispelled that myth awhile ago.
• To remember who i am and am not? Yes
• To help other people who are sufferring? Yes

But wait a moment. Isn’t my wanting to help other people who are suffering itself a desire? Why would I want to help people if it’s just going cause more suffering for myself (since I would then have a desire)? How awkward and confusing!

But you know what? As long as we’re human we’re gonna suffer. Life is suffering and we cause it, and that doesn’t make it good or bad. It’s just what it is. If we create it we can also choose it. We can want what we have. We can choose our suffering. That’s very empowering.

Now this might sound like I’m saying we should give up and accept our suffering or that we should ourselves become victims. No such thing. Authentic compassion can invoke some tough love when needed. The irony to all of this is there is no suffering. There’s not even anyone or anything to save. A friend once told me “True enlightenment is the realization there is no enlightenment.”. If you understand that, you’ll get my previous remarks.

So on March 6th I took the Bodhisattva vows. I made a conscious choice to be human rather than always yearning for something greater somwhere else. I am choosing my suffering and as such can experience the fullness of life and become a resource for others.

Big Heart.

Two chapters from Jeremy Zawodny's and Derek Balling's book
High Performance MySQL are available over at mysql.com. Server Performance Tuning contains great information on RAID architectures, how to manage tmp tables, avoid disk thrashing, running out of memory and also resolving CPU bottlenecks. There's also a very informative chapter on Replication.

A great Open Source and free application for managing mailing lists is Mailman. It has a web interface for both admins and end-users, and usually comes with most hosting packages you sign up for on the web.

One limitation to this web interface however, is it doesn’t have the ability to export your user list. So what do you do if want to backup your data or move to another mailing solution? You’ve got to pop open that command line and dig in.

You need to find where mailman is installed. You can do this with: find / -name list_members -print which tells you the location of the mailmain executable program list_members. We’ll be using that later. Once that’s found, navigate to that directory.

Hopefully you’re in some location like /usr/local/mailman/bin, and you probably see other mailman specific programs in that folder as well. Now, to use list_members, you need the name of your mailing list. You’d think that well, the name of your mailing list is the name of your mailing list. But it’s not always the case. For example, if you run the program ./list_lists from your current folder you’ll see something like:

root@localhost [/usr/local/mailman/bin]# ./list_lists 
2 matching mailing lists found:
       Announce - [no description available]
        Mailman - Mailman site list

root@localhost [/usr/local/mailman/bin]# ./list_members Announce
No such list: announce

root@localhost [/]# cd /usr/local/mailman/lists/
root@localhost [/usr/local/mailman/lists]# ls
./  ../  announce_example.com/  mailman/

Ah, so our real list name is announce_example.com. Now we can go back and export our user list with the following command.

root@localhost [/]# /usr/local/mailman/bin/list_members announce_example.com > subscribers.txt

Your subscriber emails are exported to the file subscribers.txt line by line that you can then take with you. Whew!

I know I'm getting old when I sign up for an Individual Retirement Account. Of all the information I've read and financial advisors and friends I've spoken with, folks generally recommend Vanguard for the brokerage of choice. Their website is easy to navigate and your accounts are simple to manage. There's the right mix of information for the dummies who never took an investing class to more advanced info for the money jocks.

So today I opened a Roth IRA with 50/50 split between the Vanguard LifeStrategy Conservative Growth Fund VSCGX and the Vanguard Target Retirement 2050 Fund VFIFX.

For anyone new to the world of investing, I highly recommend Investing for Dummies. The content is wide and vast and gives you some great jumping off points to explore from. The book tends to play it on the conservative side which is good idea for those just diving in.

What are you left with when you strip yourself of everything you think you are? You were never born, for example. Your parents didn't even know this, they could have never known. You knew, but forgot. Observe yourself falling away from your self and stop believing the thoughts about who you think you are. Right there, beyond expectations, beyond goals, beyond fear... is you.

You, my friend, are beautiful. When all other perceptions fall away what else can arise but Joy itself? There's not a thing you need to do to become who you are. You're complete and whole and loved and perfect in every single moment of You.