Now and Here

It is assumed that as a samurai, you have already decided that the fight you are going to engage in is important enough to spend your life on, otherwise you should be elsewhere. Richard Babin, Iaido Sword: Kamimoto-Ha Techniques of Muso Shinden Ryu

Quite interesting, and applicable for nearly everything - if you are doing something not that important for you, it is time to think how to avoid doing this altogether.

The life is quite short, we should not waste it. On the other hand, we should not be afraid. Anyway, we are going to die, it can happen any moment. I believe the best we can do is to strive to die something that matters. Perhaps it would be a good practice to ask ourselves: is it OK if I die doing what I am just going to do?

This attitude does not stem only from Eastern mysticism - it is present at the core of our Western culture as well - just peruse through the pages of the Bible. We only tend to forget it, and that is our fault, for which there are no excuses.

Books received

Yesterday I received a few books from Amazon.

First of all the long awaited book Iaido Sword : Kamimoto-Ha
Techniques of Muso Shinden Ryu
By Richard Babin.

I am very glad to have a good book on eclipse plugin development.
For now I only looked throough a couple of chapters, but I can say this
is probably the book I was looking for.

Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins (Eclipse Series)
By: Eric Clayberg, Dan Rubel

For those of you, who do not know what Eclipse is: It is very
sophisticated tool integration platform, also an IDE for Java and
virtually any other language. And it is open source. Just look at
www.eclipse.org nad give it a try.

Besides I got second part of the Japanese for Busy People course.

A little recollection

In 1993 I spent my summer vacation in Wales. There I get to know a student of physics named Gareth. He used to write and sent Gareth's Newsletter. It was one piece of paper that contained information on what he was doing. The kind of info we want to share with friends and family. Newsletter was more convenient than sending personal letters to God knows how many people. It was the time before the explosion of Internet popularity.

And nowadays he probably owns a blog...

Nihongo Journal

Two days ago I got the latest issue of Nihongo Journal, an excellent magazine for the learners of Japanese.

Pity, the magazine will not be available after March 2005.;-( AFAIK there is no other magazine like this one.