http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/improve-your-mind-by-reading-the-classics/

As you can see in the first picture, she is a very long-haired cat. She’s strikingly pretty in fact. But the lack of grooming means that her fur becomes a horrible mess. We try to brush her, but it needs to be a daily task and I’m afraid we don’t have the time to do it that often.

Sadly, the end result is displayed in the photo below. Yes, we had to have her shaved! She was quite a good sport about the whole thing, and we eventually got over the urge to laugh every time we saw her.

This time we’re really going to brush her as often as it takes to keep her fur nice and clean. Sorry Angel!

Looking after this many fish is not a trivial task! Maintaining an aquarium is practically a science in itself, and goldfish are very messy. It was a constant battle to keep the water clean and algea-free. That aside, however, it was nice having the fish. It was very peaceful to sit and watch them float around.

The years passed, and, much to my surprise, not a single fish died. They grew and grew; the larger ones were roughly a foot long. Each spring I’d take them all out to the pond, and each fall I’d bring them back into the house. The only close call we’d ever had was when one of them somehow managed to wedge itself into a small hole in the bottom of a plastic decoration in the aquarium.

Last summer, it became Drew’s job to feed the fish each day. After school one day, he came back from feeding them and said that he couldn’t see any of them in the pond. Janette took a look and confirmed that they were all missing.

What a surprise! Five years had passed without incident, and then all thirteen disappeared in a single night!

We’re still not sure what happened to them. No fish parts have been discovered. Our first thought was that a family of stray cats from our neighbourhood were probably responsible. We’d seen one of them running out of our back yard a couple of days earlier carrying something (I’ll write more about these cats some other time). However, the kittens in this family are still quite small. It seems like they’d have a hard time catching such big fish. Raccoons are a definite possibility, but we haven’t had any problem with them in the past. Perhaps there was something different – the water level was higher than usual, so perhaps this allowed the raccoons to get a better grab on the fish.

Drew got upset when we turned off the filter in the pond, because he was worried that they were still there, hiding in a shady spot. I guess, for the kids, it’s a somewhat gentle introduction to death and the ways in which nature can seem cruel at times. Neither of them seemed terribly upset at the time, and I don’t think they’ve given it a second thought since then.

A curious thing that I had noticed over the years was that the fish popped up fairly frequently in my dreams. In these dreams, the situation was almost always the same: the fish were neglected or completely forgotten, only to be rediscovered. When I found them in my dream, I was always surprised that they were still alive in spite of the lack of food or water or whatever they’d been suffering through.

Here’s an example of a dream from a couple of years ago:

I had been given a fish tank by someone (previous owners of the house?). It was a very fancy setup – a large aquarium that had several smaller aquariums in it. I realized that I’d been neglecting the fish for weeks. Some of the fish had already died, and others were either starving or in such shallow pools of water that they could barely move. I started trying to fix one of the smaller aquariums, but I couldn’t figure out how the pump worked.

Of course, in a dream, a fish is not necessarily a fish. The fish as a symbol, particulary in Christianity, has a lot of meaning. The ‘Jesus fish’ can be found on the back of many vehicles today. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys for some very interesting reading.

In doing a bit of research about fish in dreams, I came across http://www.dreamanalysis.info/ , a Jungian psychology site. They have a fish symbol as their logo, and the following paragraph that explains this choice:

The fish is an age old symbol and one which frequently appears within dreams. Within the dream the fish tends to represent that which is formed yet remains unconscious. Catching a fish is to pull from out of the waters of the unconscious onto the dry land of ones conscious mind. The fish and fishing can also represent the process of dreaming and dream analysis itself.

My dreams may have been telling me that I’m not paying enough attention to developing these unconscious ideas, or perhaps that I’m neglecting the messages that are being communicated through my dreams.

Speaking of Jung (one of my favourite subjects), here’s another dream that had fish in it, and interestingly, Jung himself makes an appearance:

I’m in a park with Carl Jung and a person who has been looking after him in his old age. I’m disappointed to see that Jung is not aging very well – the psychological foundation that he built for himself has failed him now, and he has reverted to child-like behaviour and is a significant burden on the other person. At one point he soils himself, and then gets mad at his caretaker for ignoring him when he was trying to get his/her attention about it. I feel a bit guilty that he felt ignored, much like I would upon realizing that I’d been ignoring Drew or Owen when they were trying to get my attention. The caretaker points out that Jung loved the goldfish that are in the ponds in the park, and I look closely at them. They are huge – 18 inches long or so. Some of them are wallowing in the shallow parts of the ponds. There are also some other, darker, fish of about the same size.

This is a very interesting dream to me. From what I’ve read of Jung’s later years, he was a very serene and content person, which is in stark contrast to this dream. I’ve been reading a lot of his writing over the past couple of years, and I guess this dream indicates a reluctance on my part to fully trust his philosophy. I think you should always approach things with some degree of skepticism. Perhaps I was consciously becoming a bit too enthralled with Jung’s ideas at the time, and my unconscious sent me this message to back off a bit and consider the merits of the ideas carefully. Or it may not be specific to Jung himself. He could represent the “wise old man” archetype, in which case the warning might be about the danger of taking anyone’s ideas as your own without questioning them thoroughly, regardless of the wisdom that that person (or group of people) may posess. Wisdom is not easily come by, and it makes a lot of sense to pay close attention to what a wise person says, but you should never do it blindly.

But what about the fish in this dream? Jung did plenty of writing on the fish as a symbol, so it’s not surprising that the caretaker told me of his love for the goldfish in the pond. If the fish represent unconscious ideas, perhaps the dream is telling me that I’m getting to know the “gold”-coloured ones (i.e. pleasing to the eye) that are floating near the surface, but the real benefit will come from digging even deeper, to the “dark” ones that are not as accessible (and likely, not as pleasant). Interesting stuff.

The first thing I did when I got it was to install Ubuntu. I figured if I messed it up, it would be no big deal to re-format the whole thing and start over.

Surprisingly, it went very smooth. Here’s what I did:

• Start my laptop using the Ubuntu 6.10 Live CD
• Plug the USB drive into the computer
• Go to System > Preferences > Removable Drives and Media. Uncheck the three options for:
  • Mount removable drives when hot-plugged
  • Mount Removable Media When Inserted
  • Browse Removable Media When Inserted
• Install Ubuntu as usual. You may want to format the entire USB drive or partition it. I partitioned mine so that I had approx 30GB for linux.
• At the end of the install preparation, change the drive upon which grub will be installed to /dev/sda.
• Remove the CD and reboot.
• Configure your PC so that USB harddrives are at the top of the boot sequence (or after the CD/DVD).
• At the grub loader, you’ll need to change the boot entry from (hd1,0) to whatever is appropriate for you. It took me a few guesses, but in the end (hd0,1) worked. You’ll want to make this a permanent change by editing the grub file when Ubuntu loads.

So that’s it! It boots great on my laptop – it’s fast and everything seems to work fine. Right now I’m trying to boot on another computer, though and I’ve run into an error. More on that later.

Janette pointed out that next year, when he’s in grade one, he’ll be on his own at mealtime. If he doesn’t take it upon himself to finish the healthy parts of his lunch, there will not be anyone looking over his shoulder to make sure he’s gotten enough.

With that in mind, yesterday morning, during yet another frustrating breakfast, I told Owen that he’s not going to get any desserts until he shows us that he can do a good job eating his meals for a full week. I think it’s a reasonable approach. He’s old enough to take some responsibility.

Unfortunately, we had already planned a dinner at Boston Pizza with my father to help Drew celebrate his recent birthday. The kids’ meals at Boston Pizza come with a big chocolate-chip cookie, and I was expecting a big battle from Owen. After a few “Dad, look how much I’m eating” attempts to win favour, he slipped into his usual pattern and Janette ended up feeding him much of his food.

Surprisingly, he didn’t get upset about not getting a cookie! When we all got up to leave, he was standing at the end of the table with the cookie sitting right in front of him. He reached over, pushed it toward Drew, and said “Eat it” with a little smile on his face. I was very proud of him! So proud, in fact, that I immediately wanted to break down and give him the cookie for being so mature about it. Argh! It’s tough being a responsible parent!

Why I read it: I’ve really enjoyed much of what I’ve read from the great Russian writers, whether it’s short stories from Anton Chekhov, “War and Peace” or “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth” by Leo Tolstoy, or any of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works. Dostevsky, in fact, is my favourite author, and it was a reference he made in “The Idiot” to Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons” that made me want to read it. When I find an author I enjoy, I like to read the things that I know influenced him/her. Dostevsky’s reference to Turgenev made it obvious that he was an important figure to him, and “Fathers and Sons” is Turgenev’s best-known work. The reference in “The Idiot” was to the “nihilist” character in “Fathers and Sons”, which also caught my attention. I like anything that has a philosophical leaning to it, and this made it sound as if Turgenev might have something interesting to say.

What the book is about: The book tells the story of two young friends, Bazarov and Arkady. Bazarov seems to be a natural leader, and his influence over the impressionable Arkady is obvious. Bazarov is the nihilist mentioned in “The Idiot”; he claims to believe in nothing. Figures of authority, religion, political institutions, traditions, etc are all without significance to him, and the novel is largely about the gap between his generation and the older characters in the novel. Arkady’s father and uncle represent the traditional values of the society, but they are struggling mightily with the changing Russion political climate as serfs are freed and traditional ways are changing.

Anyway, the cartoon, while funny even in my ignorance, did raise the question of “what’s the deal with Jimmy Carter and the rabbit?” Being only nine years old at the time, and living in the media black-hole of Nova Scotia, I somehow missed this key political event. A quick Google search turned up this illuminating article:

Jimmy Carter Attacked by Killer Rabbit (April 20, 1979)

Today in Odd History, President Jimmy Carter was attacked by a rabbit during a fishing trip in Plains, Georgia. The rabbit, which may have been fleeing a predator, swam toward his boat, “hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared.” President Carter was forced to swat at the vicious beast with a canoe paddle, which apparently scared it off.

Upon his return to the White House, Carter told his staff about the furry amphibian’s assault. Most of them refused to believe him, insisting that rabbits can’t swim (although since most mammals can swim, there’s no reason to believe that rabbits cannot), and that even if they could, they certainly wouldn’t attack humans, and certainly not presidents. Fortunately, a White House photographer had been on the scene, and had recorded the bizarre attack. The photograph showed Carter with his paddle raised, warding off a small creature which might, or might not, have been a rabbit. One staffer was quoted as saying, “You couldn’t tell what it was.” Undaunted by their skepticism, Carter had the image enlarged, and there it was–a killer bunny rabbit, apparently bent on assassinating the president.

The story might have ended there, except that White House Press Secretary Jody Powell mentioned the incident to Associated Press reporter Brooks Jackson in August. The Washington Post ran it as front page news. The original photograph was not available (until the Reagan administration leaked it in 1981), but the paper filled the gap with a cartoon modeled on the poster for the movie Jaws, starring the rabbit and entitled Paws. Powell made a belated attempt to impress the public with the seriousness of the attack, calling the creature a “swamp rabbit,” but since Carter had to appease his rabbit-loving constituents by insisting that he had not actually smacked his buck-toothed opponent with his paddle, but only splashed water at it to drive it away, it seemed unlikely that he had been in danger. The entire episode became a symbol of Carter’s floundering presidency. According to Powell, “[I]t shows the extent to which an insignificant incident can snowball and end up in newspapers and news shows across the country.” Carter biographer Douglas Brinkley says, “It just played up the Carter flake factor…. I mean, he had to deal with Russia and the Ayatollah and here he was supposedly fighting off a rabbit.”

I wish this had been around a couple of months ago as I stumbled through the many options available for Rails development. My experience lately has been that all roads lead back to Eclipse. Right now I have separate installs of Eclipse, RadRails and Flex Builder 2. RadRails and Flex Builder both build on the Eclipse platform, so if I’d gone about this a bit more intelligently, I could have all three of these environments rolled into one.

Live and learn!