:: worlds in words ::

So you might have heard about an article that Ars Technica ran, titled Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love.  You might also have read the reply to this post on Brian Carper’s blog, Advertising is devastating to my well-being.  I actually found out about this here on John Gruber’s blog (Daring Fireball), which I follow through RSS – I don’t read Ars Technica or Brian Carper’s blog.

The basic gist is very simple, as if you couldn’t tell from the article names – Ars Technica argues that viewers on their site should not be turning off adblockers; Carper calls this stance “repugnant”; and Gruber states that he doesn’t know what the easy answer is, but links to an article on Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog, Why Ad Blockers Work.

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Everybody has their coping mechanisms.  Some people eat, some drink, some work out, some clean – me, I drive.  When I get angry, when I get overwhelmed, when I want to go out and clear my head, there’s nothing that’s quite as soothing to me as getting behind the wheel, filling up my tank, and blasting it down long and winding country roads – or whatever’s closest to ‘em where I’m at.

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Although it stands to reason that a samurai should be mindful of the Way of the Samurai, it would seem that we are all negligent. Consequently, if someone were to ask, “What is the true meaning of the Way of the Samurai?” the person who would be able to answer promptly is rare. This is because it has not been established in one’s mind beforehand. From this, one’s unmindfulness of the Way can be known.  Negligence is an extreme thing.

When I began training in Kendo many years ago (as well as other arts like Kenjutsu and Iaijutsu), I picked up a copy of Hagakure, the “book of the Samurai”.  It was more as a point of interest to the mentality and philosophy of the warriors of old – but alongside the Tao te Ching, it ended up being one of the few books that entirely changed my life.  The quote above, which is the first verse of Chapter One, is one of the main points of the philosophy which hit home for me.  The necessity in meditating upon that which guides our lives and our beliefs, such that when it comes time that you are asked a question or forced to make a decision, you know where you stand without a doubt.

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I don’t know if this is a recent trend or not – I highly doubt it – but a theme has been making itself very evident to me lately all over the place.  In real life, in articles I read all across the interwebs, it seems that a large amount of people are trying to deal with the adjustment of moving from a school environment into what we call “the real world”.  While some have been able to transition with relative ease, others are struggling with the differences.  There seems to be a period of chaos in moving from the world of academia into the career life.

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Image from http://jangosteve.com

A great little blog post popped up on my Recommended Items list in Google Reader which caught me just from the title.  Intrigued, I decided to go and have a read.  In the article, Steve Schwartz discusses the scenario of people who feel like they have no clue what they’re doing but appear to be recognized and praised by others as being not only competent but exceeding expectations.  Of course, the piece spoke directly to me – and I think many others of us as well.  So here I ramble on.

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