You may spend your life killing,

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but you will not exhaust all your foes. If you quell your own anger, your real enemy will be slain. - Nagarjuna , a Buddhist philosopher, c150-250 CE

He that will be angry for anything will be angry for nothing. - Sallust, Roman historian, 86-34 BCE.

When we reject people in anger, or turn on them with the aim of inflicting pain, we damage our souls even more. - Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, 121-180 CE (Meditations, Chapter 2)

[For those who are curious where I've been ... erm ... mixture of a lack of enthusiasm, energy and time for blogging. But not to worry, I have had plenty of time to come down with Strep throat - twice. I am currently on my second round of antibiotics, apparently the first round wasn't wholly effective. Makes me wonder how 10 days was decided upon as the standard treatment duration because this is not the first time a round of antibiotics has failed to cure me and I have ended up going for a second round.

I have also been busy reading about photography, taking pictures, examining my pictures (there were thousands, I had to left to go over). I have also been brushing of on DCT (Discrete Cosine Transforms), JPEG transformations and file format. Raw file format (CR2) on my camera (a Canon EOS 350D). And SSE (Streamming SIMD Extensions) on the Intel Pentium chips (in many ways I prefer Altivec on the PowerPC - it is far more orthogonal). I have also been honing my image editing / retouching skills using GIMP. The latest version of GIMP 2.4.6 has a healing tool that is really, really good at removing wrinkles, sags, and blemishes from pictures. I can make myself easily look 10 years younger.

My kids were with me in Ottawa for the past 7 weeks (normally, they are in Montreal with Sofia), going to day camp. They have enjoyed it a lot and will be going back to Montreal this weekend. Sofia will be taking a few weeks off in August to care after the kids.

I am not terribly confident that I will be individually replying to comments in the next little while, but I do appreciate each and every comment. Also no major promises that I will be visiting or commenting on other people's blogs. I might. I might not.]

Comments

Richard said…
kaymac: thanks! I am trying and the good Lord willing (and should the antibiotics be sufficient), I should.
August 15, 2008 10:05 AM
tin-tin said…
i hope you'll be well already.
don't pressure yourself in visiting the blogs and responding to the comments :)
August 16, 2008 9:52 AM
Just me said…
Hiya Richard... I'm sorry you're not feeling well. Strep is the worst!! Antibiotics are not what they used to be.. I hope you feel better soon. Enjoy some of the quiet while you heal.. you'll have more energy to play when the kids get home.
August 17, 2008 12:19 AM
Ancilla said…
Hope that you'll get well soon :)

ps: as what tin-tin said... don't make yourself get stressed with the blogsphere things.
August 17, 2008 10:12 AM
Anonymous said…
I'm so glad that you are pursuing your photography!

I hope you feel better really soon.
August 21, 2008 4:52 AM
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