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Category: mind

Social Anxiety

Social Anxiety

Today is my brothers 27th birthday.  Or, it would have been, if he had not committed suicide in December 2014. My brother suffered from unamangeable anxiety & depression.  I'm remembering his life, his illness, and his death, as I read the Spring 2016 edition of Tricycle magazine. Social anxiety comes from being focused on "how we are doing" in this world.  We are constantly judging our Read the article >>
Practical Mindhacking

Practical Mindhacking

Since I was a teenager, I've been interested in learning how things work.  For years, that meant learning how computers worked.  When I did my first meditation retreat, I started to take that intellectual curiosity and turn it towards my mind.  Basically the pursuit of an ever more lucid understanding of the following questions: Why do I think the things I do? Why do I feel the things Read the article >>
Lucid Dreaming for Fun & Profit

Lucid Dreaming for Fun & Profit

I gave a talk at Ignite Boulder 28 last week.  This was my 2nd Ignite talk; my first one was about something very serious and personal, and I wanted to do something that was fun & light the 2nd time around.  It's on Lucid Dreaming, here it is: Transcript of the talk is below: - When I was a kid, I used to dream a lot about superpowers. As an adult, in the year 2002, living in Philadelphia. was Read the article >>
AutoPilot

AutoPilot

Have you ever asked yourself: "Am I awake right now?"   I have. Every now and then, I lucidly remember and relive a specific mundane moment from my childhood -- walking to the bus stop, backpack and red lunchbox in hand, and all of a sudden being overwhelmed by this feeling like "is someone else walking in my body?".  Like my brain subconscious was playing tricks on me. I used to get panic Read the article >>
Physical Workspace Hacking; 6 tips to create a War Room.

Physical Workspace Hacking; 6 tips to create a War Room.

Like any good engineer, I work hard to maximize my impact.  Relative to time invested, I want to accomplish as much as possible. So I feel it makes sense to invest some time in organizing my office into  my war room. I have noticed how horrible the workplace organizational skills of some of my cohorts are.  Especially engineers.  Just because you're building in the digital world is no excuse Read the article >>
The Art of Non-Reaction

The Art of Non-Reaction

Tweet.  Text.  E-Mail. Instant Message. Ring.  Buzz.  Growl.  Chime. By the time you are done reading this post, you've likely received multiple requests for your attention.  Perhaps they came in the form of notifications on a shiny new Apple device.  Or maybe they were interruptions from your office environment around you.   If you are not in your office on your Apple device, perhaps Read the article >>
Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness

Software development is a somewhat abstract process and, often, estimating the path from feature ideation to completion is an exercise in guesswork.  An unfortunate fact of life as a web engineer is that building blocks involved are often undocumented, unsupported, incomplete, and/or convoluted.  If, like me, you work in a distributed environment, your different team members surely have different Read the article >>
Beginners Mind

Beginners Mind

This weekend I went through my first zen retreat.   My interest in meditation has ebbed and flowed over the past several years.  The scientific evidence is piling up - Meditation increases mental clarity, healthy sense of self,  critical thinking, decreases depression, and my personal experience seems to comport -- it increases overall mental well-being.  As an engineer, my mind is often spinning Read the article >>
Engineer Mind

Engineer Mind

Foremost, stop yourself from distractions. Study your change request, first, as a user of your product. Do not forget that before you were an engineer, you were a user. Read and re-read the objectives and their supporting data, let them marinate with your conception of your product. Open your browser, type in your products URL & immerse yourself, but only with your user mind. Understand the Read the article >>
On Identity

On Identity

The first thing people ask me when they haven't seen me in a while is "How's StepOut?". I find it playfully amusing that, to others, I'm the "Indian online dating guy". Not because I have any particular special amused sentiment towards India, online dating, or the web itself, just because it's something I never thought I'd be doing professionally. Work as Self I used to hate pitching the company. Read the article >>