The New World of Lonnie Mandigo

Gratitude I'm extremely grateful for the many bright, interesting, and engaged people that I've had the opportunity to meet and interact with.  This alone makes life worth living. Geek I fired up a Minecraft server several months ago.  Mostly to have something to do with my grandkids.  They connect once in awhile, but not regularly.  I was telling some friends about it the other day and at least one of them is getting into it.  Minecraft is fun, but being able to share a world is MUCH more fun. The downside was discovering that my implementation had some serious performance problems. I had been running a vanilla Minecraft server on a moderately powered box with 8Gb of memory.  It was chronically several thousand ticks behind.  This created some really unfortunate behaviors. Last night I bit the bullet and replaced the vanilla Minecraft server with Paper .  It appears to be running much better, but we'll see over time. Ponder For quite awhile I've ...

When I was a teenager we used to like to sleep outside.  Generally it involved spreading a piece of plastic out in the backyard and rolling our sleeping bags out on it.  It was a good way to connect with the outdoors and to get away when you couldn't get away.  It was an adventure. An opportunity that sleeping outside provided was time to lay there comfortably and stare at the stars.  During one of these adventures my good friend Brian and I wrestled with the question, "What would be here if nothing was here?"  In our teenage way we wrestled with the semantic quandary of, "Well if nothing was there then something would be here and that something would be nothing."  I don't remember coming up with any conclusions about nothing (though ironically that may be exactly what we did) but we did create this nice model of time.  The time when there was nothing we called 'less' and the time when there was something we called 'more'.  This, I'm sure...

 Humans may be the victims of the greatest, most cosmic, curse.   We will become extinct and we'll know why.

 Life is a journey, but a journey is a series of destinations.