Regina Brett’s 45 life lessons and 5 to grow on

Heiniger-Net Posted on by
  1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
  2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
  3. Life is too short to waste time hat­ing anyone.
  4. Don’t take your­self so seri­ous­ly. No one else does.
  5. Pay off your cred­it cards every month.
  6. You don’t have to win every argu­ment. Agree to disagree.
  7. Cry with some­one. It’s more heal­ing than cry­ing alone.
  8. It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
  9. Save for retire­ment start­ing with your first paycheck.
  10. When it comes to choco­late, resis­tance is futile.
  11. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.
  12. It’s OK to let your chil­dren see you cry.
  13. Don’t com­pare your life to oth­ers’. You have no idea what their jour­ney is all about.
  14. If a rela­tion­ship has to be a secret, you should­n’t be in it.
  15. Every­thing can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t wor­ry; God nev­er blinks.
  16. Life is too short for long pity par­ties. Get busy liv­ing, or get busy dying.
  17. You can get through any­thing if you stay put in today.
  18. A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.
  19. It’s nev­er too late to have a hap­py child­hood. But the sec­ond one is up to you and no one else.
  20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.
  21. Burn the can­dles, use the nice sheets, wear the fan­cy lin­gerie. Don’t save it for a spe­cial occa­sion. Today is special.
  22. Over­pre­pare, then go with the flow.
  23. Be eccen­tric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
  24. The most impor­tant sex organ is the brain.
  25. No one is in charge of your hap­pi­ness except you.
  26. Frame every so-called dis­as­ter with these words: “In five years, will this matter?”
  27. Always choose life.
  28. For­give every­one everything.
  29. What oth­er peo­ple think of you is none of your business.
  30. Time heals almost every­thing. Give time time.
  31. How­ev­er good or bad a sit­u­a­tion is, it will change.
  32. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
  33. Believe in miracles.
  34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of any­thing you did or did­n’t do.
  35. What­ev­er does­n’t kill you real­ly does make you stronger.
  36. Grow­ing old beats the alter­na­tive — dying young.
  37. Your chil­dren get only one child­hood. Make it memorable.
  38. Read the Psalms. They cov­er every human emotion.
  39. Get out­side every day. Mir­a­cles are wait­ing everywhere.
  40. If we all threw our prob­lems in a pile and saw every­one else’s, we’d grab ours back.
  41. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
  42. Get rid of any­thing that isn’t use­ful, beau­ti­ful or joyful.
  43. All that tru­ly mat­ters in the end is that you loved.
  44. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
  45. The best is yet to come.
  46. No mat­ter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
  47. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
  48. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
  49. Yield.
  50. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.
Posted in Fun

My personal tourist guide

Heiniger-Net Posted on by

Since this blog has been dead for sev­er­al years, because I moved many of my online activ­i­ties to Face­book, I decid­ed to cre­ate a new line of arti­cles here. Because I am expect­ing more vis­its from out­side of Switzer­land, I want to describe a set of excur­sions, and maybe I end up with a sort of small Swiss tourist guide. Since I live in Zurich, the focus will be some­thing like this:

  1. Easy one day touris­tic excur­sions from Zurich, for which it is worth get­ting up in the morn­ing and get going.
  2. Short tours to the envi­ron­ment, that can be done spon­ta­neous­ly in an afternoon.
  3. Longer tours that take more prepa­ra­tion and maybe even an overnight stay

 
I already assem­bled a list of pos­si­ble excur­sions on the Offer­ings page “Excur­sions to Swiss Attrac­tions”. In the near future, I will describe some of these excur­sions in more detail when­ev­er I find the time. This page, there­fore, serves as a direc­to­ry and overview for excur­sions that I rec­om­mend at any time, which I prob­a­bly made myself, and which I love to do with my vis­i­tors. It can serve as an inspi­ra­tion and basis for suggestions.

Lava lamp project, part 3 — mk2

Heiniger-Net Posted on by

Recent­ly, I stum­bled upon an adver­tise­ment for this object. It is a gad­get called Blink(1), which can be plugged into a USB port and which has two col­or LEDs, one on top and one on the bot­tom, that can be con­trolled by a piece of com­put­er soft­ware to show any col­or in any bright­ness. The gad­get is cost­ing around 40 swiss franks and it has a nice piece of con­trol soft­ware, which can be used to make the gad­get light in many dif­fer­ent use­ful ways. For exam­ple, IFTTT (If This Then That) can be used to make it light in var­i­ous col­ors upon giv­en con­di­tions, or URLs, files or scripts can be called to define col­or com­bi­na­tions, or a mail­box can make it light up if a giv­en num­ber of new mails arrive, or if the mail of your sig­nif­i­cant oth­er arrives or if the mail has a cer­tain sub­ject line. Or you warn of a low bat­tery, or when the CPU load exceeds a cer­tain percentage.

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Lava lamp project, part 2 — firmware

Heiniger-Net Posted on by

In part 1, I described the hard­ware of my project of a com­put­er con­trol­lable lava lamp. In this sec­ond part, I want to dis­cuss the nec­es­sary firmware, which is the soft­ware nec­es­sary to teach the Picaxe Micro­con­troller the desired functionality.

We need to keep two areas in focus:

  1. We need to be able to read the desired col­or val­ues from the USB ser­i­al port, defin­ing the desired inten­si­ties of the col­ors green, red and blue.
  2. These desired val­ues have to be turned into actu­al light in desired col­or and inten­si­ty. This means, the LEDs have to be turned on.

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Lava lamp project, part 1 — hardware

Heiniger-Net Posted on by

I want­ed to build a device that can light in dif­fer­ent col­ors, and where the col­ors can be con­trolled from a com­put­er. My idea was to hook it up with a com­put­er, who then should sig­nal some state by light­ing the appro­pri­ate col­or. For exam­ple, while build­ing and com­pil­ing a pro­gram, the lamp should blink in blue col­or. When the build is fin­ished, the lamp should light either in green (when the build ran fine) or red (when some­thing went wrong).

I found the lava lamp shown to the right, which is equipped with a col­or-chang­ing LED and is pow­ered from USB. I bought one and intend­ed to mod­i­fy the con­trol­ling elec­tron­ics to my purposes.

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