I'm listening to...

95bFM on the internet. It's making me homesick like crazy, but it has served to remind me that Kiwi music is different from the rest, and that it is good!

History really is bunk

I'm reading Authentic Happiness by Martin Selgiman at the mo. He's a scientist who is interested in positive emotions, and I am struck by this paragraph in which he sums up the evidence for the influence of childhood trauma on adults:

"The major traumas of childhood [such as the death of a parent] may have some influence on adult personality, but only a barely detectable one. Bad childhood events, in short, do not mandate adult troubles. There is no justification in these studies for blaming your adult depression, anxiety, bad marriage, drug use, sexual problems, unemployment, aggression against your children, alcoholism, or anger on what happened to you as a child" - Authentic Happiness, p.67.

Wow! What he emphasises is that how we think about our childhood is a much stronger determinant of adult unhappiness than what actually happened.

I feel a rave coming on...

ALT vs TITLE

I was getting steamed up because, on the advice of my geek friends I switched to Firefox, and now suddenly I find that my alt attributes are not popping up little messages about the images in my various blogs. Apparently this is because that attribute was never intended to do that, and the specs say use a "title" tag to do it. I never knew that. Thanks to Gadgetopia for sorting this one out for me. Now I have to retrofit all my images, and of course Blogger doesn't automatically add a title attribute to images, but I'm not bitching, really I'm not, I just like to know where I stand!

More Happiness

I'm making the BBC happiness page my homepage! Still exploring all the bits, but it is facinating. I took the test on the Authentic Happiness Page and found that my my signature strengths are:

Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
Love of learning
Curiosity and interest in the world
Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
Spirituality, sense of purpose, and faith
Appreciation of beatuy and excellence

Sigh...

Happiness

OK, this is really only for people with broadband, which now includes me! The BBC has an interesting streaming video (real player required, but hey you've got broadband, right?) on the subject of Happiness. A subject which tends to puzzle me. Quite an intriguing 10 mins.

Dictionary of Pali Names

Good score! Found the Pali Dictionary of Pali Names online tonight. Bonus!

Batchelor's blog

Yikes, these long breaks in posting to Bricolage are getting longer... Just discovered the blog of Stephen Batchelor (left) on the Tricycle Magazine Website. I was particularly struck by this recent post on the Two Truths. This is a good thought provoking article, which confirms for me that you can't take the tradition on it's own terms. We must investigate, reflect on, and test the tradition. In this case Batchelor draws attention to a development of a teaching, probably after the parinibbana, which obscures the fundamental insight of the Buddha, which he describes as: "the radical contingency of all existence, devoid of any intrinsic self-essence or God.