Roger Hyam

So I start writing iZendo from scratch and make quite good progress in simplifying it down. Just four pages and some AJAX to update the lists. All looks good till my crisis of faith! Could I do this with twitter? Could I ‘just’ have a Twitter feed that is the virtual zendo? It would certainly save a lot of effort and would integrate with all the IM and phone systems etc.

The trouble is I can’t see how we get a public page that updates in near real time to show  messages from multiple people. The zendo would have to follow people and look for messages that said they were meditating or it would have to wait for direct messages and post them back as messages on its own page so others could see them. None of these things work. Even if I used the API the app would need to poll the server all the time and there can be quite long delays on this. We are limited to once a minute for starters. This would need to run on a ‘real’ server not a hosted space.

Looks like it isn’t feasible but maybe I should sleep on it.

Thanks for listening,

Expressing gratitude makes me feel good. I believe others get similar pleasure form saying thanks. It could be that we have this response hardwired by our genes or that it is beaten in by our parents as a kind of important social meme. Either way it appears to lead to a more harmonious society so no doubt there are good social-darwian reasons for it all.
Recently I have been dwelling on the spiritual aspects. Saying thank you is an admission of dependancy. It is an acknowledgement of our identity being entirely contingent on others - and so a tiny step along that path of awakening.
Many things spin out of this.
There is no need to have a ‘target’ for our gratitude. We can just say thank you in acknowledgement of our existence.
We don’t only benefit from saying thank you for what we like. Even the receipt of something unpleasant is turned around if we acknowledge it with thanks.
Gratitude is a real key into compassion, wisdom and spiritual growth. So how do I get my family to say grace before meals - directing it at no one in particular?