consumerism
By many measures, there has been tremendous progress in key well-being indicators for all of mankind. There is less poverty, less hunger, less violence and more prosperity than there has ever been in human history. We live in times of plenty not just for the few but for the many.
ease
I think the tension between the difficult and the easy, between that which we can do only with struggle, and that we we can do with ease, is an important dimension to consider for how we design our lives. We have a natural tendency to seek out the easiest path
happiness
I tend to believe in the inherent goodness of whomever I meet. I believe that each one of us has a desire to bring joy and happiness to others; even if that is to the detriment of others. I also think that most people I have know are kind. They
economics
Few will disagree that the continuation of our species as a noble goal to pursue. It just feels inherently plausible to us. But I think that we should nonetheless reflect upon whether this is really such a worthwhile and important goal to pursue. Some say that we may be the
One of the things I really like about Windows 10, is the ability to hit the Windows key and type the first few letters of the application name to find and open this application. Mac OS X in theory provides the same feature by hitting the Command Key + Space. This
beauty
I've already mentioned that I believe that gratitude and forgiveness are emotions which I believe we should foster within ourselves. Today I want to explore in a little bit further detail what makes up forgiveness and why it is such a powerful force to bring good to ourselves
compassion
I have long had an interest to learn more about Buddhism. Actually I bought myself a book on Buddhism many years ago while I was visiting Thailand. This book did not really grasp my attention and I always wanted to explore this topic further. So I recently obtained a collection
happiness
Virtue seems like a dusty old concept which fits in an 18th century - but not in our modern digital age. I disagree! I believe the problem with virtues is not the concept as such but the particular virtues we have long aspired to. Virtues, however, are a key pillar
happiness
I have long been an avid follower of the positive psychology movement. Be it justified or not, I am a bit skeptical about psychology as a discipline in general since I got the impression that a lot of established facts and practices in psychology are based on poorly executed studies.
linux
With the release of Java 10 only a few days ago, it seems only prudent to update to Java 10 on suitable systems since the support for Java 9 official ends with the release of Java 10. (Note that Java 8 still enjoys long-time support, so it might be the
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is well established service of the AWS cloud and can be used as a powerful platform to deploy applications in various languages. In this short tutorial, I will outline how to conveniently deploy a Tomcat application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk using the beanstalk-maven-plugin. The following assumes that
open-source
I've always had a soft spot for diagrams. I think that representing information in various visual ways tremendously helps our thinking and understanding. Unfortunately it is often a big headache to create (and maintain) diagrams. So I was very pleased today when I came across PlantUML. PlantUML is
