Aug 10 2009

LXappearance and icon themes

After having recently reinstalled Gentoo on my main production machine, I thought I would look into some theming to make things more aesthetically pleasing. I installed a bunch of GTK themes that I ended up not liking, so I got rid of them. I use Openbox with a bunch of LXDE applications installed to ease the process of customisation. One such application is LXappearance. Getting rid of the unwanted themes from the LXappearance menu wasn’t all that difficult. I simply went to /usr/share/themes and removed the respective folders. However, I couldn’t seem to get the unwanted icon themes to go away. If I’m not mistaken, icon themes are usually installed to /usr/share/icons. When I went to manually delete the icon theme folders, however, there were no such directories. Hmmmmmmmm…

Since searching the web didn’t yield any significant results, I thought I would go to the source code and figure out just what happens when one installs an icon theme using LXappearance. In /usr/share/lxappearance there is a script called install-icon-theme.sh, and it contains the following line:

export XDG_DATA_HOME=”$HOME/.local/share”;

That lead me to check that respective directory. Bingo, there were my icon theme folders. I simply deleted the folders, and the respective icon theme choices were no longer present in LXappearance. I was simply excited as it was my first success of the day. 🙂

|:| Zach |:|

Jul 17 2009

Kindness

Today was one of those days where I regain a little bit of faith in the goodness of humanity. Firstly, I went to drop off a package for RMA. When I got to the shipping facility, I realised that I hadn’t sealed the package with packing tape. The guy simply said “no problem, I’ll take care of that.” After thanking him, and right before I left the store, he said “actually this prepaid label doesn’t cover the weight of the package, but don’t worry about it. I’ll just change something really quickly.” That was the first set of niceness that I encountered today.

Secondly, I went to get some bagels from a store I noticed while on the way back to my car. I walked in, placed my order, and then realised how late it was. I said “wow, do you guys stay open later than most of the other locations?” The guy responded with “no, we closed about 15 minutes ago.” Then, to make things even better, he said “we’re just going to throw these cookies away, so would you like to take them?” I thanked him for his generosity, and went about my business.

Though these events may seem small, trivial, or even petty, they helped me see that there are some people that do care about being nice to others. I just hope that I can share the same type of small niceties with others, and maybe these types of behaviours will permeate.

|:| Zach |:|

Jul 10 2009

Buddhist Wisdom for Difficult Times (Part IV)

Okay, so the idea that I could get one of these done per day hasn’t exactly worked out. However, I’m still going to finish the series, but it may take me longer than previously anticipated.

We need to seriously investigate whether people who have fame, power, and wealth are happy and whether those who have nothing are always unhappy. When we look into this, we see that happiness is not based on objects but on one’s mental state.
                    –Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche

In this bit of wisdom, Nyima encourages us to find evidence of the correlation between “fame, power, and wealth” and happiness. Are those three things–which seem to be interrelated in most Western societies–the source of happiness? If one answers “yes” to that question, then it naturally follows that people who do not have fame, power, or wealth are inevitably and perpetually unhappy. Further, since Nyima used a strong word like “always,” one only needs to find a single opposing case in order to completely refute and nullify the argument. Therefore, in this instance, anecdotal evidence seems sufficient to sustain Nyima’s investigation.

Fortunately, in the next sentence, he explains that these worldly and material things are not the stems of happiness. Rather, one’s “mental state” is more readily responsible for one’s happiness. As mentioned in Part III, it would seem that happiness (which is an emotional manifestation of a “good” situation) is not objectively determined by the situation around us, but rather by our perception of that situation. Nyima’s position, like Roshi’s, indicates that in order to feel fulfilled and to experience happiness, one needs to actively sustain positivity under both desirable and difficult circumstances. One cannot simply sit back and deem an aspect of or event in life as “bad,” and do nothing to change it; that will certainly result in unhappiness.

|:| Zach |:|