We went to a little town near Santa Barbara called Solvang. It is made to look like a Danish village. The place was amazingly cute. We wandered around trying to find a place to eat. Many of the places we tried to eat were full, but we found a nice place on the outside of town. It was very tasty, and the seating was surprisingly relaxing. After dinner we went to a nearby campsite. We didn’t get to have a fire since there was a fire advisory. The night ended up being really cold, but we stilled played some games on Brian’s iPad. The night didn’t go well, but we managed to stay warm enough.
We did two hikes in the morning and they were both beautiful but arduous. The first hike was down the cliff of Cliff House. The cliff had a beach at the bottom, and it was a really steep hike. The trail was a little loose with the chopped rock. It was a lot of fun, but I chose to not go on the beach since I didn’t want to get sand in my shoes. The hike back up was hard. We then went to a hike down the road and had a little over a mile hike up the mountain. The view from about a third of the way up was really nice. Everyone was ready to head down, even though it wasn’t nearly as far as we had planned on going. We went back down the mountain and got some ice cream. Steph and I shared a chocolate shake.
We then drove down to the Elephant Seals beach. The beach was fun, and there weren’t nearly as many there as there will be at peak. There were a few of them that had gotten there, and the males were massive. We mistook a few of the huge males for large boulders.
Steph and I got to Cliff house late, and we walked into a really nice house. The wifi wasn’t good enough to run the games, but we played the board games and card games that we brought.
Adam Amit/Tina, and I played a game of Tzolk’in. Amit didn’t really care for it, but Adam and I had a good time. It was nice to get 3 monuments, even though I would have done better to have done differently. Adam still won with a really high score, and I think the biggest difference was me not getting many skulls. It comes back again and again, that if you don’t go for skulls and gods you will lose. I never have been able to get a full set of things that led to going for the god route.
We played some Cards Against Humanity, and I chose randomly. I ended up winning with the random choosing.
The house was very nice, and I regret not being able to stay there another night.
This was one of the best books about founding companies I’ve read. It has all the basic high level things that one may need. It covers a lot of the topics that I was unsure about, and I am recommending it to the rest of the team. Steph is ready to start it, and I explained most of it to Candice.
This was a really nice book, and again I liked it more than the movie. It was very nice to hear everything. I was hoping for more information than it gave, but the book was still good. It isn’t until the third book that things get really good, and the information comes out.
This was really nice to go through the book after seeing the movies. I liked the books better than the movies from the extra information they give. The movies are certainly really good adaptations of the books. I agree with all the changes they made.
This was a hilarious book. I really like how they make fun of the organized religion, and how it ends up. The crazy planning for a retaliation before you plan for an attack is also great. I like how the god ends up being a small turtle that is incredibly shallow.
We got up in the morning to cook some food for Thanksgiving dinner. We decided on Tom Yom and cheese, but the cheese didn’t turn out. The Tom Yom was a big hit, and we got request to bring more of the soup. I also donated my remaining abalone to the dinner, and Russel cooked it up nicely. There was a lot of typical Chinese food like friend rice, mustard green, and spring rolls, but there was a turkey as well. After dinner we played some of the games I have been making and that went over really well.
This was a very nice listen, but I had to take it in chunks. The fiction books that I listened too at the same time were very nice breaks from the depth and density of this lecture series. The evolution of philosophy as described by this book seems to be full of reactionary thought, with the swings getting wider and wider. I can identify most with the Aristotelian thought with everything being in the pursuit of Eudaimonia, which can be roughly thought of as happiness or well-being in a totally non-hedonistic sense. I would put this as the basis of my thoughts in a utilitarian framework with a hierarchical anthropomorphic view of all life based on level of consciousness and sense. I fully reject some of the later discussed views like reality being perception. These views are wholly unusable for working life, and aren’t even practiced by the people that support them. I very much hold that a philosophical position should be practiced by those that hold it and not just held in theory. There is a funny story of an ancient Greek person (reality unknown) who believed and practiced in the thought being reality school, and his friends would have to constantly save him from being injured by these notions. He would do things like believe that fire wasn’t hot and try to walk through it. Even he didn’t fully follow this thought as he blamed his cook for making a bad meal; wouldn’t it only be bad because he thought it was so in his own philosophy? I liked the thoughts presented here and can use the language to flush out my own ideas further, and discover what great people have thought before on the subjects.
It's an Exciting World 