Patrick Canfield

Chance encounter

Sadly, when I first passed by in my pre-caffeinated haze, I mistook them as another group of vagrants up to mischief on the sidewalk outside of Bean Bag Cafe, where I was heading to putz around over coffee for a while. They were doing something with…

Contrasting experiences

Yesterday a couple friends and I went on a bike ride that took us across the Golden Gate Bridge, to the top of a mountain where it was unpleasantly cold and windy, then down to a beach where we passed out in the sun for a couple hours before…

Zen and the art of giving a f***

Last night I attended a “sit” at a Zen meditation center , as has been my custom lately. The “sit” is a 30 minute meditation. Sometimes it’s guided, but this time it’s completely silent. Afterwards the facilitator fields questions from those…

ZzzzEO

I don’t have any ideas today, so I’m just going to write about my dream last night. In my dream I was the CEO of a company with hundreds of employees and I was thinking wow, I finally have a job that I really enjoy and the pay isn’t bad either. It’s…

Why

What hubris. Publishing a blog at a website named after yourself? Adding to the ever-growing ocean of information whatever commonplace thought crosses your mind? For whom? Who cares? Why? You’re looking at it all wrong. It’s not for anyone but myself…

Back at it

Hey, it’s been a while. Since my last entry I started and finished a contract job. It wasn’t the kind of work that I really want to do, but I learned a lot (mainly about the nature of contract work) and was compensated well enough that I have time to…

A dharma bum afternoon

Things had come to a head. My head, to be exact. They were prancing about and demanding my attention. I had decided to go home early because I could no longer feel the importance of anything. There I curled up in bed with a book and put on the radio…

Getting cultured, on a dime

So I went on a little adventure last month. I’m posting this a month after the fact because I wanted to finish this thing I made to accompany this blog post. Been putting in a couple hours a day a few days a week. What is it? A box that shows photos…

Sleep, mindfulness, and art

I finally feel like I’m winning the war against my insomnia. I’d been fighting this war for over two years and every night felt like a new battle. Daily exercise helped a lot, but it seemed like I needed eight hours of exercise to buy eight solid…

Atlanta

The whole EventRay team, all three of us, got together in Atlanta this past week for a coding “sprint.” It was pretty successful on all fronts: We accomplished five weeks of work, ate real bar-b-que 1 , chicken and waffles, and saw Marietta’s giant…

Glacier National Park

Was in Glacier National Park in Montana earlier this month. We saw some mountain goats, some birds, and this guy: Grizzly bear! 📷 by Shing Some other hikers coming the other direction warned us and we backtracked to the top of a hill then stopped…