Justin Dag

Very early on in the course of sleeping, something clicked in my head indicating I was dreaming.  It was as if I woke up into the dream.  This is practically identical to how it happened in my first official lucid dream.   I’ve been wanting another lucid dream because it was so amazing and free, so I was really excited excited to be aware and ready to explore this vastly limitless world.  However, what transpired next was hardly fun.

I woke up into a mist of gray with nothing around; my vision distorted and with limited distance capability.  There was some really strange, but familiar electronic music playing.  The music sounded like a cross between Deru and Shuttle 358.  I was paralyzed and suffocating, which was excruciating.  I was dying, but somehow managed to wake up, gasping for air.

I was 1/3 scared, 1/3 relieved, 1/3 annoyed that I was lucid and could not take advantage.  The good news was being alive and mobile, but here’s the interesting part.  Much later in the night, although technically this morning,  I was in a dream telling a close friend of mine, while he laid on a bed in what looked like a hotel room, about the experience I had earlier.  He didn’t offer any insight, but it was really cool how it all tied together.

Wild huh?

When creating custom Grails environments, you can’t use hyphens or Grails will complain with the following:

MissingMethodException: No signature of method: groovy.util.ConfigObject.minus() is applicable for argument types: (null) values: {null}

Change the hyphen to say an underscore, and you’re good to go.

Last night I endured a pretty erratic sleep, but it resulted in my first lengthy lucid dream. I previously had some smaller ones that were more psychedelic displays than anything else, and one that lasted about a minute, where I wasn’t able to stay in a dream state long enough for anything interesting. However, last night or should I say this morning at around 7:30AM, I experienced a full blown lucid dream. Some things became a bit jumbled toward the end, but here’s a run-down of events.

I was walking along a sidewalk in what looked like an industrial park that was quite desolate and gray under dense and shaded clouds. Then, the notion hit me, and I recall saying to myself, “wait, I’m dreaming!!” and “I can do this.” Now everyone’s first inclination is to fly, so I tried that. Off I went, soaring above some impressive oak trees, but I wasn’t really able to control my flight, which nearly woke me. I managed to stay in it, and come back down to continue my journey through this strange, dark, but somewhat familiar landscape of closed offices and large lawns.

I was hoping that one of these buildings were open to allow for some exploration, but was denied. I then thought to myself, “I want to interact with ‘people’ to see what that would be like. Maybe they can offer me insight; maybe answer some questions none of us here can.” The climate was changing a bit. The clouds were brighter, but still very gray and cool, while carrying a touch of rainfall. Unfortunately, no one else was around, except a black cat that morphed into some other four-legged creature who ultimately transformed, just like the atmosphere, into a dog – a Doberman Pincher to be exact.

My next idea was to attempt to lift something I would not normally be able to, and thus appeared several statues of animals. One of these animals was a dog – yes, a Doberman. This is where it gets a little fuzzy, but when I tried to raise this solid and substantial object, I was attacked by a vicious, ravenous dog. I’m not sure if the statue turned into this living beast or if the same animal I had seen previous was my assailant, but it caused me to awaken.

It turns out the word “position” is a reserved word in Grails. If you use this as one of your domain entity’s properties, Grails will not be able to create the table for your domain class.

Yesterday I participated in a community service program organized by my company, Conde Nast. We were given the opportunity to garden and clean up some small unkept parks in upper Manhattan, mostly on the east side.

At first I was a little reluctant to break up the flow of my work week to appear as though I was in a work release program required by the rules of a parole. After cleaning up a few items in the morning, fake Mike D and I began our journey to 100 and Madison – some projects. As we arrived, late of course, my timid nature and engrained mind map kicked in. I was lucky enough to be with a collegue of mine, STFU and another co-worker who we’ll call ‘Mr. Malformed XML.’ This ‘Mr. Malformed XML’ is not actually malformed himself, and I’m am in no way making fun of him. I just can’t think of a better name at the moment. STFU on the other hand, I am making fun of, but it’s because I like him. We worked together at Tommy; super nice guy and a lot of fun.

Once I settled in and got my hands dirty, my famous focus took hold, and really cranked out some nice work. Ms. Fung and I meticulously cleaned some beds and laid the groundwork for plants and flowers to flourish. I was rather excited to plant some plants, tomatoes mostly. Hopefully, someone will enjoy the taste of some fresh tomatoes.

Overall it as a great experience, and I hope CondeNast arranges another outing. I strongly encourage everyone out there to seek out some volunteer work. It will not only help others, but yourself as well.

Katie Bennet and I did a small, quiet hike on Long Island Saturday, July 19. The Muttontown Preserve is the largest nature preserve in Nassau country, somewhere in the vicinity of 550 acres. There are several marked trails for hiking (good ol’ #5 & you’re next red 3), cross-country skiing, and horseback riding.

The highlights of our hike were of course spending time with Ms. Bennet, being overly prepared, a super cool frog, berries that I know Katie wants to try, lots of beautiful wild flowers, the letter J, and the famous Muttontown Preserve “bridge.”

I certainly encourage anyone reading to go outside and enjoy the natural world around us.

Had a run-in with Grails and trying to wire up some custom beans using Grails’s Spring Bean Builder DSL mechanism. I was wiring up an instance of the Apache HttpClient object, which can be constructed with HttpClientParams and/or HttpConnectionManager. Now the Grails BB syntax expects the first argument to be the type you’re wiring, followed by the parameters to pass into the constructor. Something like this:
httpClient(org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient, defaultGlobalHttpConnectionManager)

Where httpClient is the bean name/id, org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient is the type we’re wiring, and defaultGlobalHttpConnectionManager is some custom implementation of the HttpConnectionManager.

When using this Bean Builder syntax, Grails gets consfused about the argument ordering and is unable to create its Grails Application Context. I also tried the following which didn’t work either.
httpClient(org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient, null,
defaultGlobalHttpConnectionManager)

I don’t know if you can explicitly set the arguments the same way you can in the standard XML wiring approach. My solution was then to use the tried and true method.

<bean id="defaultGlobalHttpConnectionManager"
class="com.site.commons.http.GlobalHttpConnectionManager"
destroy-method="shutDown" lazy-init="default" autowire="default"
dependency-check="default">
<property name="soTimeout">
<value>20000</value>
</property>
<property name="connectionTimeout">
<value>20000</value >
</property>
</bean>

<bean id="httpClient"
class="org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient" lazy-init="default"
autowire="default"
dependency-check="default">
<constructor-arg ref="defaultGlobalHttpConnectionManager" />
</bean>

Resources:
http://grails.org/doc/1.0.x/
http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/apidocs/index.html

I’ve been wanting to try this whole mediation thing for a while now, and once again the topic has made an appearance. Thanks to Katie B and Mike V, I gave it a shot last night. Katie and I attempted a 15-20 minute session.

It was pretty darn hard, but in the end I figured out a few things that really helped me calm my overactive brain. First off, I can’t close my eyes. When my eyes are shut, my mental film projector begins replaying accounts of the scenes I’ve seen that week. Two, and I think this is common, but I focused all my attention on my breathing pattern coupled with my signature blessing hand gesture to accompany the rhythm.

For a solid 5 minutes or so, I was completely relaxed and calm. My mind was actually quiet and I liked it.

Think I’ll try it again.. You should too.