Dreams and their Meanings

Chase Dreams

"I'm Being Chased"

Chase dreams often stem from feelings of anxiety in your walking life.

The way we respond to anxiety and pressure in real life is typically manifested as a chase dream. Running is an instinctive response to physical threats in our environment. Often in these dream scenarios, you are being pursued by some attacker, who wants to hurt or possibly kill you. You are running away, hiding, or trying to outwit your pursuer.

Chase dreams may represent your way of coping with fears, stress or various situations in your waking life. Instead of confronting the situation, you are running away and avoiding it. Ask yourself who is the one chasing you and you may gain some understanding and insight on the source of your fears and pressure.

The pursuer or attacker who is chasing you in your dream may also represent a part of yourself. Your own feelings of anger, jealousy, fear, and possibly love, can assume the appearance of threatening figure. You may be projecting these feelings onto the unknown chaser. Next time you have a chase dream, turn around and confront your pursuer. Ask them why they are chasing you.

One may be consumed by their own anger, jealousy, love, or selfdestructive behavior. For example, you may be drinking too much or exhibiting open hostility toward others around you. You may subconsciously be threatened by these actions which have been jeopardizing your relationships and/or career. Your dreams are a way of calling attention to these self-destructive actions.

A more direct analysis of chase dreams is the fear of being attacked.

Such dreams are more common among women than men, who may feel physically vulnerable in the urban environment.
These dreams are inspired by fears of violence and sexual assault in which we are so overexposed from the media. The violence that the media portrays magnifies our fears and how at risk we all are.

Top 13 Funny Software Development Quotes

Over the years, I’ve collected some of the smartest-yet-funny software development quotes I have read. Here’s the current short list in no particular order. Oddly enough, there are thirteen of them and they all address the woes of programming.

Feel free to add any like quotes in the comment section!

1. “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.” – Tom Cargill
2. “In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.” – Author Unknown
3. “I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.” – Bjarne Stroustrup
4. “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.” – Mitch Ratcliffe
5. “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” -C.A.R. Hoare
6. “The gap between theory and practice is not as wide in theory as it is in practice.” – Author Unknown
7. “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.” – Gerald Weinberg
8. “If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.” – Edsger Dijkstra
9. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” – Bill Gates
10. “Nine people can’t make a baby in a month.” – Fred Brooks
11. “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” – Rich Cook
12. “There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.” – Jeremy S. Anderson
13. “Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.” – Ralph Johnson

Possible IBM acronyms

IBM: It's Being Mended
IBM: Inmense Ball of Muck
IBM: I Believe in Memorex
IBM: It's Better than Macintosh!
IBM: Idiots Built Me
IBM: Intense Bowel Movement
IBM: Inferior But Marketable?
IBM: I've Been Mislead
IBM: It's Better Manually
IBM: Infinitly Better Macintosh
IBM: Indefinitly Boggled Machine
IBM: I Bought a Mac
IBM: I Blame Microsoft.
IBM: I Bought Macintosh
IBM: I'll Buy Macintosh
IBM: I've Been Moved
IBM: I've Been Mugged
IBM: Incontinent Bowel Movement
IBM: Identical Blue Men
IBM: Idiotic Bit Masher
IBM: Idiots Become Managers
IBM: Incompatible Business Machines
IBM: Incredibly Boring Machine
IBM: Infernal Bloody Monopoly
IBM: Institute of Black Magic
IBM: Internal Beaurocratic Mess
IBM: International Brotherhood of Magicians
IBM: Intolerant of Beards and Mustaches
IBM: It'll Be Messy
IBM: It's Backwards, Man
IBM: Itty Bitty Machines
IBM: Itty Bitty Morons
IBM: It Barely Moves
IBM: I Buy Mainframes
IBM compatible - IBM contemptible

Are friendship and love unconditional?

At first glance, you’d be tempted to say that true friendship and love are unconditional. Think deeper.

Situation 1: unconditional friendship

Imagine you are the head of a family; you have a nice position in the society, a marvelous wife, and happy kids. Your best friend has just stepped in and confessed to you that he committed a crime. You are his best friend, so he doesn’t know where else to go.
What do you do:

• a. tell him to leave your house immediately, because you don’t want to be an accomplice
• b. call the police to inform them, and never get in touch with him again, because a murderer cannot be your friend
• c. invite your friend in and try to figure out a solution together

Situation 2: unconditional love

The same as above, but with your marvelous wife playing the role of the confessing murderer.
How does it feel like now? What would you do:

• a. the same thing as you would have done in Situation 1
• b. choose a different answer

Situation 3: just unconditional

Now you expect me to replace the wife with one of your kids. Instead of that, I suggest you ask yourself something else: is there any person in the world for which you’d preserve the same feelings after the murder confession?

If your answer is YES:
Congratulations, you are really capable of unconditional love! Your friends and your beloved ones can rely on your support no matter what.

If your answer is NO:
Congratulations, you show a higher understanding of love and friendship, you know that a person is the sum of her values, acts, thoughts and feelings. So if a dramatic change occurs, your friend/lover becomes another person, which you can no longer relate to.

What do YOU think? What is your definition of unconditional love and friendship?

Happiness In 7 Simple Tricks

What is happiness? The Holy Grail of humankind since Neanderthal. The Fata Morgana we can never catch (or can we?). Happiness is one of the things we never get enough of, no matter how much we have and no matter what definition we give it.

I never heard anybody pretending being happy an entire life. Moments yes, but not a lifetime. Perhaps that’s because happiness is such an intense feeling that no human body can sustain it for so long. I don’t know. Nevertheless, I think I found a few simple rules for lots of happy life moments:

1. Take the others as they are. Don’t try to change people around you, because nobody ever changes, unless they feel like doing so. Instead of making your friends unhappy because they are not able to live up to your standards, try to adjust your way of looking at them, try to accept their way, and enjoy the good things you saw in them from the very beginning (before becoming friends, there was a kind of attraction between you, wasn’t it?)
2. Indulge yourself. I know people who wouldn’t forgive themselves for making even the smallest mistake. They think and re-think the moments, blaming themselves, getting angry and frustrated, thus not being able to enjoy the present moment. The frustration comes from the fact that they cannot travel back in time to do things right. If you cannot fix things anyway, what’s the use of accusing yourself and punishing you ever and ever again? Get over the past and live your life!
3. Smile. Research has shown that smiling and feeling good work both ways. If you feel good, you’ll smile, right? Well, our body is strange, it seems that it has the power to influence the mind: so, if you smile, you’ll immediately feel better. Besides, you’ll have a positive effect on people around you: seeing you smiling, they will tend to smile back to you, thus contributing to a good atmosphere.
4. Respect yourself. You are your most valuable asset, so make sure you take good care of your soul. Don’t do things which don’t fit into your life philosophy. Don’t give you reasons to hate yourself later on.
5. Respect the others. It is not always true that you get what you give, but if you give lack of respect, you’ll get it back for sure.
6. Live the moment. Don’t wait for the most proper time to do something you wish to. Do it now, because the proper moment never comes. There is always something more to wait for, so you’ll end up old or dead and burried before you even notice that your moment never came. Do you want to learn how to play the piano? Don’t wait until you’ll have more time. Make yourself some time, find a place in your schedule and go take piano classes. Do you want to write in your blog every day? Just sit down and write. You’ll see that time will be there for you when you need it.
7. Give. Whatever you can, be it knowledge, money, old clothes or even a phone call to a lonely person, just make sure you give something every day. This will make you feel like a good person. Helping is in the human nature, so why not following our giving impulse? There are many people who are in need for your help, that you’ll never be refused if you know how to look for those people.

Each of us is unique, but I believe we all share some things, and seeking happiness is one of them. Which is your way of seeking happiness? How do you know when you found it?

Freedom: Debt Management Is the First Step

              Freedom Debt Management is a 501c3 community service organization, a non-profit that provides free and confidential solutions related to personal finance management. I haven’t used their services, as I live outside the USA, but I suppose that only the initial counseling session is free of charge, otherwise it’s hard for me to imagine how they manage to pay those professionally trained counselors and debt relief specialists. You’d probably have to pay a fee to access their debt management programs and plans, but if you want to know more, you can just visit their website and see for yourself.

The purpose of my article is not to advertise Freedom Debt Management, but to offer you a few tips that can help you manage your personal finances in a better way, so you can at least reduce your debt if not get rid of it for good.

1. Credit card debt is your biggest enemy

You’ll never earn your financial freedom if you keep on paying with your credit cards. Surely, it’s nice to have them for emergency situations, but buying a new pair of shoes isn’t an emergency, I hope we can agree on that. So, if you are already moving money from a credit card to another, trying hard to make ends meet, you’d better stop spending from the credit cards and let them slowly get balanced. Be careful with those credit cards, as they are not all alike. Some of them are more expensive than others, so make sure you repay the most expensive ones first, then get rid of the debt on the others. Then, after you’re done, either cut your cards in pieces or simply control your shopping impulses better and don’t use the cards unless you have a real emergency that needs immediate attention.

2. Assess how did you get into so much debt

Just sit down and think and put things on paper, so you can have a clear vision on where are you in the current stage of your life, in what your personal finances are concerned. Analyze your spending habits and see if you can track any patterns that may have dragged you into debt. If you came to read this article, most probably you are spending more money than you make, and that’s not started yesterday, but it’s a long-term, established habit already. You have to be conscious that you need to stop it and to reverse the trend as soon as possible, otherwise you’re never going to see your debt relief day.

3. Make your debt management plan

Don’t be afraid to put everything on paper. It’s better to have everything mapped on a chart, so you can set your goals and determine your priorities in repaying old debt. Make a list of all loans, mortgages, credit cards, payday loans or unsecured loans you may have, then write down the interest rate for each of them. Rank them accordingly. The most expensive one should be your top level priority for having it repaid. There are several ways to do this fast. For example, you can transfer the balance to cheaper credit cards. If this is possible for you, just do it as soon as you can. Another option could be a consolidation loan which would allow you to balance all your credit cards and get rid of that expensive debt for good. Make sure, though, to calculate if you can afford this consilidation loan, otherwise you’d make more harm than good on your path to financial freedom, debt management, personal finances controlling and smart budgeting.

4. Stick to your debt management plan

Plans are nothing if they are meant to remain only on paper. For a plan to give the desired results, you have to make it happen, you have to bring it into your life and follow it. This is a rule for all kind of plans, not only those which involve dealing with personal finance issues. If you’re a student, you may find it impossible to get rid of debt, but you should think that student debt is an incredibly heavy burden for a young person trying to start a life. Jobs for beginners aren’t that well-paid, so why not try to spend less during your college years and start your working life free of debt? I know this is easier said than done, but at least try not to get too deep in trouble.

Make more money

Now some of you are going to call me nuts. Who doesn’t want to make more money? Everybody does, but what are you willing to sacrifice for increasing your earnings? Some of your leisure time? Some of your sleep time? Watching your favorite TV shows? Do you see how many choices you have? However, if all you do after work is sitting in front of your TV set with a beer in your stomach, another one in your hand and countless others in the fridge, then you shouldn’t be surprised your income is always the same.

So, if you consider your actual job isn’t as rewarding as you’d like it to be, then go out there are find a better one. Or take another one. Or try to learn some alternative ways to make an additional income with only two-three hours of work per day, plus your weekends. Do something.

At least call a debt adviser like Freedom Debt Management and see how you can find a solution to your financial problems.