anamnesis

Crowds (NO SEO 4 U !)

2012-01-23T01:39:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, when places get too crowded, I like to get off the beaten trail and wander in forest for a while. I could wander around in Google+, it's kind of a weird apocryphal wasteland, caught in the cross-fires between the ennui of good-enough and the margins of too-close-to-same. Plus, there's all that exhaustive "learning" stuff. Which strikes the same chord as growing political "awareness" movements of "we already know enough" and "more facts will not be necessary" Especially facts which would necessitate re-thinking. We like our answers. Better than your answers. And we don't like your questions much either. So bugger off with the horse you rode in on.

Blogger is kind of a comfy zone. A private TAZ. The hordes moved on. Although ... through no fault of my own, it appears I have garnered top google rankings for certain obscure phrases. None of which result in more than a hit or two a week so far. Which is not too crowded. If I got a sudden influx, I'd probably run anyways. Especially if it involved dealing with lots of comments. I like comments, don't get me wrong, I just don't like responding to them. Generally. Even questions... I like to respect them for themselves, there's too many answers going around already.

But I babble. Which is what I do here. My writing has atrophied. Not that it was all that to begin with. So I may play with words and thoughts, and with constructing little trails of ideation that dead-end or lead to muggings in grammatically blind allies. I have no way of telling what you are looking for, but this is what I see.

Get Off Your Butt

2011-12-09T22:39:00.001-07:00

at least every thirty minutes, anyway.

A longitudinal study of over 17,000 Canadians revealed a relationship between sitting and mortality. Which is researchese for the longer we sit the sooner we die.

Well yeah, just another pitch for more exercise right? Nope. Had nothing to do with the amount of exercise, age (well, a little to do with age), smoking or how fat we are. All else being equal, those who sit the most die the soonest.

Further studies determined "The greater the number of breaks taken from sedentary behavior, the lower the waist circumference, body mass index, as well as blood lipids and glucose tolerance." Even if the physical activity and sedentary times were otherwise the same.

So what's the take-away? Set a timer for 30 minutes, get up, stretch, scratch your head, pace the floor for a few minutes. If you really want to get productive, use Pomodoro and make this a natural break between units of intentful activity. Doesn't have to mean productive all the time, but intent, even for entertainment, tends to contain and generate energy, rather than leak it like the rusty bucket of distraction. And the miniscule amount of energy required to set an intent each 30 minutes, is paid back with interest.

Here are some Pomodoro free timers.

Facebook and Blogging

2010-11-20T14:31:00.001-07:00

Read a strange quote, on a forum I attend regularly, it went like this...

(this forum) makes me like people I've never met, while Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life.

I don't think it's quite that bad, but perhaps personal blogs still have a purpose ;) I can say different things here. Without spamming friends' feeds. It's fun sometimes just to put thoughts out where we can see them. And if we look at what we put out and think, ahh... that really isn't it. That's kind of silly. There's no need to clarify, because time does move on. You can never step in the same river twice, someone once said. Probably after busting their ass because they'd crossed this stream every day but today that nice rock-step midstream was curiously absent. But hey, wisdom earned is wisdom gained.

Which brings me to some pondering I've been doing of late over the differences and similarities between wisdom and understanding. But I think that's for another post.

The Origin of Common Phrases

2010-03-20T17:49:00.005-06:00

I had no idea that this is where that phrase came from!

GOP Hypocrisy

2010-02-10T17:42:00.003-07:00

Amazing. And sad.

Here's the House I Want

2010-02-10T02:24:00.003-07:00

It's in Iceland though, still trying to convince wifee that this is the one.

Where the Jobs Are?

2010-02-08T18:08:00.004-07:00

And how it got that way.

***The first few minutes are in dutch, but the rest is in english. The war on drugs has been going on for more than three decades. Today, nearly 500,000 Americans are imprisoned on drug charges. In 1980 the number was 50,000. Last year $40 billion in taxpayer dollars were spent in fighting the war on drugs. As a result of the incarceration obsession, the United States operates the largest prison system on the planet, and the U.S. nonviolent prisoner population is larger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.

Obama schools the GOP

2010-01-29T17:52:00.001-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

22 Things I Learned in Debate Club

2010-01-20T12:33:00.010-07:00

Reflections on a stint in high-school at Asheville, North Carolina

People in debate clubs are special kind of nerds
The best research can be interpreted different ways, if it can only be interpreted one way that's unnatural, there's a weakness that can be found in the research itself. Look for it.
To really understand your own position, you need to understand its complete opposite on its own terms.
When you can argue either side effectively, you tend to lose opinion on matters and feel like there's always something beyond your grasp.
Some people just like to argue and if you are, or have been, in in a debate club, you are probably one of those people. But you will probably argue with this assertion
When doing research, the pros are as important as the cons and vice-versa.
Sometimes your words will defeat your own arguments. Words are not to be trusted, so anticipate how they will rat you out and reward defectors in your opponents' rhetoric.
A well articulated argument is a fascinating thing, whether you agree with it or not, take a moment to appreciate the artistry before even starting to formulate a rebuttal
Robert's Rules of Order make for really dry RPGs
The ground can shape perception of the figure without making its influence known. Every statement has an implicit context. In every context are implicit assumptions.
Learning to divest identity from opinions, and from points of view, creates versatility. But it can also inflate the ego. Until the ego just becomes another point of view. But it's tempting not to push to that final conclusion. Or to renig at times after you have
Judges aren't logical. There's always "metas" in an argument that outweighs facts, sometimes these metas can be read through micro-expressions.
A "fact" always carries a default interpretation, but don't stop there.
A good team is a combination of unique strengths created by synergies. These synergies can be recognized in action but not usually articulated
You've been debating a topic for too long when all your hear yourself saying is blah blah blah
You can't argue yourself out of a position you haven't argued yourself into
Sometimes an elegant victory is recognized by everybody except the judges and creates a comradely of unspoken recognition
This makes you wonder how many other messages you are missing
When you just start debate, your friends not into debate will go through a period of annoyance with you
You'll learn to control it, but it will always be commenting in the back of your mind. When you are back into normal social mode, this commentary will probably bear no resemblance to what you are actually saying, but you'll recognize it as two types of perception, both equally valid in their contexts and both streaming through your consciousness
That may go on for years after high-school. And you may have flashbacks the rest of your life.
Intelligence fluctuates, sometimes even over the course of an hour

Counting Tomatoes

2010-01-18T16:13:00.010-07:00

Around this time, every year, I rethink objectives. Cyclic rituals, like New Year's resolutions, may seem silly in this post-agrarian age, but I find they help punctuate time in the daily stream of affairs. A pause button, where we can freeze-frame the blur of the parade, pan around and take in the themes or make fun of the floats. If we've been chasing the parade all this time, we probably haven't seen anything new. That's how parades work. Of course, if we run the opposite direction, we have an analog fast forward, especially if it's a real sucky parade. But you get the picture.

Each year I notice something new that helps set perspective. This year it was the insidious nature of deadlines. The name alone evokes a static sense of direction. They say the only difference between a goal and dream, is that a goal has a deadline. But then again, "they" also say a bunch of stupid stuff.

I'd like to say I don't really listen to "them", but "they" do seem to have some outposts in my head. I doubt the "they" in my mind even exists as such in the outside world, but I notice their representatives are at almost every internal council meeting. Along with these outsiders, I also have had a few strong internal allies at the meetings over the years, there is always: "who gives a fuck." He's not the most positive guy or best social influence, but he's a good debater that doesn't get tied up in manipulative rhetoric. On his side of the table also sit more soft-spoken and nuanced friends, like "everyone's doing the best they can" and "don't take anything personally." They've always been a comfort. At the head of one side of the table sits compassion. I don't really understand her, but she connects me at times, when I listen, to all the wonder and glory of the flawed humans we are, each with the spark of kindness, bravery and ferocious love in the face of vast ignorance, false assurance and petty self concern. At the other end of the table sits severity. Things will never be perfect, all is impermanence and everything of value can be lost. He has no patience for stupidity, wasted effort or excuses for being anything less than our full potential. It's a tough crowd that makes for some lively discussions, and they aren't particularly enamored that I've labeled them over the years, my "ship of fools" from a Grateful Dead song. But lately I've been discovering my own true place at the table, which is a stillness, deep inside, that seems to put the ship back on course. This year, I will seek to deepen this. Meditation has really been the key here, and everyday I've been fitting in an hour and often two, to find these bearings; this year I will make it more a priority, more two than one. Resolution number 1.

But back to the point about deadlines. Ever since I can remember, this has been true north for the majority of my time. Homework, work, forms, bills, all the minutia of activities organized for living and participating in the hive. With retirement dropping some of the major pull on this compass, I've been searching for new, or older half-forgotten ways, to re-engage with time in a more qualitative fashion.

I've made mistakes and came to some realizations. I think the first realization was that I'll always be driven from within, but without the external to set the scope of these drives and objectives, there is more I'd like to do than one, or several lifetimes, can accommodate. At least in terms of objectives. I've always known, and often forget, that the sum of desires will always be more attractive than the pursuit of any single one. So there's the monkey and his nuts syndrome. Reputedly this was a trap used in India. By securing a jar half full of goodies that a monkey can reach into with his hand but which he can't withdraw if he grabs any, they catch the monkey with his paw in the jar, unwilling to let go of what is within his grasp, but not realizing that by trying to grab all he can hold, he's stuck in a same spot with nothing. A sitting duck-monkey. It was a realization I came to in my 30's, that I could have anything I wanted, but not everything I wanted. And what's this anyway about lessons that we just have learn again and again and again?

So I've always been interested in other monkeys that seem to have figured a way out of this trap. That's how I stumbled on the Pomodoro technique, and it seems to be working for me in this new context. The name, Pomodoro, comes from a timer that looks like a tomato. In time management terms, it is a way of "time-boxing." But where I found it valuable is on two fronts. The technique is basically to set out what tasks you want to involve yourself for the day. This is most effective when you have a big picture. Which I do. I'll talk about the big picture sometime, but not today. And most of my immediate tasks are related to learning, in this larger context. Pomodoro fits this approach well.

With Pomodoro, each day you add one or more tasks to your task list related to your big picture and you estimate the number of "Pomodoros" or 25 minutes increments that you will spend focused entirely on task. At the end of a Pomodoro, no matter where you are or how exciting the task, you take a break. This alone has been pretty major. By forcing these breaks, it seems to help avoid the dive-in-until-sick-of-it-and-then-postpone it for weeks until it resurfaces again and has to be restarted from scratch habit.

The 25 minutes is a block without any interruptions. Internal or external. If interrupted, you void the task and start again. So there's a game of stacking up pomo's during the day. By blocking everything else off for these short periods, it's easy to enter the "flow" state with the pomos. You may eventually be headed towards some end, but the focus is on how you are investing time increments daily. Breaks are enforced for 5 minutes or so after 25 minutes and an hour or so after 4 consecutive pomos. Or whenever you feel like it. Each pomo can be a different type of activity and you can mix and match but when you dive into a pomo, you are locked in to a single focus.

At first I thought 25 minutes would be too short, but I'm finding it just about right to totally engage and then step away. I'm also getting a better sense of what I can realistically do in a day due to a clever "Reality Check" ratio in the tool I'm using.

The trifecta of my new strategy deals with memory. It's long been known that if you really want to remember anything, the way the brain works is that optimally timed repetitions create durable, long-term memory. I use a program developed by an engineer and memory fanatic who researched these intervals brilliantly. With it, I've began to store everything I learn, and want to remember, and it's one of my pomos everyday. Anything I've high-lighted in a book, that I come across and think would be useful to know, I can ensure it doesn't just go into a slush pile of wasted attention. If I'm reading something for pure entertainment, then I pursue it as such, but it helps tremendously in discriminating the "informational" content of what I'm absorbing by asking if this is something valuable I want to keep or just trivia that will evaporate in 24 hours. Either one is ok, but it does tend to reduce the motivation to peruse endless streams of trivia. It also lets me easily pick tasks back up that haven't been worked on in weeks without having to get back up to speed.

What excites me about this approach so far is that I can spend about 5 hours a day in a focused learning state that is supporting my big picture vision, that anything I learn and want to remember I can practically guarantee I will, and that this is a process, which I'm engaged in to reach important goals ---but that the goals happen almost as a side effect. The most rewarding part is racking up those little pomos, the joy of "flow" and knowing I'll remember everything I'm learning that I want to remember. It's exciting every day to immerse myself back into the stream knowing I'm not just paddling in place but that I'm also not rowing incessantly for the big pay-off upstream.

Sort of a weird set of New Year's resolutions, but it's going to be sort of a weird year too.

Fix You

2010-01-14T11:33:00.003-07:00

Love this song by Cold Play, and I like this Young@Heart troupe...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gosIuO1HqEg

Except when it's not

2010-01-13T23:56:00.001-07:00

Dang, I've been using this strategy for years. I tell people that I have an exceptional memory, except for when I don't. I had no idea the republicans would pick it up :-)

A New Start

2010-01-01T19:40:00.002-07:00

No resolutions yet, those come about mid-month. I liked SleepyElf's post, I think we'll have some overlap. We had a great Christmas, laid-back and warm, no drama, just nice visits, hugs and immersion with family. Each year I'm reminded of what a blessing it is to share a moment of time in this slipstream ride with those who have been with us on our journey, some since our inception. Some since theirs. While nothing stands still, these moments are precious. Many thanks to our gracious and loving hosts, to our wacky siblings and alien nieces and nephews. Then we ushered the new year in with old friends on a blue moon. Goodbye 2009 and nice to meet ya 2010.

Since jumping from the moving plane of employment in July, it seems like time up to now has been spent on a new island. The adjustment was easy, combing beaches, swinging in a hammock, piling up a few coconuts. At first I continued with the same projects and approaches I'd always used to manage activities outside of work, it was just an expansion of time allotments. What I used to have only part time to explore, I now had all day. But every new year, from about the 1st to sometime in the middle of the month, I've had a ritual of re-evaluating where things have went and where they're going. Taking stock and making adjustments. Fine-tuning. But this year feels significantly different. I'm feeling more pulled towards immersion, deeper into things than was possible with the small and interruptable time-slices between the immediate and back-burner commitments of evolving complex architectures at work. A different type of flow is opening up that I can't quite articulate yet, but it feels pretty exciting.

A Schizophrenic Man

2009-12-18T16:47:00.002-07:00

Why is this scary? Because I understand exactly what this guy is saying and I think the guy questioning him is an idiot. Only got about 5 minutes into it though...

We are entitled to our own opinions. We are not entitled to our own facts.

2009-12-15T02:53:00.001-07:00

I think I'm starting to like this guy.

Security

2009-12-14T00:56:00.001-07:00

Secunia Personal Software Inspector is a very handy, and free, program to run to scan for security holes in applications installed on your PC. Recommended :-)

Bloggers -vs- Big Media

2009-12-12T17:42:00.001-07:00

Blogger discvoers that whenever the Pentagon claims to have bombed and killed a bunch of Taliban, the number killed is always 30.

The Dangers of Fishing

2009-12-07T23:35:00.003-07:00

I heard about Alien's mishap at the fishing hole but didn't realize how hazardous this was until I saw it happening to the pros too...

I'll just stick to hang gliding.

You Know What They Say About It

2009-12-02T14:12:00.002-07:00

You've probably seen these cropping up recently...

I found it very interesting that comments have been disabled on that one.

If you want to understand what's really going on, now watch this. It's very worthwhile to watch all the way to the end.

No Cigar for me.

2009-12-01T15:14:00.001-07:00

NanoWriMo is officially over. I did not hit the grand prize of 50,000 words. I'm in the low 20k ring today, but I'm ok with that. I learned some important lessons that I wouldn't have learned otherwise and my story actually started to "click." So, in spite of all the NanoWriMo warnings, I decided to take a little more time with it. I'm still preserving the 1st draft mentality, but the 2nd draft should be easier with an additional 2 weeks to wrap up in a more orderly fashion. A friend with a good eye for detail offered to edit the 2nd draft for me and I'm going through all the steps up to and including submitting to a publisher so I can check this one off.

Best Wine Ever. Dang it.

2009-11-28T21:30:00.005-07:00

Got back from a party at an affluent acquaintance's penthouse downtown. The affluent part plays a factor in the story. Had a great time and was very impressed with a particular bottle of wine. One of about 4 or 5 I think we went through. They were all good, but this particular one had a nice smokey, rich flavor that was just outstanding. Probably the best red wine I've ever tasted. It was a Barbaresco from Northern Italy. So on the way back home we stopped by the liquor store and I wended my way through the isles of spanish, portugese, chilean imports until I got to the large italian section, and sure enough, spotted the very label we had that evening. I started to grab one or two when I noticed the price tag ---holy crap, $65! I put it back reluctantly. Time to get busy on some projects and maybe something I can look forward to in the future. In the meantime, I grabbed a porter from a local micro-brewery. It'll have to do :-)

Frozen Dead Guy

2009-11-26T21:24:00.002-07:00

Perhaps not the most fitting Thanksgiving topic, but it did come up during thanksgiving celebration today with some old friends. We had some guests at the table from Sweden, and for some reason the topic of Nederland, a small town north of Boulder, and technically part of Boulder country, came up.

Now Nederland is an odd town to begin with. One of many little mountain havens in Colorado that march to their own drummer. In the more urban centers we have pesky things like zoning and big tracts of houses that look pretty much the same. Not so in the mountain towns. The dwellings are as colorful as the inhabitants and their stories.

This particular story is about an old codger named Grandpa Bredo. Grandpa Bredo died in 1989, but that was really just the beginning of his story, and how he got from Norway to a shed in Nederland is probably best described in the Nederland Chamber of Commerce page here. Each March the festival has grown, there's been songs and youtubes about Frozen Dead Guy Day and, if you visit us in March, we'll take you to the festival. You may even want to join the local Polar Bear club and lounge around in freezing water in your bathing suit eating ice cream and slushies to really get into the spirit. Proceeds go to Nederland elementary and middle school.

And I probably shouldn't even mention Alfred Packer Day, celebrated at CU, or the Grill named after him in the University Memorial Center and cafeteria or people might really think we're weird. That's why I didn't bring it up. Maybe I should just stick to the rubber ducky races.

Flu Shot Making People Sick?

2009-11-25T18:45:00.003-07:00

Saw this news article on H1N1 Vaccine Recalls in Canada after Marbella's experiences. It merited a little more investigation.

The first thing that struck me as odd was this statement

The batch under investigation by the federal government and GlaxoSmithKline bears the lot number A80CA007A brand name Arepanrix, which is the version that contains adjuvant, a chemical additive that stretches supply and boosts immunity.

The term "adjuvant" was new to me, so I had to look it up. A couple of surprising findings surfaced. Adjuvant is basically a "filler." Apparently it's routinely used in vaccines ---without an adjuvant, a vaccine is much less effective. So it appears the vaccine without adjuvant may be used in cases like pregnancy or infants, but they'd be at far greater risk for getting the virus or they could use the adjuvant, like the rest of the general population and perhaps take another type of chance.

Adjuvants are kind of scary. They are typically aluminum salts, that through some unknown mechanism, seem to stimulate a vigorous response to the vaccine by the immune system. But the adjuvant used by GlaxoSmithKline is actually squalene. It's an oil usually extracted from shark liver and found to cause autoimmune diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis in animals.

Other ingredients of the vaccine include 25 micrograms of mercury (thimerosal), used as a preservative, and polysorbate 80.

The second curious statement was "The rate of serious adverse events is so far 0.54 per 100,000 doses distributed which Butler-Jones noted is less than what is generally expected for the seasonal flu vaccine."

As of November 12, H1N1 has been attributed to 121 deaths in Canada. That's about 1 death per 200,000 Canadians. About the same death rate as hernias.

And it turns out the study on adverse effects actually averaged the normal with the adjuvant versions ---the adjuvant vaccine has a much higher adverse ratio, more like 395 out of 100,000. About 50 times more than H1N1 itself.

Just thought that was a bit odd, and that was without digging very much at all, maybe 30 minutes of research (that I should have been writing.)

I don't have any particular opinion, pro or con on flu shots in general, but I think it pays to look very closely at what's being "sold" to us as information and science. One flaw of capitalism is that the interests of institutions, private or public, are not always aligned with the interests of individuals.

Mimicry

2009-11-22T16:06:00.001-07:00

This sucker is GOOD. Wait toward the end when he starts to mimic camera shutters and chainsaws.

When Dreams Dream?

2009-11-16T21:45:00.008-07:00

I keep a dream journal on my headboard. Last night, I discovered my dreams keep dream journals too. Several, in fact. I caught them writing down stuff that happened during MY day, when I was conscious. I guess my "waking life" is their dream life. Snippets of conversations and things that were said. They were trying to piece it together and figure out what's happening outside of their dream world, or what it means in their own terms. Kind of like dream interpretation, but reversed. I don't blame you if this sounds confusing, I'm confused too.

I wonder if me writing that down in my dream journal would be part of what they are writing in their dream journal which I am writing about and whether I might someday find myself in a strange recursive loop with a white coat and lots of shiny buckles trying to squeeze a word in edgewise to prove I'm still sane?

Tim Conway's Elephant Story

2009-11-15T20:10:00.001-07:00

Wait for the Siamese ones... hearing that noise those poor elephants made brought tears to my eyes.

15% of our population, we don't need

2009-11-13T19:59:00.002-07:00

And what happens when we pretend we do. This interview is just too sane.

I Think I Found Tao's Future House

2009-11-12T20:13:00.002-07:00

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

2009-11-11T12:29:00.006-07:00

A cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."

The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than relatively more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Ever notice that the more you know about something the more cautious you are about making sweeping generalizations? This may come across as a more tentative grasp of the subject than someone more self-assured. The more we know the more we seem to realize what we don't know. This is why, I believe, the most persuasive politicians and news channels can be the most incompetent perspectives on a situation but appear the most authoritative. It's human nature :-)

List of Cognitive Biases

Al Franken Kicks Butt

2009-11-10T18:06:00.003-07:00

I was curious what kind of Senator Al Franken from Saturday Night Live would make. I think he did well here.

Understanding Others

2009-11-03T23:15:00.001-07:00

A historical perspective of Iran.

What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs

2009-11-01T01:07:00.001-06:00

From the California Assembly

2009-10-30T17:45:00.000-06:00

Heard it from a friend, who heard it from a friend, who....

2009-10-29T19:02:00.005-06:00

Today's project involves the family in this picture. We don't know who they are. This photo, as well as many others, are all glued to construction paper pages inside an old leather-bound album we received today from a friend. She got it from her father, a farm boy from Texas who fought in Okinawa the winter of 1945 against the Japanese. How exactly he got it, we aren't sure. Someone, probably another young man from another side of the planet, was carrying this album with him as the world was falling apart.

There's very little writing in it. Not enough to provide any sort of clue to the people or even the specific locales. School pictures, family photos, pictures on the beach, but oddly nothing really definitive. No signs, landmarks. A few cryptic notes.

We're assuming, from what little we can piece together, that the mystery owner was probably from Okinawa, and not just stationed there. Our niece, who lives on one of the islands of Okinawa (of which there are hundreds. Islands that is, not nieces), has some connections and gave us some contacts with the news media. We've scanned some of the pictures and bright-eyes is sending them to those contacts to see if we can help reunite these captured memories with the people they may be important to.

Sipping my coffee with snow still falling outside my study window, it strikes me how odd a journey this album has taken. To be passing through our home, trying to find its way back. And it is my sincere wish, to all those who journey, that they reach the destinations they seek.

Bright Blessings,
-K

Social Postits

2009-10-24T20:24:00.006-06:00

Well this was cool. I was researching the "Nook" a bit more (an e-reader from Barnes and Noble.) What I was curious about was whether it supported PDFs and how. That was a major limitation of the Kindle. I have about, oh 2000+ PDF books I'd like to move over.

In the product comparisons I noticed the little highlight indicator of the software I discussed below (diigo) which allows people to put "postits" on a web site and share them with friends or the world.

So I hovered the mouse over those and got a pop-out of some good information about that particular detail and how it was implemented that wasn't provided or approved by the official site. In fact, they have no clue those postits are even there.

Now here is this whole other layer of the web superimposed on the first layer. One of annotation and commentary that can span the public at large, related groups and affiliations or just a single user, making a note for themselves about something when they revisit the page in the future.

Growing a Book

2009-10-24T17:52:00.007-06:00

I've been mucking around with hubpages. It's in the same category as squidoo, designed to publish single topics in a big ecosystem of topics. A nice approach for people who don't want to maintain dedicated web sites, or want to supplement that activity, with pocket money coming in from pay per click ad revenue and other options.

But there is another application for these systems, I'll call it "The Incremental Book."

The more successful publishers at these sites usually have several islands of interest. A particular topic or category that they explore with a number of independent articles (lens, hubs, pages,etc ) that all referencing each other in a mesh of links. This is good marketing. Google likes pages that have links pointing to them and this "backlinking" is a strategy for pushing a page up in the search results of google, assuming you've picked good keywords/phrases and your article is organized well around that single focus. Kind of like writing a paragraph around a topic sentence.

This also lends itself to a new and fun way to write a book.

You start with a topic you'd like to write a book about. No commitment at this point, just an idea. You start writing little sections of the book, one interesting piece at a time and publishing them individually on squidoo or hubpages. By publishing them there, you also get feedback, comments, etc (you'll need to actively participate in the forums on these sites around the topic area, offering advice, asking questions, which in turn drives people interested in that category to investigate your writing and provide you feedback.)

While you're growing your book this way, you also start making money from the traffic and ads for its partial content. Especially as the number of articles related to your topic grows. Then, instead of a line with a hook in the water, you have a net, where someone that hits one of the pages in the general area will likely be interested in the other related topics you have conveniently linked to in your mesh.

Once you have fleshed everything out, you can pull all the content together into an ebook and then let affiliates sell it for you through something like paydot.com

Here's a description of the process that goes into more detail.

Now this definitely goes against the grain of conventional thought for writing a book, which is generally to protect every scrap of an idea diligently and send the finished manuscript to a big publisher and wait for the royalty checks to roll-in. But the times are changing faster than our mental maps. This new model takes advantage of:

The opportunity to make money off of little pieces of a bigger project before it's complete
Using a group of people interested in the topic to help refine it and make it better
The counter-intuitive trend of people buying ebooks which package something together, even if they could assemble the same thing from material spread out on the web; the tendency of people to buy printed books, even if a free ebook with the same content is available
Different vectors of information. People looking for information through web sources and people looking for information packaged, look in different ways and in different places
Leveraging interests of people who would rather sell stuff than make it. Using affiliates means you can outsource your marketing to people who enjoy it and are good at
Once the mesh of articles is out there and the ebook is done, it requires very little effort to maintain as a stream of income, unlike a physical product you have to stock or a service you have to perform

Anyway, some thoughts on a new approach for those looking to supplement their income while actively engaging themselves in research, learning or exploring things that truly enrich them.

Maybe the Dingo Ate your baby?

2009-10-23T12:24:00.005-06:00

That was such a weird line from Elaine on Seinfield. One of those phrases that stick in your head and you have to catch yourself from blurting out in inappropriate social contexts. Or not.

Continuing the theme of posts about useful tools ---for those writing and researching on the internet, I've been playing with this puppy recently:

http://www.diigo.com

And it's pretty impressive.

You can put "sticky" notes on any web page (that just you, or others you want to share with, can see)
You can highlight important parts of a page, the highlighted text is saved in your bookmarks on diigo which you can tag, search, etc.
You can search across all your bookmarks, tags, etc.
Stuff is saved when you bookmark, so if the page goes away, you still have the information
You can "publish" any of your tags to blogs as a feeds or post directly as an article.

All this can be private, just for you as a research tool, but it's also cool that you can collaborate with a group of friends and share research. This looks like a pretty powerful tool for organizing all those little snippets of information you come across while browsing for various interests, projects, lens, or just file to read later in a way much more powerful, flexible and organized than the simple brain-dead bookmark feature of a browser.

Plus, you don't lose it all if your computer crashes or you upgrade. I've been using del.icio.us for this in the past, but after playing a bit today I think I've found a worthy successor.

Finding Images You Can Use

2009-10-21T14:52:00.008-06:00

Photo by Randy Son of Robert's.

If you are looking for good images to use on your web sites, blogs, squidoo lens, etc. here is a secret weapon.

Flickr has a number (i.e. > 16 million) images that users have uploaded under the Creative Commons Attribution License. This license permits you to use the photo on personal or commercial sites, crop it, tweak it, etc. as long as you give credit to the owner.

That's the first part of the secret. The second part is how to search for just the images with this license, and find good ones in the mix.

This link goes directly to the search box on Flickr for Attribution only licenses. Enter any search term and you'll get a list of pretty mediocre shots. So the next step... above the list of thumbnails returned by the search, you'll see the default sort is "Most Relevant." Click on "Interesting" instead and you should have some pretty images that have gone through a certain amount of "crowd sourcing" for quality. And there you go. You can't use these for t-shirts and products (like zazzle and cafepress), but it's a great source to add impact to your articles and stories published on the web.

First Zazzle Experiment

2009-10-18T01:10:00.004-06:00

To give Alien some ideas and to test embedding. I present you with the Infamous BarkenPantenSniffer. A canine philosophy which originated in the streets of Stuttgart in the early 1800s before sweeping through most of Europe and North America. It is believed by scholars to be the first philosophy which jumped species and founded the basis of German Idealism.

BarkenPantenSniffer by minnaloushe
Design customized dog apparel online at zazzle

No graphics were uploaded in the creation the shirt.
There was some animal testing involved, however.
Zazzle seems much easier to just slap a visual idea up quickly, they have a variety of fonts to pick from and you can layer images in incrementally. Looks like a good way to make a quick bumper sticker too :-)

The Case of the Flying Boy

2009-10-15T17:12:00.007-06:00

A strange case here in Colorado. It starts with a rather unusual family from Fort Collins, one Richard and Mayumi Heene. Richard is a tinkering home scientist type, was once a meteorologist (aka weatherman.) They have three boys. The family chases storms for fun and works on science projects in their backyard together. They were once featured in ABC's Wife-swap show.

As our story begins, there is a large mylar balloon, 20 feet in diameter and 5 feet high, filled with helium moored to the side of their house. A box is attached to the balloon for equipment, like the basket on a hot air balloon, but at the moment it is empty. Richard and Mayumi are in the house, the boys are playing outside. Suddenly, an older brother comes running in the house shouting that his little brother, aptly named "Falcon", who is 6 years old, had released the balloon and was inside the box.

The balloon was designed to hover about 20 feet above the ground. They ran out to see it disappearing into the sky where it climbed to over 15,000 feet. Helicopters were scrambled to find it, airport traffic was rerouted around the area, it stayed aloft for an hour and a half before it came back to earth, 50 miles away just north of the Denver International Airport. The box was bent and folded over on itself but no little boy was to be found.

Until later. When they finally found him hiding in another box, in the attic of their home, afraid of the trouble he was in for releasing his dad's balloon.

BTW, the theme of the wife-swap episode was safe homes -vs- risky ones. Guess whose was the risky one? :-)

But seriously, had there been a big floaty thing with a basket in it tied to our house when we were kids, I can almost guarantee the chance of the same scenario, except one of us would have actually BEEN in the box.

First Snow

2009-10-10T14:01:00.002-06:00

Picture by Bright-Eyes

Great Prank!

2009-10-09T16:55:00.001-06:00

Space. The Final Frontier.

2009-10-09T15:24:00.005-06:00

Last night bright-eyes and I went to a lecture on campus. It started at 6:00 and finished around 10:30pm. Then we hit IHOP and got back around midnight. My head and tummy were both stuffed.

The speaker was Nassim Haramein, an Italian physicist with some pretty radical ideas and a way of explaining them that was absolutely magical. He was one of those kids in school that remind me of some of my brothers. Stuff that other kids would just absorb verbatim and spit back out on the tests, he would think about and try to make sense of first. Like the idea of dimensions.

He was excited to learn in his elementary school class that they'd be covering dimensions! I still remember being excited about this too. But he too was disappointed with the results. First the teacher drew a dot on the board and said this is dimension 0, but it doesn't exist. WTF? I can see the dot dude, what do you mean it doesn't exist?! Then he drew a series of dots connected in a line. This is the first dimension, it doesn't exist either. Then he drew a box of lines, this is the second dimension, it also doesn't exist. Then he explained the third, which miraculously springs into being while being built on these dimensions that don't exist. How can you combine 3 things that don't exist to make a 4th that does? There's some sleight of hand here.

And what Nassim drew out, in a most entertaining way, were all sorts of sleights of hand going on in physics and our "current" understanding of the world.

Like most original thinkers, he turned a lot of things on their head. Here we are trying to understand the nature of matter, which is .00001% of what exists and seems to dissolve into smaller and smaller units the deeper we go down. We're just about at the physical limits of this exploration today with the Hadron Collider, which is a huge tunnel, 17 miles in circumference that they haven't even been able to turn on yet without it failing due to the complexity and scale. All this just so we can smash the smallest particles we've found so far into even smaller particles.

Meanwhile, as they go deeper down the rabbit hole, looking for the "God particle" that is the ultimate building block of nature, they are ignoring the 800lb gorilla in the room. Space.

Perhaps, like a vortex in water, that becomes visible in contrast the rest of the translucent environment of water, matter is just a particular dynamic of space?

This was just were he started; it was a wild, humorous and informative ride. He will definitely stretch your mind...

His project page is here. He has some DVDs also if you get curious.

When I get X then I'll do/be/have Y

2009-10-05T00:25:00.004-06:00

There is a big line forming to the right. And another to the right of that, and so on, as far as the eye can see. We're trying to get to the ticket stands at the front of the lines We can picture the ticket in our minds already. It's really nothing special, in itself. A little ink, a little chit of heavy stock paper. But printed on the front is written: "Admit One." If we have this ticket, then we can get in. Get the prize that has been denied us because we just didn't have this one thing that would open the door. And it's ok to wait, it will be worth it. We'll stand in the rain and mud, in the snow and wind. And even if we have to leave, just knowing we can come back to this line, with the ticket counter at the end, makes everything we do less of a burden. Because it will all change when we get the ticket ---we know what ticket we need, and what line we need to wait in.

Odd thing is, we've done this before. So many tickets, so many lines before. But this next one is the one that counts. Well that, and maybe those tickets we missed in the past for sundry reasons. Man, those could have been some prizes. But we can't live in the past. Can we? It doesn't change. But the future, we can build castles that never existed before there. We can tear down the shacks and clear the pastures with rusted cars, tractors and buses and build idyllic plantations, with shade trees and hammocks. That would be just the ticket. And we might appreciate a nice lemonade, waiting here in line. It sure tastes good, this cold drink, with the ticket stand in sight and we don't mind the wait. Sometimes the flies are buzzing though, the mosquitos, the sun beating on our heads and it's annoying and we wish we could get the ticket soon. That guy selling lemonade is on break. But hey, he'll be back and, more importantly, the line is moving.

But sometimes we might wonder what it could be like not to stand in line. To have no tickets to anywhere but here. To walk off, away from the crowds, into the forests to make our own trails. Where every step is an arrival and there's nothing we plan to see or be or have but what we discover before us.

Elemental

2009-10-03T17:48:00.004-06:00

Happy birthday Zach, wherever you might be :-) Happy pre-birthday Resa! Man, we have a lot of birthdays this time of year!

Watched O Horten last night. Odd movie about a train conductor in Denmark(?) retiring after 40 years and his adjustment to some new routines. It wasn't really a comedy, per se, but had some strange characters and was one of those peeks into another life (and another culture) that's always been fascinating.

This linked into an article I was reading today on the correlation between risk taking and happiness and is loosely related to the next book in my wishlist: Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

Yesterday, bright-eyes and I drove to an urban section in the outskirts of Denver, where the Korean community seems to have colonized. I wandered through "HMart" drawn from one pretty bright object to another, with indecipherable brandings, while bright-eyes took a more purposeful track. We ended up with some munchies and one strange contraption for "roasting fish." I'm not sure what that means. Afterwords, we went to a most excellent mom and pop Korean BBQ restaurant then got lost a wee bit, but eventually found our way home.

And now I better get back to work on a project that started as a simple contact page for bright-eye's site and has since morphed into a peculiar experiment that I'll publish (not here) in a day or two that will probably be of interest to only about 2.5 geeks worldwide.

And I'll leave you with one of my favorite elements: Bismuth. Atomic number 83, pictured above. Not only is it purty, but it's also the active ingredient in pepto-bismol and is what gives it the pink color (they use the un-oxidized form ;-)

I'm still waiting for an answer from Norm, on how the heck they attached the sticks on these fences in Thailand but it seems like he's too busy posting about 7 headed snakes and stuff. Sheesh.

Clarifying the Health Care Debate

2009-09-30T20:24:00.002-06:00

If you haven't been keeping up, this is a really good explanation of the options on the table and the forces at work. On a side note, I used this guys book, "The Back of the Napkin. Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures" as one of my essential manuals at work, but it's also good for exploring all sorts of ideas, projects and plans. Particularly for those who think visually, or want to. (Click on the "Full" to see the, er, full effect ;-)

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

The Solar System

2009-09-30T13:11:00.002-06:00

This guy is doing some interesting stuff. He has some very innovative ideas about space and time and in this video he is presenting a simple demonstration about how our solar system really moves that you won't (or didn't) learn in school.

The Shack

2009-09-26T02:27:00.002-06:00

Thanks for the cards and calls on my birthday(!) With the money Marbella sent, which I keep trying to no avail to get her NOT to, I purchased a book that she and gerbeans have been adamant I should read. I sat down and read it today, and I'm glad I did.

It struck a lot of chords. I've never been particularly impressed with religions or their institutions. Even the "scriptures" of such seems to have captured more about man's interpretation of "law" rather than "spirit" and The Shack brings this out very nicely in a captivating and heart-wrenching tale. It may shake up those with more rigid views, in particularly the Sunday morning Christian crowd; but I think this shaking up, or rather "waking up" strikes closer to the essence of a personal relation with the divine than any group ritual or institutional form. It reminds me a little of Christopher Moore's book _Lamb_, which was a story of the life of Jesus told by his best friend, and 13th apostle, Biff. That one was much more light-hearted, but also eye-opening in the ways we typically frame our messiahs and messengers of what lies beyond.

I enjoyed the discussions of "reality" and the layers of perception involved. It's always seemed to me that reality is not all that black and white. There are degrees of "real" as well as various facets. All in all, a good read, inspiring and some deep exploration of the nature of our relationships with our world, our fellow humans and this awesome mystery of which we are a very small and gradually awakening part.

Write a Novel. In a month...

2009-09-25T15:57:00.002-06:00

Every year I've been tempted by this, I think the time is ripe. I've joined the NanoWriMo "contest" starting November 1. The goal is to write a 175 page novel by the end of the month. A quote from their FAQ:

"Art for art's sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and "must-dos" of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives."

I'll put the word-count widget up on the sidebar here in November to keep the pressure on :-)

To understand the spirit of this thing, and for a pretty good read in itself, check out No Plot, No Problem.

Life is Crappy. Be Happy

2009-09-23T14:07:00.007-06:00

There is a point, when you are learning a new language, where you have moments experiencing what it would be like to speak it fluently. You may find yourself following a few consecutive sentences without translation, riding the rhythm of meaning in this new discourse, before it falls apart and you find yourself clueless again.

Even before this, however, you have to listen in a way you're not used to hearing. It may sound like the words are similar to words you know, or sounds you know, but it becomes an obstacle to learning if you can't let go of those ready classifications and just hear it as it is.

Start from scratch.

Weeks have now passed since my retreat. I have continued the practice. This little essay attempts to capture some of my thoughts and experiences, from the aftermath, as well as some deep discussions recently with friends and some recent postings from Ayla and Tao I enjoyed and how they intersect with my world at the moment.

Let's start with Zorba the Greek. This is a tale of a young Greek intellectual, Piraeus, with book learning and a philosophical understanding of the world who begins a journey into a deeper exploration of life through a propitious encounter with the irascible old codger named Zorba. Zorba has lived a full life and, as you might imagine, has a very different take on it than Piraeus. At one point Piraeus, overwhelmed by this character's depth, asks him if he'd ever been married. Zorba replies, "of course. I'm just a man. I've been married, had kids, a family, a job, the whole catastrophe!"

Out of context, this might sound like a punch-line. But what Zorba was trying to say to Piraeus was an interesting insight about life, one that is particularly skewed in American culture it seems. That is that life is basically a mixture of the good and the bad. Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin, but happiness or unhappiness is not intrinsic to either.

In its essence, meditation is simply being aware of what is. That's what makes is so hard. And rewarding. It's not some detached state of tranquility where you remove yourself from the world and its concerns. It starts, of course, with just sitting with minimal distractions. Because our minds are so easily caught up in our habitual responses to things, we need this simplification at first. But the goal is to develop this center we can take out into life in order to observe, perhaps for the first time, what's really going on. It gives us, incrementally, a little space between our thoughts and feelings and our reactions to them.

And it does this so we can discover a curious in-sight. Most, if not all of us, spend most of our time suffering. And it's not necessary. But to get to this insight, requires us to stop and really observe. Not think. Because the first stage of this observation is noticing the tremendous barriers of denial we have about it. I think the "flavor" of this denial is uniquely cultural, but the existence seems to be universal.

Please note, this is not a "sad sack" type of tribunal about "life is hard, poor me", it leads to something interesting. The way out of suffering is through it, not around it. Sometimes a bone may need to be broken again to set properly.

When we start exploring our raw experience instead of our thoughts and interpretations, we may notice that we're seldom very happy. When things happen that bring us pleasure, we want to hold onto them, we want to find ways to get more of this in the future, to secure it. We cling. When things happen we don't like, we elaborate it. "What a jerk! How inconsiderate" we fume and rant or we recriminate ourselves, "I should be more forgiving", "this shouldn't bother me!" Most of us live in a low-grade but constant state of anxiety and agitation about all the things that need to be fixed, improved, remedied. We may dip for a few moments, at times, into acceptance of how things actually are, usually only in moments of pleasure, and these are often rapidly overtaken with plans on how to get this more often or how to hold onto it. We may find ourselves comparing our lives to others, with self-satisfaction or dismay. We may posit some future where we anticipate pleasure. When we actually start looking at these moment to moment experiences of our mind, there seems to be a lot of scurrying.

And then we may notice that underlying all of this is a fundamental illusion, one that doesn't really mesh with how things really are. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing stays the same. Certainly not in the external world, much less our moods or sense of self. Yet most of our reactions assume there are constants. Most of our disappointments are discovering time and time again that this is not the case.

So is there a way to live this life "as it is", to experience the full catastrophe, without grasping for pleasures and running away from pain? Without becoming a martyr in our suffering or becoming numb and indifferent? I believe there is, and I think the first step is, as a wise man once said, "To let go of suffering, we have to admit it into consciousness."

To explore this more deeply, and not simply philosophize about it, I can recommend two experiential guides to start a journey:

Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Dancing with Life by Phillip Moffitt

A somewhat related and entertaining talk on the illusion of how we make certain decisions...really fascinating; the implications of not knowing ourselves as well as we think!

Free Online Courses from MIT

2009-09-21T00:42:00.000-06:00

Some courses available in the Cognitive Psychology area...

Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Course #	Course Title	Term
9.00	Introduction to Psychology	Fall 2004
9.00P	Introduction to Psychology	Fall 2001
9.01	Neuroscience and Behavior	Fall 2003
9.01	Introduction to Neuroscience	Fall 2007
9.011	The Brain and Cognitive Sciences I	Fall 2002
9.012	The Brain and Cognitive Sciences II	Spring 2002
9.012	The Brain and Cognitive Sciences II	Spring 2006
9.013J	Cell and Molecular Neurobiology	Spring 2008
9.02	Brain Laboratory	Spring 2002
9.03	Neural Basis of Learning and Memory	Fall 2007
9.036	The Visual System	Spring 2005
9.04	Neural Basis of Vision and Audition	Fall 2006
9.044J	Brain Mechanisms for Hearing and Speech	Fall 2005
9.05	Neural Basis of Movement	Spring 2003
9.07	Statistical Methods in Brain and Cognitive Science	Spring 2004
9.081	Human Memory and Learning	Fall 2002
9.09J	Cellular Neurobiology	Spring 2005
9.10	Cognitive Neuroscience	Spring 2006
9.110J	Neurology, Neuropsychology, and Neurobiology of Aging	Spring 2005
9.12	Experimental Molecular Neurobiology	Fall 2006
9.14	Brain Structure and its Origins	Spring 2005
9.15	Biochemistry and Pharmacology of Synaptic Transmission	Fall 2007
9.150	Biochemistry and Pharmacology of Synaptic Transmission	Fall 2007
9.16	Cellular Neurophysiology	Spring 2002
9.173J	Noninvasive Imaging in Biology and Medicine	Fall 2005
9.18	Developmental Neurobiology	Spring 2005
9.181J	Developmental Neurobiology	Spring 2005
9.19J	Cognitive & Behavioral Genetics	Spring 2001
9.20	Animal Behavior	Fall 2005
9.201	Advanced Animal Behavior	Spring 2000
9.22J	A Clinical Approach to the Human Brain	Fall 2006
9.250	Evolutionary Psychology	Spring 1999
9.285J	Neural Coding and Perception of Sound	Spring 2005
9.29J	Introduction to Computational Neuroscience	Spring 2004
9.301J	Neural Plasticity in Learning and Development	Spring 2002
9.322J	Genetic Neurobiology	Fall 2005
9.35	Sensation and Perception	Spring 2004
9.357	Special Topics in Vision Science	Fall 2001
9.373	Somatosensory and Motor Systems	Spring 2002
9.402	Language and Thought	Fall 2002
9.458	Parkinson's Disease Workshop	Summer 2006
9.459	Scene Understanding Symposium	Spring 2006
9.51	Affective Priming at Short and Extremely Short Exposures	Spring 2003
9.520	Statistical Learning Theory and Applications	Spring 2003
9.520	Statistical Learning Theory and Applications	Spring 2006
9.520-A	Networks for Learning: Regression and Classification	Spring 2001
9.52-A	Investigating the Neural Substrates of Remote Memory using fMRI	Spring 2003
9.52-B	Topics in Brain and Cognitive Sciences Human Ethology	Spring 2001
9.52-C	Computational Cognitive Science	Spring 2003
9.530	Cellular and Molecular Computation	Spring 2000
9.531J	Systems Biology	Fall 2004
9.56J	Abnormal Language	Fall 2004
9.57J	Language Acquisition	Fall 2001
9.587J	The Lexicon and Its Features	Spring 2007
9.591J	Language Processing	Fall 2004
9.59J	Psycholinguistics	Spring 2005
9.601J	Language Acquisition I	Spring 2002
9.611J	Natural Language and the Computer Representation of Knowledge	Spring 2003
9.63	Laboratory in Cognitive Science	Fall 2002
9.63	Laboratory in Cognitive Science	Fall 2005
9.641J	Introduction to Neural Networks	Spring 2005
9.65	Cognitive Processes	Spring 2004
9.660J	Computational Cognitive Science	Fall 2004
9.66J	Computational Cognitive Science	Fall 2004
9.67	Object and Face Recognition	Spring 2001
9.675	The Development of Object and Face Recognition	Spring 2006
9.68	Affect: Biological, Psychological, and Social Aspects of Feelings	Spring 2005
9.69	Foundations of Cognition	Spring 2003
9.70	Social Psychology	Spring 2005
9.71	Functional MRI of High-Level Vision	Fall 2007
9.74	Foundations of Human Memory and Learning	Spring 2002
9.75J	Psychology of Gender	Spring 2003
9.85	Infant and Early Childhood Cognition	Fall 2005
9.911	Reasonable Conduct in Science	January (IAP) 2002
9.912	Special Topics in Brain and Cognitive Sciences	Fall 2001
9.912J	Introduction to Computational Neuroscience	Spring 2004
9.913	Pattern Recognition for Machine Vision	Fall 2004
9.913-A	Intensive Neuroanatomy	January (IAP) 2002
9.916	Modularity, Domain-specificity, and the Organization of Knowledge	Fall 2001
9.916	The Neural Basis of Visual Object Recognition in Monkeys and Humans	Spring 2005
9.916-A	Probability and Causality in Human Cognition	Spring 2003
9.93	Cognitive Neuroscience of Remembering: Creating and Controlling Memory	January (IAP) 2002
9.93	Marathon Moral Reasoning Laboratory	January (IAP) 2007
9.95-A	Research Topics in Neuroscience	January (IAP) 2003
9.96	Experimental Methods of Adjustable Tetrode Array Neurophysiology	January (IAP) 2001
9.97	Introduction to Neuroanatomy	January (IAP) 2003
9.98	Language and Mind	January (IAP) 2003
9.98	Neuropharmacology	January (IAP) 2009

See the whole catalog.

Concepts

2009-09-20T04:00:00.003-06:00

Photo Albums

2009-09-18T13:48:00.003-06:00

Some of Bright-eye's photos posted on Google's Web Albums. Pretty seamless process using Picassa.

Going on some errands today to pick up some warm fuzzy shoes for winter. Visiting friends with teepee tomorrow for solstice music making and talking like a pirate. Yarrr!

Making Money

2009-09-08T19:51:00.003-06:00

For you creative types out there...

15 Places to Make Money Creating Your Own Products Online

Or, if you're not feeling that industrious at the moment...

People of Walmart

I'm not sure how (or if) they get around the photo release clauses for taking people's pictures, but if you bring your cell phone with a camera on your next walmart expedition you could net youself a $100 gift-card ;-)

The Return of Elvis

2009-09-07T10:41:00.002-06:00

Rock On Mew!

Back from Camp

2009-09-06T14:27:00.005-06:00

So I promised to write-up something on this trip and here it is. First off, for those of you thinking a "meditation retreat" is an idyllic mental holiday where one can float in the bliss of a mind uncluttered with day to day concerns, I should disabuse you of the notion. Not the uncluttered part, rather the idyllic one. It was hard, hard work.

The schedule had us meditating about 11+ hours a day. The first three days dealt with harnessing the "flickering" mind through a practice which sharpened mental awareness to the here and now without being pulled away by past, future, thoughts or feelings. The main key to this was the same approach taken in taming any wild animal... persistence and patience. The mind runs away a thousand times, each time you eventually notice it has left the premises, you bring it back. Without getting frustrated or annoyed, the bringing it back is an essential piece, not a failure. Like doing reps with weights to build muscle. First it may have run away for 5-10 minutes before you even notice, very soon the length of time it is missing, and the number of times it runs away, reduces dramatically and you start to experience a very powerful "sharpening." This becomes restorative in its own right, but was only a foundation for the next part of the training: vipassana.

If you google "vipassana", this meditation retreat will come up first in the search results. It's taught by SN Goenka and his audio/video instructions along with onsite teachers and instructors are used in his centers throughout the world. It is non-religious, non-sectarian, but it does use the techniques taught by Gotama Buddha which, Goenka emphasizes and demonstrates, are not doctrines, but ways to experience basic truths about reality for yourself. To see things as "they really are." So after the first part, with the ability to at least hold onto a small beam of awareness without flitting into fantasy or thoughts reacting to thoughts rather than simply observing experience, the mind can start to investigate what is actually present in our bodies in terms of sensations.

And down the rabbit hole one goes, following Gotama's lead in exploring the very bedrock of human experience and the cause of all suffering and misery in the human mind. A tall order! But what one can learn here, experientially, is that our entire interaction with the 6 senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, thought/feelings) result in sensations which are constantly changing, constantly in flux and impermanent. The core of human misery then is wrapped up in either clinging or aversion to these sensations. What becomes powerful is the experiential part. It's one thing to realize, intellectually, perhaps through the loss of a loved one or some other life event, that things are impermanent. One could develop a philosophical stance from that perhaps, but to experience through observation this stream of arising, passing away, arising while simply observing starts to condition the awareness at a very deep level and, in Gotama's terms, starts to purify the mind and undo deep complexes of reactivity in our unconscious.

Usually we go straight from noticing to reacting. And while not specifically part of what was being taught, I tripped across something very cool. Meditating in the same position for an hour or longer, gives you a first hand opportunity to observe PAIN. This pain can be extremely intense, but it's not actually harmful. After slowly moving and stretching and getting circulation going again, things are as good as new (for the most part :-), but during the experience you may easily think you are suffering irreparable damage. This lead to an interesting epiphany for me. The difference between pain and suffering.

During one period of sitting, on Day 5, I started getting all sorts of pain arising from knees, hips, ankles, a little symphony of about 5 different sections each competing to see who could cause the most discomfort. Rather than changing posture, I decided to simply look more closely at these sensations, without wanting them to go away (aversion) and without trying to ignore them. Without any thought that things should or could be different from what they simply are, right now. Just simply focusing that "beam" of present awareness on what they actually were, their dimensions, their nature and qualities, ignoring any reactions to them that wasn't primary experience ---and a most amazing thing happened. As I observed each painful sensation, simply curious and with equanimity, it changed into something that I think the closest word is "radiance." Not pleasure or discomfort, but a subtle type of ecstasy. I rode out the rest of the session on this wave.

However, the next session, being all psyched to recreate this intriguing experience, I couldn't get back to that place, and realized something else about clinging or attachment to an expected result. Meh. I couldn't do it. So I went back to the normal progression. It did give me a hint at something possible though. I suppose one could practice this with hot chili peppers too :-)

While I was skeptical, off and on throughout, about this vipassana technique and the philosophy of simply observing sensation without interference as a way of unraveling deep habits of the mind to react in ways that propagate human misery, I couldn't argue with the actual experience and the "lightening" effects of this meditation. It was an interesting lesson in what Goenka refers to as the "field of wisdom" being composed of what you've heard or read, what you've reasoned out and the most important part of this triad: what you experience directly. The focus of this training was not on accepting any esoteric "truth" about the nature of reality, but upon a practical way of undoing our conditioning to see for ourselves what might really be happening discovered by a deep expedition 2,500 years ago. Not an easy task, by any means, but I do think the retreat delivered on providing a small, initial glimpse about what this type of exploration can reveal.

Here's a more comprehensive and entertaining description of the experience than my own.

And a good write-up on this retreat.

Creative Procrastination?

2009-08-25T15:27:00.002-06:00

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be checking into a 10 day meditation retreat. I'm excited at the opportunity to just let go of everything and explore the moment as deeply as I'm capable. I'm also a bit anxious. No reading, writing, social interaction, no tech toys, media. Just sitting and observing what goes on within without all the props. Not in order to change anything, or figure anything out, just to notice without interference, judging, reaching for or pushing away. Seems so easy... and so hard.

For You History Buffs...

2009-08-20T02:06:00.000-06:00

Khalkhin-Gol: The forgotten battle that shaped WW2

In August 1939, just weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviet Union and Japan fought a massive tank battle on the Mongolian border – the largest the world had ever seen.

More

Some Radical Improvements in the last year

2009-08-14T16:10:00.002-06:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Glenn Beck's Operation

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Spinal Tap Performance

Pictures

2009-08-12T20:28:00.002-06:00

Click the play button, then if you click the button on the lower right it will zoom up to full screen.

Back to Work?

2009-08-12T11:42:00.003-06:00

I don't think so. Catching up with all the stuff that piled up while we were out, I tripped over an unsolicited contact for employment in a "Highly Classified US National Cyber Security Project."

"These roles would be located on the east coast. Relocation package offered. The compensation is extremely high with outstanding benefits"

I don't know which of my colleagues thought I needed to be gainfully employed, they seem to know a lot of my background, but c'mon, East Coast?! Which likely means the D.C. area, Blech. Several of the openings did look intriguing...

"ranging from offensive and defensive security technologies for computer networks" and "develop and analyze intrusion software to characterize and/or neutralize threats" but I'm involved in far more frivolous pursuits at the moment, ok thank you bye.

We're Back!

2009-08-12T02:52:00.004-06:00

Made it back. Here's bright-eye's first experiment with her camera in "video" mode. It's a little clunky but may provide a taste of a small piece of the road driving through the redwoods. Man, I am tired. Talk with ya tomorrow :-)

The Adventure Continues...

2009-08-10T00:37:00.001-06:00

Finally made it out of Oregon on Saturday. Down the coastline on highway 101. We puttered around little coastal towns sampling seafood. Packed some smoked halibut, salmon and cod for lunch stops. Late Saturday afternoon we cruised into a little campground nestled in the redwoods to pitch our tent. I unrolled the air mattress, looking forward to a nice cushy sleep. Was having some problems opening the batteries for the little electric pump, so whipped out my razor sharp Spyderco and sliced through the plastic wrapping like butter. As well as the top layer and bottom layer of the cushy new mattress which the battery pack was resting on. Crap.

No way was I going back to those little plank pads, so I punched in walmart to my android phone and it gave us directions to a store in the nearest town where we were able to pick up a replacement. Whew. The night was awesome after that.

Next morning we took down camp and headed out further along 101 and down the scenic valley where all the really big redwoods hang out. Including famous "Big Tree", which is 1500 years old. Amazing. R even got some pictures of some elk that made a guest appearance after having stood us up in Yellowstone. Then we made a big mistake.

Never, ever, ever, take Highway 299 as a shortcut to get to Redding in order to head up to see Mt. Shasta. It's 100 miles of solid curves following the Trinity river up and down hills. I've never gotten car-sick *driving* before, but I came really close. Just when you rounded one curve, you'd hit another in the other direction; some went almost 290 degrees, and they were relentless. I'm crossing off every road that has a 99 in it from our maps.

Before we hit the highway of doom though, we made a little stop at an area called the "Mystery of Trees" or something like that. Had a giant Paul Bunyan and his blue ox beside it. Every now and then Paul Bunyan would shout "HELLO!", which freaked this little kid out who had been watching the huge statue closely. He bolted as fast as his little legs could go wailing as he went. His parents finally caught him and tried to get him back to the shop, telling him it was just a statue, but no way did he believe them.

R told me they had some pretty good prices on some stones and stuff she liked, but I got pretty bored with it, until I stumbled into a room that had Native American flutes. A sign said you could get a mouthpiece from the shopkeeper if you wanted to try them out. So I got a little rubber tubing thingy so I wouldn't spread swine flu and started trying different makes. A little boy was watching me, and I told him he could get a mouthpiece and try them out himself, but he said "nah, but would you play *that* one." So I played a few for him, and started getting an audience. I finally found one I really liked and it was cheaper than I could buy online from the same company. When I brought it to the counter, the lady said she really enjoyed each and every one of my performances and asked how long I'd been playing, LOL. Some customers also commented, so now I've got a big head and need to really practice so I have something to back it up.

Well, better let R on to do her catch-up. Heading out tomorrow on a less than scenic route home, we're still about 1200 miles away but have seen everything we came for and more. Camping ended on a really high note, so looks like we'll be doing more of that as well. Sorry for all the text and no pictures, will remedy that soon.

Jumbled Notes

2009-08-08T00:20:00.001-06:00

My days are getting all jumbled. Better record something so I have some semblance of order. Or not. Since we last met... hooked up with Mew and clan, Sonic and K, and in-laws, friends, etc. in Port Angeles. Mew and Merry had a small wedding out in the beautiful forest they have in that part of the country. It was a simple but elegant ceremony.

Was great catching up with the NW crew. We didn't want to get in their way too long though, so headed out Thursday. Before that we got a tour of some of the neighboring towns. One, Port Townsend, Mew termed "mini Boulder." Interesting little villa. We went out to a huge bunker that once housed some incredible artillery. Two giant cannons that could shoot 8 miles, weighed 300 tons each and took 50+ men to man. Unfortunately the guns had been removed, but we got to play around in the bunkers. All sorts of dark and twisty passages. They said they fired one of the cannons once before they removed them, it broke windows all over town and they got a call from Canada telling them to cut it out. The original plan was for the bunkers to defend against the invasion of the Japanese along the NW coast in WWII. I guess it worked, I never heard about any successful landings.

Man, Washingtoners do take their coffee seriously. There are little stands all over the place with some interesting diversification. Espresso and Gourmet Hot Dogs, Espresso and Oysters, Espresso and foot massage?!. OK, I made that last one up. Probably.

The night before we left we pitched our tent next to Sonic's. It was our first tent adventure in many years; I about barfed. Nice spot though, just off the beach. Saw eagle tracks in the sand the next morning and Sonic, K, R and I tracked it down to a tree (with some help from the campground host pointing us to the right island.) They make interesting tracks. Pretty much a straight line, and they hop. Those suckers are really big too. Merry said when she had baby chickens they'd bring their young eagle fledglings(?) around to train on them. I was sore in all sorts of interesting places after the tent resort. Sleeping on those pads that are 3 inches wide is a little challenging, so to prepare for our next tent outing in the redwoods, R and I went by Sports Authority and picked up a nice cushy queen size inflatable mattress. Since we're car camping we don't have to worry about weight.

So we haven't made it very far. Spent Thursday night in Oregon and here we are tonight, still in Oregon next to the "wild coast." Pretty awesome seaside. Tomorrow we plan to camp in the redwoods, then see Mount Shasta. I think I've omitted a whole bunch of stuff, but I'll try to fill in the gaps and put up a picture album once we're back.

Night Tides

2009-08-04T04:27:00.001-06:00

I hear seagulls!

After a 16 hour drive from Butte, Montana, we checked into the Red Lion in Port Angeles at 3:00am local time. The hotel is right on the bay, next to a place called the Crab House (which I hope is referring to seafood.) Tomorrow is Mew and Merry's big day, luckily (for us) in the afternoon. They were coming into town in the morning at 8:30 to workout(?!) but I told 'em we probably wouldn't be up yet. Sonic and Kaisha flew into Portland a couple of days ago, so the whole CO clan and expatriates should be hooking up in the PM (today!) Sonic is headed out to Canada afterwords and bright eyes and I are going to break in our tent along the coastline on the way back. But for the next couple of days, after the ceremonies, we're hanging out with the in-laws and wee ones.

I wandered out to explore the strange sounds before bed and stumbled onto the bay. Pretty awesome in the moonlight, waves lapping on the shoreline and the lighthouse from Victoria(?) flashing from afar. Looking forward to seeing what things look like in the daytime. But for now, I'm going to bed. G'nite.

Truck'in"

2009-08-02T23:56:00.007-06:00

"I'm State Patrol Officer Perkins"

"Huh?"

"I'm Officer Perkins"

"Oh. Hi"

"The majority of that pass you just did was across a no passing lane. I'm in route to somewhere else so I'm just going to give you a verbal warning, but look ahead next time."

"Ok, thanks. I don't know these roads and it looked pretty straight, those lines caught me by surprise too."

"Well, be careful next time."

Nothing about the 90mph I hit when passing, I love Montana police.

We're on day two of our northwest cruise. Made it to Wyoming on day 1. Day 2 we spent all day touring the Grand Tetons (well, there is actually only one Grand Teton, the rest have imaginative names like "Middle Teton" and "South Teton" so not hard to excel in such company. We backtracked a little on the Teton adventure to visit Jackson Hole. One word of warning. If you ever order the MooLatte from DQ, don't take a really big gulp, even if it's hot and you're really thirsty. You will suffer an intense cold-burn from about mid-throat to somewhere deep in your chest that you didn't know you had and don't want to hear from again. And it will last for about 30 seconds. And you will probably do it again by mistake.

After the Tetons we hit Yellowstone. Bright-eyes couldn't figure out why it was called that, because all the rocks were gray. I told her they used to all be yellow before the fires. I'm about 80% sure. Old Faithful spit on us. Three times. We left soused in eau de sulfur. Meandered a lot, saw antelope, buffalo, elk, a bear, and some wicked fast little things that I almost ran over twice. Pikens or something like that.

Some amazing colors in the geyser pools. Crows seemed to be attracted to the steam and I caught a couple of them trying to learn English. Poor suckers, just when they were getting a word mastered some German, Chinese or Latvian tourists would walk by jabbering and they'd just start squawking again.

We've been trying to navigate partly with my android phone's GPS (and, btw, this is the first car I've rented with a USB port in the dash. Sweet.) Still not sold on the whole gps guide stuff. Sometimes it told us to "turn right" or "turn left" slightly to get back on the road we were already on. But it did take us down a route that wasn't even on the map that shaved off some major time. Ended up here in Butte, Montana, after convincing it we really didn't want to go to Butte City, Idaho.

So tomorrow we may try to make it through the rest of MT all the way to the far corner of Washington. I'd post some pictures but my smart card reader on the laptop can read every memory card format except for the one that my camera uses. May steal one of bright-eyes. More news as we discover it...

And, if anyone knows, bright-eyes was wondering what all the weird fence-like things are all over Wyoming. She was thinking maybe they were to catch tumbleweeds, although it seems really elaborate and extensive for that, and she rejected my story about outdoor auditorium seating for birds.

Frog Immigration

2009-07-30T01:48:00.024-06:00

M is my favorite niece in Japan, and one of the kids' favorite cousins abroad when they were small (and probably still.) In March she quit her job, packed up with her husband, and moved to a small island among the hundreds or so which make up the Okinawan Prefecture. The Prefecture, in turn, is part of a larger chain called the Ryukyu islands stretching from the southwest of Japan to the northeast of Taiwan.

Since then, we've been a little concerned about them. They went there with no jobs and no real exit strategy. The island they picked was beautiful, but you can drive *around* the *whole* thing in 2 hours. I certainly admired the approach. Picking a destination, then letting the details work themselves out, instead of building up toward a destination to reach someday. They had some savings, so first they were going to decompress from the rat race before becoming seriously concerned about survival. They were both fed up with the work and the pace in Japan and needed some time to think about life and where they were going. They've been stretching their budget with bountiful crops overflowing from neighbors' lots, surplus from local fishermen and a low-key lifestyle. Wandering the beaches, laying on their rooftop and watching the stars at night. Since it's a beautiful spot, it's also been an excuse for friends to visit. (It's on our list for the future :-)

And just today we discover M. got a job. She'll be employed until December in Frog Immigrations for the Government. Which makes you wonder how these things work sometimes. She's always been crazy about frogs and has all sorts of frog paraphernalia. Her job is to study the frog population of Ishigaki, identify the communities and locate the frogs not native to the island that don't have their proper papers. Now we're curious to see what Mr. K, M's husband, will turn up. He almost went to an interview today in a suit and crocs. Lucky M. caught him before he got too far. If he finds a job as unique as hers, I don't think they'll have any problems with their new home. I told M she should make a bet on who ends up with the strangest job. But she may have to give him odds. I have weird relatives on both sides of the globe.

DIY Mayo

2009-07-29T13:51:00.002-06:00

Confession: I haven't actually tried this yet. It looks fantastic though, and I'm putting it here so

a. I don't forget
b. Someone else might try it first and let me know :-)

Follow the Money

2009-07-26T15:43:00.005-06:00

If you want to know why something is the way it is in this country, don't be fooled by rhetoric, the answer can usually be found in money.

Did you know that medical profits and income make up one-sixth of our economy? Any time there is that big of a racket, the motives for keeping things status quo will be wrapped in distortions about how their only goal is to benefit _you_. After all, _you_ are the most important reason for why things are the way they are. (Your money, that is.)

Thus the fear-mongering about socialized medicine and how bad it sucks in places like Canada. (BTW, I'm on a board with lots and lots of Canadians, and they are amazed and amused how easily Americans swallow propaganda which totally misrepresents Canadian health-care and satisfaction, just so we won't consider it a viable alternative. Ends justify the means I suppose)

A Dr. Shadid in Oklahoma had an interesting model in 1929, his case is informative.

And a pretty good argument why the free market cannot be the answer for health-care, and why.

Ex US Cigna Exec's story. In the UK news, of course.

Bad Timing

2009-07-25T15:28:00.000-06:00

Organizing Books

2009-07-21T16:18:00.005-06:00

I've got lots and lots of books. Probably 5000+. Seriously. Every room in the house has at least one bookshelf, usually many more. I have bookshelves in my garage, lining both walls. Even after my recent purge of books related to my office and older technology, which accounted for about 8-10 boxes worth going to recycling.

So here's my plan. I finished working out the details last night.

Storage bins that are stackable and weight-bearing.
Labels and Sharpies.
No rush, do a box a day or so, fill it with books. Enter just the title of the book in a program that will look up the rest of the details from amazon and fill it in, including an image of the book cover. Assign it a category or two and the storage bin number.

Now, what I'll eventually have is a stack of storage bins with clearly visible labels. A program I can look up any book I have and know exactly where it is. Just the 100 or so books I'm actively reading, and the 100 or so reference books, will be out on my study shelves.

I'll be ready to move in the future, have organized the garage, got rid of a lot of shelving that was taking up space, while making my books even more easily found than ever before.

So that's the plan. If you see any flaws, let me know. I think the only adjustment will be keeping the containers accessible and not stacking them too high as the book I'll be looking for will probably always be in the bottom bin.

Man, shrews have a rough life!

2009-07-20T20:50:00.002-06:00

A Productive Day

2009-07-18T13:20:00.006-06:00

The other day a sibling asked what I meant by "I had a productive day." It was a good question, and immediately brought to mind that we all probably think about that term differently. So I thought I'd wake up this afternoon by rambling a little about this.

Being productive is only half the recipe. The other half of a *good* day, would be "enrichment." Of course, being more Spanish than German, it's not split down the middle. Enriching is the stuff like good conversation with good company, snuggling with a loved one, hugging family or trying the vulcan mind meld with a squirrel at the kitchen window. It's learning new stuff, trying new things. Sometimes it's just noticing old things in a new way. It can be just about anything, but its characteristic is a nice, uh... enriching feeling. Watching TV or doing anything that's become rote very seldom qualifies.

Productivity is usually enriching, but enrichment does not have to be "productive." Now that we've cleared that up :-) ... productivity, to me, is the feeling I get when I'm moving towards goals and objectives I've set for myself. Doing chores and taking care of urgent stuff are objectives the outside world has set *for* me, so they don't fall under my definition of being productive. I try to keep those things to a minimum as much as possible. Sometimes that does require some pre-planning up front, and that planning part may slide back into my productivity quandrant.

Productivity, to me, is really about personal integrity. It's about keeping my word to myself. If I decide something is worth pursuing or investigating and my actions don't reflect that, then there is some conflict I need to better understand. Even though I'm telling myself I want something, it may be that the desire comes from trying to conform to some external self-image of what I should be doing, and parts of me resent it. So being productive is not just about external action and behavior, it's about getting all those parts rowing in the same direction. And either throwing the trouble-makers overboard, or appointing them captain. Either option prevents me from rowing in circles.

A productive day then is not necessarily getting to the final destination, but the spirit of unity and skillful effort that comes with shared endeavor towards a common goal. An important goal, not an urgent one. I'm sure there will be urgent stuff stacked up long after I'm gone, but I hope I get to as much important stuff as I can.

Once that's working smoothly, the only other challenge is kaleidescope eyes. An affliction caused by the crystallization of airborne salt particles on the cornea of the eye which presents the illusion of multiple destinations when there is really only one. Perhaps a future topic. (see what I did there? :-))

Earthbox Adventures

2009-07-16T18:28:00.008-06:00

Well, following Sleepy Elf's lead but less exciting, our earthbox experiments this year are getting close to paying off. Here is the suspect line-up:

From closest to furthest we have japanese cucumber, japanese eggplant, tomato (4th of July and Bigboy w/Basil for pest control), parsley and yellow squash.

So far we've picked a cucumber and a couple of squashes, but the tomatos' days are numbered...

Something Fishy

2009-07-15T19:04:00.007-06:00

I encourage you intrepid Argonauts out there, wrestling with maintaining a daily fish oil regime, to check out this little graph:

You can read the short article on wired here. But the cliff notes are:

Guy decided to improve his mental processes by timing himself on a set of 100 random math problems every day. These were simple problems, like: 7 x 9 or 13 - 5.
MRI studies have shown that just doing these type of problems daily, with time pressure, improves overall mental functioning.
He improved a bit, but hit the typical training plateau after 90 days.
Then he got curious about what effects fish oil might have.
Looks like it started helping pretty quickly to break through the barrier and at 800mg of DHA the effects started really kicking in.

More detailed background, if you're interested.

Optimism

2009-07-13T15:29:00.006-06:00

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs -- all this resinous, unretractable earth.

~ Jane Hirshfield ~

(Given Sugar, Given Salt)

---

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

~ e.e. cummings ~

(Complete Poems 1904-1962)

You're Doing it Wrong

2009-07-08T16:59:00.015-06:00

The first true week of liberation from work-world duties has come and gone and I think I'm doing it wrong.

I've re-organized, re-arranged, re-structured and to re-view I have a mind map of 9 areas of interest which expands out into 50+ or so items of activity or exploration. I've tried to freeze it, for at least a month, but it keeps growing. It has slowly dawned on me that to really put all this "freedom" to use, I need limits.

It may not make logical sense, but I've been conversing with poets of late. I usually turn to them when I'm trying to figure stuff out and need insight. They tend to have some of the most subtle perception of conditions and the freshest ways of looking at things in new ways than any of the left-brain contingent (who excel more in how to do stuff once you've figured out what to do.)

David Whyte is the man, in this regard. And one could do worse than spending a few days with his counsel in Midlife and the Great Unknown where he speaks of Dante awakening in the dark woods or Clear Mind, Wild Heart and in both he gives insight below the surfaces, where poetry speaks revealing truths to those who know how to listen. (I'm still learning, but DW is a good mentor.)

And then there's this guy...

He literally popped into my dreams last night. I had one of those tedious dreams I have sometimes. Some people came to a party I was hosting and began threatening us at some point. It devolved into physical violence, and back and forth doing all sorts of painful stuff to one another, fueled by righteous anger, but also feeling bad about what I was doing. And it went on and on and on. Until this guy popped up in a shelf in the corner of the room. Just for a moment. A big, chubby, golden, grinning Buddha. Suddenly it was like the clock turned back to the beginning of the party. The small group I was in, involved with the conflict, all realized time had been set back, but the original troublemakers did not. We greeted them cordially, wished them well, and they went on their way this time, none the wiser to how things had unfolded previously.

And so today, with coaching from the bards and a flash appearance from chubby B, I added one more task to my map of time-binding. Bumped it to the front of the list and am now studying the how-to of The Power of Less. Tripped across this in the same day or so; things sometimes happen in threes. And this interesting character, from a suspiciously similar situation, is providing serendipitous insight into what I was doing wrong. Totally makes sense. Next week will tell what I learned from starting over.

Oh yeah, and I stopped on the way back from the bookstore with bright-eyes to have a root-beer float. If I don't go running tomorrow, I may just start looking like Mr. B.

The Next Chapter

2009-07-04T16:26:00.006-06:00

8 trips escorting Ms. Dolly from the 3rd floor, down the elevator, through a maze to the loading docks and into the dumpster. 4-5 boxes per dolly load, filled 3/4rths of a dumpster with 23 years of accumulated files, folders, weird hardware, cables, manuals, proposals, research and software. Feels like a weight lifted from my shoulders.

It's been a fun ride, but now I'm hopping off and fishing tickets out of my pocket, looking around at the other attractions. One look back at the ride I just got off ---for many years this was my view, facing north...

Facing East, where birds would often land on top of those trees and cock their heads curiously to check out the strange dude in the glass cage...

I brought bright-eyes in on the way and, of course, she's taking pictures of the clouds ;-)

Click on 'em to zoom :-)

Tagging Thoughts

2009-06-21T16:13:00.003-06:00

Just a few more ideas about tagging in relation to Evernote in the previous post.

Most "modern" computer metaphors are still anchored in the model of a "desktop." Both the operating systems and applications have propagated this scheme. You have folders which can contain content or other folders in a hierarchy. They may be dressed up with tabs, but they are still tied to physical ordering.

Getting used to tags opens a new paradigm. Imagine being able to throw some scrap of information in a file that is tagged with a number of attributes.. "idea", "psychology", "think about", "project x." With tags it's like you made multiple copies of this scrap and put it in several folders. This metaphor breaks down, however, because you can also have a set of virtual folders that is the intersection between tags. You can look for all your "ideas" or you can look for "ideas" to "think about" or "ideas" for "projects" or "projects", "home", "next steps" and slice and dice what you want to be looking at/for. I have a tag called "Why Not Do This?" that just captures fun things to explore more deeply if I'm looking for diversion.

I can't say I've mastered this yet. I'm still discovering ways the old physical model makes my classifications more rigid than they need to be. It's also a fun exploration of your own taxonomies of thought and structuring something more akin to how your mind organizes things in its own unique way.

I'm finding it useful for a whole bunch of things. One of its major advantages is for any sort of research, especially casual research. With the ability to easily capture a page or selection, tag it with where it relates to my current interests, projects or musings, I also feel better that I'm not just wasting time on some transient information that will never make it past my short term memory stores. Kinda cool.

Two Free Tools

2009-06-21T15:40:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I retired my venerable old Journal program. I'll still keep it around to get to info stashed deep in its 10+ year archives, but my new note taking tool has pretty much left it in the dust. I know gerbeans is using the Journal still. It's a good program, written in Delphi, by a nice guy in Oklahoma city whom I've corresponded with over the years. Its new fancy replacement, for me, is Evernote. I'll just bullet point some of the advantages I see in the switch for those of you who like to research things on the internet, keep journals, or just capture all those nifty ideas bouncing around between your ears before they flit like moths for a brighter bulb.

The Journal was organized like most note taking apps, you could create folders and tabs and such, but you'd have to navigate to the right place to put in information; this doesn't really scale after you've accumulated lots of stuff and have inconsistent patterns for where you put it.
With Evernote you just slap a new note in and tag it. You can put multiple tags on a note, picking from existing ones or making them up on the fly. So you don't lose any time trying to find the right spot for the info before you start writing. Tags are easily changed, added and deleted at any time.
You can find notes a bunch of ways. Search, date ranges, you can select multiple tags to zero in on stuff, like "Projects", "Home", "This Week" There is no rigid ordering by physical directories or tabs so your cross-referencing can be as flexible and creative as you need.
You can view with a "chronology" bar that lets you see the most recent stuff you've entered across all interests (or filtered by tags.) This is more useful than it first appears, you can see just what you've been researching, writing or thinking about for the week, for example, without having to go back and collect it from all over.
You can add "to-do" checklists to any note and then you have an additional filter for todos... like "Projects", to-do... when you toggle the checkbox they drop off this list (you can find them on another list called completed tasks if you want.)
It has plugins for your browser, so when you are on any page you can copy/capture a piece of what you are looking at into a note, or the entire page, with a simple right click. It does a nice job of preserving the formatting, images and links on the section captured and automatically puts a link back to the source in the note.
It has a screen capture too as well as drag and drop for images, docs, pdfs and such.
Any image, including screen captures, it will scan for text and make the text searchable. Haven't played much with this yet, but could be handy, especially scanning in old documents, receipts, etc.
There's a free web piece that syncs folders to an account on the web. I won't use that, my notebooks are private and local to my PC, but it's a nice option for sync'ing work related research for those with day jobs ;-)
Lots of other cool features, but my main attraction is the flexible way to organize material, the low friction input of information and the abiilty to capture stuff quickly and seamlessly that you may be browsing across with powerful ways to find it later. Pretty sweet.

The other free tool is an excellent registry cleaner + alot more. You get those crappy ads all the time on the internet for registry cleaners. But this one has a long and venerable history, and it's free. It also cleans up alot more than just registry: CCleaner. Highly recommended.

Change of Routine

2009-06-05T02:16:00.024-06:00

My bad habits are sporadically dying. Over the last several weeks, I have been easing into several changes. Abandoned my WOW and SL accounts. Dropped Rhapsody. Subscribed to Safari. Packed up all the books I need to return to the office, until I ran out of boxes. At the same time, started releasing all the focus that was wrapped up in enterprise concerns and started doing more compelling personal projects.

Excited at the blocks of time I can devote to learning, one of my favorite hobbies. But I like to learn stuff that has hands-on application. Dropping my old corporate computer languages (yeah, you java) and picking up Python. Studying design. Got back into martial arts in a fun class. Yoga in the late mornings, followed by lounging in the sauna and/or steam room. Becoming a meditation junkie. In the morning I sit up in bed, massage the kidney points in my feet, do a couple of sun salutations, hindu squats and pushups, then sit on my cushion letting go of each and every thought that tries to grab my attention. The feeling is awesome.

I have some weight to lose, so cleaning up my eating patterns (although once a week I will eat _whatevar_.) Escape in diversions is losing it lustre, since I can choose my attractions instead. Writing poetry again, and making art, journaling (for you internet kids, this is like a blog, but only I can read it :-) Going on dates with bright-eyes. Opening my social circles again.

I've talked with several "retirees" asking them what they've learned about the process. Most of the feedback doesn't seem to apply. "Not setting the alarm clock!" I rarely set it anyway. "Not having my day structured." It wasn't structured before, and it isn't now. "Finding things to do." No problem there. "Losing a piece of identity that came from a role at work" Never took my identity at work, or anything associated with it, with much seriousness anyway.

What I'm finding though (not yet retired, but a couple of weeks as a dry run) is the fun iin creating an ideal day. Releasing all that stuff put on hold until I didn't have to work. And sequencing it, sheesh, can't do everything at once. Becoming fluent in Japanese was pushed out a few months. But I have a good plan for accomplishing it. This is fascinating. I love more effective ways to learn things.

But what of all of this? I find my will has become a bit flaccid, using work as an excuse for not devoting more time to my dreams and deep interests. It's also odd in that the last few discussions like these, polling retirees for insight, were topics centered around health worries and issues. I know this is a serious issue for many of my family as well, and I am concerned about them. And my friends. But not so much for myself. My goal is not to maximize the quantity of my years, but the quality of my time. It's not important that my "identity" continues when I leave, but I don't know fully what that means.

In India, there is a custom for people to pick up their spiritual pursuits after retirement, when they can devote their full attention to understanding the role of mortality in existence. For some, of course, this comes too late, but that's the ideal anyway. And I've had too many strange experiences, in my short span, to dismiss what we live in as anything but a deep mystery (as has most of my weird family! Some of us were probably burned at the stake in a past life, including sleepyelf and Merry, thus the obsession with roasting marshmallows. I've never seen my siblings actually "roast" these, they always set the whole thing on fire, lol) I'm not obsessed with figuring it out though, but I do want to experience it more deeply, and more attentively. I don't know if any of this makes sense, but there is a big reconfiguration going on in my head, just outside of consciousness, and I'm curious what will emerge from it.

Funny Feeling

2009-06-04T04:04:00.007-06:00

It's still a funny feeling, looking at this black brick on my desk. If you took about 5 regular sized DVD cases and glued them together, you'd have the footprint of this 1 Terabyte external drive I got from Costco for around $130. It's the backup drive for our computers, so if they crash and burn, or they are replaced, the transition is painless.

But when I got home with it, I had a flashback to the start of my career in Colorado. We had STC 3350 drives, about the size of a washing machine that held 300MB. To get the same capacity I was carrying with one hand would have filled our entire house, the backyard, front-yard and continued a half mile down the street. Oh, and cost 2 million dollars.

I think the computer field, more than any other branch of technology, has accelerated at the fastest rate by an order of magnitude. It's impacted major aspects of our society, business, science and social lives, both locally and globally. It's been a fun ride. And now it gets more interesting. In my previous job, the directions I pursued as architect had to maintain a complex balance between the way technology was evolving, our capabilities for handling change, the existing landscape, the costs, the available support, the work culture and a myriad of other factors. Without this balancing act, I can now explore things purely for their potential. Exciting times ahead I think.

And STC brings back another memory. It was a company in a town next to the one I live which actually made those 3350 drives. I interviewed there once. It was the only interview in which I ran for the exit. The job description suckered me in. Working with Artificial Intelligence for some of their tape robotics. But as I wound my way through the sea of cubicles to the small side office for the interview, I started feeling like one of grandpa's coyotes tied to a stake. Inside I was pacing back and forth at a trot. On the outside, I was doing ok in the interview, but then I just jumped up and bolted out, without a reason or an escort. And felt like a rat in a maze trying to find my way to an exit. When I finally made it outside, I felt I could breathe again, and went home shaken but relieved. It's been a strange ride as well.

Broken Wing

2009-06-02T20:27:00.005-06:00

Bright-eyes got a new ski boot when she fell on the steps the other day. Here she is at her 'office' adapting to the new lug-weight.

We both went to the doctor's for x-rays. I had one taken for my wrist, which was hurting for a couple of weeks after a Krav Maga class, and she had one for her ankle. Mine finished first, so I was sitting out in the waiting room. This lady asked me if I'd like to take a free hearing test. I said "huh?" She started to repeat it but then noticed me grinning.

So what the heck, I went to the back, they beeped things in my ear and said I had excellent hearing. When I came back out front the lady asked how I did and I told her I passed with flying colors. She said "See, that didn't hurt did it?" I replied, "No, but I haven't told the results to my wife yet." It took her a few seconds, but then she cracked up.

Bright-eyes came out and we both went home, but then she got recalled because they sent the results to Denver and the specialist there saw a fracture. So back in for the boot. She's getting pretty salty with the crutches but we hope to have them off this week in time for her trip to Idaho.

I Remember

2009-06-01T20:59:00.006-06:00

When I was growing up, I had two families. One I'd go to summers, and work on their ranch. From the instant I was there, I was part of that family. I had a new brother and sister and a different mom and dad.

I've always been a night-owl, and loved sleeping in, but this new dad would come down the hallway booming "DAYLIGHT'S BURNING" at what must have been 5 in the morning. And he wouldn't let up. He was like a human alarm clock. There's no way you could sleep with that kind of racket in the hall.

I'd drag myself to the kitchen table, looking for my familiar box of cereal and a bowl, but that was not to be. What was happening in the kitchen was dozens of eggs frying, bacon sizzling, slinging hashbrowns, rattling plates and glasses poured with OJ. It was like some preternatural feast. At first I was not too keen on this change of diet. But in the days that followed, I discovered its value. It was fuel I needed! We burned it off fast. I never knew there were so many things to do in a hayfield. Mowing, raking, bailing, hauling. Machinery, cows, feed, herding, de-horning, shots, chasing, moving stuff, whew. Not at all like wandering around in the forests I was used too. But I never got PAID for wandering in the forest either. That was new. And paid pretty well for standards at the time, and living expenses of a young boy.

And I really got to enjoy the simple things, like Aunt K making a bee-line to us in a truck with a cooler full of ice water in the back. I don't think I've seen a more welcome sight. My earliest memories of Aunt K, whose heart is as big as Texas, was chasing us around trying to give us hugs. Hugs, when she caught us, that were the most heart-felt hugs of pure love you could imagine.

After a few of these summer stays, I got to know my Uncle more. And I was amazed. I had some biases against people that were big. And he was a giant. Based on my extremely limited experience at the time, I didn't think big people were too smart. But he was. Not only really smart, but curious about just about anything. He was also one of the most "authentic" people I'd ever met. He said just what he thought, and didn't beat around the bush. Which sometimes got him in trouble at family gatherings, where the crowd could be a little on the prim side. Some of that trouble, it must be confessed, was with our instigation. Like the time we put these ingenious little "loads" in his cigar that explode when you light it. Of course, after fetching him a cigar and standing around to make sure he lit it while with a group of adults, it went off with a pop and the first words out of his mouth was "You little shits!" And then he laughed.

BD knew how to work hard and he knew how to relax. And there's nothing like the feeling of relaxing after a hard days work. After some particularly hard days, he'd take us to a family run Mexican restaurant. One time he said we'd be going "dutch." Well my younger sibling was pretty excited about this until he found out it meant everyone had to pay their own way. He didn't want to part with any of his hard earned treasure, so ended up dining on water and crackers. Of course, when the bill finally came, BD picked up the tab and G sure wished he'd ordered those enchiladas.

The only time I remember BD not saying what he thought was when Val and I decided to whip up a chocolate cake from scratch. We were dumping milk and eggs and cocoa all at the same time and somehow ended up both putting salt in. Way too much salt we found out later. We were mighty proud of our cake and cut him a big slice. He ate the whole thing and bragged about it, but when Val and I went to eat us a piece later we had to spit it out because it was too salty. Nobody else ate any, but BD never said a word.

For several years I got him a calendar of famous out-houses for Christmas which seemed to tickle him. But his last year, when his illness had progressed and the doctors said he wouldn't be around much longer, I didn't think a calendar would be very appropriate. So I got him the ugliest pillow I could find ---it had an embroidery of a deer, or a caribou, or it could've even been a rat with horns. Imagine the pride and affection I felt for this very special Uncle when we gave this to him and he took one look at it and said "Man, that's the ugliest pillow I ever saw!"

I could say so many things about BD. But that's all I'm going to say about that. He made an impression on so many lives; I know he made a deep one on mine. There's a part of my very essence that would be different if I hadn't known him. A gift I can only try to repay, with the nephews and nieces that I love. There's no one who can walk in his footsteps, he was one of a kind. I wish the greatest blessings to his family, whom I remember as this solid unit of warmth and endeavor around the breakfast table those early mornings, in the deepest sense we have all suffered a great loss, but I know they, and we, will soldier on, such is our way. Love you BD.

Blueberry Girl

2009-05-03T21:51:00.000-06:00

How to Cut Corners on your Advertising Budget

2009-05-02T21:07:00.003-06:00

You don't need fancy graphics, cgi or animation.

You don't even need a clever idea or gimmick.

Yeah, all that might buy you an extra 20% sales, but it's going to cost you 80% more than using this simple, open-source template from anamnesis:

1. Get a couple of actors.

2. Make them look like what you think your target market looks like ---or what your target market would like to look at/like.

3. Film a conversation using one of our PROVEN templates.

The Social Proof Template - Pattern 1

Actor A: Is that the new MacGeeWhizWhooper?
Actor B: mmmm. nom. nom. nom. carn't tawk, so goood.
Actor A: I can't believe you'd be speechless like that for a mere 99 cents?
Actor B: wharrrff canna I saryyyy?

Optional Appeal to Authority Add-on

Narrator. Deep authoritative voice ('Are YOU in good hands?" dude, for example)
Recites:

Yeah. It's that good.
What are YOU waiting for?

Extended version for 45 sec time slots

Following "What are YOU waiting for?" ...
Santa Claus?
Well he's one of our best customers
it's what makes him so happy
and benevolent
don't believe ads?
Ask our customers.
Maybe they don't believe you
could resist such a treat
Who are we to argue with that?

The MacGee WhizWhop
For a limited time
wherever fine synthetics are served

Next Installment

Stay tuned for the coveted and heretofore unaffordable McGuffin Pattern next. A template so potent that many ad agencies are threatening us with lawsuits if we reveal it here.

Quality, sales or minimizing costs, pick any two.

Time Management

2009-04-26T15:21:00.014-06:00

I was re-reading Seneca's essay On the Shortness of Life the other day. He was a part-time Stoic and Greek philosopher, ordered to commit seppuku by Nero. At least the Greek version of seppuku, which seems to involve warm baths and poison.

But Greek politics aside, Seneca has some interesting observations, like:

"And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long—he has existed long. For what if you should think that that man had had a long voyage who had been caught by a fierce storm as soon as he left harbor, and, swept hither and thither by a succession of winds that raged from different quarters, had been driven in a circle around the same course? Not much voyaging did he have, but much tossing about."

This "tossing about" stuff is worrisome.

For many years, I've explored philosophies and systems for organizing tasks and completing projects. I've used them to good effect at work. At home, not so much. But as I leave the world of priorities structured for me, to time that is unencumbered, it becomes even more important to manage this resource well. In a way truer to my own valuations.

Simple to-do lists aren't very effective for me. It's easy to get lost in the trees. Prioritizing becomes annoying and it's too easy to collect deadwood that clutters the space with should-do things that will never actually get done. Especially if you're trying to keep track of everything. Plus it's often a grind. Every day is plotted out. You can do things spontaneously, but then you might feel guilty or "unproductive."

More elaborate systems like GTD work better. For a while, anyway. GTD really can free the mind from clutter and still leave you confident that everything you need to do is organized in a way it will be accomplished when it needs to be without having to keep track of it in your head. Some people get hooked on the 'mind like water' state GTD delivers and work this system obsessively. But it does require upkeep, and even minor slippage on keeping tasks up to date undermines confidence that the system has captured everything of relevance.

Finding time management systems that work with our own strengths and tendencies and mitigates our weaknesses and blindsides is a challenging endeavor. Some people figure however they are currently managing time is good enough, and it may be. But I come from a discipline that has found much value in studying "best practices" and adopting those that prove more useful than what we build by default.

I've recently adopted a unique approach that shows a lot of promise. It actually helps leverage the fact that we often procrastinate by choosing more interesting tasks rather than more necessary ones. It has a built in way of winnowing out stuff that we think we should do but will actually never get around too and is actually fun to use, without the right brain feeling like it's being ordered around by some regime established by the left brain. Or the left side feeling like it has to keep remembering important stuff that might slip through the cracks. A true bi-partisan partnership, if you will.

If you are looking for a system that may help keep your voyage on course, and one that does so in a way that adapts to what's truly significant while side-stepping the auto-engage mechanisms of procrastination, give this a gander. And/or check out the short video:

Spring in the Rockies

2009-04-17T14:42:00.003-06:00

Pictures from the front and back windows of the house TODAY.

The Density of an Unladened Mind

2009-04-16T17:41:00.004-06:00

Are the self-proclaimed "teabaggers" really as dense as they appear or just easily manipulated? Besides being clueless to some nefarious alternative meanings to the term, they also seem to have missed a basic equation.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Iconic Internet Videos

2009-04-13T19:13:00.003-06:00

This site has organized the 100 most iconic internet videos. These are clips that almost everyone growing up with the internet has seen or heard about. There's alot of funny material here, unscripted, unrehearsed, the kind of stuff only possible on a medium like this. Here's a couple I like that you may not have seen.

The Christian and the Lion

One of the most infamous evil pranks ... it added a new term to the memesphere: Screamers.

"I think you might be confusing tyranny, with losing"

2009-04-09T21:08:00.006-06:00

Changing guards... these days we are picking different types of representatives, from a different type of media, to leverage our opinion through new channels of influence. Forget the slow and tedious process of electing officials to officially speak for us in the "appropriate" legislative venues. We can speak through the popularity of those who share our views, and those who strike a chord of truth in the seas of propaganda and partisan news. We can vote with our attention for the most intelligent representation of truth. Which in turn focuses more attention. Kind of an agile regulatory action. And sometimes when the truth is not padded, common sense can be a rude awakening.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Baracknophobia - Obey

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Let's just hope it's effective in countering this type of stuff. If it can collect enough awareness of what is happening to change it:

Obama has taken the Bush party line ---declaring that even an investigation into the "possibility of warrantless wiretapping against innocent americans" would constitute "exceptionally grave harm to national security." Which keeps it from coming to court, of course. And thus to the public

Gimme a frick'in break. This like shouting "MIND YER OWN BUSINESS" to the American public. As if "national security" was none of our concern. I don't think it's "our" security they are worrying about above though, I think they are worried about dissent and backlash if it was generally known that certain government agencies operated above the law. But this is a catch-22 clause. The backlash could be because our security was being trampled, but should we keep that secret to protect our security? Only if it's based on delusion.

Perhaps power obtained, even by an office, is not so easily relinquished for the good of the people. Even with a new resident to said office. And especially hard to relinquish for professional politicians.

On the macro level, this doesn't actually concern me. Things are unfolding as they should, action, reaction, hand over hand, we're struggling up from the mud of ignorance, forged by nature to skirt forces of complete annihilation, honing our evolution into something useful, as is its way, at breakneck speed.

So yeah, focus on the near ---get hopp'in mad, or crazy happy, live with passion ---but don't get so absorbed in passion that simple presence is lost in the current. Presence where every human experience, without judgment, is an unknown factor. Like the Chinese farmer below, who knows where it might be leading? And in all this chaos and change, hold somewhere in the background of the day, that simple awareness that hasn't been touched by anything we've experienced since we came into this world.

Only time can truly judge these arcs of experience, and our vision in time is so small. What can we remember, as an individual or a culture? What can we try envisioning, tethered as we are to the collection of an infinitesimally small scope of occurrences and memories? What do we mistake for the structure of "reality" rather than just limited samples of content and how does this blind us to un-lived possibilities of infinite perception?

A farmer in a poor country village was considered very well-to-do, because he owned a horse which he used for plowing and for transportation. One day his horse ran away. All his neighbors exclaimed how terrible this was, but the farmer simply said, "Maybe."
A few days later the horse returned and brought two wild horses with it. The neighbors all rejoiced at his good fortune, but the farmer just said, "Maybe."
The next day the farmer's son tried to ride one of the wild horses; the horse threw him and broke his leg. The neighbors all offered their sympathy for his misfortune, but the farmer again said, "Maybe."
The next week conscription officers came to the village to take young men for the army. They rejected the farmer's son because of his broken leg. When the neighbors told him how lucky he was, the farmer replied, "Maybe."…

My New Favorite Munchie

2009-02-13T20:47:00.002-07:00

Roasted, Salted Pumpkin Seeds!

Check out the 10 Health Benefits of these suckers.

Everyone Has Good Ideas

2009-02-12T10:33:00.003-07:00

But making it to the top of the pyramid is rare. A nice visualization from Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.

More Juice Out of Life

2009-02-12T08:57:00.003-07:00

Wow, I think I'm addicted to juice!

I recently started a couple of new habits. Eating breakfast every morning (or when I wake up, which is morning for me, and probably everyone in Japan too) and making juice to complement said breakfast.

After fishing the juicer out of its box on the top corner of a storage shelf and reading the instructions (ugg) I pretty much have the mechanics of this sucker mastered ---which allows me to focus on the good stuff--- my most favoritist juice recipe.

They say it's even healthy, but I'd probably drink it regardless. It's just that good.

Here it is:

2 Apples
2-4 Carrots
Half of a lime, unpeeled
A piece of ginger about the size of your thumb from the tip to the first joint

If the stuff isn't organic, be sure to clean it. Chop it up a little, to fit in the chute, the night before and stash it all in the fridge and you're ready to roll in the morning (plus the juice is cold.) Amazingly energizing!

Breakfast of Champions

2009-01-25T22:07:00.005-07:00

Here's what I had for breakfast today. Actually, it was lunch and dinner too.

Some baked beans, 3 cheese scalloped potatoes and one of the most delicious steaks I'd ever eaten, courtesy of Sonic and his contacts as work. It was even worth grilling it outside with snow falling on my head. I used Marbella's soy and ginger marinade, you'll have to bug her for the recipe, I think it's a secret.

Here's the message that came with the steak...

You have received Meyer Natural Angus (MNA) beef today. I know the experience you’re going to have eating the steaks will be excellent!

Included in your shipment are Meyer Natural Angus Prime steaks. You will get a variety of steaks to try. Here is a little information that will make your experience as good as possible.

These are Natural steaks. We have never allowed antibiotics or hormones to be used at any time. The end result is steaks that have been created the old fashioned way to deliver full beef flavor and incredible tenderness. Since they are natural, they contain less water than conventionally raised beef. As a result, your MNA steaks will cook a little quicker than typical store bought steaks.

A great tip is to allow your steaks to rest for 5 minutes after grilling. If you can wait that long, you’ll have an even better steak!

Real Angus is what we use. There are many Angus options out there today. So many that very little of the product called Angus today actually is Angus. There is big demand for good reason. Genuine Angus beef is incredible beef. It’s simply the best breed for creating a superior steak. MNA only uses source verified Angus beef. No imitation Angus in our beef.

USDA Prime meats are rarely found in markets, reserved almost exclusively for the nation’s award-winning restaurants and steak establishments. This is beef nirvana -- USDA Prime steaks and filets, hand trimmed and hand selected, with sublime tenderness and generous marbling that melts throughout each cut for incomparable flavor. It has abundant marbling and is excellent for dry-heat cooking (i.e., roasting, broiling, and grilling). USDA Prime beef (about two percent of graded beef) has more marbling, so it is the most tender and flavorful grade of beef available.

In grading beef, marbling is a key factor not only for determining quality but it also translates into a better eating product. This Prime Beef will have an abundant amount of marbling, or fat, throughout. During the cooking process this marbling will melt helping to keep your steak or filet juicy and full of flavor. Best of all, marbling is forgiving during the cooking process and actually helps you deliver a more consistent, higher-quality steak.

These MNA Prime steaks were aged a minimum of 21 days. Though seldom done, aging beef is extremely important. Naturally aging beef improves the tenderness and flavor of the meat so that when properly cooked it will deliver an exceptional eating experience.

Pachelbel Rant

2009-01-24T23:27:00.001-07:00

Never seen a rant about a piece of classical music before. Hilarious.

So Far So Good

2009-01-23T22:45:00.003-07:00

Wow, nice going Obama!

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished...

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Fox News Fear Imbalance

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

But Obama may be on top of it.

Imogen Heap

2009-01-10T16:52:00.002-07:00

Just for now. Admirable, seamless mastery of art and technology.

Thai Chicken Curry

2009-01-01T21:52:00.018-07:00

Happy New Year!! We had a great trip and good time visiting with the clan. Excellent weather, good company, good food, what a great way to usher out the old year.

Looking for something interesting to do with chicken? Here is the recipe that goes with that Fish Sauce and Red Curry Paste we left in a certain back fridge. If you can find a can of coconut milk at wally world, you are set.

Ingredients for 4 servings:

14oz (one can) Coconut Milk
1 Tablespoon of Red Curry Paste
2 Tablespoons of Fish Sauce
2 Tablespoons of Sugar

1 lb Chicken breast cut into 1" or so pieces (about 1.5 lbs is good too)
Some red and/or yellow bell pepper strips

Add about 1/2 of the coconut milk and the red curry paste in a pan and stir in the curry to dissolve it a bit. Then add chicken, fish sauce and sugar and bring to a gentle boil and cook until chicken is done (think I used about a 6 on the oven dial.) Throw the peppers in at any point, based on how crunchy you want them (I added them about half way.) When the chicken is done add the rest of the coconut milk and when it's hot again it's ready.

Those leaves in the picture are kaffir lime and add a great flavor, if you can find them fresh; throw in a few when it's almost done with the remainder of the coconut milk.

Serve over hot rice. Or, if you're G., mashed potatoes :-)

The curry paste controls the heat, 1 Tablespoon is mild, a heaping tablespoon would add a little bite and 2 tablespoons makes it yummy hot. Don't go less than 1 tablespoon tho or you'll lose some of the awesome flavor.

This is an authentic recipe from a most excellent cook-book I've had for years.

For those experimenting, look for the Thai red curry past e (Mae Ploy is excellent) at your local Asian store or online, and ask for the best quality fish sauce they have. Grab a few Kaffir leaves and some coconut milk and you can whip this exotic dish up in about 10 minutes.

It all started with this photo

2008-12-22T00:22:00.002-07:00

and here's what happened next...

Creativity. We got that going for us.