Five Years of the iTunes Music Store

I suppose I could perform a more detailed analysis, but just looking at my smart playlist for purchased music, I've bought 3,396 songs at the iTunes Music Store since it opened five years ago. I recognize this makes me a hopeless loser in the eyes of the web-utopians, and their rabid anti-DRM ideology. All I know is, I've been enjoying more music than at any time since college. That is, if you can call the United States Naval Academy, "college."

And I must say, I feel great sympathy, and some sorrow, for Elaine, who hasn't had music as much in her life of late as I have. iTMS has made it trivially easy for me to have music, old and new, in my life. Yeah, it costs money, a notion that is deprecated in Life 2.0™, but it's one of the few truly synergistic transactions on the web. The value a $.99 track adds to my life usually vastly exceeds its marginal cost.

Rock on.

Competing Messages: Dreams of Utopia

Seth Finkelstein on the latest drama in the favorite poster-child of the "web utopians."

Guess it's just all that "cognitive surplus" being put to good use.

Cheese Sandwich: Not Much to Say

Just an update to keep the lights on here. Wish I had some deep, pithy thoughts to share, but alas, we seem to be low on them today. What deep thoughts we have, we're keeping in reserve for one of my brothers-in-law who is recovering from his second surgery for mesothelioma. So, while things are generally good here, its tempered by the knowledge that others, close to us, face very significant challenges.

It was warm yesterday, so I decided to run on the treadmill. It comes as a surprise to me how much harder I find it to run on the treadmill now! It was the opposite earlier in the year, when I transitioned from the treadmill to road running. Because the pace is fixed, my average heart rate was higher than road running, while I never really approached my maximum. Still, the perceived level of effort was higher on the treadmill, I felt more fatigued at the end and had no real emotional lift, like I experienced at the end of my run last weekend. All of which simply says I need to try and schedule my runs for the cool parts of the day, and save the treadmill for those days that don't have any cool parts.

My apartment is beginning to resemble one of this children's attractions, where a pit is filled with a large number of plastic balls. Only in my case, the pit is my apartment, and the spheres are tennis balls. Bodhi finds one or two nearly every day, and brings them all home with him.

I spent a great deal of time lounging around the pool yesterday and Friday ("Livin' the dream, baby!"), and so I've got a ton of housework I've been neglecting. How one guy and one dog can make such a mess remains a matter of much mystery to me. (Allow me to offer a plug here for the American Association of Assiduously Alliterative Authors.)

Okay, back to work!

Social Hygiene: Another JBT Interview

This is an audio interview of Jill Bolte Taylor from January of this year at the web site of the Sound Medicine radio program. It's pretty similar to the TED talk, but it's still interesting on its own merits, and it offers some important points that weren't mentioned in the TED talk.

Cheese Sandwich: Who's Counting?

I happened to stumble upon this little piece about heart rate at the NY Times after my run on Saturday. It's interesting. I will say that, apart from occasionally glancing at my time, and looking more intently at distance as I approach my turn-around point, I seldom looked at my watch on Saturday during the run. I don't trust the instantaneous pace reading, and the heart rate text is tiny and would require more than a glance to read it. Whereupon I would probably run into traffic or a light pole or something. I do study the data after I dump it to the computer.

I will look at my heart rate on my walks, just because it's a little more difficult to sense the level of effort I'm expending on a walk. And walking into light poles is a little less painful than running into them.

Social Hygiene: A Clean Install

I've been continuing to kind of follow some of the discussion about Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk, and her experience of her stroke. There are some fascinating reactions to it, the most interesting by the people who disagree with her in some way. One, in particular, is some sort of online guru, whose objections are kind of funny. Others are more "technical," in that they object to Taylor's summary description of the brain in an 18 minute talk! I won't link to those, but you can find them pretty easily if you look for them.

Most interesting of all are some interviews of Taylor herself. There are a few from before her TED talk, but more seem to be appearing. A recent one in New Scientist (Paid content, so I won't link to it. You can find it if you're a subscriber.) was especially interesting, as she described her recovery and some of the choices she seemed to be able to make as part of her recovery.

One of the things I'm a little less enamored with is Taylor's apparent reliance on the "brain as computer" metaphor. I like metaphors, they can be very helpful; but some people, and I'm not referring to Taylor here, seem to like the metaphor more than the thing it's meant to represent, and they begin to think the thing itself really is the metaphor. That is to say, it may obscure more than it illuminates. But in this context, I like the brain as computer metaphor.

Let me quickly add here the usual disclaimer, "I'm an authority on nothing," so it's likely I've gotten something or everything of what follows wrong to one degree or another.

With that out of the way, let's talk a little bit (heh) about computers. Computers have operating systems, the low level program that pretty much enables the computer to do the useful things we care about. We're not often terribly interested in the OS, mostly just running particular applications. But operating systems are important, and they often contain bugs. Since bugs can adversely affect the way the computer runs, the people responsible for maintaining the OS often issue "patches" for it - a bit of programming that is supposed to run in place of the bug, correcting it. Sometimes we just live with the bugs. Life's like that.

Enthusiasts may write programs that alter some aspect of how the OS works, usually to offer some enhanced capability. While it may work reliably 90% of the time, it might cause problems the other 10% of the time. If you play around with your OS in this way a number of times, it may become difficult to identify the source of a new problem that arises. If that happens, you may do something that is referred to as a "clean install." You'll wipe the OS off your computer's hard disk, and install a completely unmodified copy of the OS as it came from the factory. That often resolves many problems, and you can make choices about which patches or enhancements you want to install after that. Okay, that was way too much about computers.

One of the ways in which the mental health profession tries to help people improve the quality of the experience of their lives is through something called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). You might think of CBT as a way of maintaining your brain's operating system. Like most efforts of this sort, it's probably best not to go mucking about in there unless you know what you're doing. But professionals can often look (Metaphorically!) at your brain's OS, maybe get a "core dump," and spot a bug and then give you a patch to run when you encounter that bug.

Now let's step aside here and talk a little about the brain and how it's a bit different as a "computer." The brain relies on networks of neurons, and its "programming" is "stored" as network connections. There are various types of storage in various locations, but much of it relies on strengthening those network connections to store the "programs" and also to speed their operation. Repetition is one of the key ways these programs get stored and "optimized." Some of these we might call "habituated behaviors," things we do unconsciously, they don't require a cognitive, volitional, choice when they operate. The brain recognizes a stimulus it has seen before, and rapidly runs a stored program appropriate to that stimulus. This is a pretty gross over-simplification, but it's close enough.

Well, some of those stored programs are buggy. When a car cuts you off on the road, the most appropriate response, is probably not to blow your horn, ride up on his bumper and flip him the bird. But you do stuff like that often enough, and pretty soon it's a bug, stored in those neural connections.

So then you need a patch. You go talk to a professional, kind of look at the code, see the logic error, and maybe write a "patch" together. But because the brain is not really a computer, you can't just install the patch and forget about it. You have to consciously call up the patch every time you encounter the stimulus, and thus strengthen the network connections of the patch. (Mindfulness is very important here.)

So that's a brief, simplistic, incomplete and somewhat deficient description of what CBT is intended to do.

Well, Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke was very interesting in that regard. Rather than installing "patches," the way you or I might have to, she seems to have been able to do a "clean install" of her brain's "OS." Check this out:

Did you actually consciously reconstruct your brain with your thoughts?

Yes, renewing or rerunning neurocircuits was a cognitive choice. The non-functional circuits started to come back online one at a time and I could choose to either hook into that circuitry or not feed it. For example, when the anger circuit wanted to run again, I did not like the way it felt inside my body so I said "no" to its running. Every time it tried to get triggered and run again, I brought my attention back to it - I did not like the way anger felt so I shut it down. Now that circuit rarely runs at all, mostly because I feel it getting triggered and nip it in the bud.

Awesome! And so fortunate for her, too. Later, she adds:

So, I look at us as a collection of neurocircuitry of thoughts and emotions and physiological responses. When you see the brain as the kind of computer network that it is, it becomes easier to manipulate. But you have to be willing. People say "Oh I'm so much more than my thoughts, I'm so much more than neurocircuitry," and I'm like, yeah, I had that fantasy once, too. I don't any more. As human beings we all have the ability to focus our minds on what we want to think about.

I think folks who meditate are willing to pay attention to their thoughts so that they can purposefully redirect their minds. Mantras, prayer beads, consciously thinking about one's breathing - these are tools that provide the brain with an alternative to the constant brain chatter, permitting the mind's focus to shift to something else. It's the same sort of thing. There are people who are comfortable witnessing their thoughts, while there are others who think they are their thoughts. Learning to observe our neural circuitry and not engage with it is a skill we all can learn.

Of course, what's kind of really cool is asking yourself, "Who is doing the observing?" That's another thing altogether. But I think this remarkable woman has had an extraordinary experience, and she speaks to us in a way that seems very accessible and strikingly resonant.

I don't wish to elevate Dr. Taylor into some New Age guru status, and I'm quite confident she has no such intention for herself either. But I am encouraged by her account. I've been engaged in something of an ongoing effort to pay attention to my attention, and to try "to widen the space between stimulus and response," for some time now. I have some modest, momentary experience with that "deep inner peace circuitry" she mentioned in her talk. I know it exists, and it's changed the way I look at myself and the world. But changing "the way I look at myself and the world," is a far different thing from actually changing myself, which, unsurprisingly, is somewhat harder.

But I believe it's worthwhile. I'd go further and suggest that it's much more than worthwhile, but it would be hard to articulate exactly why. But it is why I believe that we're not here to "change the world." I believe the world is here so that we might learn to change ourselves. The world doesn't "need" us. We need the world to form the experience of our lives. Who we choose to be, how we choose to be, should, I think, be informed by this. I think most of us have it exactly backwards, but it's hard to show that. Probably because of the bugs in our OS. One of which, naturally, likely may be the one that has the conclusion of this post being all about me! But, there you go.

Or, more precisely perhaps, "No matter where you go, there you are."

Cheese Sandwich: Delta Max

Went out for a run this morning and enjoyed it. Since the disaster on the 15th of March, I've been taking it easy running. In fact, if anything, I haven't been running enough. But I have been walking pretty consistently at work, and increasing the pace on my walks. I've managed two 4 mile walks at 58:10. I pretty much have to increase the pace now to get my heart rate up much above 120 bpm. Which just tells me it's time to mix it up a little and figure out how to incorporate some interval training. But that's for another post.

Instead, I had a really nice run today, managed to do five miles at about a 10:54 pace. Again, that's not very impressive except to me. I felt rocky starting out, but everything seemed to smooth out about a half mile into it. I could easily control my breathing, my pace seemed regular and not straining, and I was just enjoying the run. I planned to do five, with some flexibility to turn around early if I felt like I was straining. But by the halfway point, I was still feeling good and easily controlling my breathing and my heart rate hadn't topped 170. While I hadn't done so intentionally, the data shows that I actually increased my pace after turning around. This is perhaps partly because I was now running into the wind and the cooling effect of the breeze made me feel much better. By mile three, my heart rate reached 170 and stayed in the 170s from that point on, but I felt good and could still control my breathing with only a modest effort. I wanted to finish strong, so I tried to pick up the pace a bit for the last quarter mile and I hit 180 bpm at 4.8 miles. At this point, I'd have to say I would have had difficulty controlling my breathing, but I didn't feel as though I was "sucking wind." I still felt good, and wanted to keep going hard to five miles. So I did.

At five miles, I hit 190 bpm, and I still felt strong. In fact, I felt pretty good, like "happy," though it was probably my maximum effort. I couldn't have kept going much further at anything approaching that pace. But what's interesting to me is that 190 bpm is the fastest heart rate I've seen since I bought the Garmin back in January. I don't specifically recall seeing 190 on the treadmill, though I seem to have the impression I may have hit 190 or so at one point. Those measurements would be unreliable anyway, since you have to grab the sensors with your hands, and I wouldn't do that while I was running with any speed. Normally I would just grab them at the end of the program, during the cool down. But that's all beside the point. What's actually more interesting to me is that my recovery time was pretty quick. Even with going up the stairs to collect Bodhi, my heart rate was back down around 130 bpm in ten minutes. On the March 15th disaster, my recovery took much longer, and I didn't see 130 for over twenty minutes.

So I guess you'd call that progress. In the mindfulness area, I tried to pay attention to my body and my breathing, to respect it and not let my ego set the pace; I tried not to give in to anger at ignorant and oblivious drivers (I didn't give anybody the finger or call them an asshole today. Though I thought about it.); and I was grateful for a beautiful day and the health and good fortune to go out and run in it.

I guess you might call that progress too. But, really, it's just practice. One that I need to keep working on.

Found

I've been walking the beaches around here for a good many years, and while I've occasionally found some interesting shells, I'd never found a shark's tooth before. Until Thursday. From what I've been able to glean from the intertubes, they're supposedly fairly common on the southeastern shore of the United States. I guess that depends on what you mean by "fairly." And this one is probably a fossil of some indeterminate age. Anyway, it's still pretty sharp! (The ruler is in centimeters.)

Social Hygiene: Being Here

Yesterday morning I took a shower and as I was toweling off it occurred to me that I couldn't recall if I'd washed anything besides my hair. I remembered washing my hair, but that's about it. It wasn't a "senior moment," it's more like an "out of body experience." My head was someplace other than where my body happened to be. Tell me that's never happened to you before...

That used to happen to me fairly often. On the worst days, it sometimes led to a chain of events, each more catastrophic than the last. "Catastrophic," being relative and rather hyperbolic. But the result was a lot of anger and frustration, a feeling of powerlessness. Sometimes in a session with Sandy, I'd rattle off a series of ill-considered, seemingly logical conclusions based on merely one or two false premises, but the result would be an extremely unhappy and negative conclusion and much apparent suffering on my part. Sandy would tell me, rather emphatically, "David! Just be still." Sometimes it sounded like, "Just. Be. Still." Other times, "Just! Be! Still!" She's a remarkably patient woman.

There were several components to my problems, one of which was to take ownership of things for which I had no responsibility, and even less authority. That was often the source of the false premises. The other component was to always be trying to "figure things out. " I've always scored well on logic and reasoning tests, and problems were always things that seemed to require solutions. The solution to my problem was identifying which problem was really mine!

During this time, I was reading a lot of books about Zen. I happened to be reading one by either Charlotte Joko Beck or Cheri Huber, and she related a story about counseling a woman who was in a great deal of distress regarding some problem in her marriage; and the author asked the woman to identify the source of her suffering in that very moment. Was her husband there? What, exactly, was wrong with that present moment? She was safe. She was sheltered. She was with someone who cared about her, what was wrong with that present moment? And the answer, of course, was really nothing. The woman's suffering came from placing her attention in the past, or in the future, neither of which really exist except as memory or imagination, and why should we allow either of those to alter the experience of the present? The point is, chances are, for many of us, right now is a pretty okay place. There are many people who do suffer in the moment because of the circumstances of that moment; but there are many more who do so for no other reason than where they choose to place their attention.

So I learned a little bit about asking myself a question when I find myself making myself miserable: What's wrong with this present moment? I learned some other things as well, about asking myself what I was believing, and was that true? But "what's wrong with this present moment?" is a powerful question, and helps to create an awareness of mindfulness, and ultimately, mindfulness itself.

Sometimes "What's wrong with this present moment?" isn't a question we ask consciously or volitionally. Rather, we might recognize the question when we offer an answer that isn't true. Sometimes we don't recognize it, and we miss an opportunity to practice mindfulness. We can't count how many opportunities we miss, there are so many! But every now and then, I get lucky and notice an opportunity.

For example, I walk my dog several times a day. On a "bad" day, I'll be walking him and thinking about some problem or something that wasn't going the way I'd wanted it to go. Bodhi, being a dog, is blissfully unaware of my inner state of ignorance and confusion, so he's just off smelling every interesting scent he happens upon. My head won't be in the walk with him, it will be somewhere else, or worse, wanting to get finished with the walk so it can literally be somewhere else, and I'll start snapping at Bodhi and yanking on his leash to get him to move along!

On a "good" bad day, I'll catch myself and ask myself what's so important that I can't spend a few minutes with a beautiful dog that loves me, and enjoy him as he enjoys exploring the smells, chasing the lizards and eating the sticks. And so then I get to practice. I try to pay attention to my attention, and place it in the present, whether it's in me - Am I tense? How's my posture? Or whether it's in my surroundings, listening to the birds sing, looking at the stars, feeling the wind on my face. And I'll recall that all I have to do is breathe.

On a "bad" bad day, I'll drag my poor dog around the property and he'll wonder what's up with his ignorant master?

Sometimes I'll be out on a walk and see some beautiful scene, and my second thought will be something along the lines of wishing I had my camera with me. And then I'd think about how inexperienced I am as a photographer, and how I probably couldn't do what I was seeing justice. And when I'm lucky, I'll wake up and ask myself what that's all about? I don't have a camera with me, so it doesn't matter how good or not-good I am as a photographer, so let's just enjoy the scene! In this case, the mere existence of the camera has mediated my experience of something nature has afforded me, for which I have some appreciation apart from what the camera might have afforded, but it is somehow diminished by my attention going to the camera!

If I had had a camera with me, I could be a photographer. (I'm not really, I just take pictures.) But if I don't have the camera with me, I can just be. Two different experiences. Which is really better? Well, it's probably a judgment call. Some people love photography so much, they're probably taking pictures even when they don't have their camera with them, and I'm not prepared to say that that's a bad thing for them. But it is a different experience of the present, and who knows what they might experience were they not mentally "taking pictures."

Sometimes I'll be out walking and being fairly mindful, and then I'll start feeling pretty proud of myself and thinking about how I'm going to write about this in Groundhog Day! And in that instant, I'm out of the present, and into the future, writing in Groundhog Day. It's a tricky, tricky thing, this mindfulness thing. The minute I started thinking about blogging this, I was no longer in the present, I was in some imagined future. And then if it turns out I don't have time to write about it, I get frustrated or disappointed, and really, what's the big deal? It's not like there aren't a million other people doing a much better job writing and teaching about mindfulness than I could! What's wrong with this present moment? I'm not blogging about how mindful I was? Is that really a problem?

And then I laugh at myself, because this really is all kinds of funny.

Anyway, I think my breakfast is almost settled enough that I might try and do a little run. Pay attention to your attention. All we have are moments to live. Try to make each one count. It seems hard, and it is at first, but it gets, maybe not "easier," but better.

Losses

Noted with sadness and sympathy, the recent passing of AKMA's father, and Elaine's friend and former husband.

Some New Music

It occurred to me the other day that I didn't have any Aerosmith in my music collection, nor any Van Halen of the David Lee Roth vintage. So I toddled off (virtually) to the iTunes Music Store to remedy those deficiencies. I purchased Van Halen and Van Halen II, but iTMS didn't have any early Aerosmith. It's a label thing, I guess.

Fortunately, Amazon did have the early Aerosmith releases, so I downloaded Aerosmith and Get Your Wings, but Toys in the Attic was less expensive on CD than as a download, so I ordered the atoms instead of the bits. Rather, I had the bits delivered by CD and UPS, instead of Comcast.

Anyway, that's all really old music, and I wanted to mention some new music I'm enjoying. First up is Jackie Green, and the album I'm really enjoying is American Myth. I don't really know how to review music, I don't think I speak the language, but I really enjoy listening to this album. Interesting lyrics, great sound. I love it. Your mileage may vary.

The next album I'm really loving is Mindy Smith's Long Island Shores. iTunes classifies her as "country," and I guess she lives in Nashville so maybe she is, but maybe it's not strictly country. Whatever it is, I love it a lot. Now, a caveat is somewhat in order here, because I'm a little troubled by something. I love Mindy Smith, but I also love (and am very new to) Jewel, Kate Walsh, and Patty Griffin. These singers are all somewhat similar in style and tone (again, I don't know the language), but it does kind of give me pause that they all seem so similar in style and tone. Anyway, I like them, but I suppose some people might complain that they all "sound alike." They're different enough, I suppose, that some might be strong fans of one and not the others, but if you're not well acquainted with each of them, you might have some trouble telling them apart at first listen. That might be a criticism, it might not. Whatever.

Another female vocalist, but one with a somewhat different style, is Kathleen Edwards, and the album is Back to Me. The title track is very cool and a little bit scary, in an amusing sort of way.

Maybe between Mindy Smith and Kathleen Edwards is Missy Higgins' On a Clear Night. I think one of the things I like about iTMS is that I can just provide a link to the album and you can sample the tracks a bit and get a sense of what the music sounds like without me having to try to describe it. All I have to do is tell you I like it!

In a somewhat different vein, Shelby Lynne channelling Dusty Springfield in Just a Little Lovin' appeals to my middle-aged sensibilities. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

And now for something completely different, My Morning Jacket is an interesting discovery and the album I'm enjoying is It Still Moves. I'll go out on a limb here and say maybe Grateful Dead meets Poco meets M. Ward. Who knows? I like it.

Back to female vocalists, I heard Tift Merritt on NPR's Talk of the Nation and loved her stuff. iTMS classified her as "rock," but I'd say she's pretty much "country." What do I know? "Everything is miscellaneous," I guess. But I like Bramble Rose and Another Country.

I bought Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago, but I've found that, like Joshua James, I have to take this guy in small doses. I can't listen to a whole album, but a single track at a time can be a worthwhile experience.

The Little Willies are a treat.

If you're just lookin' to chill with some very mellow guitars and vocals and nice lyrics, you can't go wrong with Mojave 3's Out of Tune. This album is a decade old, but I just got it.

Anyway, there's some new, or new-to-me, stuff I'm listening to that may or not be to anyone else's taste. I like 'em. You might too.

BSG: More Thoughts

I received an interesting e-mail from Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems, developer of Tinderbox, regarding my last post about Battlestar Galactica. Mark points out something I hadn't really considered about the show. From his e-mail:

"I do think the show is doing something interesting: unless I much miss my guess, it's the first unsentimental drama to explore theology in a very long time. "

"By 'sentimental', I mean the technical meaning: telling us how we ought to feel. There's a lot of art that does that, of course. And there's a lot of explication about how We feel is Right. But Battlestar is actually trotting out some very interesting and forgotten debates. Are the elect visible? Are the righteous prayers of the wicked answered? How do you distinguish between a prophet and an idol -- especially when the prophetess is a pagan traditionalist and the idol preaches that the lord is the creator and is one? Starbuck's claim, essentially, is that she has experienced a revelation."

I replied that I thought his observation was valid, but that it hadn't seemed to me that the show had focused on theological questions in any significant way thus far. The religious elements are more used to explore character than to pose exclusively theological questions. The fact that the original series offered a technologically advanced society with a religious system of gods rather than monotheism was, in my opinion, just some gratuitous novelty as sf, while also being somewhat suggestive of the Chariots of the Gods notion, which had been a fairly recent fad when the show aired in the late seventies. (The pilots' helmets kind of resembled ancient Egyptian headdress.) Ron Moore's decision to embrace the system of gods served two purpose. First, it was faithful to the memory of the original series, and second, it afforded the opportunity to make the notional bad guys, the Cylons, monotheistic, which would seem to make them somewhat more like "us," but radically monotheistic, which allowed them to be seen as fundamentalists. It helped to recreate the uncomfortable ambiguity that resembles so much of "real life."

Whether or not the show's writers explore the questions Mark suggests in any significant way remains to be seen. I'm not sure it would be resonant with a significant portion of the audience, though I suppose it would appeal to some.

For myself, I'm just not very optimistic that the entire series will hang together cohesively by the conclusion. Granted, they posited the existence of 12 models of human-form Cylons from the beginning, but it feels to me as though they hadn't fully considered what parts all twelve were to play throughout the series.

I'm really pissed off about Saul Tigh being a Cylon. First, he and Adama fought together during the first Cylon war, when all the Cylons resembled "walking chrome toasters." So how is Saul a Cylon? What? Did they take a sample of his DNA and replicate him later on? Why? Why him?

And Roslin's aide? How could she be one of the "final five?" Until Billy's untimely death, how could any Cylon conspiracy be confident that she'd even survive the original attack on the colonies, let alone make it aboard Galactica as an aide to the president, along with three out of the four known members of the "final five."

Anders? He's not very credible either. How could a Cylon conspiracy be certain that any sort of rescue effort would ever be mounted to recover any survivors. To say nothing of the fact that leading a resistance movement as part of his cover wasn't a great way of ensuring his survival. He was very likely to blow himself up, or be shot accidently by one of his own people, even if the Cylons were trying to "miss" him. Well, maybe they figured someone would come back for the Arrow of Athena, you say! Yeah, it sure seemed like that Number Six was just going to let Kara waltz out with it.

This just seems so bogus. Complexity for the sake of complexity, which I think is the influence of Lost. I hasten to add that I've never watched Lost, so I only know what I read about it, which isn't much. But it seems like Lost garners favorable notices for it's complex story-line, mysterious characters, and shocking surprises; so Moore and company, not content with being merely a strong, character-driven, Peabody award-winning, serial drama dealing with difficult contemporary issues as no other series on television, has to try and be as "complex" as Lost. Without having been built that way from the ground up. It's all being tacked-on after the fact.

I'm not enough of a fan-boy to follow all the sites that I'm sure have discussed this very issue ad nauseam, so I'm sure this has all been hashed out by others already. For the moment, I'm content to just watch the series to its conclusion, and hope that they can pull it off and give it a satisfactory resolution. Not that the humans must find earth, or even that they have to survive. Just that the story makes sense when it's finished, even if everybody dies. Right now, I don't know how they can make that happen. This "final five" thing seems like a "bridge too far." I'm afraid that anything they do to make this make sense is just going to be lame. Lame. Lame. Lame.

"Oh, ye of little faith..."

BSG: The Beginning of the End

I watched the season premiere of the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica. I did so mostly out of inertia, or maybe just curiosity, rather than genuine interest. So many externalities are now shaping the show, it seems to me as though it's lost its integrity. Not in any sort of moralistic sense, just that they've managed to paint themselves into corners that aren't especially good ones.

Many spoilers follow, so don't read this if you want to be "surprised" and haven't seen the episode yet.

Starbuck's time discrepancy, yeah, okay maybe we could explain that with some fancy "wormhole" thing, but the brand new Viper? So she's an artifact, which would imply Cylon deception; or it's a "miracle," and BSG doesn't believe in miracles. So Starbuck becomes a distraction, a bit of artifice that demands attention at the expense of other aspects of the story-telling.

The fleet jumps into a nebular region of space, experiences strange power fluctuations which also seem to affect President Roslin, Starbuck appears, along with a Cylon fleet, and a huge fight ensues. Yeah, Tigh is struggling with the revelation that he's a Cylon, so we have the gratuitous imagination scene where he shoots Adama like Boomer did, only it's played straight at first. Could have done without that, I think. Distraction.

Ships are lost or sustain serious damage, yet when the Cylons inexplicably flee, the fleet manages to jump away as well. What? Nobody's FTL drives were damaged? No discussion of how many ships were damaged, no acknowledgment of a tough decision whether to stay and offload damaged ships or try to effect repairs. They just jump. Because they have to serve an asinine storyline about Starbuck and Roslin. Boy, does that suck. And they keep jumping, even though they don't know how the Cylons found them the last time either, and the captive Six tells Roslin the Final Five are very near, so they're compromised! Why keep jumping if the Cylons are just going to find them anyway? Where's the discussion of how to deal with that little dilemma?

Then there's the "cliff hanger" ending with yet another gun being pointed to someone's head, who we fully don't expect to actually get shot because she has to die from breast cancer. I'm so sick of the guns to heads thing.

This is no longer about the last remnants of humanity fleeing from the agents of their extinction. No, now it's the Starbuck Show!

I can't see how this is going to end in any way as satisfactorily as it began. They've got too many gimmicks underway, and they have to tie up a lot of loose ends, and there's no integrity to it that I can detect. I think they kind of lost their way in reality, much as the fleet has on the show, if Starbuck is to be believed. I think they've been overly influenced by Lost in more ways than one.

Anyway, I'll finish out the season just to see what happens, but I don't look forward to each episode anymore. I expect to be disappointed each time.

Cheese Sandwhich: Sunrise 04-06-08

I went down to the beach this morning for another reason, but managed to get to see the sun come up. Wasn't an especially spectacular event today, but it was nice anyway.

Cheese Sandwich: Better, Faster, Stronger

Dr. James Vornov's favorable mention of the Garmin Forerunner 305 did indeed influence my purchase of the device. I'd been thinking about heart rate monitors for a while, but hadn't looked into them much beyond the Polar line. Jim's experience, the price reduction and the utility of having real time/distance data along with heart rate made it a relatively easy decision, and I've been very pleased with it. I've also just purchased Ascent, based on his recommendation, and I love it. People are kind of fascinated by the moving map view, with the updating data display. It's like missile telemetry! (Except I move slower than any missile. Ever.)

Jim's a much more disciplined and methodical trainer than I am, which I find admirable. For whatever reason, I tend to resist my own efforts to be more disciplined, and when I try to overcome that, it quickly becomes counterproductive. The effort at discipline becomes the objective, which I seem to resist, rather than whatever goal the discipline is intended to serve, which becomes secondary and largely unmet. So I find I have to kind of give myself permission to be somewhat flexible in my approach! That's a topic for another day, but one of the things I have to do is stay interested. The data collected from the watch helps to keep me interested.

He has posted about the Mark's Daily Apple and Functional Path Training weblogs, and the value of interval training. I've been thinking about how I might incorporate interval training into my efforts. I did some sprints one day on my lunchtime walk, and it was interesting to look at the heart rate and pace data. One thing that was sort of frustrating was that I had no consistent means of telling how long or how far I was sprinting while I was doing it. I could go to a track and use markings on the track, or I could measure a distance and set up some cones or rocks on the beach, but for a variety of poor reasons, I haven't yet.

Instead, because I'm a highly conditioned and habituated consumer, I bought that little Nike+ transducer for my iPod nano. My intent is to create a single track, either using iTunes alone, or in combination with something like Garage Band, that contains some number of seconds of fast music for a sprint, followed by slower music for recovery, and repeating that for some number of intervals in the session. Apart from appeasing the reward centers of my brain with thrill of opening yet another package, I think the music will help me maintain the intensity of my effort during the sprint portion, plus it will be interesting to compare the data from the Nike+ and the Garmin. More on this when I actually get around to doing it. As I said, I'm somewhat "flexible" with my approach to training. But I am fairly interested and motivated to do this, so I'm pretty confident I will. I meant to build the track this weekend, but it may be overtaken by events.

With regard to maintaining interest, I confess I haven't been back to taekwondo as I'd planned to do following the Gate River Run. Right now, I'm sort of wrestling with what I want to accomplish in tkd. Part of the problem is that I've been doing it fairly consistently for six years now, so it's becoming somewhat familiar. I won't say I'm approaching anywhere near mastery, but I have reached a level of skill where improvements are much more incremental, and so the rewards are less immediately tangible. On the other hand, I'm quite aware of my own deficiencies that have contributed to that situation. I'm working on fourth degree material in my new form, and it's just going to take hard work to master the form. I'm not averse to working hard, but I have to kind of trick myself into doing it sometimes.

So I'm kind of reevaluating what I want to get from taekwondo, and where I want to go with it. I think I'm pretty close to a resolution, and it's interesting, to me, how this is playing out.

As I've mentioned before, one of my co-workers suggested I try a yoga class offered locally. I did so, mostly out of curiosity. I'd been aware of yoga for a long time, but frankly, the magazines kind of put me off the whole idea. They're mostly illustrated with images of very buff, beautiful people in perfect poses. And I'm nothing if not imperfect and a bit lumpy. So I'd never really considered yoga until my friend from work suggested giving her class a try.

Well, I'm thrilled I did. It's a great class, and the instructor is wonderful. It's probably a little of a "beginner's mind" thing, but it's very exciting because I really do suck at it, but I know I can improve! So there's the interest/reward thing in spades. Plus, she's great at incorporating mindfulness into the class. I'm taking the introductory course, and I think I'll probably do that two or three times before I start one of her regular sessions. I want to make sure I've got the basics down for the poses before I try to do them in a less instructional environment. But one of the great things about yoga is that it's making me move my body in ways that taekwondo doesn't, so I'm strengthening other aspects of my core and my legs, while also making demands on my balance, and focusing on my breath and center. What I'm suggesting is that yoga practice seems to have the potential of allowing me to resume taekwondo at some point, and see some larger improvements and greater rewards. So I'm pretty excited about that.

I think I want to return to colored belt material in taekwondo in order to perfect those forms and prepare for the September instructor certification test. That will be the second of three parts in the certification process. Assuming I passed, I could take the third test next February and receive my black collar as a certified instructor. It'll be years before I can test for my fourth degree, so I think I want to focus now on my instructor certification, and mastery of the colored belt, 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree forms, and then focus on achieving the fourth degree.

In any event, I've been struggling a bit with what I want to be when I grow up. My current employment is very nice, and it meets my income needs at the moment, with child support and a good deal of "starting over" debt. Not that I started over "wisely," mind you. So, while it's not fulfilling, I'm not really in a position to abandon it. Of course, there's always the chance that it will abandon me, too! But I've been wondering what else I might care to do that I would find more rewarding, and I think I may have finally stumbled upon it.

I've long entertained the idea of teaching taekwondo, but it's never been something I've felt particularly strongly about. I'm far older than most of the instructors I've trained with, and the nature of the business means you often have to attract children and train them. I love kids, but again, I think the younger instructors fare much better with them than I would. I'd prefer to train adults. But the aspect of the art that I would prefer to emphasize is the mind-body connection, and the art of mindfulness. Not many people come to taekwondo with that as their goal. I certainly didn't. Mainly, the formality of the program, the discipline and the structure of the classes, was very comfortable to me because of my military career, and in some ways it seemed to help me make the transition.

Ideally, I'd like to do something that allowed me to work on my own mindfulness, as well as continue to improve in my fitness, and give me the opportunity to kind of serve others, if only as an instructor. One of the things that has me so excited about yoga is that it seems like the kind of thing I would enjoy doing. And, of course, tai chi comes to mind as well. So I think I have sort of the beginning of a plan for the next few years. I want to finish my instructor certification in taekwondo, because I think it's a valuable asset. I will study yoga and pursue a training certification in that as well. After I've earned my cert in taekwondo, I plan to begin training in tai chi, and explore what formal qualifications exist for instructing in that art.

While I'm working on that, I think I'll focus my financial efforts on reducing or eliminating my debt, so I can be much more flexible on my income requirements. My navy pension affords me a great advantage in that regard, if I can restrain my spendthrift tendencies! The goal would be that once I'm no longer responsible for child support to Caitlin's mother, I would be in a position to get by on a substantially reduced income, as I try to establish a new career as an instructor in yoga, tai chi and perhaps other forms of mindfulness training. Who knows? It may all be a pipe dream, but it's the first thing that's gotten me excited about a potential career change in a long time.

We shall see.