I disturbed this guy as I was raking leaves this morning. He's about two inches or so from leg-tip to leg-tip. He was certainly easy to spot as he scurried away from my rake. I ran in and grabbed the camera and when I came back out, he was still sitting there. I tried for a number of candids, but Mandy came by to see what excitement was, and the spider became very shy.
I bought myself a little gift. (Yes, I am selfish. I know this.) It's the Canon Powershot A70. I love my DC290, but it's so S...L...O...W! I wanted something a little quicker on the draw, not too expensive, using compact flash for storage, more control over the exposures, and smaller than the 290. I happened to spot the A70 at Target last weekend, and hadn't heard of it before. I did a little homework using the web, and it looks like the perfect camera for me. It's not a perfect camera, but for the price, I think I'll be quite pleased.
I'm sure glad I didn't buy the A40 when it was on sale at the Exchange a couple of months ago! I bought the A70 through Amazon and selected free shipping. It was $10.00 cheaper than Target's sale price, and I avoided sales tax (as I would have, if I had bought the A40 at the Exchange).
I was purging my iPhoto library last night and I happened to notice something. I have the organize window set up to view images by name, so everything is pretty much in the order I shot it. The images are sized such that I see two columns of thumbnails (obviously, they're pretty big thumbs). There is a sequence of shots I made last October during a nighttime thunderstorm that was going on northeast of here. I was really just trying to see if I could capture an image of a bolt of lightning. Unfortunately, my DC290 wasn't quite up to the task, but since I had the camera set up on a tripod, I managed to capture about 20 frames of clouds illuminated by lightning at night. As I scrolled the thumbs, it created an animation effect, and I saw I could make a time-lapse video clip.
I put it together last night in Quicktime, and it looks pretty cool as an image sequence. Each time I've exported it as a Quicktime movie though, the quality of the images has gone down too much. I'm going to have to peruse the QT docs and see if I can't manage to get better quality in the images, and then I'll post it somewhere. It's not incredibly cool, but it isn't the kind of thing you see every day either.
Speaking of iPhoto, I did some more investigation into virtual memory. Another very cool utility to use is Memory Monitor, which puts a little moving graph of your memory usage in the Dock. Plus, it's free. He includes a nice discussion of virtual memory in his help file, and introduced me to using vm_stat from the terminal.
I'm still not savvy enough to really understand what's going on in iPhoto, but I'm getting the impression (which may be a false one), that I really only need a little more RAM, and it won't pound virtual memory as hard. I may buy another 512MB and see if I can't avoid the vm issue altogether.
One of the cool things about Giants: Citizen Kabuto is that it is optimized for multi-processors. (Yea, Omni!) One of the bad things is that it doesn't allow you to save your game in the middle of a mission. It is a pretty fun game, I'm still working my way through the Meccs scenarios. I'm on the base-building tutorial, and I never seem to have time to finish it before I have to do something else with the machine, so it's start all over again each time. Of course, it does go faster each time, as I learn what things to do and what things not to do.
I had about 150 pictures sitting on my compact flash card in my digital camera, and I decided it was probably past time I downloaded them to iPhoto. I'm running iPhoto 2 on 10.2.6 and my library has about 3000 pictures. That's a pretty big number, and I have begun to delete all the out-of-focus, and what-was-I-thinking shots, but it's likely to remain a relatively big number. It's not helped by the fact that my library it almost totally hosed.
Some time back, something went awry on my iMac that I don't recall at the moment. It was before I got the G4, and it was before the 10.2.4 update that caused all the problems with OS X resetting the clock to like 1969. But it was a time issue, as all my files in my library started showing up with weird dates in them. Normally, the library is ordered by the date you uploaded the pictures. Because my dates were all scrambled, my library was totally hosed, and I've never managed to get it unhosed.
So when I imported my photos from the iMac into iPhoto on the G4, I inherited all the problems in the previous library. I'll eventually get it all sorted out, but it's a pain. One thing I've noticed is duplicate photos. A nice feature of iPhoto is that it allows you to display your photos by filename. This has the benefit of largely unscrewing the ordering problem caused by the date malfunction, as the cameras employed a consistent naming scheme employing the sequence numbers of the pictures. This also revealed I have a lot of pictures that are duplicated. Some differ only by a "_1" appended to the name, while others have exactly the same name, but have a .jpg appended. I've been going through getting rid of those as I discover them.
One thing I noticed using iPhoto was a lot of disk activity, and the computer became very unresponsive, lots of the Spinning CD of Infinite Futility, which does not make for a happy user experience. So I ran Top in Terminal and discovered that virtual memory was clobbering my system with pageouts.
At first, I wasn't sure it was iPhoto that caused it, or if I was just noticing it because I'd launched iPhoto into what may have been a fairly low memory situation to begin with. There's a neat utility called Do I Need More Memory? that helped clarify the situation. I launched that utility this morning, then launched iPhoto. iPhoto immediately consumed over 500MB of available RAM (out of 1.25GB installed). I started scrolling in the Organize view, and it consumed all the available remaining free memory and started clobbering the HD with page swaps. This is not good.
I think the next step is to break the library up using iPhoto Library Manager, and see if I can't get this problem to go away. I suppose I could also go ahead and buy another 512MB of RAM as well, but I was pretty sure I wouldn't be seeing the day when 1.25GB of RAM wasn't enough for the kinds of things I do.
The big lament associated with this update is that Apple disabled sharing songs with one of your three authorized cpus over the internet. Judging by the degree of umbrage being expressed, you'd think Apple had canceled Christmas or something.
Apparently, it's just essential that we be allowed to share the music in our libraries over the internet in order for us to be able to listen to our music while we're at work!
Well, color me stupid or something, but couldn't one just burn one's AAC and MP3 files to CDs and play those instead of using bandwidth? I know it's not as geek-chic as doing it over the net, but get real. If you're lucky enough to own a Superdrive-equipped Powerbook G4, then you can probably fit your whole library on one or two data-DVDs. How much music are you actually going to listen to in an eight-hour day anyway?
It's hard to imagine how this is a serious inconvenience to anyone. I read one account where a couple of guys who were old college buddies were using the sharing feature and iChat to listen to each other's music and comment on it. Okay, that's nice, but I don't think it's a key feature of the application.
Plus, you have to consider the use of resources. Does it really make sense to have your computer at home turned on and awake just so you can read its library to listen to music? Doesn't it make more sense to put the computer to sleep and just carry around a few CDs or an external drive, or, God forbid, an iPod?
Of course, it was entirely predictable that this would happen, given the efforts of some people to point out how this feature enabled Napster-like file swapping. And, of course, others are pointing out ways of continuing to share, stream or swap files, in spite of the update. Thumbing our noses at what were, to this point, the most reasonable efforts at addressing the concerns of the copyright owners and users is a pretty sure-fire way of making sure such efforts will only continue to get more unreasonable as each side tries to play a zero-sum game.
There are no good guys in this, no victims, only chumps.
Another long weekend is over. Bummer. It was a productive one, though.
Saturday was a trip to Books-a-Million. I hadn't been in three weeks, so I was due. I walked out with Mac OS X Hints, Learn Applescript in 24 Hours, and Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialog With the Dalai Lama. I've been doing some tech reading to give my pea-brain a break from trying to comprehend Nagarjuna. There are some good books coming out for OS X now.
Next to BAM is an Ace Hardware with a nice selection of fairly substantial (and expensive) garden or patio fountains. The cheapest one I liked was about $450.00, add another $30 for tax and you're within earshot of $500.00. Still, I almost bought the damn thing. Then I got to thinking about this pile of bricks I have that used to be part of a patio. I think I can build what I want for a hell of a lot less than $500.00. I need to head to Home Depot next weekend for some kind of container (no, not a pond shell), a submersible pump, and some plastic tubing. Maybe I'll prototype it in Legos or something.
I got about 8 miles of beach bike riding on Sunday. It could have been 12, but I forgot my ID card, so I couldn't get onto the naval station. It was a beautiful morning, with a lot of folks out even at 0730. The southern leg was into the wind, so I bailed out of the sand about halfway back because I needed to make better time getting back to the house. We only have two working bikes, and Maria indicated she and Caitie planned to go for a ride that morning. Of course, they were both still asleep when I got back.
I did a ton of yard work, which is unusual for me because I generally hate yard work. I guess I hate entropy more. Magnolia trees generate these enormous leaves that take years to decompose, I raked up about 12 bags of those from the back corner that had reverted to jungle. There's a lot of kudzu back there, and I pulled up all of it that I could find, though it'll continue popping up. I've got some more to go back there, then I'll have to level it all out somehow and I'll let Maria figure out what she wants to put back there. I just got sick of looking at the jungle.
Even the garage came in for some much-needed attention. I figured I had to do something, or someone would sue us for breaking their neck trying to walk through the thing. It's not finished either, but it's a lot better than it was.
Went out to dinner Sunday night with the whole family in honor of Chris's birthday. We ate at Chizu, a Japanese restaurant where Melissa worked for six years. Bobby, the proprietor, banned Perrier water in a moment of patriotic fervor, much to Maria's dismay.
Maria, Melissa and her prospective mother-in-law, Karen, looked after wedding arrangements on Sunday. They got their dresses yesterday. I guess the current thinking is there will not be tuxedos for the men, although the alternative has not been specified. Footwear is specified to be formal flip-flops. The ceremony takes place on the beach.
But now it's back to work, and there's plenty of that to do. I've got a stack of paperwork I've got to complete. That's another form of practice for me. I can't begin to tell you how much I dislike filling out forms. Just something I can work on.
SARS, Iraq, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, climate change, economic doldrums, Axis of Evil, West Nile, media consolidation, digital rights management, fish all gone, hole in the ozone, Patriot Act, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, snipers, bombers, genocide, strained relations, broken alliances, voter apathy, racism, sexism, RIAA, DMCA, Total Information Awareness, Longhorn, SCO, Mad Cow disease.
Too much fear. It's a wonder anyone gets out of bed in the morning.
Everybody is competing for attention by appealing to fear. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even a PhD in sociology, to see where this is leading.
Bush is going to win reelection, because he'll have the least need to appeal to fear, while still getting the benefit of all the others' appeals to fear. He'll appear "positive," and everyone will be sick to death of "negative." Get ready for four more years of Bush II, unless the Democrats can put together an affirmative message that still contrasts with the administration's message. Not impossible, but it goes against conventional wisdom. Negative campaigning swings votes. But it also drives people away from the polls. A positive message may not swing the "likely" voters, but it may get enough of the "unlikely" voters to the polls to make a difference.
I saw Reloaded tonight. I wasn't disappointed, but then we already knew I lacked the discriminating taste of my betters.
I'm probably going to have to see it a few more times before I can figure out what I really think about it, but I do want to see it a few more times, so I think it's worth seeing.
My impressions (will include spoilers):
Time may be an issue of some kind, apart, I think, from the dramatic element. Oracle mentions time, the French guy wants to send a message to the Oracle that her time is almost gone, the Architect marks time by anomalies, Neo has "the sight," he can see the future, at least sometimes. When Mopheus is asked what if the prophecy is bullshit, and he says that then they may all be dead tomorrow, in which case, how would it be any different than today? I think time's an issue.
The Oracle's guard said you never know someone until you fight him. I'm not sure what that means vis a vis Smith and Neo.
I liked the little Adam-12 reference in the highway sequence.
Smith is functioning in Zion, Neo can control squiddies in Zion, and Neo bleeds in the matrix, so it certainly appears as though Zion and the Matrix are indeed different levels within a single conceptual framework.
I love the references to power and choice. I believe the only power that exists is the power to choose. The French guy outlines the deterministic cause and effect, stimulus and response view of reality. What we're not sure about, at this point, is if that is an accurate description. I'm not sure if the movie will really tell us, but I'm interested to see where it goes.
I like what Neo told the kid who thinks Neo saved him, "You saved yourself." Of course, if he was "saved," he'd know that already.
I didn't like the Architect's comment about hope. It was very cliché, I thought I was watching Q in ST:TNG. And if Neo were a practicing Buddhist, he'd know hope is an illusion. Well, that's what I think anyway. I'm not a Buddhist, so what do I know?
But I like love. Love is faith in action. If you have no control, what do you have left? Faith and fear. Morpheus had faith in a prophecy, but now the prophecy is revealed as an illusion. What's left for Morpheus? Same as always.
The number six may not be the deal I thought it was. Reading about the Buddha, I learned that there were supposedly six enlightened ones before him. Neo is number six. Maybe he has to die again and come back, then he'd be the Buddha. Or something.
Neo mentioned the Agents had upgrades, yet Trinity and Morpheus seemed even better able to make it a contest than they were in the first film. I guess they've been practicing too. As plot holes go, that one bothered me more than the fight scene with the Smiths, which didn't bother me at all.
I loved the superman stuff. I flashed on another favorite movie of mine, The Iron Giant, and the end of the movie where the Giant hears Hogarth's voice, "You are who you choose to be." And the Giant says, "Superman."
Great flick. A lot of fun. The critics are piss ants.
I bought a set of headphones yesterday, nothing fancy, to listen to iTunes a little more closely. I was surprised to hear that some of the songs I downloaded have what sounds like tape hiss in the background. Poco's Magnolia is a good example. Others are utterly pristine, like Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight. I suppose it's a function of the source material, and the hiss isn't audible through my JBL Creature speakers, so it's not a huge deal. I tried the headphones in both the headphone jack on the front of the G4, and in the Griffin iMic. It's a close call, but I think the Griffin does have noticeably less noise.
I think heard some destructive artifacts in a Rush song, but I didn't note the title, so I'm going to have to go back and listen again and then see if I can find an original to compare it with. If it is defective, I'll notify Apple and see what happens. For the most part, I'm quite pleased with the audio quality, even with headphones.
I also made the mistake of playing with the equalizer settings (once you put on headphones, you really feel like you have to fool with the sound), and now I seem to have the problem where the amplification goes down when the source audio level should be increasing. It's kind of like the leveling function that's supposed to work in many TVs to keep the commercials from blasting you out of your recliner. When Bonnie Raitt is supposed to be forté, she suddenly sounds like she's pianissimo. I think a bug fix is in order here.
Bought a few more tunes, Bette Midler this time. No, not The Rose, but From a Distance, Wind Beneath my Wings, and I Don't Want the Night to End. I'm up to 120 songs from the store.
About a week from my birthday, I'm short of my goal of losing 25 pounds by my birthday. I have lost 15 pounds, which I suppose is respectable. I managed to get myself off-task, but I'm motivated to get back on track again.
I'd been struggling with my bike the last two weekends. The rear tire was flat, courtesy of some of Chris's classmates, and I didn't have a 15mm wrench to remove the rear tire. Two sets of metric wrenches, and I don't have a 15mm wrench? What's up with that? You really don't want to use a crescent wrench on a nut that's really torqued down like these were, you just end up rounding off the nut. So I just pulled the tube out with the wheel still in the frame and found a leak and patched it. Pumped it up, took it for a spin and all was well. Or so I thought.
The next day, I went into the garage and I saw the tire was flat again. I'd had bad luck with a previous brand of patches, so I assumed it was simply a bad patch. I had several left of the new type, so I figured I'd just try again. I pumped some air into the tube to verify it was the patch leaking, but before I even had to put tube in the bowl of water, I could feel air coming from another leak.
Now, this is where I get concerned about advancing age and diminishing cognitive abilities. The new leak was only a couple of inches from the previous leak. I examined the exterior of the tire to see if there was something lodged in the tire, but didn't see anything. I slapped a patch over the new hole, replaced the old patch, put everything back together and pumped it up. Took it for a spin all over the place and everything seemed fine. The next morning, the tire's still hard. I'm thinking the problem is solved.
Last weekend came along, and I headed off to Home Depot to buy some things, and just because wandering around Home Depot is a form of relaxation for me. I had hoped I could buy a single 15mm wrench, but no such luck. I ended up picking up a third set of metric wrenches, this one included both the 14mm and 15mm sizes missing in my previous two sets. I rode the bike some more over the weekend and didn't think much more about it.
Tuesday morning I stepped into the garage and I saw the rear tire was flat again. Argh! Well, this time I pulled the wheel from the frame using my new 15mm wrench, and put a new inner-tube in the thing. When I pulled the old inner-tube out, I could see a hole in the second patch I put on the old tube. Well, finally the light bulb goes on, and I feel around the inside of the tire with my fingers and discover the point of a thumbtack inside the tire. They had punctured the tire the first time with a thumbtack, and broke the head off leaving the point inside the tire. Uttering some fairly salty comments about juveniles, I pulled the point out from the inside with a pair of pliers and installed the new inner-tube. I'm bicycle-mobile again. I hope to spend some quality time on the beach with my bike this weekend.
I've also been working on reclaiming another corner of the backyard from the jungle that has overtaken it. There's a lot of kudzu back there, and I want to get rid of it before it gets out of control. It may already be too late for that. It's a fairly tough vine when you're pulling it down from a tree or something else it's managed to climb, but when you're pulling it up from the ground it has a clever weak-link arrangement that leaves a large root-nodule in the ground from which new vines will issue. It's tough to get rid of entirely, it'll just keep spreading underground until it find someplace where it'll grow undisturbed, so even if I manage to keep it out of my yard, it'll eventually take over everything in wooded lot behind the house. I'll try to keep that from happening, but I'm not optimistic about the long-term, it'll eventually win.
Well, that's enough cheese sandwich for one day, maybe for the whole weekend. Hope you all have a good one.
I read major portions of Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained a few years ago. I didn't read the whole thing through, because Dennett is always writing to prove a point; and it's not like he just wants to demonstrate the validity of his argument, he wants to bludgeon every other argument around him. There's the persistent sound of an axe being ground, and it really is wearying.
Nevertheless, as I read more about Buddhism, I find their views of the self are remarkably consistent, in many ways, with Dennett's, though perhaps I should phrase that the other way around. Julian Barbour has a lot in common with Nagarjuna. In the absence of what we would call pure science at that time, Buddhism sure seemed to attract some very deep thinkers.
I seem to enjoy early deep thinkers more than late or contemporary deep thinkers. They're easier to understand in many ways. They make fewer references to other deep thinkers, and deal with metaphors and analyses that are easier to grasp, although I think the emphasis on not-grasping helps in Buddhist thought. It can still give you a headache though.
I have no idea where this current fascination is going to lead, but I'm sure it's leading somewhere. I have reservations about some of what I'm reading, but a lot of it is deeply resonant.
I have never seen a single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I still haven't seen Reloaded yet either. Maybe tomorrow night. Of course, I've read all about it.
I think it's fascinating that a movie can spawn a thousand sites and endless speculation as to its meaning, but life doesn't seem to inspire the same level of breathless fascination - even for the people who mock the people who study the movie.
Irony isn't dead, it's the fifth fundamental force of the universe. In fact, I think it's responsible for the universe. If you think about it, why should there be a universe? Why should there be anything? I say, irony. As proof, I offer entropy. And Microsoft licensing SCO patents. Ah, but what do I know? You got a better theory? Let's hear it.
My comments don't appear in IE (I think it's 5.something) on my Windows box at work. The page takes a long time to render and I get the little caution icon at the bottom left. Says something about expecting an object in line 65, error code 1. Since the comments rely on Javascript, I'm guessing this has something to do with that. But since it's just cut-and-paste code, I have no idea what might be wrong, especially since it works on my Mac. I'm having a hard time figuring out if this is a bug or a feature. While I work on that, if anyone has any ideas on what I might look at changing, please let me know. Thanks.
In thirteen days, I turn forty six. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature either.
Mac OS X versus Longhorn? Does it matter? No. It never ceases to amaze me how insecure Windows people are. You are already the overwhelmingly dominant power in the universe. You might just relax and enjoy it. Ignore those insignificant Macintosh people with their puny 3% market share and slow processor speeds. Besides, you got Scoble. I mean, what more could you want?
I followed a tip I read somewhere and configured my Griffin PowerMate to zoom my screen in and out. Pretty cool. Comes in handy sometimes on the web. I'm going to program the button to invert the screen just because I can.
Well, that's probably enough out of my mouth, young man. Or something. Dishes to do, clothes to fold. Springsteen lyric for the evening:
Time's Shadow now features comments. I'm using the enetation free service at the moment. I expect to send them some money soon, but for now I just want to see if it's going to be worth it.
When I read criticisms of post-modernism, which is still something I have only the vaguest notions about, it sounds like they are describing Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna deconstructs reality, and proves it's all "empty." In some respects, Nagarjuna's descriptions resemble quantum physics as well, but only in kind of a philosophical sense. Both can give you quite a headache.
When I get a headache reading Nagarjuna, I try to read something else for a while. Lately it's been D. T. Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, which, according to Amazon, is out of print at the moment. I've been reading his essay Ignorance and Enlightenment, and it's a bit of slow-going as well. Part of it is I seldom have more than 10 minutes to myself to read, part of it is just that it seems to demand so much thinking as I read. It's not just absorbing information. It's the kind of stuff that makes your head hurt too, but I think it works different mental muscles than Nagarjuna, or maybe I'm just very dense.
Suzuki, at least in the early part of the essay, seemed to emphasize will in overcoming ignorance, pointing to Guatama's (the guy who eventually became the Buddha) efforts in achieving enlightenment. I don't seem to respond very favorably to it, but I haven't finished the essay yet, so I'm not making any fixed judgments about it. But I do have some early reservations, at least about how one goes about emphasizing the agency of will in achieving enlightenment. Like so much else when one gets into these things, it becomes strongly self-referential (probably because everything is empty and contingent, but that's another story).
What is will? I think the simplest description is the power to choose, which is something I think I understand fairly well. We often talk about "free will," that is, a power to choose which is not influenced by external forces. As a culture, we seem to believe we all possess "free will," and that this is a good thing. We're all the masters of our fates, the captains of our souls. We hold people accountable for their actions on the basis that their behavior is willful, they chose to do something. My impression is that we, as a culture, hold free will to be an ennobling virtue that distinguishes humanity from the other animals. But I don't happen to think that's a terribly accurate view.
Recently in the news was a report of a 40-something-year-old man who began exhibiting a sexual obsession, including pedophilia. Up until he began exhibiting the behaviors, he was by all accounts a normal guy. As these things often go, he ran afoul of the law and was going to be incarcerated when it was discovered he had a tumor on the brain. The tumor was removed, and the behavior disappeared. The tumor began to grow back, the behavior reappeared. As I recall, the most recent report was that a second surgery had removed the remaining portions of the tumor, and he was well again. You have to wonder about the universal applicability of free will when people go around with tumors in their heads, and other brain defects which remain invisible to the eye.
Leaving aside clearly physical defects, let's think about choices, since will is the power to choose. A choice is potential action that we can conceive or imagine, though I believe perception plays the largest role here. There is an enormous physical, neurological component to this process, that is probably mostly inaccessible to our cognitive faculties. Dr. Antonio Damasio outlined some of what he believes those processes are in Descartes' Error. But, presumably, we're all similarly wired in that regard and so at least we're all playing from the same deck. But the cognitive portion that is available to us, is strongly influenced by our belief system, by what we believe we know about a given situation or circumstance.
I've been reading recently about knowledge and information in some weblogs. Information is a physical entity, it is encoded on the fabric of reality. There is nothing unreal about information. Information, stored in our brains, is ultimately a belief. Knowledge is, at its root, a belief. People will differ with that, because they will say they know some things, while they may only believe others. But the only difference I can perceive is that knowledge is a type of belief that has a very strong reliability rating. If I know something to be true, chances are many others will give the very same account. I know the world is round, because, in part, that's what everyone else says. I also know about the shadow of the earth on the moon in a lunar eclipse (Though how do I really know it's the earth's shadow? Well, because everyone else says so.) The point is, knowledge is ultimately just a belief that has a certain flag set in our brain, the "know" flag. So our belief system includes everything we know and believe about ourselves and our environment, and that frames how we perceive our choices.
So when one speaks of knowledge, one is also speaking of ignorance. When one has a belief system that is constructed of a set of faulty beliefs, then one may be said to be ignorant. But the exercise of will relies on one's belief system to perceive, or conceive of one's choices. If one is ignorant, how does one make good choices? How does one begin to discover the extent of one's ignorance, so that one may begin to exercise one's will to begin to overcome one's ignorance and begin achieve enlightenment? For the most part, this is a trivial exercise, usually involving trial-and-error, but it can help create an even more flawed, ignorant, belief system.
It's kind of a trap, and it's built that way by evolution. Evolutionary forces care not one whit for whether or not individual human beings are enlightened, and we're going to leave aside for today what enlightenment is. Evolutionary forces only care about groups of individuals surviving long enough to pass along their genes. As a result, we're well equipped to function in large social groupings believing any number of totally false things, as long as they bind us together to kill saber-tooth tigers and gather enough food to raise kids. It also equips us to bind ourselves together well enough to kill other such groups. Nature's goals are not necessarily our own, though I may choose to revise that statement at a later date. Nature may be more subtle than I'm giving her credit for at this moment.
I don't think Suzuki acknowledged the difficulty of escaping the trap, and that's part of my reservation regarding his emphasis on will. In part, it's exactly right. One can never achieve enlightenment without first making some kind of conscious choice to believe there is some form of enlightenment to be achieved. But our will is a tiny and weak thing, and it is constrained by our physiology and our belief system, and therefore significant effort is necessary to first begin to build up the will, the power to choose. I think Zen Buddhism does that especially well. I think much of Zen, and perhaps much of Buddhism in general, is intended to help deconstruct (there's that word again) our belief systems, so that we may begin to perceive a wider range of choices and escape the traps of conditioned and habituated thinking that serve the social groups we are affiliated with. This is also the approach of cognitive therapy.
A quick aside on the physiological aspects of how our minds function. Our physiology often betrays us, just ask an alcoholic. But we're learning more and more about how the mind works, and so we can also find ways to avoid the physiological traps, though they remain formidable challenges.
One of the things I learned very early in my therapy was to ask myself "What's going on inside you (me)?" I would consider what I was feeling, what I was believing, and then ask myself if that was true. Very often, it was not. This seems a very un-Zen-like thing because it creates the subject-object dualism in the mind about oneself, which is the topic of a wonderful Alan Watts essay, Zen and the Problem of Control. But it's kind of a boot-strapping process. It helps to begin critically examining one's belief system, and the long effort at ridding oneself of the untrue ones. It's mindfulness of what's going on in one's internal environment, so that one avoids the traps of habituated thinking, and many of the physiological cravings as well. It reminds me of what Bodhidharma is reported to have said (Bodhidharma was the Indian monk who brought Buddhism to China, where Chan (Zen) began.):
Not reliant on the written word, a special transmission separate from the scriptures;
Direct pointing at one's mind, seeing one's nature become a Buddha.
"Direct pointing at one's mind, seeing one's nature become a Buddha." I love that.
The nature of ignorance is such that one never knows what one doesn't know. Enlightenment ultimately transcends both knowledge and ignorance, but must rely on the will to be achieved. The will is the space we inhabit between stimulus and response. It's a very tiny space, but we can make it larger by paying attention (mindfulness), being still (meditation), not becoming attached to (distracted by) results, and exercising the only power we have - the power to choose.
The standard disclaimer: I'm an authority on nothing. Do your own work. I make all this shit up.
I really like the iTunes Music Store. Too much, maybe. I bought another 13 tracks tonight. Poco, Johnny Cash, Buffalo Springfield, Marvin Gaye, Niel Young, and Rod Stewart. Got some Rickie Lee Jones the other night. I'm up to 117 songs from the store.
Given the amount of attention and acclaim the original garnered, I suspected the first sequel would be in for a rough go from critical viewers. I haven't seen it yet, but most of the reviews I've seen have been mixed. I think there's a certain desire to slam the sequel, simply because the original did so well. "See? They aren't geniuses! Only human," or something like that. I'm not saying the Wachowski brothers are geniuses, but they received that kind of attention. People sometimes love to see people fail, and often hate to see them succeed because others' success only reminds us of our own failures. And there's also, I think, a wish to mock the people who enjoyed the original so much. I've seen a lot of references to "shallow philosophy" and "pop mythology," (or was it "pop philosophy" and "shallow mythology"?), which I suppose presumes to cast those who enjoyed finding the various philosophical allusions in the film fun or significant in a bad light. We're not serious people, I guess, maybe just pretentious. I guess I just missed all those other films with "serious" philosophical content.
Personally, I think philosophy is too important to be left to the academics. I think academics do perform a service, but they tend to become too entrenched in their "communities" playing head games with one another, and it's difficult for those of us in the great unwashed masses to fathom what they're thinking about, which is probably just the way they want it anyway. Same thing goes for religion. Not that I think people shouldn't have to do some work, I'm still slogging my way through Nagarjuna (The guy was a genius - I think he'd have liked The Matrix. I was watching the movie the other day when Smith and Neo are shooting at each other in the subway station and they run out of bullets. Smith says, "You're empty." Neo says, "So are you." I laughed. If I ever write something about Nagarjuna, that's going to be the title.) So I'm happy whenever a pop-culture vehicle contains references to ideas that can make you go, "Hunh?" and maybe inspire someone to actually dig a little deeper and see what these guys were talking about. But some people don't like that for some reason. Go figure.
Anyway, I haven't seen the movie yet, but I am looking forward to it. When I read criticism like, "Why didn't Neo just fly away before he had to start fighting 100 Agent Smiths?" I have to think someone is reaching for something to criticize. There are plot holes in your own life, or haven't you noticed?
I'm just looking forward to being entertained and hoping that the WB are going to give us some things to chew on and think about while we wait for the conclusion. It is only half a movie.
Caitie and I waited up and saw the first half of the lunar eclipse last night. I didn't quite make it to totality, it was getting late when we finally gave up and went to bed. I'm sure we didn't miss it by much, there was just the thinnest sliver visible. She thought it was pretty cool. Of course, I'm dead-tired this morning, and I'll probably be cranky. I tried some through-the-eyepiece photography with my Astroscan. I'm afraid I'm not very good at it, mostly due to lack of preparation, practice and equipment.
For a guy who has little time to play games, and who cringes at the $49.95 price tag of new games, I'm not sure why I care, but I hope Nintendo can get the GameCube turned around. I'd hate to see yet another market segment become a choice between Microsoft and one other vendor.
I've got a Cube, and it's a fine machine. I've compared the graphics by looking at the three machines playing demo games at Target, and I can't see any difference. I suppose there are particular games where one platform does better than the others, but this isn't a case where the technology of the other two platforms is so superior to Nintendo's. Plus, it's very compact, unlike the behemoth from Microsoft, and the rather awkward dimensions of the PS2. Nintendo does need to do a better job courting developers and getting major releases out quickly, but this isn't a technology issue.
Well, that was the best episode of The West Wing this season. I'm not sure the series will last all of next season, but the first few episodes, until they conclude this story arc, will be worth watching. John Goodman as the acting president was a nice choice.
In anticipation of seeing Reloaded, I read the Time magazine piece that contained a number of spoilers. I won't repeat them here, other than to note something I read last night that suggests the varied philosophical and religious allusions remain present in this sequel. It has to do with the number six, and it's a Buddhist reference. I had never heard of it before, unremarkable given that I really know very little about Buddhism, but I happened across it in D.T. Suzuki's essay, Enlightenment and Ignorance. And that's enough about that.
I'm closing in on 100 tracks downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. A little Allman Brothers here, a little Clapton there, some Elton John, a Rush album, a few from Zevon. What happens is, I recall a song that I liked, I check to see if it's there, and I see a few other songs I recall I liked. So I never buy just one song! The Rush: Spirit of Radio album has sixteen tracks, and I would have purchased nearly 10 of them, so I figured I'd get the whole album. There isn't a song on it I don't like, so it's not a bad deal.
Amazon exceeded my expectations again. Since my G4 has been working so well, I decided to try some 3D games that would have overtaxed my little iMac. On Monday, I ordered Clive Barker's Undying, Giants, and Sacrifice. I elected free shipping, saving about six or seven dollars as I recall. I almost considered paying for the shipping, because Amazon indicated my package would be shipped between the 10th and the 12th of May, and it would arrive between the 17th and the 19th. I figured the last order arrived early, this one might as well, though I suspected Mothers' Day might delay things a bit.
Amazingly enough, they arrived yesterday by mail. I love it when I'm pleasantly surprised.
I've played a bit of Undying, it seems pretty good, not just a first-person shooter, thought that is a big part of it. I installed Giants, but I've only played with it for a few minutes. Graphics aren't that impressive.
I also downloaded Unreal 2003 Demo, and that plays well, though it's just a shooter as far as I can tell.
I'm going to get Stronghold, because it combines bits of real time strategy, simulation, and fun building castles. There's an editor included, I'm wondering if I can recreate TLOTR's Battle of Helm's Deep? Probably not, these things never seem to work out that way. But it would be fun to try.
Found another Nagarjuna connection in NetNewsWire Lite today. Douglasp, a microsoftie who likes Macs, posted a link to a PDF of a paper on overcoming the fear of death through the principles of Mahayana Buddhism. Nagarjuna is one of the central figures of Mahayana Buddhism, and I'm still struggling with Verses, but I keep at it, a little at a time.
It's very strange, in a wonderful sort of way, to read some of the things going on in various other weblogs and having them seem connected to the things I'm reading. Jonathon and others went on a bit about language imperialism, and I'm reading about how language is inherently deceitful. AKMA points to Frank's rant on Post-Modernism, which itself (Post-Modernism) seems like it ought to be very much like Nagarjuna's thought process, though perhaps Post Modernism never went far enough. I don't know, because I find a lot of the literature about PoMo very slow-going. Mark Woods pointed to a piece on how technology may overwhelm or actually impair a sense of the self, at least as a moral entitity; just as I'm reading a critique in First Things of an earlier article that I had missed, wherein the author claimed to have proved the existence of the self. I've saved all those articles in my NoteTaker file, because I want to think about them some more.
It's probably not strange at all. Likely enough, it's just a function of the pages I read all dealing with similar themes. But it does feel strange, like there's more to it than just coincidence. But maybe that's just self-deception as well. Anyway, enough about all that.
One of life's simple pleasures, for me anyway, is walking across the kitchen floor in bare feet after I've mopped it and it's dry. It doesn't last long. Tomorrow morning, syrup will be spilled on it, along with milk, cereal, and orange juice. The dog and cats will have shed 4.2 lbs of fur in the night while the rest of the household sleeps, of which 1.7 lbs will have drifted into the kitchen. Mandy will go out in the morning and forget to wipe her paws, as she always does, when she comes back in. I'll go out in my bare feet to take out the trash and get the paper, and though I wipe my feet on each of the mats I have on both sides of the door, I'm sure I'll drag in some more tree pollen and broken acorn shells.
But for the next half hour or so, walking across a clean kitchen floor in my bare feet feels great.
I'm up much too late. It'll be hard to drag my sorry ass out of the rack tomorrow morning. But drag it I will, and it will continue to drag until lunchtime when either I, or someone else, will kick it all over the TKD school. I was going to finish folding laundry tonight, but screw that. It'll be there in the morning, and it'll be there when I get home from work. It's always there. I'll get to it eventually.
Had some OS X weirdness tonight. Caitie wanted to print out a Hello Kitty mothers' day card. It was a gif file, and it opened in Preview. Everything looked fine, so I just hit "Print." It printed reversed! I noticed the other day, as I copied a graphic from Safari and pasted it in NoteTaker, the pasted version was reversed (mirror-image). I'll have to play with that some more and see if it's repeatable, and then see if it happens on the iBook and the iMac as well. I ended up opening Caitie's graphic in another program and it printed fine. Strange.
Here's another one of Andrew Orlowski's anti-weblog screeds. In this case, though, I'm sympathetic. Although I think it's kind of neat that if you search for "Dave Rogers" in Google, Time's Shadow is the number 2 entry ("We're number two! We're number two!"), I really do cringe sometimes when I see folks asking seemingly legitimate questions and getting directed here by Google. It's not even an ego-stroke, since it's just a dumb algorithm that seems to think I have something worthwhile to say, and it's almost always not the case. So I would really appreciate not being visible in Google's radar. I'm an authority on nothing. If you're looking for nothing, I'm your man.
I think a separate category for weblog searches in Google would be nice though.
We're having some fairly hot weather for this time of the year. I'm not complaining though, the sun is shining and it's not raining, to say nothing of devastating tornados.
Well, there's probably little sense in making myself totally useless tomorrow. I should probably go to bed. I'll take one last cruise across the vinyl, try and savor it, and hit the rack. You can be sure I won't be back here in the morning. I'll be lucky if I make it out of bed by 0700.
I'm late and out of time (What else is new?), so I'll be concise. (That'd be new.)
One of the things I learned about confronting unfulfilled desires that sometimes lead to suffering, was to ask myself, "How would my life be different if...(desire fulfilled)?" Previous to this instruction, my method of dealing with unfulfilled desire would be to complain or lament powerlessly, or otherwise make an expression of suffering.
Caitie asked me yesterday, "Wouldn't it be great if we had a gold mine under our stairs?" I agreed that I thought that would be pretty great, but I asked her how her life would be different if we had a gold mine under our stairs? She said that then she could have all the Hello Kitty stuff. I should have been smart and asked her how her life would be different if she had all the Hello Kitty stuff. Instead, a conditioned-parent response rose to the top of the stack, and I asked her where she thought she would put it?! (If you could see her room, you'd understand.) She replied that with a gold mine under the house, we could buy a bigger house. I should have seen that one coming a mile away.
But I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't be well served to consider the question, "How would my life be different if..." from time to time. It may take a few iterations, and it may take some uncomfortable honesty, but sometimes one may find that what one truly desires, one already has.
Youpi Key, the keyboard and mouse macro player is now called iKey and is a $20.00 shareware application. You'll find it here. I haven't played with it much yet. One thing I noticed is they chaned the menu bar icon to a rocketship. That reminds me of OneClick, I think. I liked the little keycap better.
Installed iTunes 4 on the iBook today. Turned on Sharing in iTunes on the G4 and I'm able to listen to my music library on my iBook via Rendezvous. I've got complete access to my digital music library everywhere in the house. Cool.
I also spent a few more dollars in the Music Store. I'm up to 57 tracks (purchased from the music store) now. That's out of about 980 total songs, nearly all of which I've ripped from CDs I own. It's not a big collection. I noted with disappointment that Bad Company is missing from the collection, as is Bob Seger. I'm sure that will improve with time. I wanted Expect No Mercy from Nazareth, but that one's missing. There's a good collection of Judas Priest, but I wanted the studio version of Hell Bent for Leather, but that's not available. Picked up a few Thin Lizzy cuts from Jailbreak!. I've got that on vinyl, but I'm sure it's damn near beyond repair, I pretty much wore that record out at USNA.
My brother Mark gave Caitlin a rock tumbler for Christmas. A couple of weeks ago, Caitie decided she wanted to try it out. So we read the instructions, loaded the drum with the rocks, grit and water, set it up on the back porch and let it go.
The first stage was the coarse grinding, and that went on for about four days. We're now halfway through the second stage, which is supposed to last two weeks. When we first started, Caitie wanted to open up the drum every few hours and see how they were doing. In fact, she did so the first time a couple of hours after we got it started, without my knowledge. It's not really a problem if you're a little careful putting everything back together, but when you're 10, those details kind of escape you. I managed to persuade her to leave it alone for the two days they recommend, and she did. After two days, you could tell the rocks were getting smoother, but Caitie had read the instructions and noted some features that should have been removed by the coarse grinding, so we let it run for two more days. I was kind of surprised and pleased with that. I expected her to want to hurry up and do the second stage. After four days, the rocks were very smooth and we were ready to begin stage two. It's been running for over a week now, and she hasn't peered in once. Either she's learning patience, or she's lost interest; I'm not sure which.
The rocks that are included with the kit are irregularly shaped and after the coarse grinding, it appeared as though only a few are going to have any interesting features to look at when they're finished. I think when try this again, I'll buy a package of river rocks from a craft store (they come in smaller bags for fountains and such, than the large bags you'd get at Home Depot), and grind those. I'm not sure we'd get rocks that were more interesting, but she would end up with some very smooth, round stones that are fun to touch and hold.
Coastal Florida isn't the kind of place where there's a bounty of mineralogically interesting specimens readily to hand, but I'll try to keep my eyes open for the occasional rock that might offer something interesting to look at polished up.
