In case you missed it, Nisus released a free thesaurus application that is also a Service for applications that support Services (most Cocoa applications; Carbon apps can, but I don't know of any that do (Eastgate: HINT! HINT!)). Pretty cool.
I also downloaded RagTime Solo, which is a free version (for personal use) of what seems to be a very capable application.
Forgot to mention iBlog is also free for .Mac users, of whom I am one (obviously). I've downloaded it and may play with it shortly, but I'm happy with Tinderbox for the moment.
AquaMinds has released version 1.6.1 of NoteTaker 2003. Somehow I missed version 1.6, and I haven't had a chance to look over the new features yet, but I've been very pleased with the previous versions of this application thus far.
I took a break last night and watched a little television. I happened to watch the first 15 or 20 minutes of CSI: Miami. What a joke! It's like Baywatch, only it takes itself more seriously. First, I noted that every female I saw was like a 10+, they all wore clothing that revealed midriff, cleavage or both. This is all fine to look at, but it's totally unbelievable. When the clerk who issued the off-shore leases for treasure hunting turned out to be a babe too, I figured the show was a lost cause.
So next there's this scene where they have to go out to try and discover what the treasure hunters had found. I guess they must have had the GPS coordinates from the one suspect they had already apprehended, because one of their team practically dove on top of the wreck site. It seemed ludicrous to me that all of these highly-paid civil servants would take the afternoon off to go out boating while one of their number dove ALONE on the wreck site, suffering from nitrogen narcosis near the end of the dive in the process! For all the so-called science and intelligence these people are supposed to have at their command, it seems as though they're monumentally stupid about stuff like dive safety.
This is an interesting critique of Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness (it's a PDF file). I expect I'll have more to say about it later (much later, as I still have to go back and read Nishida and Tanabe ), but if you're interested in a bit of an idea of what I'm reading these days, this is a decent sample. I don't think I agree with all of the author's criticisms, but then I'm just a dilettante and I've just started looking at Nishitani and the Kyoto School, so what do I know? I guess what bugs me is there's a kind of dismissive, almost flippant, attitude toward zazen (meditation), as it applies to Nishitani's views. At one point, the author writes, "-whatever be the truth of the claims that fantastic powers belong to those who have mastered zazen." So far, I've encountered no claim by Nishitani that one derives "fantastic powers" from the practice of zazen, so I think that's a little unfair and perhaps betrays a bit of bias.
I've spent part of the afternoon weed-whacking and edging and then blowing the debris off the walks and driveway. I try to view it as a ritual, instead of just a futile effort. It seems to help, if only a little.
There's just too much crap around here. I went though my library last night and found a few more books I think I can reasonably part with. I'm always buying more books, so my intention is to try to get rid of at least as many as I buy. I need to go through my drawers and closet and get rid of other crap that mostly just sits there unused.
I went to Target yesterday and bought a little end-table (more crap!) to put next to the table that holds the iMac and the G4. I also picked up small CD rack. The little table now has the Creature sub-woofer sitting on it, the Sony camcorder, the Plaintronics USB headset for ViaVoice, and it's home to all the CDs that formerly had been on the computer table. I've got a Belkin 7-port USB hub that has worked pretty reliably for me. The only thing I don't care for is that when you plug any number of cables into it greater than one, the front edge lifts off the table top. It just looked dumb. I picked up some double-backed mounting foam and it's stuck to the tabletop now. I've still got a good deal of straightening-up to do, but at least the tabletop is clean and everything has been dusted.
Mira has one of my favorite quotations from the Tao up at her place. It's a piece of the puzzle in learning to master attention, a piece I'm still learning I'm afraid.
I've been online for more than a decade now, and I've witnessed and participated in countless debates. I cannot recall a single one where someone changed their mind, their opinion, as a result of an online debate. I cannot recall a single time when my mind has been changed as a result of the arguments put forward by others in an online debate.
What I think I ought to learn is to ignore most of the silly or outrageous things people say or write; and if there are some that seem to demand some sort of response, I think I should just offer that I do not agree and the reasons why and then drop the subject. Otherwise, it becomes a time and attention sump to no good end, and I end up getting angry with people I otherwise wouldn't wish to be.
One of the lessons one has to learn while learning to master attention is choosing what to ignore.
Attention is one of the means by which people attempt to acquire authority. Too often, attention is confused with authority, and attention is always prerequisite to the exercise of authority, so it's unsurprising that people go to great lengths to get attention.
One means to capture attention is to say or write something controversial. This is a little bit of an art in itself, as what is said can't be too controversial, or large numbers of people will choose to ignore the speaker or the author; or many people will recognize it as an attempt strictly to garner attention, usually to provoke a response. On the internet, such people are usually called "trolls." But there are other people who manage to evade being labeled as trolls who utter things simply for the sake of garnering attention.
The people who utter these statements are seeking to attract the attention of both those who agree with them, and those who disagree. Often the focus is on attracting those who disagree first, as that can often provoke a response that will generate more attention from both groups. This effect is magnified on the web where people can rapidly respond to information and direct attention to it. One might think this would normally be a "good" thing, and it sometimes can be; often it is just a means of promoting the interests of the individual seeking attention and authority.
I think it's important to pay some attention to those who play this sort of game, but I think it's more important to understand what is at work here, and not to participate in the process in a way that simply feeds the attention monster. I haven't figured out the best way to do that yet, but the first step is understanding what is going on.
"This guy was huge, a lot bigger than I am," she recalls. "I just talked to him about what was going on, and he started crying and sobbing and it was clear that he was in a tremendous amount of pain. And given that there hadn't been any physical violence, I decided not to arrest him."
Three days later, Captain Maples ran into him again. "He recognized me, and picked me up and gave me this big bear hug and said, 'You saved my life that night.' "
I noticed that the little AV icons next to my iSight-equipped buddies were showing only the telephone handset, which indicates that iChat doesn't see the iSight camera. This has happened before, and it usually only required unplugging the Firewire cable and then plugging it back in. No such luck this time. QT Broadcaster and Apple System Profiler didn't see it either. So then I proceeded to:
Log out... no joy.
Restart... no joy.
Log in as a different user... no joy.
Zap the PRAM... no joy.
Switch cables... no joy.
Switch ports... no joy.
Boot from another drive... no joy.
Try the Sony DV camcorder... no joy.
Open the CPU and press the little button on the motherboard... no joy.
I was getting ready to boot into Open Firmware and reset the nvram and maybe run the Hardware Diagnostics CD when I decided to check Apple's support site. The second article you find when you search on "Firewire" tells you that sometimes the Mac stops talking to the Firewire ports. The solution to this is to shut down, remove the Firewire cables, unplug the power cord and let the Mac sit for three to five minutes, then plug it back in and start up. Then plug in your Firewire devices one at a time.
I've read a number of reactions to last night's season premiere of The West Wing, and most of them have been negative. One viewer complained about the absence of the usual witty repartée, another complained that John Goodman wasn't "credible" as the president, and a third thought the episode was too "melodramatic."
I thought last night's episode was one of the best ones since before 9/11. After 9/11, real world events were more dramatic, indeed even stranger, than the fictional world of the Bartlett administration. It seemed to me that the series lost its emotional footing and was struggling to come up with plots that could compete with reality. Instead of political maneuvering and examinations of differing political values, we got a lot of personal stories about Toby's pregnant ex-wife, CJ's Alzheimer's-afflicted dad, and Josh's feminist live-in girlfriend. Spare me. Last night's episode, to include the last two episodes from last season, set up a dramatic situation that competes with reality in a way that's exciting, entertaining and thought-provoking.
Is the plot credible? The resignation of the VP following the disclosure of marital infidelity and inappropriate discussions of confidential or classified information? Yes, credible. Kidnapping of the president's daughter by terrorists? I think 9/11 has significantly expanded the envelop on what's credible these days. Transfer of presidential authority under the 25th Amendment, given the circumstances of the plot? Again, credible. John Goodman as Speaker of the House credible? Eminently, and not just because I think he's a fine actor.
Lack of witty repartée? Give me a frigging break! The president's daughter is kidnapped, a Secret Service agent is murdered, terrorists are holding her hostage, 14 Americans get blown up in Turkey, the president steps down...yeah, I can see the potential for a lot of yucks in all that. There's a whole season yet, I'm sure there'll be plenty of glib, fast-paced, humorous dialog.
Too "melodramatic?" Geez people, ever listen to the theme music? Of course it's melodramatic. One of the great things about the series is that it has consistently used broadly-drawn melodramatic dialog, if not always plots, to explore interesting issues, often with a pretty fair amount of balance and nuance. It's always been melodramatic, that's the part we really love. Bartlett raging at God in Latin in the cathedral? That wasn't melodramatic?! It was great! After 9/11, how can fiction be anything but "too melodramatic." When we don't get melodrama, we get Q&A sessions in the White House cafeteria with the kids from Presidential Classroom, now that was pretty exciting.
Okay, did I think it was flawless? No. The dog was a useless distraction, I have no idea why that was left in there. Goodman's comment to CJ as she was brushing dog hair off her butt, which is probably the only reason why the dog was in there in order to set up this comment. That was gratuitous and dumb. The military briefings in the Situation Room have consistently been a weakness of the show, and John Amos' CJCS was just a little too eager, a little too sanguine under the circumstances. I thought Mrs. Bartlett's reaction to learning that Jeb had authorized the assassination of the terrorist leader was not on-key. The obvious take is she's blaming her husband for Zoey's kidnapping, but all that talk about "our decision" wasn't credible.
I think the plot set the stage for a number of fascinating story-lines in the coming season. John Goodman will be an excellent foil to Martin Sheen's Bartlett, and I suspect the plot will evolve a grudging mutual respect for one another. I suspect we may be looking at a Republican VP for the remainder of the Bartlett administration, which might be interesting.
Will Zoey survive? I don't know. If I had to bet, I'd say yes. I thought the final scene was excellent, I especially thought the scene along the fence outside the White House was beautifully done, even though I find those sorts of displays a little disturbing. I'm a sucker for those kinds of scenes with the music and set-piece tableaus. I'm sure there's a technical term-of-art for that, but I thought it was great.
And I still think Donna is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I made it through the section on Tanabe Hajime and I'm into the last third of The Philosophers of Nothingness on Nishitani Keiji and it's fascinating. In addition to wanting to read more philosophy, I'm also a little more curious about the role of academics in wartime Japan and Germany. That will have to wait for some other day though, when I have more time. I've got Nishida's An Inquiry Into the Good, Tanabe's Philosophy as Metanoetics, and Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness all queued up after I finish Philosophers. That will probably take me well into the new year.
I don't recall that I mentioned the outcome of my little adventure installing the water softener. Well, all went well and I didn't have to send for professional help. The biggest hurdle was discovering that CPVC isn't the same thing as PVC and a copper-to-CPVC adapter coupling is not going to mate with PVC fittings. The second biggest was having to actually solder the sweat fittings together. I had a 1" to 3/4" adapter and the aforementioned copper to CPVC coupling to join together. I'd never soldered pipe together before, but it looked pretty straightforward. It only took me two tries to learn that I probably should not pick up a freshly soldered assembly with my bare hand. I'm sure I impressed the parents of my daughter's friend when the stream of salty sailor-talk issued from my lips and I danced a little jig around the WorkMate in the driveway as they were dropping off their little girl. The only potential problem was I was going to have to install the assemblies in order to know if they leaked; and if they did, we'd pretty much be out of water until I'd fixed them. As it turned out, they didn't leak at all. (Dave high-fives himself). If anything, the installation looks a little neater than the one it replaced, so I'm pretty pleased. And it's nice to have soft water again.
It's pretty certain Maria is leaving her job in Melbourne to return to Jacksonville in the fairly near future, which necessitates revisiting a good deal of unfinished business right around the time Melissa is getting married to Pat. That has occupied a number of my thoughts as well. Well, sooner or later this has got to get done, and it's long past sooner.
My left leg below the knee has been swollen for about three days. I went to a sparring seminar on Friday night and through most of the seminar I was paired with a black belt. We did drills together and everything was fine. Part of the seminar was point-sparring and I got paired with a white belt, who ordinarily wouldn't, spar but I guess if you pay the seminar fee you spar. So I'm working with this guy, letting him try some of the things he's learned and I end up losing both rounds. That wasn't so bad, what was bad was that our legs collided on a round kick and my left shin ended up with a bruise on it about the size of half a grapefruit. That swelling eventually went down, but it seemed to just spread itself around the rest of my calf as the skin has felt tight and now I've got the blood pooling down in the instep of my foot below the ankle. This morning the left ankle more closely resembles an ankle, though it's still bigger than the right. I'm not sure if the swelling is down from being horizontal all night, or if it's actually gone down. It feels less tight.
My problem is my round kicks still don't go very high. That will improve over time, a lot more time it seems, but in the mean time I think I'll confine my kicks to side-kicks, hook-kicks and crescent kicks as I'm less likely to have my shins collide with another kicker. If I could kick high, I could probably keep my kicks above people who kick low and a round kick would be less likely to kill my shin. Alternatively, I could buy shin guards and that may be on the agenda at some point as well.
Anyway, it's been a little busy around here, and there's always a lot more to do and think about than I have time for, so I haven't been doing much here. There are a couple of longer pieces sort of writing themselves in my head. At least one of them will likely see the light of day here. Eventually.
A few years ago, I speculated on what might be possible when you had a number of people each equipped with a PDA with GPS, accelerometers and the ability to link with other PDAs. At that time, I should look up the post Google can't seem to find it, I speculated that in a natural disaster, like an earthquake, you could used several of the devices to help locate people trapped in a collapsed building. It wouldn't be necessary for the victim to have a device, just that the victim be able to make noise, either by speaking or tapping. Several PDAs could link together and measure the time of arrival of the sound signals and, knowing their own locations by means of GPS (differential GPS, in order to achieve the degree of precision required) would then be able to compute the location of the trapped victim. Alternatively, by means of beam-forming with sufficient sensors, they would be able to more closely listen to detect vibrations that might indicate the presence of a survivor. Of course, I suspect that beam-forming in a chaotic mass of concrete and steel rubble might be in the "too hard" category. Too many potential paths in a non-uniform transmission medium, but it would be worth exploring.
Well, it looks as though that kind of thing is going to happen sooner than I thought, only with mobile phones instead of PDAs. Here's a Wired article describing what's happening.
Chris has sort of turned over a new leaf in terms of acquiring music. He persuaded me to sign up for eMusic.com. It doesn't have a huge catalog, but it has a lot of the music he enjoys. I signed up for the 3-month subscription at $15.00 a month. I can download as much music as I want, it's all in MP3 format, and there are no restrictions on how many devices you play it on.
It looks like a worthwhile adjunct to iTMS for Mac users. It isn't as convenient, downloads are like a 3-step process and it requires a separate app to actually download the music to your Mac. You start in the browser, select the songs you'd like to download and the browser downloads a token of some kind that you double-click that then the download begins in the eMusic app. After that you can do whatever you'd like. Chris has downloaded over 1k songs in the week I've been a member.
It seems as though some of the criticism of Wesley Clark, coming from the right anyway, is that he is something of an egoist, and that perhaps he wears, or at least at one time wore, too much cologne.
Heavens to Murgatroyd!
If there is one sin or defect that nearly every candidate for high office shares, it is that of ego. I have worked for smart egoists and stupid egoists and given the choice, I'd choose a smart egoist any day of the week. There's something about the nature of ego that allows egoists to take the kind of risks that one has to take to pursue high office. And there's something about how humans perceive ego that allows even stupid egoists to succeed where people of greater intellect and humility will often fail. I think egoists instinctively know how to flatter the egos of those who may be of some assistance to them, and I think the dimmer ones know how to hide or camouflage their liabilities. There's little else to account for the success of so many stupid egoists.
Being an egoist has little to do with integrity or other personal virtues. That is to say, egoists are no more likely, nor less likely to be people of good character, apart from a certain lack of humility. If anything, I'd say that egoists who are people of character tend to adhere more closely to virtuous behavior, while those whose character is compromised are no more compromised because of their ego.
My sense of Wesley Clark, having not worked for him and only going on what I've been able to read along with everyone else, is that he is a smart egoist, and appears to be a person of good character. If I were asked, of either Wesley Clark or Rush Limbaugh, which is the better man? I'd say the answer is pretty clearly Wesley Clark. If were asked, of either President Bush or Wesley Clark, which is the better man? I'd say the answer is Wesley Clark.
The problem every egoist faces is that every flaw, every error, every misstep is magnified in the eyes of their detractors by the size of their egos. Fortunately, as ego goes, it's a pretty level playing field when you get to the office of the presidency.
I've been ever so slowly working my way through the section on Tanabe Hajime in Philosophers of Nothingness, and I finally got to the part where Heisig writes about Tanabe's Philosophy as Metanoetics. That part is pretty exciting. Well, as exciting as philosophy gets anyway. A quick bounce to Amazon, and that's now in the queue too.
Until I reached that point in the book, I was not terribly excited about Tanabe, and I was wondering why he was such a big deal with his Logic of the Specific. I thought he was interesting, especially with his notion of absolute mediation, and I think he'd have some interesting things to say today with the latest ideas about emergent behaviors and social organisms, but it didn't seem terribly important. But Tanabe had a rough time as a Japanese philosopher in WW II, and that in itself is an interesting read. The product of his experience was Philosophy as Metanoetics, and there are a lot of really important ideas there, at least by my reading. In Heisig's sketch of Tanabe, I think I can make out the outlines of the hero's journey in the account of his philosophical life. Regular readers may recall that the hero's journey, as outlined by Joseph Campbell, resembles the five stages of grief as outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, which also resemble the five stages of the soul as described by Dr. Harry R. Moody (not the life-after-death Moody). It's interesting to consider that this seemingly single process acts in similar ways in different contexts.
But that's not what is so interesting about Tanabe's philosophy of metanoetics. Heisig doesn't mention if Tanabe discusses Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, but I think he would have almost certainly been aware of it. What Tanabe seems to have been writing about is the profound nature of ignorance, something we seem to have become unaware of in our fascination with the success of logic and reason in the enlightenment. The issue appears to be, what do logic and reason inform us about how we are to think and act when confronted with the finite limits of logic and reason? It's a good read, but it can give you headaches. Philosophers do seem to murder language as they try to express complex ideas, but it's worth the effort to try to figure out what they're talking about.
So far, I'm still more favorably disposed to Nishida Kitaro, but I'm much more sympathetic to Tanabe than I was when I first started reading the essay; and I'm looking forward to reading what he himself wrote in Philosophy as Metanoetics.
I'm strongly inclined to support Gen. Clark's candidacy for the Democratic nomination. The only thing bad about that is that every single candidate I've ever supported or voted for has lost either the nomination or the presidency. I don't have a very good track record for picking winners.
I've got this notion about negation bouncing around in my head. It's from reading all this philosophy. Of course, I have no idea what it means, but it's starting to become one of those ideas I'll keep noticing over and over again. Somehow, negation is tied up in something coming into being.
Naturally, I notice this first in a movie. And naturally, being me, this is not serious cinéma. They're "popcorn flicks."
Last night I watched Galaxy Quest for the umpteenth time. Cecil doesn't understand this, but I like watching some movies over and over again. It's probably a brain defect of some kind. Maybe it'll be interesting to tell you how I came to watch Galaxy Quest again.
I was reading a review of Matchstick Men, and one of the stars is Sam Rockwell. In a sidebar, the reviewer wrote about Rockwell's role in Galaxy Quest, as Crewman #6, the guy who dies before the first commercial in episode 82. So now I've got Galaxy Quest stuck in my head, and Sigourney Weaver is pretty hot in that flick, so I'm thinking the housekeeping will still be here tomorrow, I'm watching a movie!
That probably wasn't very interesting. Well, pushing on...
So I'm watching the movie, and I'm having a great time, the laughs are always just as good for me the fifty-third time as they were the first, and I'm kind of mentally checking off the whole hero's journey thing and just having an ordinary Dave Rogers movie experience, which is a pretty good time if you're me. Which I acknowledge, most of you aren't. If you haven't seen the movie, you're going to be at a bit of a disadvantage in this next part.
Anyway, there we are in one of the dramatic turning points of the movie, the bad guy Saras has taken control of the starship PROTECTOR and has the alien Thermian commander Mathazar strapped to a table and Tim Allen as actor Jason Nesmith as Commander Peter Quincy Taggert, commanding officer of the PROTECTOR from the "historical documents" (TV shows intercepted by the Thermians in space), is confronted by Saras regarding the function of the Omega 13 device. In the hero's journey sequence, we're in the wasteland, where there is the risk of losing to despair. Allen/Nesmith/Taggert tells Saras he doesn't know what the Omega 13 device does, but Saras doesn't believe him so he tortures Mathazar some more. Saras says something to the effect, "You don't expect me to believe that the commander doesn't know every nut and bolt of his ship," to which Allen/Nesmith/Taggert replies, "I'm not the commander," which is the dramatic moment of the scene and suddenly the word "negation!" flashes across my consciousness. Up to this point, the conceit of the movie has been that the Thermians actually believe there is a CDR Peter Quincy Taggert (James Tiberius Kirk), and Allen/Nesmith/Taggert has been embracing the fantasy. What happens next is that Allen/Nesmith/Taggert completes the hero's journey, effectively, authentically, "becomes" the commander and saves the day. Roll credits. Fun movie.
But as soon as I associate "I'm not the commander" with "negation," I flash on Neo in The Matrix, "I'm not the One" - negation! Roy as Mr. Furious in Mystery Men effectively negates himself in his encounter with his love interest, who later then asserts his genuine identity as Mr. Furious following her rescue by him from the clutches of the evil Casanova Frankenstein. So now I'm wondering if I'll see negation somewhere in other movies, like The Legend of Bagger Vance, or Groundhog Day. It seems like in order to become the thing you're not, but that either you or others really think you are, you have to negate that thing, which somehow allows it to come into being. Which sort of brings in the question of negating the self in order to...what?
This is what happens when you read too much philosophy. You get headaches, and movies become term paper projects. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Lately I've been thinking about exploring the theme of man's alienation from nature as developed in the insightful work, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. I'll try to resist the impulse.
Okay, that's today's non sequitur, carry on with whatever it was you were doing. Nothing to see here... Move along...
First, thanks to Hal for responding in the comments. Second, my apologies to everyone for such a poor comment system. I just spent a considerable amount of time typing much of what appears below in a text box about the size of a postage stamp and it occurred to me that I might go blind in the process, and I could save my eyesight by offering these words here.
I want to add that "clever means" is also written as "skillful means," and I think you actually see that more often, and it's used in the context that Hal outlined in his comment. Sometimes one has to help lead people to enlightenment obliquely, in ways that may seem counter to the very nature of enlightenment.
What I thought was especially funny about that article was the phrase "and then divorce it from its spiritual Buddhist roots."
I don't know that it's so much that we need to do that to make it acceptable to our scientific minds, we're one of the most "religious" countries in the world, and in that context any taint of "spirituality" shouldn't prove to be an insurmountable obstacle. I think there is a certain, rather small, segment of society that would welcome scientific evidence that meditation is beneficial, so they could disclaim any sort of "spiritual" motive behind the practice, but I think that's a rather small segment. I think science affords the Lama the opportunity to get the idea of meditative practice into the minds of millions of otherwise generally "religious" or "spiritual" people without the burden of it being a "Buddhist" or "eastern" practice.
I don't think it's possible to divorce meditation and spirituality, though many of us may have to agree to differ over what the word "spirituality" means. My experience tells me that the key prerequisite for having a "spiritual" experience is being still, which is one of the most basic parts of meditation. Once one begins the practice of being still, one is then able to "pay attention" in an almost unconscious way, and will begin to do so whether one is aware of it initially or not. Of course, if you tell people this, some of them will deny it, and for them that's probably true, it's just the way we are. My experience with meditation began for the mental health benefits, the "spiritual" part just became clear as time went on. It didn't cause me to adopt any particular religious belief, but it did cause me to explore the nature of faith and its role in my life.
Again, we probably have to agree to differ over what that word "spirituality" really means or encompasses. I would say my sense of spirituality shares some things in common with traditional western religions, but it omits others that are probably essential to a truly "spiritual" experience from their point of view.
In any event, Dr. James Vornov in his comment points out that Buddhism, although it can sometimes be just as encumbered as any other religion with lots of dogmatic beliefs that are only peripheral to its founder's vision, is perhaps the least overtly "spiritual" religion in existence. I would argue it's much less like a religion and more like an organized philosophy, but then we can get into some pretty tall grass so I'll agree for the sake of most discussions that it's a religion. But it's this flexibility that Hal points out that allows the Dalai Lama to embrace science and not perceive it as a threat to his religion.
In any event, it made me laugh out loud to read that sentence about divorcing meditation from "its spiritual Buddhist roots." It's so consistent with so much of Buddhism, an appreciation for the fundamental contradictions of existence. The Dalai Lama is practicing non-attachment, and not-grasping, in order to achieve the very thing he appears to be surrendering.
Jonathon Delacour has another exceptional piece up today. We, at least in America, seem to live in a society where sadness, apart from expressions of genuine, acute grief, or these sort of strange public spasms of grief-like behavior, is treated almost like a disease. Depression can be a disease, but sadness is an important and appropriate emotion, though it sometimes makes us feel uncomfortable when we witness it in others.
I know it's possible to experience great joy in moments of profound sadness. I know that despair is sadness unrelieved by faith, and often reinforced by fear. While we should never yield to despair, and try to aid those who may wish to do so, accepting our sadness and embracing it can help us in understanding the nature of our temporal existence. Accepting and validating the sadness of others does this too.
All things pass, even feelings of happiness and sadness. Let the feelings be. Don't try to deny them or cling to them. Just appreciate them as part of the narrative of your life.
Therefore, the Dalai Lama hopes researchers can scientifically prove that meditation has medical and emotional benefits, and then divorce it from its spiritual Buddhist roots to offer the world a secular method for relieving suffering and finding happiness. Wired News.
One of the things you learn if you read anything about achieving goals is that a goal must be achievable. That is, if you state a goal that is overly broad, or beyond the scope of anything you could hope to accomplish, it's not goal, it's a marketing statement, intended to fool either yourself or someone else, often both.
From CNN:"We are following a clear strategy with three objectives: destroy the terrorists, enlist international support for a free Iraq and quickly transfer authority to the Iraqi people," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.
Goals and objectives are similar things. If they differ, I would say that "objective" is a more immediate kind of goal, with greater ramifications if it is not achieved. In the military, an objective might be to seize a particular airfield in order to provide a logistical airhead necessary to support combat operations. A goal might be to raise $1M in the Combined Federal Campaign. So it's logical the president is using the word "objectives" in his statement about his strategy in Iraq.
The first of Bush's three objectives is "destroy the terrorists." Is this an objective or a marketing statement? It's a marketing statement, because it is not achievable. But it is easier to say in a sound-bite than something more realistic.
A lot of supporters of the administration's handling of Iraq have mentioned something about a "flypaper strategy." That is, the U.S. presence in Iraq will attract much of the manpower and resources of middle east terrorist organizations that might otherwise have been employed in terrorist acts elsewhere. Additionally, terrorist activity would be somewhat easier to detect given the concentration of surveillance resources, and intelligence gathered could be used to further disrupt terrorist networks in their home bases.
I'm very much disinclined to give any credence to this as a "strategy." It's very likely that indeed something along these lines is taking place, but I think it's more a matter of practical necessity than some grand Wolfowitzian design. I'd say it's more of a "lemonade from lemons" strategy, though bitter instead of sour, than a "flypaper strategy."
In any case, "destroy the terrorists" is a meaningless objective. Which terrorists? All "the terrorists?" "The terrorists" that threaten democracy in Iraq? "The terrorists" that threaten America? How about "the terrorists" in Afghanistan? How many of "the terrorists" are there? Do we know? How will we know when we've "destroyed" all of "the terrorists?"
The other two objectives in the president's statement are, arguably, achievable, though they are somewhat vague. We want to "enlist international support for a free Iraq," and we want to "quickly transfer authority to the Iraqi people." The first isn't clearly related to the second, so we must infer that the transfer of authority to the Iraqi people is to be in a manner consistent with Iraq being a free country. If "quickly" is the governing concept, then I'm sure there are any number of former-Baathists and Islamist mullahs who would be happy to assume authority immediately. I think "quickly" is unachievable in any meaningful sense of the word, and so the third objective is at least partly a marketing statement.
The problem with making these kinds of defensive marketing statements is that they will come back to bite the administration, and this country, in the ass. The reason why these kinds of defensive statements are made is because they in fact do not have a coherent plan that they can advocate to the American people and to the world at large, and it's long past time that they wrote one.
We don't have the luxury of waiting until next year when we can turn out this crowd of would-be amateur imperialists. There are smart people within the administration and others in this country and around the world who could be called on to craft a genuine plan for supporting and rebuilding Iraq. We have to continue to demand that the president produce a document, a plan, that outlines specifically how he intends to achieve his objectives in Iraq. Otherwise, this entire enterprise will founder on the rocks of misguided policy, misplaced hope and an utter failure to properly plan.
Interesting article in the NY Times on the potential benefits of the regular practice of meditation. Don Park linked to the article and shared some of his experiences and concerns regarding meditation. I understand the nature of Don's experience, but I don't think it's the adverse consequence he believes it could be. Much of the rest of what follows is very likely a repeat for anyone who's been reading Time's Shadow for a long time, so you may wish to find something more entertaining.
One of the interesting meditative practices mentioned in the article is the practice of cultivating compassion. Many of you know that one of the things I strongly believe is that the only real power anyone has is the power to choose. In most respects, we are constrained by the limits of our biological processes; in effect, we are programmed to behave in certain ways. The phenomenon of consciousness, however, affords us some measure of control over those behaviors in the power to choose.
Much of the time, probably most of the time, we make our choices unconsciously because we lack the cognitive resources to subject every potential behavior to scrutiny. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, it's just the way it is. But by being aware of this, we can make choices about how we choose to apply those cognitive resources. This is a key part of the practice of mindfulness, the practice of paying attention.
One of my main laboratories, the site of my most frequent and productive application of mindfulness, and attempting to exercise the power to choose, is behind the wheel of my car. Driving has always been a fairly stressful experience for me. Some people find it relaxes them. Your mileage may vary. But many people for whom driving is a stressful experience aren't really aware of that fact. They've become conditioned to accept that experience and aren't aware that there are other experiences available to them. That was the case with me.
Many years ago, before I learned most of these things, I was aware that driving was stressful for me. I discovered that some things helped, like what I chose to listen to on the radio. If I listened to hard rock while driving in heavy traffic, I was very stressed out. If I tuned into classical music or soft jazz, I was much less stressed. Stress manifested itself in how I felt about what was going on around me, how tightly I gripped the wheel, the kind of running commentary going on in my head. When I'm stressed, I don't have a very high opinion of all the other people I have to share the road with. Naturally, it goes without saying that my driving is the epitome of driving skill and everyone should drive the same way I do.
Even though I long ago learned to tune into something less stressful, I was still very much a stressed-out driver. Part of the problem was that I often got into the car as a stressed-out husband or father, and was heading off to do a job that itself was stress-inducing. Part of my way of coping with all that stress was to adopt the attitude that, "I don't get ulcers. I give ulcers." For all of that, I was still a comparatively nice guy.
Anyway, about four years ago I began to learn a lot more about how consciousness works, and what resources are available to us to effect some control over the nature of our experiences in life. Crashing headlong into a brick wall, not literally of course, has the effect of giving one the time to stop and reflect on whether or not one might be doing some things differently.
I learned that one of the first things we have to begin to learn to do is to pay attention. Attention is a cognitive resource, as the article mentions, and it's a finite one. We can't pay attention to everything, but we can begin to make choices about what we wish to pay attention to. If we want to have a better experience living our lives, one of the things we need to learn to pay attention to is our own experience, our interior climate, what's "going on" inside us. We almost always "know" how we feel, though sometimes we may have difficulty expressing it. What we may not be aware of is that what's "going on" is something we can change. Some guy cuts me off on the road, while I'm trying to maintain a prudent distance, and immediately, I know I'm pissed off.
What used to happen was that I would have to "punish" the offender. Sometimes this meant blowing the horn, sometimes flipping the bird, sometimes riding his bumper, sometimes all three, none of which was particularly wise. I chose to act on the feeling by being a jerk, I didn't know I could act on the feeling by altering the feeling.
I still get pissed when some guy cuts me off; but most of the time now, I choose to act on the feeling instead of the "offender." This is probably going to sound "wimpy" to some people, but it's nothing more than learning self-control, and there's nothing "wimpy" about having self-control. Feelings are the physical responses to thoughts we're having, and those thoughts are accessible to us. Thoughts are framed in the context of our belief systems, the things we believe about ourselves and how the world "should" work. Often, those beliefs are incorrect, or simply not useful for the given situation. I believe everyone "should" maintain a safe distance between themselves and the car in front of them. I believe that other drivers should respect that space, and not exploit it for their own advantage. Sounds reasonable, but the real world demonstrates every day it is under no obligation to conform to my beliefs about how it should operate. Becoming angry about that is rather powerless. Depending on what else may be going on in my life, another driver cutting me off may prompt an angry response because I believe that that person doesn't respect me. This is personalizing the situation. I have no knowledge whatsoever of how that other driver feels about me, or if he was even aware of me apart from the awareness of my vehicle as an obstacle to avoided. This is a false belief that is mostly rooted in fear, which itself probably has its basis in another false belief.
So when some guy cuts me off, and I notice I'm getting pissed, what can I do to change the feeling? First, I can respond to the situation, not the other driver. I note that nothing terrible has happened, no one has been hit, nothing irreversible has taken place. I can slow down or otherwise allow the space between us to increase to the safe interval. If my attention is still going to the other driver, I can discard any thoughts about him being a jerk and accept the fact that I simply don't know anything about the driver in front of me. It may be that he's racing home to attend to some emergency. That's essentially a false belief, but it helps accentuate the fact that I'm simply ignorant of this person's situation and in a poor position to make harsh judgments about him. He may even be someone who is simply just like I was, and too often still am; someone who is ignorant of what's going on inside him and believing a lot of false things about what's going on around him.
It's acknowledging this state of ignorance that facilitates the cultivation of compassion. Such is the nature of ignorance that none of us may even know what we don't know, and therefore we are all in a state of ignorance from which it is usually difficult and often inappropriate to render harsh judgments. This is not to say we are never justified in making these sorts of judgments, but it is to strongly assert that all such judgments should be tempered by compassion, because none of us can claim a unique position to know all of the truth of a particular situation.
There are days when all of this goes right out the window, and I'm just as much a menace on the road as everyone else. Those days are fewer now, and hopefully they will become more infrequent as I continue to choose to practice. The driver's seat is a natural laboratory, but the lessons can be applied anywhere. I'm mindful of the opportunity to practice in the car. I'm less mindful of the opportunity in other venues (like weblogs), but as I practice I get better, a (very) little at a time. And it all begins with paying attention.
That's probably enough for now. I've got some plumbing I need to attend to. I'd like to consider Don Park's reservations at some point, but that will have to wait for another time.
One of the first songs I remember learning, besides the usual kindergarten tunes, was Don't Take Your Guns to Town, and something about pickin' time...gonna get new shoes come pickin' time,and Frankie's Man Johnny,I'd Rather Die Young, Troubador, One More Ride... I loved those songs when I was a little kid. When I got a little older, I never really got into his whole "man in black" thing, though I loved A Boy Named Sue.
It's hard for me to recall now just how often my parents listened to those albums, and it's entirely possible that it was us kids playing them more than our parents did. We had a Motorola stereo, a big ol' piece of furniture it was. The only other album I remember a lot of was Eddy Arnold's Thereby Hangs a Tale, which had so many great ballads on it, The Wreck of Ol' 97, Ghost Riders in the Sky, The Red Headed Stranger, The Tennesee Stud and some others.
I wonder a little if 30 years from now, maybe Springsteen will pass away and my son might remark to someone about how his dad always listened to Springsteen albums, "...some of them actually on that plastic stuff they used to make analog recordings on, what was it? Vinyl? Man, that guy must have been old!"
Not good. Still early, but not good. That larger circle, centered on 2 AM Wed, is the entire area where the center of the storm could be by 2 AM Wed. If it slowed, it'd be closer to or in the white circle; if it recurved significantly, it'd be in that area north of the white circle; if it sped way up and continued its general track, it'd be off northeast Florida/southeast Georgia. Just understand that hurricane track prediction is almost as much of an art as a science, but most likely it'll be about where that 2 AM Wed position shows it - if the model holds. (Listen to me. Rogers at his most pedantic. I feel your pain.)
The weather guessers locally are saying there isn't much in the way of steering currents, meteorological features that kind of direct the track of the storm, at the moment; so it's probably going to continue its west-northwesterly track, becoming gradually more northwesterly.
If the track holds, NE Florida isn't out of the woods, but it looks like Georgia or South Carolina will be the probable areas of landfall. But it's still pretty early, and what do I know about hurricanes? Not a lot.
Okay, found the Newton. I just love Apple technology, the list is still there. I think I posted something like this at the old EditThisPage site quite some time ago, but it's probably worth going over again. With a little luck, we won't have to evacuate, but it's beginning to look as though some folks will have to. I went through this drill four years ago about this same time - actually, the timestamp on the note says 9/14, so there you go.
First, have a plan. If you have relatives or someone you can stay with in a safe area, arrange it with them ahead of time. If it looks as though you might have to evacuate, there's a lot to be said for going early, the roads get jammed up pretty fast once a public official makes the call. If you can afford it, you may wish to make reservations at a motel or hotel, but don't expect to luck into any vacancies. I'm not too keen on the hotel/motel idea, but you may feel differently. Again, make arrangements early.
If you're going to go to a local shelter, which is what I plan to do, here are some things to consider based on my experience.
Again, go early, you may be able to select your own bit of floor to camp out on, and you'll probably want to be near an outlet if they are available. You will probably not want to be too near high-traffic areas like the heads (bathrooms), water fountains, office or cafeteria. I strongly recommend getting a spot against a wall, even if you can't find an outlet. Not for safety's sake, but just because I feel more comfortable when I'm not literally surrounded by people, I can at least face the wall and make believe I have a little privacy. Might not be a problem for most people. Some shelters offer cots, but they're often intended for the elderly and infirm, so don't expect to get a cot. I'd say bring a couple of inflatable air mattresses.
Bear in mind you'll be mixing with all kinds of people. I remember being surprised to learn that the shelter I had chosen was also designated as the shelter for all the homeless people in our area, as well as the people from the nursing homes. You really get to work on your people skills, your humility and your empathy, to say nothing of your patience. If your children bring any of their favorite toys or collectible cards (Pokémon, or that new game, YuGiOh?), you may want to advise them to be careful as they're sharing. My son lost his most valuable card when several kids crowded around him and he was proud of showing them around and crushed when his most valuable card turned up missing.
You don't get a lot of area, I think we got something like 10' x 10' for a family of four, so don't plan on bringing a lot of furniture (you'd be amazed). I'm going to get one of those large plastic storage boxes (bigger than a cooler) this weekend. Last time we relied on a cooler and a couple of cardboard boxes and some bags and it was kind of a mess keeping everything organized. If the box is strong enough, it's something to sit on. At the least, it's a card table, something to prepare snacks on, play board games, draw pictures, you get the idea. I'm going to try to bring a simple PVC pipe frame, something I can break down and assemble as needed, that I can hang wet towels and wash cloths on. Bring a couple of folding chairs, that's about all you'll have room for.
Okay, a list of stuff:
Toilet paper
Handiwipes (disposable cleaning cloths)
Paper towels
Waterless hand cleaner
Patch kit for air mattresses
Aspirin
First aid kit
Prescription medications
Plastic gloves (I don't remember why I wrote that one down - kind of scares me.)
Garbage bags
Hand broom and dust pan
Pillows and extra pillow cases
Net bag for dirty clothes (could use trash bag I suppose)
A couple of sponges (I think this is for spills, but I don't recall)
Extra toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss, - basically beef up your toiletry kit
Toothpicks
Ear plugs
Batteries (AA and AAA mostly)
Activities for kids (crayons, paper, pencils, games, Gameboy)
Books and magazines
Address book (or PDA) - you're going to meet some neat people you may want to stay in touch with
Battery operated lantern (You'll probably not lose power, our shelter had a generator hooked up to it, but they turn the lights down at night and it's easier to use a lantern than to hold a flashlight in your mouth when you're looking for something.)
Folder of essential papers and phone numbers (Insurance policies, birth certificates, SS cards, etc. You'll probably want to lock that stuff up in your car.)
Portable CD player with headphones (I have a Panasonic that isn't much bigger than a CD itself, plays MP3s and has an AM/FM receiver as well.)
Disposable camera(s) - you'll want to record your experience, but you don't want to be too upset if you lose your camera.
Flip-flops.
Snacks - things that don't require refrigeration and don't make a lot mess. The shelter will almost certainly provide food, but it's nice to have some of the kids' or your own favorite treats.
A container for water.
If you're lucky, chances are you'll only be staying for a couple of days. I think we were there two nights, but I had some reason to believe all of those things I listed would have made the experience a little better. Again, arrive early and get a good spot. Try to ensure you only have to make one trip and make sure your vehicle's fuel tank is filled before you leave in case your area is without power for some time. When you park your vehicle near the shelter, be aware of where you're parking. Is that tree going to come down? Is the roof covered with gravel? (It'll blow off and break your car's windows). Is this area likely to flood or be really muddy when it's time to leave? That kind of thing. If you get there early, you have the luxury of asking yourself those questions, which may or may not be a good thing. You can also try to find a good area that's reasonably close to the shelter and use your vehicle to stage additional supplies if you need them, and if they let you out to get them.
A couple of additional items - figure out what to do with your pets in advance. That's something I have to figure out for Mandy, we didn't have her four years ago. Cell phones may or may not work after the storm, but certainly bring one if you have one. Let those close (emotionally) to you know what your plans are so they aren't worried. You may wish to let your employer know as well. I've got a pair of those small handi-talkie personal communications things with the 2-mile range. I may bring those along. I recall wondering from time to time where my kids had run off to and something like that may help.
Anyway, that's about all I know about hurricane evacuations. I'm sure I'd have some different lessons if we'd have been hit four years ago, but hopefully this may be useful to others.
Okay, if Adobe sucks, MakeDocGUI is pretty cool. It's a Java application, so the GUI is not Aqua-native, and it isn't exactly overwhelmingly intuitive, but I figured it out and I'm pretty dense. It isn't terribly versatile, it doesn't handle graphics, for instance, but it does what it does well. You can turn a text file into a Palm DOC file; which you can, in turn, read using any of a number of Doc viewers. I'm using Palm Reader at the moment and it seems pretty worthwhile.
I had to append the .pdb file extension to the filename, and it's probably worthwhile to experiment with the settings a bit to see how they affect the formatting of your document.
Trying to give Adobe the benefit of the doubt, and because Mac OS X's "Save as PDF" is otherwise such a cool feature, I played around trying to convert the same text file that I used in MakeDocGUI. I think if there were a way that I could create a custom page size in Page Setup, and then used minimal margin settings, the results might have been better. The text flows through several screens fairly well, then there's a large gap probably due to a page break in the original file.
I've had about as much fun as I can handle playing around with this tonight. I think I'll go look for my Newton and stick a fresh set of batteries in it. I've got my notes from the last time we had to evacuate due to a hurricane four years ago. I'm going to go buy a box of supplies this weekend. Fortunately, the stuff I'll be looking for isn't the kind of thing that runs out during hurricane evacuations. They're the kinds of things one probably doesn't think of when one thinks about spending a few days in a school - like toilet paper. Amazing how fast that runs out. And a small broom and a dust pan to keep the dust and dirt picked up around the little area you get, and trash bags to put that dust and dirt in. Waterless hand cleaner? Good idea. Here's a tip - always evacuate early, as soon as the shelters open. Secure a location near an outlet and you'll have power. Good for your laptop and the little blower that inflates your air matresses. And bring a patch kit for those as well. In a pinch, medical tape works pretty well. Bring ear plugs too, lots of folks won't be sleeping and they'll have portable TVs and radios going all night long, as well as talking and snoring. There are probably some other things I wrote down in my Newton that I don't recall at the moment.
While I should be attending to preparations for a possible hurricane evacuation, or else reviewing what supplies will be necessary to install the water softener this weekend, I am instead fixated on trying to get readable documents into my Clié using only free software. (Tomorrow should be a slow day at the office, I'll install Documents to Go there and see if that works any better.)
I was reading the documentation ("What? Read the docs?! Never!") that came with Acrobat Reader for Palm and I wondered why I had version 2.0 when the web site said 3.0 was the current version. I went back to adobe.com and carefully followed the not-too-friendly links to reach the appropriate download and downloaded it again. It was actually the third time I'd downloaded it because I have two copies of the version 2.0 installer in my Downloads folder, and I'm certain it was the exact same link I'd clicked on twice before. For whatever reason, this time I seemed to actually get version 3.0, which is OS X native, probably a Carbon app. I took this as a good sign.
I was able to get it to see all my pdf files, and this was another good sign. I selected the directions file to transfer to the Palm, and it did it's thing and said it was good to go. I checked the prefs, and I was configured for full-size graphics. I punched the HotSync button and let the Conduit manager do its thing. When it was all done, my directions were there on my Clié. When I selected the file to view, I was not happy to note that i still got the spinning red arrows around the Adobe logo, but it did seem much faster than the previous version. Unfortunately, it still doesn't handle the graphics right. It included the big advertising graphic, and some of the little check-block graphics, and the two large-scale maps, but it didn't display the large, small-scale map. Worse, tap-and-hold on the small maps didn't display them in their full size, and they were unusable as maps. So version 3.0 is really no better than version 2.0 in terms of using Apple's Save as PDF to convert web pages to documents you can upload to your Palm device.
In somewhat better news, the version 3.0 converter was able to cope with the free e-book, Beyond Good and Evil and I was able to successfully load that on the Clié. That's a major improvement over 2.0. Reading it, I didn't get the spinning arrows as I paged through the text, so that was another significant improvement.
What remains to be seen is if I can save mostly-text web pages to pdf files and have them convert properly to read on the Clié. As it stands right now, 3.0 is a marginal improvement, but it still mostly sucks.
One handy use of a high resolution color handheld, or so I thought, would be to load maps and directions from sites like MapQuest. Silly me, why would I think that?
I thought I'd use this to give Plucker a try. I went to MapQuest, selected a previously used set of directions and then configured the page for the printer version with nice readable maps and less advertising. I copied the URL and then went to Plucker and selected "Paste URL as New Channel" from the Import/Export menu. The Plucker app promptly crashed.
Repeatedly.
Well, I figured I'd give Adobe another try. I told Safari to print the page and selected Save as PDF from the print dialog. I tried to use Reader for Palm to add the file to the queue for transfer to the Palm, but of course it can only see four of my >100 .pdf files, and the directions weren't among them. Ever one to persevere in the face of adversity, I opened the directions in Acrobat Reader 5.0 which has a menu item to "Send to Palm." After I selected that menu item, Console came to the front and informed me that "AcroDeskCmd.exe" had crashed.
"Typical," I thought.
I have no idea what AcroDeskCmd.exe does, but maybe it's not important. I switched back to Reader for Palm, and there was my PDF sitting in the queue to be sent to the Clié. So I pressed the hotsync button and sat back to see what would happen.
After all the beeping and whatnot, I pulled the Clié from the cradle and launched the Acrobat Reader application. There were my directions! Except the maps were uselessly tiny, even after following the directions to "Tap and hold to see full size."
Adobe sucks. Plucker hasn't impressed me. And so far it's looking as though it will always be easier to simply print whatever document I'd like to carry with me rather than to try to rely on technology.
Update: I went back to Plucker and used the Channel Wizard to create a new channel for my MapQuest page. That seemed to work, it seemed to go through the file and download it. When I had configured Plucker originally, I set it to export files to the memory stick. I then tried to do a HotSync and got an error message that the port was in use by another application. I used to get those a lot when I ran OS 7.x-9.x, but I hadn't seen one in X before. Logged out and logged back in, but that didn't resolve it. Restarted, same problem. Unplugged the cradle from the USB hub, plugged it back in and HotSync worked.
Pulled the Clié from the cradle and looked for Plucker - not found on the main screen. Checked the memory stick and there it was. Plucker launched okay from the stick, but it said it couldn't open my directions file because the Zlib compression library was missing.
Okay, I figured when I told Plucker to install files to the memory stick, it installed the library there as well, though it probably has to be in main RAM to run. So I launched MS Gate on the Clié to move the library to main RAM. Strangely, Sony's utility didn't see any of the files on the memory stick, though they listed just fine from the Home launcher application. Sort of shrugging my shoulders and muttering something unprintable about how far we've come with computers, I reconfigured Plucker to install the files to the handheld's main memory and tried again.
Some success. The directions were there, although the text was all centered, which was kind of strange. The main map was there as a reduced-size thumbnail, and tapping on it opened a full-size scrollable version that had been reduced to gray-scale. But it was very readable. Unfortunately, the two larger scale maps (large scale=small area) were missing, replaced by img tags. I had configured Plucker to only follow links 1 level deep, which essentially means that it would only load things that were directly on the page specified by the URL. Apparently the other maps were being loaded from another location. (Update: Actually, it's too early in the morning. The larger-scale maps aren't links, so how "deep" I configure Plucker to go will have no effect on the maps if they're being served from another domain and aren't links themselves. I realized this as I was shaving.)
Back once again to Plucker and I reconfigured it to go 2 levels deep on the page, and tried again. Looking at the Details file, I can only see one image being processed, so I'm not sure it grabbed the other maps. HotSync has been running for more than five minutes now and I'm assuming it's basically stalled and I'm going to have to force quit to see what I've got. This still kind of sucks, it's way too hard. This kind of thing is probably easier on Windows with either the Palm or the Pocket PC, given the amount of development attention those platforms get. If I can get this to work reliably, I'll try and share how to do it so others don't have to suffer. (Oh joy! HotSync just finished up. Now to see what I've got...) Okay, it still sucks. It downloaded a bunch of other crap from MapQuest (the license and all the legal mumbo-jumbo) but the two larger-scale maps don't appear. I'll have to look at their URLs and see if there isn't some clue there. I had also configured Plucker to remain on the MapQuest domain to avoid downloading any advertising and perhaps the other maps are being served from a slightly different domain. Sigh. Anything to make this more difficult. Now I have to go to work, so maybe tomorrow morning I can try again...
I got an e-mail from an old friend today who remarked that she thought it was odd that I hadn't mentioned the passing of Warren Zevon.
Just now I went to the iTunes Music Store to see if they had The Wind, and I was a little disappointed to note that they did not.
Sometimes I don't comment on something that everyone else is commenting on, usually much better than I ever could. Sometimes I just can't do the "Me too."
Anyway, I decided to play one of Zevon's songs that I do have, The Indifference of Heaven. Great song, lots of themes and imagery familiar to me. Happened to read the lyrics, you can find them here, and got to thinking.
I'm saddened at the loss of such a unique and creative voice, but whatever grief there may be, it's kind of an abstraction. I never really "knew" Warren Zevon. If there is any genuine emotion I feel regarding his passing, it's admiration for the courage he displayed in confronting his life and his mortality.
The Way of the Warrior is to say "Yes!" to it all. Roland was a warrior, and so was Warren.
And then I got to thinking about the timing of it all. It's just my feeble primate brain, trying to sense order or patterns in random events. I wonder about his death so close to the anniversary of 9-11, a full moon and the closest approach of Mars, the god of War, in millennia.
In my early morning search for an easy and effective means of transferring text from my Mac to my Clié I've so far found a couple of interesting applications:
Plucker - basically it will download and convert websites and sync them to your handheld. Just downloading it now.
It occurs to me that this would have been a good title for yesterday's comment on money, speech and politics.
Lately it seems as if I have less time than usual. Of course the reality is that I have the same amount of time I always have, I just have more things competing for my attention. The past few days I've been dealing with replacing the water softener. Ordinarily, this would not be the kind of thing that demanded my undivided attention, but the bypass valve that is supposed to allow me to bypass the softener leaks like a sieve in the bypass position, and the delta-p (drop in water pressure) across the softener is so high that I have almost no water flow on one service tank, and damn little on the other. It's been becoming a problem for quite some time, but I always figured that when the time came, I'd just put the thing in bypass and worry about it later. (Not a very proactive tack to take.) So the last couple of days I've been becoming wise in the ways of water softening and I've decided to go for the practical solution from the standpoint of my cash-flow situation vis a vis Melissa's wedding. Naturally this kind of thing happens after I spend almost $300.00 on a new toy.
Tonight I went to Sears and bought their Kenmore Ultrasoft 800. It's on sale ($120.00 off), and I took advantage of no payments, no interest until March '04. It's a tank-in-tank design with only a single service tank, but it's more than sufficient, it was the biggest unit they had. It'll be replacing a three tank setup with two service tanks and a brine tank. I think I'll be able to install it as all the piping is PVC, but I've been wrong about these things before. Tomorrow I'll study the installation manual and secure the necessary parts and supplies and hopefully I can get the thing in and running Saturday. I think it'll free up a little space in that corner of the garage as well.
Taekwondo has also increased its demands on my attention. Caitlin likes to go nearly every evening, so that's almost an hour out of my evening schedule, just shuttling her back and forth. But I've also increased the frequency of my classes. Black belt testing is only offered twice a year in December and June for decided belts. Because of when I started and my progress to date, I can accelerate a bit and take my decided test in December, but I have to master six months of material in four months. I'd been taking four classes a week but I've stepped it up to six with a Wednesday evening and a Saturday afternoon class. Apart from the increased demands on my time, I've also experienced increased numbers of bruises, aches, pains and fatigue. But I'm not complaining! It just makes me a bit slower on other things.
I've been reading a lot of philosophy, or trying to anyway, and that's been slower going than usual because I'm taking the time to try to read additional material when the author references something I'm not familiar with, which happens a lot.
In any event, things will likely remain a bit slow around here for a while, at least in the weblog. Everything else is going full speed.
With my Clié's high resolution color screen, eminently readable even in the dark, I had visions of using Adobe Reader for Palm OS to read PDFs on my handheld. Well, an hour of screwing around with this Rube Goldberg kludge has pretty well put an end to that idea.
What a piece o'crap!
First, you have to run a converter on your desktop. Okay, that's probably reasonable, handheld screens are vastly different than desktop screens. But guess what? It's a frigging Classic application! Not only that, it barfs and crashes unceremoniously. Apparently it can't handle some Adobe e-books. I downloaded a free copy of Beyond Good and Evil and wanted to install it on my Clié, but I couldn't. The Reader for Palm desktop app can't convert it, reporting some mysterious error. So then I tried to convert a pdf I'd made using Apple's Save as PDF option. It crashes the application consistently. So next I tried to convert a sample chapter of an O'Reilly book. That actually worked, and I was able to install it on my Clié, but guess what?
It sucks.
First, the document is >460K, so I wanted to store it on my Memory Stick. Well, you don't get to actually see the document as a file on your handheld, so you can't move it and there's no option in the Adobe desktop application to store it on a memory card. Perhaps if I move the Reader app to the memory card, its database will come along with it.
Finally, trying to actually read the document is an exercise in frustration. Each page gives you the little Adobe "A" logo with spinning arrows telling you it's "thinking" or something. What was the point of converting the document on the desktop if the reader has to "think" about it on the handheld??? It takes forever too.
What an utter piece of crap. What an unmitigated disaster. And this is version 3.0?! Forget it. I'll find something else to read text on my Clié.
Speech, as communication, is intimately tied to the notions of attention and authority. Money is not speech, although money is a type of authority, and a means for gathering attention. If someone asked you to stand on your head and sing Mary Had a Little Lamb at the corner of a busy intersection, you would probably refuse. It's a silly request, and it's difficult to conceive of someone having the kind of authority that would cause you to accede to such a request. But, if they offered you the sum of one million dollars, and they persuaded you that the offer was legitimate, then perhaps you would eagerly accede to a silly request. Money has this ability to amplify "authority," even to distort it. As proof, I would merely direct your attention to certain reality television shows and most daytime talk shows.
"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
Politicians rely on money as an authority amplifier. With enough money, you can hire excellent speech writers to give the appearance that you're a deep thinker. You can hire deep thinkers to help out the speech writers. And you can hire strategists and executive assistants to keep all those people productively employed. You have to have a certain amount of brains to pull this off, but history shows again and again, it's surprisingly little. Unsurprisingly, politicians therefore crave money. Not for their salaries, but to increase the appearance of their authority in order to win elections.
But politicians are also human beings with limited attention resources, and many competing demands for their attention. There's the guy who wants the fire hydrant on his street replaced, and there's the guy who needs the zoning variance for the high-rise condo project going in down the road. They can each write a letter to the politician, but the developer encloses a check for one thousand dollars. Which guy gets the politician's attention?
Now, to be fair, politicians are sensitive to at least giving the appearance of attending to the concerns of "the average voter;" and with enough money, they often hire individuals to write personal responses to constituents who write letters. But it's the people with large amounts of money who have the authority to command a politician's attention in ways the average voter can never hope to match.
Finally, money distorts the notion of accountability. Elected officials are notionally accountable to their constituents, the voters who elected them to office, as it is from the electorate that they derive their authority, from "the consent of the governed." But elected officials are also accountable to the people who provide the largest sums of money, who exert their own brand of authority over the politician.
I don't know the answer to how to properly finance election campaigns; but I do know that money is not speech. It'll be interesting to read the Supreme Court's opinion.
On a whim, I went to the Navy Exchange yesterday to see what Sony Clié models they had in stock. They recently began stocking a number of them, and I was checking on the features and prices of a number of color Palm OS devices yesterday. I was wondering if they had the SJ-33 in stock. It runs about $219.00 retail, but it doesn't come with the cradle, just a cable.
It turns out they didn't have any SJ-33s in stock, but they had the T665C marked for clearance at $199.97, and they happened to still have a new, unopened one in stock. Well, the cheapest I had seen the 665 anywhere was much more than $200.00, (a subsequent check online shows the lowest price anywhere for a non-refurb is $243.00). The 665 is last year's technology, it runs Palm OS 4.1, and uses the Motorola Dragonball (non-ARM) processor at 66MHz, and it uses a separate DSP for MP3 playback, so it's a bit of a power hog; though you can blank the screen if you just want to listen to MP3s (not a big priority with me).
One of the reasons why I liked the 665 is that it's one of the few remaining devices that doesn't come with a camera or a microphone/voice recording function or a wireless networking feature. These days, devices that are equipped like that aren't welcome in certain environments, and I like to have mine with me. One cool thing it does have that I often considered buying for my Visor is a TV remote feature. Technically, any IR-capable Palm device can operate as an IR remote, but most of them don't put out a very strong IR signal. There's a Springboard module that includes a brighter IR LED specifically for remote control use, but it's about $50.00 as I recall.
I didn't acquit myself too spectacularly as a bargain hunter, I ended up also buying a Sony-brand 128MB memory stick to put in the handheld. I could have waited and gotten one for much less than the $65.00 I paid for it, but there you go. Instant gratification, it's a character flaw.
As a Mac-user, buying a Clié is also an added-expense choice because you have to pay $29.95 for The Missing Sync in order to get seamless connectivity with your desktop computer. Still, Amazon lists the 665 from Office Depot at $349.00, and I got mine with a 128MB memory stick and Mac connectivity for less than $300.00, so I'm pretty happy.
This will probably be the last dedicated PDA device I ever buy. I expect that at some point I will end up buying a mobile phone and signing up for some kind of wireless service. I also expect I won't be working in a secure environment at that time either. This is not something I want to do for the rest of my life.
Getting up and running on the Mac was pretty straightforward, though I did make a fairly significant error that I wasn't sure how to recover from for a moment or two. I thought the simplest thing to do would be merely to sync the Clié with my existing profile on my desktop. Well, my Visor is loaded with little hacks and things, and although the sync ran flawlessly, the Clié wouldn't boot after a reset, it kept faulting out with a fatal error.
It's not a trivial matter to pop the batteries out of these things, it has an embedded Li-ion battery. I seemed to recall something about pushing the power button while pressing reset to flush the memory contents, but I couldn't find anything about it in the rather skimpy documentation Sony provides with the unit. That actually worked. I ended up creating a new profile in Palm Desktop, and then just moved over the applications I wanted to run on the Clié. The only problem is my registration number for my copy of Shadow Plan, a nifty Palm OS outliner, is tied to my profile ID as "Dave Rogers" and I set up the new one as "David Rogers." I'll probably just buy another license rather than screw around with the profiles again, or ask the developer to issue me another registration code. I'll probably keep Shadow Plan on the Visor for the time being since I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet.
Sony includes a licensed copy of Documents to Go on the CD, but it's the Windows version. I'll probably install it on my office machine for now and see if I think it's worthwhile upgrading to the latest version with OS X compatibility.
As a handheld, the 665 is pretty sweet. It does have a couple of significant flaws though. On most Palm devices, although this has changed recently, the center scroll buttons are two separate buttons. On the 665 it's a single, very small rocker-type switch with very stiff action. Not much fun playing mine hunter with that thing. For most other uses, you're going to want to use the jog dial anyway. Additionally, and perhaps this isn't a "flaw" so much as a disappointment, it's a 320x320 color screen with an excellent backlight, and Sony offers the standard 3 fonts with the smallest one being very light in "weight." It's readable, but it could be a lot better I think. I'm going to look around for a hack that installs some better font choices. Finally, it's a Sony, so you're dealing with a couple of proprietary issues like the memory stick and the base connector. You can't use any of the Palm SD cards that are coming out in fairly significant numbers, and you'll have fewer choices in devices that connect through the base connector. I'm hoping I'll be able to find some kind of low-profile adapter, although the kind I'd be looking for would be for the Handspring so I can use my Stowaway keyboard, and I don't think there's enough demand for that sort of thing. I may just sell the Visor Neo, Memplug, Stowaway and use the money to get some peripherals for the Clié, though I still haven't decided.
This is a brief note that is critical of the administration, but makes the relevant point that there is no backing out of Iraq now. But we can back this administration out of Washington next November.
I'm not sure it's as bad as all this, but it's an appropriate criticism of the flawed and unrealistically optimistic assessments going into this thing. "Hope" is neither a strategy nor a plan.
Lest I leave anyone with a false impression regarding what I think we ought to be doing with regard to Iraq, allow me to clarify. I think the president's request for money should be quickly scrutinized and approved. We're simply going to have to spend money to rebuild Iraq. That's the easy part. But I think the Congress should demand that the president produce a detailed plan for how it intends to go about the task of building a functioning democracy out of Iraq. Unless someone can point out to me the existence of such a plan that I'm not aware of, it is past the point of being an emergency requirement and it is quite simply a crisis.
Americans typically do fairly well in a crisis. It seems to me we have a fair amount of experience at nation building now, not as much as some of us would like, far more than others of us think we should have, but we have some. We can put together some smart people with U.S. experience at nation building, some smart people from Iraq, some smart people from the U.N., and some smart people from other countries in the region, and come up with something that can work. In the navy, we always used to say that you need a plan because you need something to deviate from. Well, it seems to me that we don't even have that at the moment, and it shows.
Although I find myself in some uncomfortable company, I think we have made a commitment to the Iraqi people, and to the servicemembers who've given their lives in this endeavor, to leave something in our wake worthy of all the suffering and distress. We have to honor that commitment.
Somewhat in the context of the recent, and still somewhat ongoing (actually, it never really stops) discussion of religion, Ken Loo's Notes of Doubt is very interesting, but also in other contexts as well. Recommended.
One good thing about the American election cycle, among many not-so-good things, is that it does enforce at least some kind of accountability on the leadership, even if it's unelected.
I read something this morning that said the president was going to "ramp up" the PR effort to explain to the American people his "plan" for post-Saddam Iraq. It's a "ramp" you see, because we're essentially starting from zero, that is, NO PLAN!, to something we hope is going to work, that is, once we figure out what it is.
Once we get all the UN troops in place, along with the logistical infrastructure to support them, I'm betting we're going to come in damn close to that 500k troop figure that hapless Army general, who had the bad judgment to go blurting out the truth to the Senate, happened to mention. Of course, if you haven't figured it out already, the reason why we're going to the UN is so the president can have some political cover next fall, if Iraq remains a soup sandwich. It'll be ALL THE UN's FAULT! Just ask Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly.
Oh, and that new "manufacturing czar," to help retain and grow manufacturing jobs in the U.S.? Election cycle. But I mean, hey, isn't this sort of cognitive dissonance for our man in the White House? What is the role of government in manufacturing jobs? (Pun intended.) Isn't that something the market is supposed to solve more efficiently? Wasn't that what all the tax cuts were about? I'm confused. It appears I'm not alone.
"Why would a company like Microsoft do this?" asked Richard Lang, who is Burst's CEO and half the company workforce. "We were a little company. Microsoft could have had our technology for almost nothing, but instead they stole it. We called them on it, and they could have settled at any time, but they didn't. They stuck their heels in and won't give an inch even now. The only way I can make sense of this behavior is that they need to win no matter what the cost."
You know, it bothers me less that MS might have been doing wrong by Burst, or even skirting the law in the marketplace, though both of those things bother me.
What really bothers me is MS's behavior in court, where they so brazenly display their contempt for the law, and their arrogant belief that they are not accountable to it.
This is such a monumental screw-up that it speaks volumes about the company.
If MS truly had any, I mean the slightest bit, of integrity, Gates and Ballmer would have put out one of their legendary e-mails and instructed everyone to stick to the truth, especially in legal matters. It's so damned much easier to keep your story straight. But the truth isn't important. Respect for the law isn't important. Winning, that's all that's important.
This is the company you work for and admire so much Robert. If this were an isolated incident, I could be wrong, but MS has exhibited this behavior over and over again in the courtroom. From Bill Gates' recorded deposition to the Justice Department, to Allchin's bogus tape demonstration of Windows' functionality minus explorer, to this case where the e-mails were "deleted" and the backups were withheld.
Apart from the security problems, apart from the manifest failure to innovate, apart from the bizarre stage antics of Steve Ballmer, this behavior alone is sufficient reason why so many of us find your company contemptible.
If the truth mattered at MS, if respect for the law mattered at MS, this stuff would never happen; and if it did, we'd see the people responsible publicly sacked. Those things don't matter to MS.
But they matter to me. I don't know if they matter to you.
Doc, Doc, Doc...you've got it all wrong! It's emergent democracy! It's not a mob, it's a smart mob! C'mon, get with the program. You're starting to sound like all those other luddites. "Representative democracy," is so eighteenth century.
The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that...
I never managed to spend any time working with Tinderbox and QuickTime. Somehow I figured that would be the case. The best part of the day was this morning when I did manage to hop on my bike and ride down to the beach. It was low tide and I was able to ride down to the Mayport jetties and back, I'm going to say that's nine miles on the beach this morning, plus another few on the street.
Did a fair amount of housekeeping as well. Not so much yard work, though I did spend an hour or so on the backyard this afternoon. Managed to bump into a banana spider that was probably three and a half to four inches from leg-tip to leg-tip. It was probably the largest spider I've ever seen in person.
I think I've got a problem on the main boot drive of the G4. I noticed the other day when I tried to index the drive from the Get Info window, that it didn't show when the drive was last indexed, and it indicated that it was indexing it at that moment. Normally, I think it should have shown me the date of the last index, and given me the option to start indexing. I clicked on the Stop Indexing button, but that had no effect. The drive had been showing no other anomalies, so I've been letting it go until I had some time to work on it. I figured it was probably due for a Disk Warrior pass anyway.
So today I decided to go ahead and run Disk Warrior today, to see if that would correct the index problem. Unfortunately, DW reports that the directory is too badly damaged to be repaired. That's kind of alarming. I went ahead and installed Jaguar on the 80GB drive in the G4 to begin backing things up, and ran the repair function form Disk Utility several times, which ultimately seemed to have no effect. Permissions have been repaired, and there's little more I can do short of buying some other disk utility to have a go at it. Other than the index issue, the drive exhibits no other problems. The system boots and everything seems to run just fine. But I suspect I may be living on borrowed time, so I'm going to gradually migrate everything over to the 80GB drive, and when Panther comes out, I'll slick the 60GB drive and do a clean install of Panther on that drive and use it as the backup.
Other than that, it was a pretty unexciting, although pleasant, weekend.
