There is NO LOITERING ALLOWED on this planet, move along please!

Wake-up, brush teeth, get in car, listen to NPR, arrive at work, attend meetings, go to lunch at corner cafe, have an afternoon cup of coffee, watch the clock, walk by the same folks on the way to the car, sit in traffic, listen to NPR, pull in the driveway, put your briefcase on the ottoman, hope someone made dinner, decline other activities because work wore you out, stay up too late fooling around on the web, crawl into bed wondering were the last three years went.

I have goals and dreams; I have to make them happen…but instead I am a functioning cog and it seems like I am encouraged to be just that —> have a good job, nice things, great credit, kept appearance —> an all-around non-loitering, functioning member of society… and I do not know how to break free to follow my dreams.

The problem is, I have to loiter if I’m going to make my very worthwhile dreams come true. I have to sit and think, I have to have time to sit and think, and I have to have my necessities taken care of so I can think and perform the tasks that it takes to achieve my dreams.  As a thirty-year-old, I can move into my parent’s shed for the next six months and actually make my dreams come true… but my parents would not understand the value in their child living in the shed and most everyone else wouldn’t see it either. But it doesn’t matter, even if I had a place to exist without having to pay for basics, I have to pay back loans for an education and I have to insure everything I own in case of accident or malfunction… got to make the cold, hard cash.

So, I can save up so that I can handle my “idling” expenses while I pursue my dreams, I can double up on work so that I  can make progress on my dreams at night (which would make 16 hours of computer staring), I can loose everything I own and go into default and bum off of soon-to-be-ex-friends, I could find a higher paying job and pay someone to make my dreams materialize, or I could just give up and go to work, come home, have a beer, sleep and do it again, all the while feeling like all I really need to do is be more productive than I already am.

Dear person, you are the only one who will make your dreams come true; here is some happiness advice.

Watching “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.” It is a pretty awesome series… and Stephen Hawking is a pretty amazing mind. Quite frankly, we are all amazing, imperfect creations, and we are all screwed (if we don’t get us, or a comet doesn’t get us, or a gamma ray burst doesn’t get us, the sun will definitely get us!). I’m not sure we can even relax enough to say, “at least in our lifetime the earth will not be destroyed how we know it.” I will say, that I think cutting NASA funding was a mistake.

The video talked of a planet “like” earth named Gliese 581g that I have since been slightly fascinated with… since potentially, in thousands of years, we might possibly inhabit it… who knows.

Have you noticed that bands are now seemingly required to do musical encores after there main set?

Why do them if they are not really an encore… because it is expected? It used to be an uncontrollable display of desire by the audience to just get one more taste of a performance!!!, now just a regiment, lackadaisical clapping will do.

You are held captive in a cave, and the only things you can see are shadows cast on the wall.
It’s that way for as long as you can remember: the shadows are all that you know.
One day, you escape from the cave. This forces you to re-think everything you’ve ever known to be true.
As you get over the trauma of being outside, you learn that there’s a fuller and more expansive truth, outside the cave.
If you go back to the cave and try to describe “real life” to people who are still captive… they don’t understand.
They’ll never understand until they experience it for themselves.
I’m fascinated by how this simple story has so many immediate analogies:

More on this last one, “our eyes are the cave”: In the eye, light rays are projected through a dark space onto a surface. We can only see waves in the “visible spectrum.” We can only see such a limited version of what’s going on around us. We’re missing out on x-rays and gamma rays and radio waves!

In a way, the story is like the story of your birth:

For a long time you were trapped in a cave. You felt restricted there, but you were totally taken care of.
Then one day you had to get out. You just couldn’t take it anymore. That day was the day you were born.
Coming out of the womb was the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to you. You’ve basically blocked it out of your memory.
But afterward, you learned that there’s a lot more to life. You could never go back into that cave.

So you were literally born with the story of Plato’s cave… that fascinates me!

(read more by Spozbo Moswell)

I need to conduct a phone interview where it would be extremely beneficial to record and transcribe it so that I can reference it while writing an article.

I have a fancy iphone and I thought it would be a standard feature… course not… but there are iphone apps that do it. The only problem is every app seems to have a limited amount of time they will record for (usually 20 minutes) at which point you must give the creators money and the quality is horrible and breaks up.

I did several test runs with a famous comic book artist using the app called call.rec which I was pretty unimpressed with but could have used out of need. Turns out there is a 20 minute limit… go figure.

So I did a bit more research and found out that my Google Voice account could handle the situation as long as it was an incoming call. I already have a fancy Google Voice number that routes to my iphone so I had said comic book artist call that number… it magically routes to my phone… and then during the conversation when I want to start recording, I press 4 on the number pad and tada! A voice announces that the phone conversation is being recorded to both parties and once the conversation ends, I can log into my Google Voice account and listen over and over to the conversation. It was a NY Times blog that actually reminded me to check with Google, cause as usually, they probably have it covered.

Check out BlockAdverts… read the whole page before you use it, cause it’ll make surfing the web look very different.

Have you heard of Google Badges? All I have to do is enable my web history and read Google News Stories while signed in to my Gmail->Google Account and I could get a badge related to subject matter and keywordssssss… imagine, I could one day hold a platinum badge in Fascinations!!!

Here I am, about to enable my “web history” with Google so they can effectively serve me the best quality websites for free and award me shiny gold stars for all my worthwhile mind blurbs… and I can’t get past the enable web history step (an Internet marketer could potentially benefit by having G-badges related to their verticals).

Let’s just make it clear that regardless of whether I choose to enable my web history or not, Google is still tracking how I interact with the web… especially in Chrome or when logged in to any of my Google accounts or perks… ***I can’t wait for my next post on uncomfortable Chrome screenshots*** but anyway, enabling web history at least lets me access it too!… but probably connects “me” directly to it instead of it being a little more anonymous… I don’t know at what level but here is a post on Google Anonymizing Search Records To Protect Privacy from 2007.

For some reason I want to tell the story of Rumpelstiltskin… through Rocky and Bullwinkle (yes Google, it is a burn from a little ol’web ant you could squash at will).
(here’s the link: Rumpelstiltskin as told in Fractured Fairy Tales of Rocky and Bullwinkle )

Did I mention how much I love the Electronic Frontier Foundation! If you were looking for a place to give all your money to when you die… Net-freeing organizations like the EFF need the funds and make a big impact on your digital private side.

“There is no greater religion higher than the truth”

Helena Blavatsky

Ever heard of Theosophy? Now you have. I don’t really want to comment on it much since I am new to the subject and don’t know much… pretty much just read the Wiki… but nothing bothers me so far.

I do like looking at pictures of Helena P. Blavatsky; she is intense. Considering that in the 19th century women’s views on much were not exactly respected and backed… I’m surprised she was such a recognized member of such a “secret”ish society. Here is a book she wrote: The Secret Doctrine available online for free! (yea, it was written in 1888).

Here is the first couple paragraphs of the “Introduction” to “The Secret Doctrine”

“Gently to hear, kindly to judge.”
— Shakespeare.

Since the appearance of Theosophical literature in England, it has become customary to call its teachings “Esoteric Buddhism.” And, having become a habit — as an old proverb based on daily experience has it — “Error runs down an inclined plane, while Truth has to laboriously climb its way up hill.”

Old truisms are often the wisest. The human mind can hardly remain entirely free from bias, and decisive opinions are often formed before a thorough examination of a subject from all its aspects has been made. This is said with reference to the prevailing double mistake (a) of limiting Theosophy to Buddhism: and (b) of confounding the tenets of the religious philosophy preached by Gautama, the Buddha, with the doctrines broadly outlined in “Esoteric Buddhism.” Any thing more erroneous than this could be hardly imagined. It has enabled our enemies to find an effective weapon against theosophy; because, as an eminent Pali scholar very pointedly expressed it, there was in the volume named “neither esotericism nor Buddhism.” The esoteric truths, presented in Mr. Sinnett’s work, had ceased to be esoteric from the moment they were made public; nor did it contain the religion of Buddha, but simply a few tenets from a hitherto hidden teaching which are now supplemented by many more, enlarged and explained in the present volumes. But even the latter, though giving out many fundamental tenets from the Secret Doctrine of the East, raise but a small corner of the dark veil. For no one, not even the greatest living adept, would be permitted to, or could — even if he would — give out promiscuously, to a mocking, unbelieving world, that which has been so effectually concealed from it for long aeons and ages.

“Esoteric Buddhism” was an excellent work with a very unfortunate title, though it meant no more than does the title of this work, the “Secret Doctrine.” It proved unfortunate, because people are always in the habit of judging things by their appearance, rather than their meaning; and because the error has now become so universal, that even most of the Fellows of the Theosophical Society have fallen victims to the same misconception. From the first, however, protests were raised by Brahmins and others against the title; and, in justice to myself, I must add that “Esoteric Buddhism” was presented to me as a completed volume, and that I was entirely unaware of the manner in which the author intended to spell the word “Budh-ism.”

I know… this is an odd fascination. I was justing thinking about how you know when you’re not doing something better. BETTER… not bad, just not forward; that is why businesses fail (and marriages, and lives…) in a REASON TO EXIST… they are plateauing which isn’t even holding even, it’s holding back.

There are all sorts of reasons for it; I tend to think some of it simply occurs cause we’re lazy… the non-ADD type who have to smoke things to get that burst of inspiration and creation. Or, those that care but are resigned to putting the right shape into the right spot (it’s called being a good girl and boy but that’s rarely progressive).

So, here are some things to help mitigate the situation:

——->Rethink Your Presence. All of it, physical, digital, impact on friends, impact on earth, impact on now.

————>Communicate Change. It always seems like you come to an agreement and you’re so happy about it cause it works, but my, do things change*… small, big, whatever… propose the changes that need to happen (almost weekly… biweekly?). *rethink your presence

——————->Stay Relevant. Avinash Kaushik said once at a conference (or twenty and his blog Occam’s Razor) to stay relevant. Can’t just keep up (unless its with the innovators, and even then you got to throw in!!! just like buying beer… you can do it…). I also just want to add, that I got to sit directly in front of Mr. Kaushik once and it made me happy. Hi Avinash (if you happen to check this fascinating backlink).

——————————>Don’t Be Lazy. It’s all work… yea, or like Danny Baker (former boss and GM of KTBC and TAB chairman) use to tell me in the elevator, it’s all about attitude!!! meaning, it’s work if that’s your headspace (so brainwash yourself, fun fun fun!). Just make it happen and lay off the excuses except for that special 10% of time, cause hey, we work…errrr have fun to much.

Alrighty, the thing to remember through it all is that it is all a circle… it will all come back around, even the circles that are bigger than our lifespan. If you can imagine something bigger than you… then you got no worries… or do you, hahaha, ha. Also note, fascinations are just that .

I don’t know how in the hell I missed knowing about Ogg Vorbis, but reading through their FAQ page is definitely teaching me a thing or two (that I should already have known) too.

Particularly this part about licensing cost for use of MP3 compression and the fact that Vorbis is used in 2 out of the 3 supported audio/video formats in HTML5.

Have you ever heard of using numerical IP addresses [instead of URLs] like 128.242.240.52 (Twitter), 69.63.189.34 (Facebook) and 172.14.204.99 (Google) in case, say… you wanted to bypass a certain web block a government might have put in place on a website? This could be pretty handy… especially if you live in war-torn dictatorships.

How about if you wanted to see if a Search Engine had indexed your site recently? Iplists.com has a pretty good lead on which IP belongs to which brand of SE… but I’m sure they have a lot more.

What if you wanted specific info on visitors… like you are looking to view IP addresses in GA? Well, included is an interesting hack on the matter that is a definite no no in terms of privacy and Google Analytics (but interesting nonetheless). Surely there are other metric systems out there that can help you… hint hint. See… aren’t numerical IP Addresses fascinating!

Ramble Ramble Ramble:

Seems like time is free, seems like it doesn’t really exist, seems like it’s worth what you are willing to trade for it or what will get you something that you could trade for what you really want. Seems like we invest a lot of time trying to make our time valuable and still it is only as valuable as someone is willing to pay for it given the circumstances. How much is happiness worth and is happiness worth time? Is what we want from our time really happiness and we are giving our time to others to get money to get happiness? Maybe we could bypass the money middle man and go straight to the time in happiness payment. Does happiness buy food? Time buys food? What we receive in exchange for our time buys food. What if we exchange our time for food directly and bypass the money middle man? Will my time ever be worth anything if I keep giving it away for free? What is helping others worth? It seems there are a lot of potential payoffs of time. Sometimes my time is worth happiness, sometimes my time is an investment in happiness, sometimes my time is worth money, and sometimes my time is worth life. My time is worth my life or my life is worth my time. My life is worth money, but really my life is worth happiness.