Crooked Mouth

Saw this ad a few days ago. Hey, that’s an almost poetic advertisement…
Maybe not PC… but…

We arrived in San Francisco. I read for most of the flight… Confucius said:

By nature, men are nearly alike;
by practice they get to be wide apart

Now working on slideshow, which is still not finished, and guitar-playing, which will never be finished…

Monday HD

For Steve and others who have the computer setup and D/A converter to listen to 24/96k files: It’s Red Desert Sky, from One Guitar, and you can download the AIF file here. This is a 170MB file and you might not want to download that on yer phone… well, no phone I know could play the file back anyway.

For all others I have a 320kbps mp3 file of t-one 1996. Download the file here. This is a continues file, same as on the CD, not cut up as you would find it in the ListeningLounge. This is also a rather large file at 157MB.

Sunday


At the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano this past May. By Joe Mozdzen.

The furture is near (or is it here?)
Check out these apps for the iPhone.
This is an amazing “remote control” for a Canon DSLR:

onOne Software – DSLR Remote for Canon DSLR Cameras & iPhone
Control Your Canon DSLR With Your iPhone

* Remotely fire your Canon EOS DSLR camera with your iPhone or iPod Touch
* Remotely control the camera settings like shutter-speed, aperture, white-balance and more
* View images saved on the camera from your iPhone or iPod Touch
* Look through your camera’s viewfinder remotely
* Great for remote-firing at sporting events, for kids, and for self-portraits

And this app allows the user to reserve and find a Zip Car – honks the horn for easier location and unlocks the door!

Zipcar iPhone App Makes Car-Sharing A Breeze | Autopia | Wired.com
Zipcar has joined Apple to make getting a car as easy as using your phone. The pioneering car-share company has developed an iPhone app you can use to choose, reserve and locate a car on the go – a brilliant move, considering one-quarter of the company’s subscribers have an iPhone in their pocket.

Oh the irony!

Vic Says:
Received my Asiabeat – Monsoon CD from Amazon. It’s basically brand new with a hole punch through the UPC code. Putting it in the CD tray as I type this to load onto my iPod. : )

A very good example of our system failing. Here is what happened. Vic took the perfectly legal option and bought the album on amazon. That’s commendable, of course. But what really happened here? The hole in the UPC code signifies that the album was for promotional purpuses only. Legally that CD was never actually given to the person or group (a radio station or a newspaper perhaps) that originally received the CD, instead, it was lent and is supposed to be returned upon request – which, of course, never happens. So, said person sold the item, which s/he received for free, to a CD reseller, who advertises on amazon. By buying the album Vic in essence paid money to UPS for shipping the album, amazon for facilitating the sale, the CD-reseller who sold the album and the person who sold said CD to the reseller. Unfortunately no money went to the record company and Lewis/Asiabeat did not receive a cent!! (((artists do NOT get paid on promotional copies!)))

If, on the other hand, Vic had taken the illegal option and downloaded the album for free through a torrent and sent Lewis $5…. well, you see where this is going, yes?

The way we deal in music is broken. Nobody has a perfect solution yet, but here is to hoping we’ll find one soon.

Saturday Thoughts

I have been turning that comment over and over in my mind:

1. Victor Hornback Says:
“…in my view nothing is ever lost…”

I sometimes wonder if anything is ever created. If not then collective consciousness is not so much a collection growing over time as a shifting in and out of form whatever is already there.

To which I answered:

3. Ottmar Says:
Victor, that’s a mighty big thought and I like it.

Just consciousness shifting, turning, dancing, flexing, shining, fractalizing…

Methinks one would find examples of this thought in Hindu and Buddhist texts, don’t you think? Maybe some Googling is in order.

Haven’t googled anything, but listened to this talk by Alan Wallace at Upaya – part od the free podcast series at Upaya.org. I don’t think it’s a very good talk. Mr. Wallace goes on and on and appears to enjoy hearing himself talk, but does not actually say much. But, I had to stay in the studio to make sure a candle wasn’t falling over and burning the place down (here and here) and so I listened to the entire 90+ minute podcast. (((yes, that’s my bell that starts the podcast – I gave the sound to Upaya)))

Mr. Wallace mentions that while we can observe the physcial changes in the brain – e.g. see the Wikipedia list of different Neurotransmitters – when it comes to studying the interior life we have to depend on a research subject’s word. Two subjects experience and relate the same situation very differently. I find it’s useful to know Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrant Model – I, We, It and Its, or the Subjective and Objective view of an individual, and the intersubjective and the interobjective view of the collective – check it out here if you like. (((are you feeling sleepy?)))

Alan Wallace draws an interesting comparison with Science around Galileo’s time. Before Galileo no powerful telescopes existed, therefore astronomy depended on naked-eye observations. If I remember the talk correctly, before Galileo the most powerful telescop had 3x magnification, but Galileo was able to devise one with 30x magnification. With the help of this telescope Galileo was able to observe that Venus had moons orbiting around it. That, of course, started trouble for Galileo, because since Aristotle it was understood that the Earth was the center of the universe.

Well, in terms of studying the interior world of our Minds we are still using naked-eye observation. We have to take a subject’s word for what they are experiencing. We can observe what is going on in the brain objectively, by measuring currents and chemistry, but we can’t look into the interior life of Mind. Yet. Will someone invent the equivalent of a telescope – for the mind? Or is that just not possible?

So, from there my mind jumped to thinking that nothing every REALLY happens. TIme is a construct. And, as Victor wrote, Collective Consciousness is not so much a collection growing over time as a shifting in and out of form whatever is already there. (((that does sound like something Nagarjuna might have expressed – must look for Stephen Batchelor’s translation, which is somewhere among my stacks of books…)))

We discover “new” definitions, based on the current culture, data and knowledge, but I would venture to guess that in terms of the mind’s interior, we don’t know any more than some of the monks, hermits or philosophers in India or China thousands of years ago. On the other hand we can certainly distract ourselves better than they were able to… :-)

I wish I could express myself better. I swear, sometimes this stuff aligns wordlessly and miraculously in my mind while I am meditating, but holding on to that experience and putting it into words, that’s a whole other matter. Well, I tried and by now you are probably asleep, so no harm done…