Saturday, November 9, 2013

Monday, November 4, 2013

Climate Corporation is the subject of a New Yorker article in the current issue (Nov 11, 013)

I visited there once for a meetup and considered investigating it for a job.  It turns out that its work fits with my idea that climate change should  be addressed in part via insurance.  The company also was just sold to Monsanto for $1B...

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Remembering Jack Carey (video)

This is bittersweet, as it reminds me of the good feelings I always had for Jack, who was kind, friendly and helpful from my first days as a swing dancer in the early Eighties, and it makes me miss him.  My best to you, Jack...

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

best drumming I've seen last night!

Dafnis Prieto and his band Si o Si were awesome and fun!  Loose grips, playing all elements of every piece of equipment, variation, tasteful, powerhouse, musical *and* visibly enjoyed himself!

Friday, October 4, 2013

per capita energy use in Cali flat for 35 years

as described here.  Other states are up.  Kudos to Art Rosenfeld and the many people he has worked with (including me).

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Sioux City Kid at Great America Music Hall Friday Sep 27

Sioux City Kid is a great, gritty band.  They are performing at GAMH in San Francisco.

government as corporate fiefdom

The Right has extended the notion that government should be limited because its members represent interested parties until the idea is absurd.   A lot of its behavior now is purely predicated on the notion of using government for private purposes, without any sense of shame at the corruption this entails.  ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange, is one of the most egregious offenders in this regard.  For an example, read this Nation story.

Stream Sara Cahill's new album free

Sara Cahill produces a weekly radio show I enjoy, 33 1/3 RPM on KALW-FM.  She is also a piano player.  Her new release is streaming freely for a week here.

Zorn on Zorn 24 hours on 24th of September

WQXR presents John Zorn - his music and his influences, celebrating his 60th birthday.
Sadams.uk, adjust your schedule NOW!

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Journalism students on the history of Dwight House (1545 Dwight Way, Berkeley)

Here is what came up.   I was one of "the hippies" who massively altered the house in the early 70s.
We hated being called "hippies", as it meant to us lazy people who laid around getting stoned, while our motto was "Build It or Fuck It!", meaning Make Something Now.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who lived there during that time... Who remembers the time a 6x6 almost crushed my skull and Doug Shaw saved my life by shoving it over my head, so I suffered only unconsciousness due to the glancing blow of a 4x4?  I remember everyone carrying me to the van; I remember trying to tell the time as I stared at something on the wall in the hospital, not realizing it was a fire alarm.

Quick City at Cal Arts presaged Burning Man

This event was organized by me and my friends.  Inflatables, solar power, Ant Farm, NASA, gamelan and shadow puppets, guerilla tv and more...

Friday, September 13, 2013

2013 Americana Awards Wednesday the 18th at 5PM PT on AXS TV

The 2012 Awards ceremony was very enjoyable, as I reported before.  If your cable system carries the AXS channel, watch this!

Monday, September 9, 2013

listen to Wynton teach

HBO is broadcasting another master class with Wynton Marsalis.  It's worth watching even if you aren't a jazz-head - it's about living fully, in all dimensions.

touch screen Digital Audio Workstation controller supreme

raven-mti  for OSX + ProTools  $2499

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

wanted: apk file for icontrolav2 app

to install on Kindle Fire HD

Mark Porter's latest baby

Amazon's relational database service

OK: "percussion heavy" and "Bartok" - need I say more?

In high school, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Barry Smith introduced me to the blues, Bartok and Buddhism, in exchange for me doing his electronics class homework;  this changed my life forever.  Kudos to Barry, who died (too young) a few years later.  At the time I also played drums.  Taking all this into consideration, it should be no surprise that I look forward to q2music.org's upcoming broadcast:

This Sunday at 6 pm EDT, Q2 Music presents the first of four performances recorded live at the 2013 Lucerne Festival in Switzerland. The program features Martin Grubinger's Percussive Planet Ensemble and piano duo Ferhan und Ferzand Ă–nder in a performance of percussion-heavy music by Xenakis and Bartok.

standing desks reviewed

thewirecutter.com

Saturday, August 17, 2013

thinking of Aunt Francis

Listening to Steep Ravine playing on West Coast Live - the fiddle playing brought to mind Aunt Francis and her performance with Merle Haggard in Reno all those years ago.

Dwight House sold in January for $800k

"Memories, of the way we were..."

Larry on Charlie

The August 14, 2013 episode of the Charlie Rose show is a one hour interview with LJE.

Monday, August 12, 2013

You are not Facebook’s customer, advertisers are Facebook’s customer.

"You are not Facebook’s customer, advertisers are Facebook’s customer. Same is true for Google. You become an asset that they monetize and sell to their customers, aka the advertisers."  -Phil Zimmerman

Om Malik interview with Phil Zimmerman

Friday, July 19, 2013

Sunday, July 7, 2013

2012 Americana Association Awards show

I enjoyed it!  It's showing on AXS TV, a cable channel.  Especially recommended for Bruce and Dave.

Industry on Parade roots

As someone who grew up watching Industry on Parade on TV in the Sixties, I am in high heaven now with all of the cable shows about how things are made and deployed.  My latest fave is Tait Stages, about the staging company for high end rock and country shows like Madonna's MDNA tour.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Terry Riley in Redding

According to Marc Beauchamp, Terry Riley is returning to Redding for his 60th high school re-union and will be at the Cascade Theater Sunday for a matinee performance.  "What section are you sitting in, David?"  "In C"

Monday, June 10, 2013

Thursday, June 6, 2013

put in my place by young kids...

The four year old dancers on So You Think You Can Dance and the nine year old school organizer on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show give me pause when I think of myself at those ages... :-)

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Dylan Ratigan leaves MSNBC to work on veterans' jobs and hydroponic farms

On the Charlie Rose show I saw that Dylan Ratigan is working with a training program for hydroponic farming to increase veterans employment - very impressive!

Monday, May 20, 2013

Sunday, May 19, 2013

ATT Uverse lost its ability to show future showings of programs programmed to record

In other words, if I plan to record a show and program it, then try to search for other times when it is playing, it complains Search Error and says to try again later.  After work over the phone and a visit from a tech, it was pronounced a known problem with a fix on the way.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Integral Theory and Critical Realism

Lots of reading here.

Yesware add-on for GMail

This Forbes interview with Yesware makes me want to try out Yesware immediately and read all the articles.  (Note: he quotes Chogyam Trungpa!)

I Love Your Work: Ten Days on A Lesbian Porn Set

This Slate article makes this documentary sound informative and provocative.  I pretty much avoid porn due to the arguments about the ways it encourages unhealthy attitudes among viewers and producers as well as its proximity to forms of exploitation (slavery/snuff/addiction/etc) that I really want to avoid, but this might be worth checking out.

Terri Lyne Carrington's re-make/homage to Ellington's Money Jungle

this album is great!

Google's new All Access Music Play

My first experience with the new subscription streaming service has been very positive.  I uploaded 20k songs and selected a J-Boogie tune from them, which then led to streaming of a very nice selection of online music - better than I expected, lots of recordings I had not heard before.  I recommend it.  BTW, the J-Boogie queue would be recommended to Sadams...

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Hummingbirds

If you have a chance to see the NatGeo Channel documentary on hummingbirds, you should watch it - the birds are more varied and beautiful than I even imagined!

Takei to the bridge

This PSA is true and funny!

Sunday, May 12, 2013

John Amaechi

John Amaechi is an impressive representative of the gay community - his ability to communicate his point of view is striking and not just due to his English accent :-)

Saturday, May 11, 2013

re-imagining Sondheim

Anthony deMare's Liaisons project is a gathering of various artists interpreting Sondheim.  I especially like Iverson's piece.  Recording due out in 2014...

Jake Shimabukuro

Life on Four Strings is a very inspiring documentary about the virtuoso ukulele player.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

free online outliner recommendation

fargo.io is a free outliner that runs in your browser and stores files in your Dropbox account.
I recommend using it!

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

improvised west coast swing

Another aspect of WCS I have always liked is its adaptability to people of various physiques, ages, personalities, and health.  Here is a very sexy and humorous improvised dance that illustrates what I mean.

Friday, April 5, 2013

My people (computer) will get in touch with your people (computer)

automated grading of essays has inspired me to write a new cloud-based service, BlogWriter.
From now on posts on this blog will be automated.  The first post under this system follows:

Hold On - Someone Said Something Wrong on the Internet
I have detected a mistake in the posts on other blogs.  Please wait while I notify the authors of the errors of their ways...

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Men in Black IX

Scalia's comment that voting rights are the last bastion of racial privilege caused an uproar among Republican elected officials.   One governor ( who remained anonymous due to his hood) shouted that the comment would only backfire and added that the governments should continue with proven practices:
1) disenfranchisement via id laws and reduced voting hours
2) wholesale felony convictions for black Americans
3) jerry-mandering of voting districts.
"Scalia played into the Left's hands.  Leave this work to the professionals and get back on the golf course!"

LJE has been reduced to fishing with the homeless

Yet Another Yacht Story (YAYS).  "Yeah, some guy said something about teaching us to fish rather than giving us fish, so that's what we're doin'".

Monday, March 11, 2013

Request: Google Glass h/w + DJ app

One of the most iconic DJ scenes occurs early on in Blade, when we see a party of what turn out to be vampires dancing while the DJ presides over it wearing a pair of small flashlights mounted to his head.
Imagine what we could do with Google Glass Augmented Reality with a DJ app!

Dance party success!

Saturday night was so much fun!  Great turn out, mixing Buddhists with swing dancers - it resulted in a room full of great people having a good time together!  What more could I ask for?

Friday, March 8, 2013

We are fans of Portlandia

Portlandia, the hipsters-mocking-hipsters TV series - yes!  As an SNL fan, Sara has to endorse it.
I will make an on-site visit in April for the Rails Conference

(This post sponsored by Doc Martens for Kids, which is endorsed by Alison )

Deep into the Other Ballroom

This BoingBoing post by Niall Connolly should be of interest to sadams, LoriL,  KevO, and Albert.
College of Musical Knowledge upper division course for dance and anthropology minors, apply here...
I have always been a fan of both Paris is Burning and Retromania and this post is the hybrid offspring of the two.  Of course as a social dancer, DJ, fan of electronic music, and avid watcher of sub-cultures, it's right up my alley!

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Great visit with hometown friends!

We had a great time visiting with Bonnie and Laura and David and Bebe!
Good, interesting people of like minds - very rejuvenating...

Other Minds performances next week

I plan to attend the Thursday performance of the Other Minds series, as I will be in SF for the Heroku conference during the day.  I would really like to attend Friday and Saturday as well, but am too busy.  I am a big fan of Craig Taborn, so I am sorry to miss him...

Thursday, February 14, 2013

in memory of Laurence

This anniversary of his suicide especially brings him to mind, although many things per week remind me of him.  He was a close friend for over forty years...

Tea Party brewed by Big Tobacco

study of the astroturf roots of the Tea Party confirms what RS and I have discussed for decades: the Right is very good at building their movement primarily because they fund it well and pay to manage it professionally.   The increase in the concentration of wealth and the Citizens United decision feed this tendency steroids and that shows strong results.  We are fortunate that they are outnumbered and on the wrong end of demographic trends.  What is the answer to this asymmetry:  if I can make billions of dollars from an idea that lowers the standard of living of 300 million people by one hundred dollars each, I have all the incentive in the world to pursue the idea while the 300 million won't be moved by the one hundred dollars?  Replicate that pattern throughout the economy, society and politics and you have what we face today.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

basics

A grizzled veteran explorer of Africa is accompanied by a young, inexperienced aide
in the early 20th century.  Suddenly they are captured by a tribe and tied next to each
other.  Members of the tribe dance wildly around them, singing and chanting in a language
the explorers cannot understand while loud drums pound loudly for hours.  Suddenly the
drums and dancing halt.  The younger explorer moans with fear, then panics when
the older man says "Oh, no!  It can't be!"  "What, what is it?"  "Now the bass solo..."

This and this are for DP and Ricky - you know who you are ;-)

jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg's two new releases

this NY Times review of one of my favorite local musicians captures a lot of what appeals to me:
the Ornette Coleman roots, the Joey Baron-sounding drums, the downtown style, and Ron Miles, a recent discovery for me, plays trumpet.

Sasaki Roshi sexual scandal reported

NY Times coverage

new Berkeley Art Museum under construction

New Berkeley Art Museum to open in 2016 at Center and Oxford

Sycamour Slough String Band

I am also a fan of David Gans' Sycamore Slough String Band, which most of the time plays string band versions of Dead songs.

House of Lies cable tv show

I'm a big fan of House of Lies, a laugh out loud comedy about management consulting and modern business!  If you want high voltage verbal action full of self-mocking managementeze, find it here.  Available on Showtime and Amazon Instant Video...  Now to monetize the meta via concretizing the hierarchy of needs!

Monday, February 11, 2013

Beck does Bowie

Slate adds some deets and shows the vid.  This is especially for sadams.uk and Ray :-)

US youth view government role positively

According to this NY Times article, young US citizens' liberal views encompass more than marriage equality and climate change - reinforces my sense that the R's, particularly their Tea Party wing, are on the wane historically.

Friday, February 8, 2013

"Science cafes" are an interesting idea

newsdaily story describes these, which are events ala TED or Charlie Rose Brain Series on a small scale with a chance to meet people locally.  h/t to Henry

NPR is streaming the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds release

First Listen: Push the Sky Away  I'm checking it out now.

After listening: I really like this and plan to buy it!

Monday, February 4, 2013

Pot calls Kettle black/chess player (me) says "Go, Pot!"

Business Week says Matt "I Am the Grassroots" Kibbe called Rove "Orwellian" for trying to block Tea Party candidates in favor of more electable Republicans.  I am all for Republicans nominating un-electable candidates, or better yet, for a Tea Party separate from the Reeps ;-)

Friday, February 1, 2013

Did Obama undo the packing done by Bush?

Among other schemes to staff the government with extremists, the Bush administration hired many Regent University graduates.  I'd like to know if these people are still working in these positions.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Jason and others on another founder's suicide

This editorial raises questions worth reading.  As one who went down into the dark side while  day-trading/blogging/working, I relate.  Make sure you take care of yourself!

BothSidesOfTheTable blog comments as well...

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Silicon Valley housing prices rising dramatically

according to Redfin.  Good for RS and other owners...

Zakir Hussain/Bela Fleck/Edgar Meyer

If it weren't sold out, I would buy a ticket!

Special note to Dore...

color photos of Paris in 1914

Paris1914.com  Recommended to Ellen, Ross, Leonard Pitt, LoriL, and all lovers of Paris.

SF Jazz Center

SF Jazz Center named its new facility for a benefactor, the late co-founder of Oracle, Robert N. Miner, who was a special person. The space is the first stand-alone building devoted to jazz.   Excerpts of the opening night concert are available online here.   Recommended especially to sadams.uk, Mark Madrid, and Ed Miner.

Most inspiring documentary I've ever seen!

Beauty is Embarrassing, about Wayne White, brought tears of joy to my eyes.  To see such genuineness and a life of pure creativity is transforming!   Watch it!  Especially for Ross, LoriL and Ellen.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Levon on a jet plane...

I placed a hold on This Wheel's On Fire: The Levon Helm Story and while listening to episodes of Fresh Air from last year came across two interviews with him, then heard a cut from his solo release, Dirt Farmer, on last night's episode of The Grateful Dead Hour...

"We are in control of the vertical and the horizontal!"

Watch that language!

Language Log is full of linguistic humor, perfect for the Linguistics MeetUp.

Stewart Brand and Amory Lovins

In Climatewire.

Amazon Deal of the Day: Best American Writing EBooks for $1.99

This Amazon offer is good only today (not sure if this works outside the States).
Bought Essays, Short Stories, Science and Nature, and Non-Required Reading.
For good measure, added Best Buddhist (not on sale).

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Updates to previous posts

Whole Foods CEO John MacKey received a lot of press in response to his "fascism" comments.
Here is an audio interview with him about his new book and his comments.

Organizing for America is the new name for the re-purposed Obama for America organization.
The focus is to build a continuous strategy and field organizations to promote Obama's policies.
Perhaps this will counter some of the Right's strong efforts along those lines for their ideology.

High stress without managing it well this week led to my first headache in three months.  Well, you can't win them all!  "More sitting practice of meditation is recommended." -- Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

Plans for our Rio and Buenos Aires trip progress well!

Nels Cline Singers in residence in Oakland tomorrow thru Saturday

at Duende

Note: Thursday: Ben Goldberg on clarinet
Friday: Josh Jones on percussion
Saturday: Zeena Parkins on electric harp

Buddhist meditation fits the Bill

Bill Clinton hitting the cushion these days...

Monday, January 21, 2013

note to self on ZOL mountall

To make this work on Ubuntu, manually call `zpool import` before
upstart gets any of the "*-filesystems" events.  Adding an exec line
for each pool to the `/etc/init/mountall.conf` file should get the
desired result:

script
  # ...
  exec zpool import -N alfa
  exec zpool import -N bravo
  exec zpool import -N charlie
  exec mountall --daemon $force_fsck $fsck_fix
end script

The -N switch matters here, and the patched mountall from the PPA is
still required.

-Darik

Chipotle coming to Santa Rosa!

Bring those calories!

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Integral Sangha

this Santa Rosa group looks very intriguing!

DJ Gilles Peterson

Thanks to sadams.uk for his introduction to the Gilles Peterson music radio show on Saturdays on BBC6!  It's like a UK/EDM version of Dore's Tangents show on KALW, a nice variation.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Unclear on the Whole Concept

In a Mother Jones interview, Whole Foods' CEO and founder reveals he thinks Obama is headed towards fascism (his word) and that climate change is good for humans.   This stuns me!  How he can invent and manage such a well done enterprise yet hold such deluded views escapes me...  No, I won't boycott, but if I had better alternatives I would switch.

Tips on moving to San Francisco

tips I agree with and find amusing...  h/t: sadams.uk

sonics

I finally got my stereo linked up to my desktop PC via HDMI!  With the sub-woofer providing kidney massages, even the low-bit-rate MP3 recordings of radio netcasts sound pretty good!  Now to hook in the DragonFly Asynchronous Digital Audio Converter and listen to some high-bit-rate shows from the Internet Audio Archive!

negatory on the Dreamliner

Guardian UK  (h/t: Dave Winer)

an interesting review of the 787 Dreamliner

ask the pilot

I look forward to riding in one some day

dream time

I dreamed I was in a large communal household, very overcrowded.  It was a Python (computer language) cult...

New WIll Self novel review by NY TImes

Umbrella.  I have read Will Self since he appeared in The Whole Earth Review.  This is a note to myself to check this out...

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

I joined Twitter and Branch

Hoping that repair and keeping my nose clean for eleven years is enough...

I want to explore branch.com...

as I predicted, a new Civil War is promoted in response to the election

Glenn Beck comments...

Brian Eno on "we don't do politics"

via Edge.org  ( a great resource, BTW)

This point was also made by Ross, who complained that we don't do anything remotely like the well-financed, well-planned and well-staffed campaigns of the Right: home-schooling materials for K-12, arch-conservative colleges and law schools, campaigning and intern training programs for dog-catcher through Senate, think tanks and ALEC, and so on.  h/t to Steve for the link, although I am a subscriber to Edge.org as well.

add a second disk to ZOL boot RAID array

note to self: (from zfs-discuss list):


Having made a bootable installation of Linux on ZFS using this HOWTO, I was slightly puzzled as to how to add a second disk to the array and make the second disk bootable. In the end I did the steps below. They may be simple to many people, but gave me a bit of trouble. I wonder if a small addition to the HOWTO to deal with the case of adding extra disks to an existing system would be of any use?

Steps taken:
------------

Boot the system with the Linux disk and the new, blank hard disk attached.

Login and run 'sfdisk -l'. This shows from the partition tables which disk is the Linux one and which is the blank one. In this example the Linux disk is /dev/sda and the new disk is /dev/sdb.

Run 'sfdisk /dev/sda -O table' to dump the partition table of the Linux disk.

Run 'vi table' and change references to 'sda' to 'sdb' (This step probably not necessary, but won't hurt)

Run 'sfdisk /dev/sdb < table' to copy the partition table of the Linux disk to the blank disk.

Run 'sfdisk -R /dev/sdb' to get the kernel to reload the new partition table.

Do 'sfdisk -l' - both disks should have the same partition table.

Run 'ls -l /dev/disk/by-id' | grep scsi' to get the disk IDs which relate to sda and sdb. Note which is which.

Run 'zpool status'. It should show that the device ID corresponding to sda is online. Also note the pool name (eg 'tank01')

Do 'zpool attach [pool name] [existing attached disk id] /dev/disk/by-id/[id of disk to be attached]-part[x]' where 'part-[x]' refers to the partition number of the partition for ZFS storage.

Run 'zpool status'. The pool should be resilvering. Wait for this to complete before reboot.

As in the howto, do 'mke2fs -m 0 -L /boot/grub -j /dev/disk/by-id/[id of new disk]-part[x]' where [x] is the partition number for the Grub partition.

Do 'umount /boot/grub', then 'mount /dev/sdb1 /boot/grub' (assuming the Grub partition is the first one).

Do 'grub-install /dev/sdb', then 'update-grub'

Shut down the system and detach the original Linux disk. The new disk should now boot into Linux.

Monday, January 14, 2013

GMail Contacts update script

I ran into some intermittent problems with labnol's script to email selected contacts and provide a link to allow self service editing of the info.  Worked for some, permission errors for others...  So far I look like a spamming phisher because I ran it four times  :-(  sorry...

Update: I think the "errors" were the message that it is not a Google script, which arises only as a tip that it was written by labnol, not Google, Inc.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Ubuntu 12.10 problems and solutions

I lost a few days to work on a fresh install of 12.10 (was running 12.04).  Notes on the experience:

  • It turns out a fast machine with an SSD can beat the lightdm startup, leaving the machine with a blinking cursor, which happens to look like a complete grub failure; this in turn led to re-installing grub and worse - bleh :-(  Workaround: add a few seconds pause before exec lightdm
  • during installation, in the hardware scan section, modprobe I915 for Intel graphics will hang; workaround: delete i915.ko  This error was due to a regression in kernel 3.7, which was 
  • installed by adding xedgers PPA to get the NVidia-current drivers... and I could not get full resolution until I added a custom xorg.conf
  • cannot get to virtual consoles: hangs until in CTL-ALT-F7 back to X  UPDATE: edited /usr/share/nvidia-current/nvidia-current.grub-gfxpayload and commented out the example rule, ran update-grub-gfxpayload, rebooted.  This may make me vulnerable to other problems, but enables virtual consoles.

TrakDot Station

TrakDot  will arrive in April, allowing us to track our luggage anywhere in the world.

email subscription added

Down at the bottom of the page you should see a link that allows email subscriptions to this blog.
Attention: Henry

HD-BaseT is here! Yes!

Amazon sells an adaptor kit

Paying attention to what is du


Du or sie is the German flavored version of an issue that took a valued friend of mine away.  She was from California, where she married an East Coast man in Silicon Valley.  When it came time to have kids, he insisted they move to Princeton, as he did not want to them to grow up with Cali ways.  "The waiters here talk to you as if you are their best friend.  Back home they just serve you and let you get on with your conversation," he said.  I miss her and wish her well.  I, on the other hand, am third generation native Northern Californian.  "Hi, I'm David and I'll be your waiter tonight!"

Good advice from Aaron Swartz

This advice from Aaron Swartz is similar to what I told myself when I was in a bad way.  It pays off.
The whole series is worth reading, as is the blog in general.

h/t to Dave Winer.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Thoughts prompted by the suicide of Aaron Swartz

(Various pointers to coverage)

While I did not know the man, his choice to do this and his connection to the development of the Net bring to mind some thoughts.

I too once suffered from depression that brought me to my knees and to the brink of disaster.  What kept me going was the sense that we can't actually end it and can't erase and start over, that we have to address the root of things.  I dropped the non-sense pre-occupations of my life, went off the Net and into therapy, took meds, and restarted my spiritual practice.  Equally important, I found the love of a good woman, who had known me for a long time, who knew my essential core to be more than what was prominent at that time.  I got to a better place, those many years ago, and continue.  I am very grateful for this opportunity and the grace that has led to a very happy and productive life...  All Thanks...

I suspect that Aaron felt that there wasn't a viable future, that the forces weighing on him were too much.  I know that was true for one of my closest friends, who also took his own life a year ago.  I wish they both had seen a glimmer of hope for something better and had chosen a different path.

Climate change talks

These talks are worth a listen.  In the early Eighties I worked in a junior capacity for James Hansen at NASA Ames Research Center.   I recently read Michael Mann's The Hockey Stick and The Climate Wars and highly recommend it to understand the political battles, especially the so-called "Climate-gate".

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Amazon AutoRip loaded my library with a ton of music!

Amazon just announced they are providing mp3 versions of CDs I bought since 1998!  15 years of CD purchases now available online!

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

the book Subversives captures the history

Subversives provides superb analysis of the intertwined histories of J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and the Sixties student radical movement.  If you want to know something about Cointelpro, covert collaboration between the FBI and Reagan (from early years onward), FBI informant's early arming and training of the Black Panthers and many other aspects of our history, read this.  The inner details are revealed as a result of a long-running battle over Freedom of Information Act requests, which was ultimately won by the author.  While the book is very detailed, it does not repeat the error of Manning Marible's Malcolm X biography, which was weakened by excess personal trivial material.

I finally finished it last night!

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Chuck Spinney on the Afghanistan war mess

Getting to the root of the problem

testimony: my headaches have been cured by Alexander Technique

Since I began training in this three months ago I have only had one headache, which happened to be transformed on the spot to feeling great, not just relieved, when I was in for a visit.  I continue to go weekly and learn more.  It is enlightening to learn how much I contort and hold, to my detriment...  What a relief after a lifetime of pain!  For Marin County training I recommend Elaine Belle and John Baron.

Shoegazer rock originated in 8 Miles High?

Suggested by Sound Opinions show yesterday on NPR... It actually holds water!
Spacemen 3 spawned from the Byrds?!

The New School is the Old School: "I want my NCTV (Network Computer TV)"

Sadams.uk and others will recognize that in this.
Did you know Dirk is working on the Google Chrome OS?
I wonder if Ross could get by with this?

Science lessons on kindness

Yes Magazine article

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Happy New Year!

Best wishes for everyone!  I am enjoying DJ Krush Radio on Pandora, visiting with the love of my life (wife Sara), and preparing for a house party at Barbara and Michael and swing dancing tonight at WnY Warehouse!

Update: Great New Year's Eve party with local Linguistics MeetUp group, great party with Barbara and Michael and friends yesterday, then watched the US Open Swing Dance finals for 2012 on DVD.   Company party tomorrow night and Next Generation Swing Dance Club Saturday - an unusual bout of socializing for us!
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