Something strikes a resonance. Art, is in a loose transliteration of Tolstoy, a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another.
Resonance, or being on the same frequency, is in a way that connection.
Shit happens.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Samuel Clemens
Recently I come across a number of references to Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and I have been reminded that he is not just "that guy who wrote Huckleberry Finn" but was a social and political activist and was far more prolific in his outspoken and controversial opinions than the average person is taught to believe. Here's Wikipedia's summary:
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an Americanhumorist, satirist, lecturer and writer. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called theGreat American Novel,[2] and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is also known for his quotations.[3][4] During his lifetime, Twain became a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists and European royalty.
Twain enjoyed immense public popularity, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. American author William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."[5]
Alas, like so much of what is said in the world, America has chosen to pick the idyllic and beautiful things to commemorate and brushes the realistic and sometimes ugly truths under the rug of time and sheer mass of human accomplishments. In Mark Twain's own words:
I can just taste the sarcasm in that quote . . . yum!
About the tenth thing in the past few months that I have run across by Mark Twain is this cartoon clip from a claymation film titled The Adventures of Mark Twain. Where I saw it originally, the author remarked that "it is definitely not for children." I very much disagree. Hiding the truth and "all things in the least bit unpleasant" from our children does them no favor.
I feel that much of the time people use that as an excuse because they don't want to take the time to sit with their children and talk to them about it. Give the children a chance to give their own thoughts about the story, and to speculate about what the author might have had in mind. Discuss it. And, Oh my God, THINK ABOUT IT!
I believe doing that gives the next generation an opportunity to create their own thoughts and opinions -- instead of having ours forced upon them. It gives them the opportunity also to see and understand moral questions and to gain the experience to make their own decisions of what is right and what is wrong.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are some things kids do not need to see . . . gratuitous violence and most erotica are some of those things. But this piece doesn't fall into those categories by any stretch.
Mark Twain titled this unfinished story The Mysterious Stranger. It is a moral story. It is a comment on the "damned human race." When a stranger with unusual powers comes to town, be careful what you wish for . . . you may get it.
It is a beautifully done animation. And even though it is adapted and presented in another media, I believe it keeps to the spirit of Twain's original:
There you have it. Mark Twain. One of my heroes.
DicedLife.com World Premier
Back when I met Jeremy and Joe almost 10 years ago, one of the first things that they showed me was a bunch of handwritten comedy skits that they called DicedLife. The skits were a hybrid mix of comedy and parody that is ever so slightly twisted. There's "Mentos" the parody of the candy where instead of inspiring love it inspires hate in the sucker [sic]. There's "Licks-All", a parody on Lysol which kills 99.9 percent of bugs. Unfortunately the .1 percent fights back. And then there's the guy who sets his Car "Alarm" when he goes to take a nap in the drivers seat - just to make sure he wakes up.
They guys had a lot of imagination, but no resources. They lacked the budget, camera and production facilities to edit, produce and publish them (that was back in the days before YouTube and WebCams.)
Ever since then Joe has been wanting to do it, and a lot has changed since then, with video editing being available as a "standard" option of Windows and YouTube being the publishing center of the internet world. (The vidiots united.)
Finally about a month ago Joe bellied up to the bar and put money down on the domain names DicedLife.com, .mobi, .tv and .net, and the last couple of weeks I've been creating a web site for him and Jeremy.
Working with a monthly budget of zip, limited time, and hosting them on my hosting platform, we have pieced together a decent site. I even learned CSS for this one. And we went live on "August 30, 2008 . . . a day that will live in infamy . . . "
One of the developmental challenges has been to ingegrate other services into the site, such things as forum, store and a news feed. I love getting into a new thing and learning it, but it takes so much time and I can't always afford that, so I keep my eye open for solutions that are easier, but still full featured.
Recently I think I found a "canned" solution to the forum that will work for us. Lefora.com is a new forum hosting company which is offering free forum hosting (with minor ads) and they are running a promotion so that we can set up a sub-domain as forum.dicedlife.com and have it redirect to Lefora. I hope it all works, as the forum is easy, simple and actually looks good along side the site design for DicedLife. Also, you can tweak the CSS, so I can go in and make changes there as I make changes to the DicedLife CSS. Here's the "publicity" post for DicedLife.com:
DICEDLIFE.com - OUT TO SMASH INTO EVERY FUNNY BONE IN SIGHT!DicedLife.com is really coming at you now. We've got all the skits and clips together in one place, we've got the regular LoTechTV shows in production and we've done our first Live Broadcast! Things are moving and changing daily, and give us a month and we will be sneaking up there on the charts. Look out all you comedy sites! We're on the move.Soon we will be announcing our new forum for people who visit our site. Watch for it in the news. We're using a relatively new forum hosting company called Lefora. They got fed up with all the "sameness" of the other forum software out there and started their own fresh approach. (Sound familiar? DicedLife?) We wanted a place where we could administer it without spending hours setting up the forum and where our friends could come and post without all the hassles and signing up like most forums. They have a great fresh look for forums that's different, and we can customize it easier than silly old phpbb and vBulletin. Besides they host it for free!You can get free forum hosting by lefora by visiting their site.Other things in the works are more graphics, and preview pictures of the skits. As we add new features to the site, the site will evolve also so it's more snazzy and easy to use. But watch out - - it'll never stay the same long.DicedLife . . . smashing into your funny bone since 1995 . . . now with a .com version!
I really hope that Joe and Jeremy do well and keep on it and keep improving. I'm meeting with them on Tuesday to show them how to encode video and get better results on the web. They have worked so hard for so long.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Google Browser Sync
Many of you are painfully aware of the fact that Google have discontinued the Google Browser Sync extension as of the release of Firefox 3.0. I wrote a post to the Google-Firefox-Extensions support group ranting about Google and they chose not to approve the message and it did not post to the group.
Here is the original message as I received it back from GoogleGroups when I submitted it:
Subject: Discontinue Google Browser Sync Suddenly = The Worst Possible Press for Google
This is all my personal opinion except where noted.
FACT: Google has revealed less than a week before Firefox 3 release
that it will not update the Google Browser Sync (GBS) extension to
work with Firefox 3, leaving thousands of users who wish to take
advantage of FF3 and the enhancements it offers.
That makes me *begin* to doubt Google. Yahoo used to be a great
service with many great features, and the leader, but now look at
them. Before that Lycos and AltaVista had a good share of the
market. Each one lost market share when they failed to keep up in
the quickly moving internet application development and public
perception marketplace.
Google has remained on top now because they are good. And they remain
good. They keep up. They develop more. Their applications are more
innovative.
With the discontinuance of GBS they have put doubt in the minds of
thousands, if not a million users: Will Google do this to the product
I rely on? Personally I use Gmail, GBookmarks, GHistory, GNotebook,
GDocs, GCalendar, and many more.
Within the past few weeks, I have not only become aware of backing up
my valuable data, but to actively search for alternatives. If this is
now the policy of Google, to abandon users with little or no warning,
then I need safer alternatives.
I may find better alternatives, but I suspect in some cases, I will
not. I started using Google products because they were good, not
because they were Google.
I point out one fact that Google has failed to take into account: You
said in your announcement that the team that had developed GBS had
"moved on to other projects." That is because they could. They built
a good product. The users had little trouble with it. It didn't
require massive amounts of support. THE USERS USED IT, THEY LIKED
IT, AND IT WAS GOOD. Now, the world has moved along a bit further,
and what you did then is no longer current technology. It needs to
be updated. Make it good like it was. So users will use it, they
will like it and it will be good. Isn't that the Google Way? Or is
that being discontinued too?
Google: Take note: You have lost more than just a little bit of
image. Time will tell. So will the actions of Google from this
point on.with GBS. I implore you to update it. It will be worth more
to you in the future than you can see now.
There may be other alternatives on the horizon, they may ultimately be
better. Maybe. Maybe not. It all depends on you, Google. Whether
you support your users now while the development of other alternatives
is still a non-stable concept. Who knows, you may update your product
so that it is ultimately better and easier to migrate upward than will
the Mozilla Beast. If you fail to try, you fail not only the users,
but yourself.
I went on and posted a few variants to this on other sites, including Lifehacker.com where the "original/official" announcement of Google's decision was posted.
Google still hasn't released my original post, but they did release a number of posts made after.
One of those posts was a link to a hastily prepared code.google.com repository of the Google Browser Sync source code.
I hope one of the users out there have the time and energy to update it for Firefox 3. I won't have time to even think about it until next week, and I'm not sure I can dredge up enough lost knowledge to do any serious coding again.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King, Jr. must have been an amazing individual to meet. He was essentially a small town Baptist preacher until he was literally bombed into the Civil Rights Movement in 1955. For the next 13 years he was at the forefront of that movement which forever changed America, and the world.
Much of our society today revolves around the concepts and issues of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. It always amazes me that from virtually every speech he ever gave there is one or more exceptional "pearls" or wisdom. He obviously had something very specific to say in each of his speeches, and he said it. Succinctly.
Here are a some new (to me) quotes from the esteemed Dr. King:
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." Strength to Love, 1963
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
"Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment: Life's most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?"
Chairman Shakespeare
Today's New York Times has an interesting article about executives studying Shakespeare to help them understand vulnerabilities to which the powerful are susceptible. In the New York Times Theater Feed:
Lessons in Shakespeare, From Stage to Boardroom
Triumvirate
I'm still puzzling over a three questions that came out of the meeting on Thursday.
The first: When it was brought up, Jim Peterson expressed lack of knowledge about the problems in the fly loft. This information was clearly explained in my report, which he said he had read. The issue of the water pipes built across the fly loft were clearly explained in an email I sent to him on October 4. I followed it up a couple of days later with a cd of pictures of the problems that I gave to his secretary, Theresa. The problem of the sprinkler pipe at the top of the loft was document in an series of emails that he was copied on from myself, Jim Meland with the architect and the Cascade Fire Protection people starting on February 5th. There is an email where Theresa relays Jim's instructions, so there is little doubt that he was appraised. I just don't understand why he would "forget" about any problem that was a serious barrier to the use of the building as intended.
The second: Dr. Van Ausdle made the statement "We haven't de-commissioned China Pavilion." There was nothing in my report about China Pavilion being taken out of service. Where had this question come from? All three of us responded to the effect that the HVAC system had been off completely for the first month of the quarter. We had no janitorial service for a couple of weeks and now, only weekly walk throughs to empty the trash and check the bathroom papers. Kevin, when faced with complaints from the students of the building being cold, had to ask Matt Graves to turn it on, which was done on October 19. Dr. Van Ausdle turned to Jim Peterson and asked "was it?" Jim's response was unclear. He said it was on during the summer for the costumer, but was turned off during the period of no occupancy to save energy. He didn't comment on the school year.
I received an email from Cathy Nelson yesterday with signups for the Safety Committee elections. It basically said that there could be one nominee from each building, and the 12 who received the most votes would be the committee members. It said that if no one had signed up for a particular building you could write in a name. This was sort of exciting, as I have always had an interest in safety issues, and I didn't figure that anyone would be signed up for China Pavilion yet. The attachment had a list of the buildings on campus, and the safety committee nominee for each building.
China Pavilion was not listed as a building. Interesting.
The third: During the meeting yesterday, during Dr. Van Ausdle's tirade, during any other meeting or discussion I've had on the subject, the question has never come up as to whether I might be wrong about some of the facts. Dr. Van Ausdle did say that I was wrong to write the report, and therefore make vulnerable the leadership of the college and "their" architect, but he didn't refute anything (except for his comment on the de-commissioning of China Pavilion, which I had not written about.) So no one is arguing with what I said, just my right to say it.
It's my understanding that I work for the State of Washington. That's who administers the payroll system that issues my compensation checks. The State of Washington has a number of agencies, one of which is the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, and the State Board administers and funds Walla Walla Community College.
That makes Walla Walla Community College a State Agency, and therefore a public institution. Public institutions are open to public scrutiny, and it is my understanding that any and all records of public institutions are open to public inspections, except in the case of personnel records, student records and information pertaining to national security. Which means that any member of the public can come in and ask to see how their money has been spent, and given reasonable expense and effort rules, must be given access to these records.
This is taken from the Access Washington Web Site:
Washington law (Chapter 42.56 RCW) requires that identifiable public records be made available promptly to members of the public for inspection and copying upon request. Only records that are exempt by law may be withheld from disclosure. . . .
These exemptions are generally intended to prevent invasion of privacy and the use of public records for personal, commercial or political gain.
Bullies and Cowards
I am still stinging from the verbal confrontation by Dr. Van Ausdle. I just don't understand why he would come unglued and be so unprofessional. Surely, as a leader of a Community College he has ended up in an embarrassing situation before. Most effective leaders would realize it is just a bump in the road: do damage control and move on. Some reasons that come to mind for him to have behaved so coarsely is that 1) he is not able to deal with the situation in his own mind, or 2) the situation has touched close to an area where he is vulnerable; i.e. there is potential for discovering additional damaging information.
I think psychologists would say that Bullies and Cowards are the ones most likely to try to intimidate.
If you have a clear conscience, you have a more stable and clear mind and you know that the truth will eventually prevail.
Tick Tick Tick Tick . . .
There hasn't been a tock.
Maria Gonzalez talked to the people at the college yesterday. She called Kevin later in the afternoon to ask him a few questions, and aparently set up an appointment to come and talk to him next week. Kevin wondered whether or not he should contact Kathy Thornton. I said definitely he should. She should be completely aware of the meeting. She should be there if she feels it is warranted. Kevin does not need to put himself any further into the fire for not keeping everyone informed.
There was no communication from Jim Peterson or anyone else at the top for that matter. I emailed Jim Peterson to confirm that I was supposed to move ahead with the purchase of the lighting equipment at about 11am yesterday. As of now, I still haven't received a reply. It should have been a simple yes or no.
Tick, Tick,
Friday, November 09, 2007
Backwards?
I swear I didn't think of this before. I swear I didn't search all around looking and looking for a name for my blog. It just popped up.
The first word I thought of was scintillious. I wasn't sure of the definition, so I looked it up in my Funk & Wagnalls. "To give off sparks, to be witty; sparkle" Nope, not really me. Maybe sometimes witty. Maybe. But definitely no sparkle.
I look up the column a few words. I come on the definition of scilicet. "namely, to wit, that is to say." Hmmm. I read on: scīre licit it is permitted to know. Bingo! That's it.
I swear I didn't think of this before two minutes ago. Scīre is Erics backwards.
I don't know why I didn't, either, as one of my nicknames is cire llewop (Sire Leewahp.) In fact, that's the name in the indica on The Little Theatre Newsletter that I design and print.
Speaking of The Little Theatre Newsletter. . . You can view it here.
Sleepless in Walla Walla
I find myself awake at 3am. It is not usual for me. Usually when I go to sleep, I am out like a log and don't wake until my alarm goes off in the all too early morning. Not that I don't occasionally work until 3, I did last night, but that was only to finish a newsletter that had to be in the mail yesterday. So I am tired, and really should sleep, but I am unable to.
I was in a meeting today, or rather yesterday now, with Jim Peterson, Jon Stratton and Kevin Loomer at WWCC. We were talking through how to complete the theater/performing arts facility that is attached to the new Health Sciences building. We were actually getting somewhere. Dr. Steve Van Ausdle walks in and interrupts. He says he is very angry. He says he is angry about the report I wrote: "Primary Shortcomings of the New Performing Arts Facility at WWCC, October 25, 2007" He says he says he found the report very un-complementary. He says he is angry about the Union-Bulletin apparently having the report. He says he is angry that I attacked "the college's architect." He says he has lost all respect for "you." He says "we" built the performing arts center or maybe it is a lecture hall he says. He continues, "is this the way you pay us back?" He says "we" have talked in the past about eliminating the theater program, looking at Jon Stratton. He says maybe "we" should revisit that question. He starts a sentence "If I find out that the Union Bulletin had that report before I got it . . ." I retreat into my shell and tune out for a moment. Compose. Calm.
I miss the end of his statement.
Throughout this, you can obviously tell he is furious. Possibly beyond furious. The most disturbing thing was his eyes.
I have reached a point where I can actually say something. I say "I only intended the report to be complete, . . ." my pause is interrupted.
Jon Stratton eventually speaks up and basically claims some responsibility. He had the report for a week before it was given to Dr. Van Ausdle. I don't think Jon was that clear in what he said, but that is the fact. Jon eventually goes on and actually gets a bit angry himself, defending me and saying how hard I have worked for the college.
Things calm down, but only a very little. The tea kettle is no longer trying to blow its lid, its just actively steaming away.
Eventually Dr. Van Ausdle leaves. Jim Peterson says a few more words, and at one point, you can see he is trying to control his anger. He succeeds. Things are summarized, we have some actions planned. We all walk out in a daze. We don't talk about the action plan. We talk about what happened with the President.
Kevin said ". . . that, that was demonic." My thought was irrational.
Irrational? Demonic? Where were we? I thought I was at a Washington State Community College. Maybe I was wrong. Then again, I usually know where I am. It's never a hard thing to figure out. Darn. Never say "never."
What I remember most, and what I wrote down when I got home was that he talked about respect, and I thought that was a a very interesting way for him to earn respect. I also wrote down that thought it was interesting that we "owe" him for the performing arts center.
If anyone is owed, it is the students and the State of Washington.
I am tired. It is almost 10:00 when I finally get home from the rehearsal at The Little Theatre. I go to sleep fairly soon after I get home. I am still thinking about it, because when I wake up at 1:45, it is the first thing on my mind.
I have a headache. I take some ibuprofen. I try to read a novel. My little black cat wants attention. I close my eyes. I try to sleep.
3am. I am still awake. It's all been going over in my mind. Or my mind has been going over it. Whichever or both. I think: "I need to write." I think "livejournal." I did that once for a couple of years. That was a different me. That was along time ago.
What's the biggest blogging service? Isn't it blogspot? I think so.
I get up and go to the computer. www.blogspot.com. My password keeper prompts me that it has a saved password. I say "what the hell?" I've never been to blogspot before. I look closer. Google. I smile. I like Google. They think.
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