The Elaine Report: Feb 7 2013

Nothing to report because I watched this video 
and all the headlines seemed terribly ridiculous and petty afterwards.

However, I do recommend this post if you have an interest in letting a living award-winning author know your opinion on the reselling and lending of ebooks and audiobooks.

The Elaine Report: Feb 6, 2013

From Richard III to Beutel-Ei Nr. 1 in 8 steps.

• Reconstructing Richard III's Face So glad they did this! The portraits existent are so flat and characterless. There's a good description of digital facial construction and its limitations.
• Indian women robbed of their uteruses by money grubbing doctors ... and the government does nothing. Many women now convinced they cannot recover from illness without a hysterectomy. 
• New York city negotiating with Air BnB to keep visitors off the street. I was an Air BnB host for about a year. I met some intriguing, kind travelers who appreciated my local expertise. And helped pay my bills.
• Turns out being miles underground is the best way to study dark matter and get real peace and quiet.
• Microscopic nutrients from the Sahara rain on the Amazon. We are all one ecosystem, ya'll! Not a lot of other facts or explanations in this brief article with a Nikon-sponsored video of lovely shots of the Sahara.
• 21 Things You Should Never Buy at a Garage Sale. Full of ooky bugs and germs! Would have been better to tell us what we should buy.
• Internet to be replaced by esoteric time stream. Note the napkin sketch at the end of the article. Doesn't really help. Tumbled it.
• Technology aging backwards? I don't get it. Read about three paragraphs and became overcome by dark matter.
• Seamless beautiful backpack made of wool. The artist named it an Egg Bag. It is sort of egg shaped. Looks more like a Lady Bug to me. Pinned it.

One Mystical Boat

In her book, The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron writes about sticking with one boat, going deep along one path instead of shopping religions every time you come up against pain. During one of my recent stays at Yogaville, I had a consultation with Mataji (Swami Gurucharanananda) who advised me that “sampling here and there is not a path.”

My first path was Catholic. I had nothing to do with that. I was born Catholic and followed that path for 18 years until one day I looked at the genuflecting congregation and saw that they were just following a routine. There was no spirituality involved.* They had this memorized routine for mass: words they said, sitting, standing, kneeling. None of it was spiritual. I could see right through them. That was when I decided to go on a spiritual quest.

I began my quest by partying because I was a freshman in college and that’s what freshman do. After a couple of deathly experiences, I began investigating the Mormon church because my best friend and everyone we knew were doing that. So, I “investigated” and “prayed about it” and “received a testimony” that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was the one true church.

I transferred to Brigham Young University. I met a man and got married in the temple and brought my children up in the convenant. I was a Mormon for 18 years. And then one day it hit me that there was no spirituality in my path and I left that church.

For years I wandered with no path until I met a group who had decided to make up their own religion. So I did, too. I created my own goddess. From there I began investigating the basic and ancient religions, and acquiring gods and goddesses. After 12 years of snatching the best bits from other religions, I finally wanted to know what I really believed. I took the famous Belief-O-Matic quiz and learned that I was first of all Neo-Pagan, second New Age, third a Liberal Quaker, and fourth Unitarian Universalist (UU).

I had heard murmurings of Neo-Paganism in the various online discussion groups over the years but figured that real pagans were hard to find——what with the Inquisition and all. I felt I had a grasp on New Age and wasn’t interested in Liberal Quakers because sitting around not talking didn’t seem like a good way to investigate spirituality.** There was a UU church I drove by frequently and that seemed a convenient place to start.

In the Sunday services I found the first spiritual lectures I could relate to. The minister spoke from experience with facts and research. It was a thoughtful approach with nuggets of wisdom that catalyzed my quest. I joined the local UU congregation and plunged into a plethora of small groups investigating various spiritual paths i.e., Taoism, Buddhism, Humanism, and Yoga.

This led me into the wider community where I joined a local Buddhist group, a local pagan church, and a Shamanistic journeying group. This has been my path for five years: investigating and living various paths in an earnest effort to walk my own personal path. Which is what led me to Pema Chodron and Sri Swami Satchidananda. UU reorganized and focused my spiritual quest.

I am in one boat. A boat of my own device. A boat that lets me investigate creeks and rivers, canals and oceans. With it I’ve discovered there is only one path: the path to my own true nature. This is what Buddha, Jesus, Patanjali, Guru Nanak, and Mohammed were all talking about. True spirituality is the path to one’s true nature. The one and only boat. Or in Yogaville parlance: Many Paths. One Truth.

---

*As part of my investigations through my UU membership, I have reclaimed the parts of Catholicism that are good and precious to me.

**It’s ironic about my aversion to Quaker silence because that’s a big part of my practice now: meditation. Sitting around quietly, breathing and noticing. Also, the Richmond Quakers sponsor the Dances of Universal Peace. Shows what prejudice will keep you from.

You can log in but you can never leave

Bumped! A standard occurrence since I got my free Linden home and land.

I still have a paying account in Second Life (SL) due to the weekly bonus being enough to cover my quarterly dues. I also have a free alternate account and thought that having a paid account stopped all the spurious logouts. I was wrong.

Regional density of my home in Second Life. Every grayed square represents a house.

I availed myself of the free home and land deal which comes with any paid account. I chose an Asian theme thinking that I would be online while most of Asia was offline. I was right about that. What I hadn't realized from the enticing images of free homes is that the homes are packed in. Every square inch of available space is crammed with houses. No yards, no gardens, no public areas – in short, no free space at all. How many 512 parcels can you fit into a region? The Linden answer: too many!

Continental density of my home land. Obviously the servers weren't made for this kind of greed.

The set up process was easy, if a little funky. I had to log in from the email notification and not the online landmark to actually log into my home. However, once at home, it's nearly impossible to leave. 90% of the time when I try to teleport elsewhere I end up logged out. In the few experiments I've conducted, I have been able to teleport if I log back in right away and then teleport. Is this how it's supposed to be? I think not.

If I were a Linden, I'd try to make SL enticing, easy, and fun, not a technological, mystical, unexplainable, frustrating horror.

Believing the Grass is Green Now

Crocus, early spring

In the coffee shop, the man across the table made a couple of phone calls explaining he was drunk and needed detox. He said he was a week behind on his rent. He said he would walk in. He said he was located three miles from where we were sitting.

I got up to leave. He said, "I've got a situation here."

I said, "We all have situations."

He said, "I'm about to fix it."

I smiled and said, "Good luck with the fix," and left.

All addicts think that everyone else has a perfect life and they are the only ones to fail. This is an illusion we all share, to some extent. Everyone thinks the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. It's not.

Everyone has an extraordinary life. Everyone has problems and situations. We spend all of our time "fixing" things to make them right, or quiet, or peaceful, or better, or whatever.

The fact is we live in a river of events. There is always at least one situation to fix, usually more. There is no escape. There is no fix.

There is only the way, the path, fate, a higher power, faith, or whatever spirit brings you assistance. Some times it's harder than others to keep that belief, to go on. This doesn't mean believing is wrong or that we haven't got enough belief. It only means that things are really, really difficult at this moment.

And, as we know, this too will pass.

gobledeegook here geek glop easy

Still working on trying to get WordPress to do what I know it can do. Or, rather, to get my head to understand plugins. If that fails, then to get head to understand coding. Ack!

Obviously I'm not a coder. I am putting in this time so that I can reap the rewards of hard labor by being able to easily upload and add new content for the foreseeable future. I'm going down the list of WordPress gallery plugins hoping for one that will work as a portfolio viewer.

I click on a link in the list to a page about the gallery plugin hoping to see first and foremost to see a demo of the plugin and then maybe some explanatory text. What mostly happens is I end up on a page full of text with links to stuff I don't understand like alpha and beta versions, open coding sources, and, oh, incidentally, here's link to the actual plug in itself. Most frustrating was a plugin site that linked to screenshots of the plugin demo sites. After much digging I did discover links to the actual sites, most of which are obsolete.

The best bet so far is Grand Flash Album Gallery which offers this happy little 14 minute video to show you how easy it is to use.
GRAND FlAGallery WordPress plugin tutorial from pasyuk on Vimeo.
Am I the only one who's first interest is NOT in what the latest news is from the developer?

Current Fads
Listening. Marketing Mentor Podcast and Genius Mixes (Brit-Pop & Rock Mix: based on U2, Coldplay, Radiohead and others); hungry birds
Watching. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)
Activity. keeping warm
Gadget. WordPress
News Source. Google News
Reading. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein; The Designer's Guide to Marketing and Pricing - Ilise Benun and Peleg Top; Story - Robert McKee
Writing. marketing plan

It's Not the President's Fault

I recently had a conversation with a friend who relayed to me her belief that employment in the US most likely is about only 85%. Officially I think it's about 90%, not taking into account those who have dropped off the unemployment lists. I'll buy that some have given up and that some are under employed (forced to work part time or for less than industry standard). So, let's say that employment is around 85% (unofficially). Pair that with a cute statistic I saw in the news that about 70% of those employed are afraid of losing their jobs. Interpolated, this could mean that just about everyone who has a job is afraid of losing it. This is fear factor.

Let's also combine the fact that President Obama's approval rating is falling. According to a newscast I watched (sorry I can't remember which one, might have been CNN), the low confidence in job security is to blame for this loss of approval. Seems like kind of a long shot to me. After all, Obama has done a whole bunch of things in the first six months of his presidency which could affect that rating. Also, let's remember that Obama was not just a candidate, but a super candidate that we all hoped would save us. (New Hope, anyone?) Based on these ideas, I think we can say that Obama may have started out with a high approval rating but it was based on him turning out to be Superman or maybe Spiderman.

Folks, the issues in this economy go way back to the beginning of George W. Bush's reign of terror. Some go back even further. US finances have long been based on faulty notions that there will always be more money and if we run out we'll make more. Turning around this sort of thinking and getting the military away from buying $1,000 hammers is going to take some time. It won't happen overnight or in six months. It won't happen even in four years. All the president can do at this point is make a start. The best we can do is support him and offer up whatever knowledge and experience we have of sound financial practices.

It's not his fault.