Posts

    "How is it you came to be here," Airity asked.
    "Oh, I've been many places.  The places just sort of ... happen.  I take them in, learn from them, and the place just moves on," Efram replied.
    "Don't you mean that you move on?"
    "No," said Efram, "I don't recall ever moving myself."
    Airity looked puzzled, but decided not to ponder this particular one of Efram's mysteries for the moment.
    "Can you tell me about another place?"
    Efram looked at the girl thoughtfully and said "I think I should tell you about Fellen."

    "Fellen was a place in a valley full of life.  Trees, animals, flowers, and every manner of thing lived there in balance.  Harmony came and went from time to time, but balance was always maintained."
    "Isn't harmony a kind of balance," Airity asked.
    "Harmony is the result of balance -- the effect.  It is not a cause of balance however.  Trying to achieve harmony without balance is like trying to catch a breeze in a teacup.  Trying would make you look foolish, and even if you succeeded, you'd have nothing in your cup for proof!"  Efram laughed at his own little joke.  Airity filed this away for future pondering.
    "In any case," Efram continued, "life there existed always in balance... until a great warrior came to pass through.  So taken with the beauty and splendor of the area, he decided to retire and make his home there.  He dismounted from his horse and scouted out a site for his future home.  He ordered his two squires to help him clear the chosen site of trees and brush and to level the ground for the house's foundation.  As the men gathered their tools and began to hack at the trees, they were suddenly beset by a mass of creatures.  Birds descended from the treetops, monkeys threw down fruits and dung from the branches, and insects swarmed from all sides.  The men were forced to throw down their tools a scatter to the winds for shelter and escape."
    "That's awful!" Airity exclaimed.
    "The warrior agreed.  He and his men returned with a vengeance. They wrapped themselves in thick linens, covered their faces in gauze, and returned to continue their work.  After winning countless battles throughout his life, the warrior was determined not to lose his honor to simple forest creatures.  But they were shocked to find that termites had eaten the handles to their axes, and their swords and daggers were hung high in the trees, stolen by the monkeys.  Utterly defeated, the warrior yelled and raged at the animals.  He shook the trees with his hands and tried with all his strength to knock down the brush with his fists and feet.  After exhausting himself, he collapsed to the ground and sat leaning against the tree.  As he sat, his breast heaving, he heard laughing from nearby.  Looking around, the warrior noticed that in the trees sat several monks who were, at this very moment, laughing at him."
    "'What are you laughing at?' he shouted at them."
    "'You, of course' they replied.  'You struggle and fight against that which is clearly stronger than you, you get angry at yourself for not defeating your enemy, then when you can fight no more, you take comfort against the very trees you seek to fell.  Do you not see your own folly?'"
    "The warrior sat, stunned, and had his epiphany.  His whole life had been spent in struggle -- often in struggles not of his own making -- and now, when he was ready to retire from that life, he still sought to fight against nature itself for the sake of his own comfort and without a care for those he would hurt.  The warrior dismissed his servants and joined the monks in the trees, enlightened."
    Airity grinned at the happy ending, but asked "So where were you in all this?"
    "I was here.  Just as I always have been."
    Airity looked puzzled again.
    "You will understand one day, my daughter.  Until then, continue to watch."
    With that, Efram left Airity's room and turned off the lights.  Airity looked at the ball in the corner, now dark and covered in pinholes.  The remaining light in Airity's room seeped in, and she rose quietly and crossed the room to it.  She peeked through one of the pinholes and with the eyes of a god, looked down into the world once more.

I've been depressed the past few days -- unhappy with my career, a little lonesome since the move, etc.  Rob assigned me the task of writing for an hour a day to help me vent.  This is what came out.  There is no order to it, there is no need to respond, it's just my inner workings made outer for a change.  These are surface thoughts and some of the depth behind them.

Immovable.  Intractable. Some would call these words words of permanence; words of finality. I know though that these words are a falsehood.  Nothing – no absolute we can define with language – can be true.  To coin a phrase, the only sure thing is change.  I’ve given a lot of thought lately to the things in my life that I think are intractable.  Things that, on the outside, look like permanent conditions of my existence.  I know in my mind that they are not though, and I have set my mind to the task of overcoming this obstacles.  I have decided that in order to overcome these obstacles, I must be like water: fluid, stable, conforming, yet gently and slowly changing my environment.  Like the waters of the ocean, supporting myriad things in life, yet eroding the very rocks over which it flows, I must become as water. 

            Not an easy task, to be sure.  But I am, as my mother once described me and information gatherer.  I know that I do not know, so I seek to learn.  I look through books, through my past experiences, through the role models I have and have had in the past, and through modern means like the internet.  And armed with this new information, I make small changes in myself and to the vessel in which I reside.  I both live in the life I’ve created and I change it to conform to my wishes – flowing over rock and crag, smoothing the rough spots, stirring up the settling silt, and redepositing it where it serves the highest good.  

 

            I recently met a man – a new friend in my new life in my new home – who is like a mirror.  He is me if I had been born earlier in a different place.  His mannerisms, his affect, his trials and tribulations are ones I can relate to and internalize.  Some of these reflections are comfortable, some are less so.  But I welcome the image as I welcome the new day – another opportunity to see the world as it is, and another opportunity to see how the world sees me.  Why is this important, because the world is the rock I must shape – the rough stone I must smooth over.  It is the reality I must manipulate to bring my perception of what I think it should be to fruition.  It may seem grandiose to think of manipulating the world, but the idea is simple:  I do not have to change the whole world, just the piece of it that interacts with me, and this is well within the capability of the water-soul.

 

            I spoke today of changing jobs.  I spoke of expression, of wanting more than anything to be an artist – a creator.  For now, I do that through words.  I find it a crude medium; so fixed, so limited in its scope and so easily misinterpreted.  This crudity is the reason I put no stock in the Bible – it will only ever be a text, written down by man, expressed through a man’s mind, a man’s hand, and limited by a man’s intellect.  God, if he wanted us to truly know his will, would never have chosen this medium for his divine power because that power is so quickly and easily diluted by man’s limited ability to comprehend the power of communication.  I think instead that he or she daily chooses to express divine will in sunsets, storms, squalls and auroras – truly expressions of creativity and divinity.  Had he never seen one, man would never have conceived of an event in nature composed purely of color or air or water in such massive motion – his mind is too small, his vision too meager.  Let God reveal herself in nature.  And let me reveal myself through my contribution to culture and art; not through my mending of broken computers and trivial music players.  Let me be the music, the photograph, or the program that brings life and enjoyment of those devices to the user.  But for now – let me be the words that inspire someone to think or do or move.  Let me be the catalyst.  Please world, let me just be.

Just in case you're interested, the web server is also back up and I've set up a more memory-friendly name through DynDNS.  Check out the pictures of the new house at http://imeister.is-a-geek.net when you get the chance.

We finally got internet service on Monday, and I just got to rebuild the network last night.  The web server is back up, and I finally got around to registering an easier-to-remember web address.  The new page can be found at imeister.is-a-geek.net and it's available now.  I'll be updating it soon with pics of the new house.  Enjoy!

We left Indy around 5:30pm on Friday.  It was late, but couldn't be avoided.  We forgot our plants, but nothing else I don't think.  =(

The trip was ... eventful.  First, we picked up the tow dolly Friday afternoon.  I asked them to hook it up for me.  They did.  Specifically, they did it wrong.  On Emerson on the way home, the dolly popped off the ball and started flailing on the street, connected only by its safety chains.  When I stopped, it became firmly wedged under the truck and there was nothing I could do. I tried flagging people down, asking a couple of teens if I could use their phone, but no one wanted to help.  So I drove it home that way.  Just as I turned on to Riley, it came free.  Rob and I read the manual and reconnected it ourselves and loaded the truck.  It was fine for the trip.  We drove through the night, stopping 3-4 times to eat and walk Dustin, who slept most of the way in the Honda.  Darwin was loose in the cab most of the time... until he tried to plant himself on my lap while I was driving.  I tried to move him, but he was so scared he SOAKED my right leg in pee.  I stopped and hosed off my shorts in a rest stop bathroom so I didn't have to smell it any more.  He stayed in the crate after that.  We stopped in  PA to get the keys from Rob's grandmother's house, then arrived at the new house around 8:30a.  We got the animals inside, unpacked the Fit, unloaded the Nissan from the tow carrier, and tried to return the dolly to Budget.  Instead of returning it, we got bad directions, ended up on a no-outlet street, and couldn't turn around.  I'd never reversed while towing something before, so I didn't want to try.  I used an onlooker's phone to call Budget, who refused to help, so we fumbled the dolly into the same onlooker's driveway, I turned the truck around, and then we reconnected the dolly.  An hour later, we were at risk for running late to meet the unloading helpers, so we went back home.  We met them just in time, and our friends Ed and Alvin, and we unloaded completely in an hour and 20 minutes.  Can you believe it?  Ed and Alvin went out and brought subs back for us.  We waited for the cable guy but he never showed, so we returned the truck. We were in bed around 5:30p.  We slept more or less uninterrupted until 8:30a this morning.  Fortunately, we managed to get connected to the one open network in range, and have a modicum of slow internet access.

And now we begin unpacking.  HUGE THANKS to Lisa and Robert again for all their help loading.  We couldn't have done it without you.

The time approaches!  The end is nigh!

We rent the truck this morning.  Tomorrow, friends will come and help us load the myriad boxes, furniture and the piano.  The day after, we leave. 

This week has been a little like watching the Millenium Falcon trip into light speed: stars swirling lazily outside the viewport until suddenly everything becomes a blur of light stripes and the inertial dampers strain to keep people from getting squashed against a rear bulkhead.

(I know.  I'm a geek.  Deal with it.)

I'm taking my web server down today, but I'm leaving up my other PC so I still have e-mail.  I'm not sure when we'll be able to get everything set up again, but I'm hoping it's no later than Monday.  Phone will be down, incidentally, after the 4th.

"Helmsman, lay in a course for Delaware.  Maximum warp."

I have the job in Delaware. There is a bit of paperwork to do yet, but the position is mine. I spoke to the manager there today, and the guy who wanted to transfer out got his position, so I get mine. Yay me! :)

So, Adin regularly sends me the links of interesting articles he finds.  I usually click the links, assess whether the article interests me, and move on.  This one caught my attention.

Rarely do I find "new" design ideas very innovative.  Most of the time, sites like Yanko Design end up showcasing interesting but unpractical (or just ungodly expensive) re-works of things we already have or use.  This one, however, took an ages-old design and made it into something A) truly useful, B) eco-friendly, C) practical, E) versatile and D) aesthetically pleasing; all the elements of true, forward-thinking innovation.

It's a gravity-powered lamp.  The idea is reminiscent of those hook-shaped gyro toys of my youth combined with an hourglass.  That aside, think of the implications: emergency lighting, lighting in no-electricity parts of the world, no-power-consumption lighting in brown-out prone areas (*cough*CALIFORNIA*cough*), camping, boating... This is truly brilliant.  It could come in a variety of sizes (and durations, subsequently) and could be made 'rugged' for outdoor applications. 

I want 10 of them.  Now.  Let's go.  Chop chop.

I've moved a lot in my time.  And I don't say that in the frivolous sense that I've moved several times.  I've moved at least 20 times in my life.  There is one constant:  packing sucks.  UNpacking is a joy.  It's like Christmas in comparison, because by the time you reach the end of the packing stage, you're just chucking stuff in boxes willy-nilly and hoping you don't run out of cardboard, tape, or packing material, and when you start unpacking THOSE boxes, the contents truly are a surprise.

In any event, I've started sorting and packing for the move to Delaware.  I know it's still a month or so off, but the way I put off unpleasant tasks, this strategy seemed wise.  I started in the hardest room, the office, because I could have the music on, a chat going with Rob, and a comfy chair to start in.  I figure if I'm going to be doing something I hate, I might as well be comfortable doing it.  Darwin has been keeping me company most of the day, baffled at why I keep mucking about with my hands and NOT using them to pet him.  Dustin is just pissed that the cat isn't getting shooed out, but the reason is simple:  the cat has the good sense to stay out of the way of chair wheels and open boxes; the dog doesn't.

Anyway, in the course of sorting and sifting, I came across an old backup CD that I made about 7 years ago.  (No, I don't throw things away if I can help it.)  I posted some of the since-lost pictures of me that I hadn't seen in a while and came to the conclusion that, no matter how much I protested, I was hot back then.  Too bad it's all gone to pot now. *heavy sigh*

So, the company that used to run my personal website has refused to allow the use of a style sheet.  He sited 'security concerns' and said that it can be used to run/install spyware on remote machines.  While I admit I'm no expert yet, I find it at least as plausible to say that the same could be done with javascript, which was already in place on my old site.  Plus, I could easily have built the CSS directives into the web pages themselves and circumvented his authority, but I've put a lot of time into the redesign, and frankly, doing so defeats the purpose of using CSS in the first place.  So instead, I've ordered a cheap-o refurb PC that's going to get Ubuntu server and I'll host it myself.  It will be good experience with a side of web design that I haven't been exposed to before, it will teach me another marketable skill, and then I can design to my little heart's content while singing the "screw you, gayhomes.net" tune I've just made up.

Bitter, party of one.