Dilemma
David Budbill

I want to be
famous
so I can be
humble
about being
famous.

What good is my
humility
when I am
stuck
in this
obscurity?

Source: Good Poems selected by Garrison Keillor (via inwardoutward.org)

Love this.  Love this a lot.

Never Too Late

George Eliot

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Source: Pseudonym of author Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880

(From Inward Outward – http://www.inwardoutward.org/?p=1144)

There are still clever writers in the world.  A quote from a somewhat lengthy, moderately dry and technical review of the recent release of Firefox version 3.5 by Ars Technica writer Ryan Paul:

With a stroke at the keyboard, users can erect stiff privacy barriers that will prevent their Web surfing habits from penetrating the browser history and defiling the sensitive auto-completion system with incriminating data where it might arouse the suspicions of subsequent users. Thanks to Private Browsing in Firefox 3.5, your friends and coworkers will never discover your unwholesome obsession with the hot pussies in the Cats-n-Racks section at CuteOverload.com.

Love it.  I now consider myself a Ryan Paul admirer.

I’m amused that in my building, at this moment, there are 14 wireless networks floating through my apartment (in addition to my own). Their names make me want to know to whom they belong — like one of those “can you match the {x} in column A to the {y} in column B?” exercises! Coming through right now are:

• The Hibachi 808
• vino
• thatswhatshesaid
• Dynex
• feelfennec
• lilagan1
• Valentina
• print server 0C8089 (makes me want to try to print something random to it!)
• tanamit
• GoDucks
• Quick and Dirty
• FATCAT
• JUANA48
• GoCenterApple Network 071…

By the way, each and every one of these comes up as locked.  No free rides here!

Two random and unrelated (well, not directly related) items that caught my eye today:

“Rooting out cultural differences in perception is difficult, if not impossible. However, in a recent study, scientists assessed perception differences by looking at areas of brain activation instead of behavior results. The subjects — 10 East Asians and 10 Americans of Western European ancestry — performed tasks with contextual demands (normally performed better by Asians) and tasks with absolute or context-independent demands (normally performed better by Westerners). Brain images showed that, even though people from both sets were able to complete the task in roughly the same amount of time, both groups displayed greater brain activation when performing tasks not preferred by their culture.” — Seed Magazine (Mar/Apr ’08)

80% of the environmental impact of today’s products and buildings is determined at the design stage. “influencing the key design decisions that designers make can bring about extensive change in the amount of waste produced in a product life-cycle” — The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Waste Reduction / Memorandum by the Design Council

A new look? And who the heck is Paisleyboy? (Many know.) More to follow.

Have you ever seen a more beautiful freeway-cam picture??

Now I love Bill Moyers even more.  I read ead this quote today (via inwardoutward.org) and it really hit me especially in light of our current economic times and the times ahead….

Charity or Justice
Bill Moyers

Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which if individuals choose not to be charitable, people will not go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.

This is Leroy. He’s an exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum. He’s made of “wood and paper”. Some people call that drywall. He’s a good dog. I saw him yesterday with my friend Tami. Good Leroy. Good dog.

The other thing I saw which was absoutely, phenomenally amazing, was the exibit of The St. John’s Bible — it’s the first completely hand-written edition of the bible created in the last 500 years (basically since the printing press was invented).  It’s a FANTASTIC mix of old and new.  They’re hand-making all their vellum and ink — just as it was done in mideval days — but they’re making the illuminations/illustrations very modern — incorporating technology into the creation of them, ensuring a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic representation throughout, mixing contemporary styles with ancient iconography.  The techniques are ancient but they also use state-of-the-art computerized page layout tech to structure things before the actual work — each individual letter and each illumination and piece of marginallia — is all done by hand.  FABULOUS.  The page spreads are three feet wide by two feet tall and they’re strikingly beautiful.  There was one artist in particular, Thomas Ingmire, whose work just kept taking my breath away (and his The Ten Commandments nearly made me cry — something very few artists have done to me before).

I commented to Tami how his art just keeps striking me and the husband of the couple next to us overheard me and said “oh, he’s here” and started walking away to find him for me — he pointed him out, and before I knew it, I was introducing myself to the guy and telling him how much I enjoyed his work (and at that moment we were actually standing in front of one of his illumnations — a full page of script guilded in gold).  He was SUPER nice and was telling me how happy he was — of particular interest to him — at how well the guilding was holding up; he said the strenght of it always amazes him. It was an übergroovy moment in time.

One really cool thing that caught my eye was a display they had off to the side that showed how they sampled sacred music from a variety of faith traditions in a variety of cultures, generated waveforms of the sound, and made sections of those waveforms into stamps which were then used in the art in various illuminations (especially in the book of Psalms — super appropriate!).  Truly cool modern way to make this bible different that any other produced in the past.  Oh by the way, you, too, can own an official reproduction of all seven volumes of the work — only 365 of them are being created — for just $145,000.  Quite a bargain, I think. Or perhaps you’d prefer note cards for $13.95.  (More info about the project at: http://www.saintjohnsbible.org, and shopping at: http://www.sjbible.org)

And as if that weren’t enough — in the next gallery was the exhibit “The Forty Part Motet, by Janet Cardiff (A Re-working of Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui 1573, by Thomas Tallis).”  It’s an audio exhibition for which Cardiff recorded 40 individual voices each into their own mic performing the Spem in Alium (which is one of the most gorgeous and intricate choral pieces written in the 1500s) and then plays the work through 40 speakers set up in a large room(here’s a picture of it — though this, sadly, isn’t the Tacoma Art Museum — Tacoma’s setting was a standard art-gallery grey/white/wood-floor large room, but it had great acoustics).  The effect is amazing — people can walk around in the middle of it all and hear the individual voices as if the singers were right there, AND gives people the experience of hearing something like that from a singer’s point of view since you can stand right in front of the speakears facing away from them so the individual voices come right over your shoulder.  It was beautifully done and really, really made me miss singing with Pacific Chorale (or any group for that matter).  Add in a super-funny a giant, three-part, photo exhibit in the modern art room of a little Marie Antoinette doll getting her head chopped off and it really became the perfect art musuem day!!!

“The one thing on which we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard box where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”  ~~ Bono

Source: 54th Annual National Prayer Breakfast speech, February 2, 2006 via www.inwardoutward.org

So, my new job is a veritable treasure trove of phrases and word combinations that just crack me up, not so much because of what’s being said, but rather how odd it just is for me to hear them in the course of a work day.  I will start sharing them with you (if I can remember to).  Today’s gem:

So, on Friday I returned my iPhone.  The phone I waited a total of 6.5 hours in line for (well, two lines, actually — like I said, it’s a long story, but now one I won’t bother posting).

Here, for the curious, are the two main reasons:
1)  No voice dialing.  I knew this going in, but it bothered me MUCH more than I thought it would.  There are applications (well, one app) that do this now, but it doesn’t do it well, and it’s almost as much trouble to use as searching for the number the long way.  It just doesn’t make ANY sense to me why Apple wouldn’t have built this in.

2)  No insurance.  AT&T won’t offer its normal phone insurance on the iPhone and AppleCare doesn’t cover loss, theft, nor damage.  Three times in my life I’ve had to take advantage of my phone insurance and was very glad to have it (more than paid for itself).  If I were to lose, have stolen, or accidentally terminally damage my iPhone, it would have cost either $500 or $700 (AT&T’s web site isn’t clear on the issue) to replace it.  That’s just not acceptable for something I carry around 24/7.

The minor reasons:
1)  No zoom on camera (not even digital zoom).  Again, stupid.  No brightness control either.
2)  No ability to take video with camera.
3)  No ability to send pix with SMS messages
(all of the above, of course, are standard on even the cheapest of phones these days)
4)  As I came to realize the rediculousness of all of the above, I had a hard time justifying paying a company THAT much money for a phone that does so little of what a phone these days should do.  Granted, it does many MORE things many phones don’t, but seriously, no voice dialing?
5)  AT&T’s customer service closes hours earlier than Verizon’s.
6)  AT&T’s reception wasn’t as good (couldn’t even get a steady signal in the AT&T Wireless store! lol)

And so I’ll wait another two years or so until I’m out of my new contract with Verizon before I consider getting whatever version of the iPhone is available then.  Until that time comes, for the next two years I’ll be using (covered by insurance), my FABULOUS little LG Dare which I purchased for $49.99 (MUCH less than the $300.00 for my iPhone….).  It does really cool things like being able to draw on pictures (not to mention the camera has almost as many features as my regular digital cam), taking video (and being able to edit it in camera), sending pix or voice or vid with SMS messages (or e-mail), and — of course — voice dialing.  Ahhhhhhhhhh.

I got one!! Lying in bed posting from it right now!! Long story to tell, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow :)