Scattered Points

Paraphrase of the Day:  “Traditional farming methods use 10 times less water, 10 times less energy and produce 5 times as much biomass per acre as does modern mechanized farming.”  — Vandana Shiva

Back at kung fu practice today, after a week and a half off due to a bout of sickness.  In the beautiful world of crazy coincidences (and also in the world of there are no accidents) one of our Shi-Bo just so happens to be visiting the Bay Area and just so happened to be out walking at night last Tuesday and just so happened to cross the road in front of the kwoon and just so happened to see the class practicing Sun Style Tai Chi and chose to come in and watch.  And, since she is our Shi-bo, she trained with Sifu and our Shi-Gong Sun Jian Yun a decade ago.  Really awesome, she’s staying here for a couple of months and will be joining us for classes and already she has been an outpouring to couple with Sifu and provide observations and illumination.  She only speaks Mandarin, which makes for some fun listening, observing, and waiting for one of my classmates who speak Mandarin to translate for me…

I bought the soundtrack to Wall-E (DRM-free digital music, woo!).  Very interesting soundtrack, very different from most other soundtracks.  There are some 38 tracks on the album, and each cue is very short, most only about a minute or three.  Which, in thinking about it, makes perfect sense, given the mostly dialogue-less nature of the film — the music is what does some of the speaking.  Each cue truly does relate to a scene or chapter in the film.  Very nifty, and cool for the great musical range of the many cues, including a couple (EVE, and the sort-of reprise in Define Dancing) that are truly very beautiful and instant shiver-material.

Railway tracks have a particular smell to them, it turns out.  Maybe it’s the (probably nasty) oils they put into the ties to weatherproof them.  Discovered this today while walking home, and interestingly I found it a pleasant smell, likely as it brought back many pleasant memories from my youth.

A couple of weeks ago I bought six copies of The Art of Possibility, and gave a copy to each principal and each associate in the office.  The office manager saw me do this, and we had a small conversation and I’m now scheduled to introduce it to the office as a whole tomorrow at the staff meeting.  Ordinarily I think I would hide out and not tell anyone about this, so that if it doesn’t turn out no one would know.  But here I lay it out, I’m brining what’s in this book to the office, and taking on altering the disempowering conversations that are inadvertedly created on a daily basis.  And out of seeing those conversations return our work and our environment (and most importantly our experience) into the realm of creativity, inspiration and excitement.

current possibility:  living life full out

A quiz!

On the photo below, point to “away”:

What I Love: Vol 5

I love that I no longer need ‘unwinding’.

I love that I’ve gotten the secret to not needing to unwind is to not get wound up in the first place.

I love that this leaves me free to do things I enjoy and enjoy them fully, immediately, with no need or purpose of ‘relaxing’ or ‘de-stressing’ overlayed.

I love the energy that leaves me with.

I love that I don’t have to put up with, handle, or cope with things anymore.

I love that I’ve become more in touch and not detached.

I love that I learned and developed this and that I’m not some unique fluke in this way.

All caught up

A great week at work, veryverybusywithlotstodo andohwehaveanewhireandIneedtotrainherwithbrandnewmaterial andbythewaywehavetomeetwithalltheseusersanddolayoutsanddesignthemandrunthembythePMatStanfordtoo andohdon’tforgetthoseothertrheeprojects andyouneedtosetyourselfupatyournewstationafteryourmove. Feels good to be in action.

And speaking of action, getting back into Kung Fu after a week ‘off’ is always amusing — the ancient Chinese addage of “miss one day, lose three days” certainly applies… it takes me a few days to get back up to speed. But back up to speed I am now, after a week and a half of class, teaching, working on the new sooper-seekret set and a good chunk of climbing (more on this in the next paragraph). On friday for our practice, Evan and I went to the volleyball sand pit where he works and practiced Tai Chi on the sand. Two things: one, sun in the late afternoon is H O T ! ! (we ended up wearing our socks) and secondly, it is a very interesting experience. It really was great to work on the spins in sand, there’s much to be gained when you can spiral into the depths if done non-optimally. As I practiced this morning I could tell I got something from that practice, and I think I’ll suggest we do that again sometime soon.

For climbing we visited the Sunnyvale gym — my last outing there left me none to impressed.  The owner of Coyote’s in Ottawa made me wonder if it was due to the fact the gym at that time had just opened (so in a flurry of rapidly putting up routes the routes were somewhat bland).  While the geometry certainly will never be back up to par with their old Santa Clara location, the climbs were pretty good this time round.  Certainly good enough for my forearms to feel it for the next week — something about 60′ high climbs, I think.

I also has me a 4e core book set, and have been reading through those, we played in Eberron last week for the first time in a while, haven’t seen Kung Fu Panda yet (and have heard it is worth seeing), been playing in new-found freedoms, thinking I’d like to seek out some new music (any suggestions anyone?), starting to work on the Northern Shaolin book again, got some car repairs/maintenance done, waiting for my camera back from a repair under warranty, and I could use to schedule some time to do a bit of cleaning up in my apartment.

Paraphrase of the Day to end this post:

“It’s like those fish at the bottom of the ocean — you bring them up and pow, they would explode.  But they never notice the pressure, they’re born into it.  We’re born into some things, and some other things and pressures end up being constant as well, so much so that we don’t even notice we have it.  When they’re removed, all of a sudden we have this experience of ‘wow’, we didn’t even realize what we were under or that there was some other way to be.  I guess that’s similar to the expression ‘weight lifted from one’s shoulders’, suddenly there’s an expansive feeling.”  — Unknown

Vancougar

I so wanted to go to Expo 86. I’m not sure exactly what it was really, but I became quite enamoured with the fair back then (collecting all manner of info and images, best I could in the days way-pre-internet) and would’ve totally loved to head out to Vancouver to revel in it. 22 years later this past week I hit up Vancouver, certainly missing Expo 86 but revelling nonetheless in what I got.

What I Love: Vol 4

I love a good story.

I love being lost in a good story.

I love being provoked by a good story.

I love being made pensive by a good story.

I love being moved by a good story.

I love being excited by and cheering for a good story.

I love being transported by a good story.

Meandering

This is the type of research that one professor I’m designing lab space for at Stanford is currently working on:  Spontaneous Generation of Chirped Time-Energy Entangled Photons.  He works with lasers.  I get to work with lasers by proxy!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, but I passed my eighth Architectural Registration Exam — one left to go!

This is a nifty design for a helicopter, and amusing, as it basically is a similar idea to what Airwolf was to do…

This is a great site, it is amassing funds and making recordings of classical music (which is in the public domain) and then releasing the recordings into the public domain (as most recordings of said music are NOT in the public domain).  Ditto with the sheet music for a lot of these pieces.

In my post about Prince Caspian I spoke thusly:  “not so fine as an epic fantasy tale.”  In thinking about it later, I realized I misspoke.  One of the things about Narnia is that it is not really ‘epic.’  That’s key really, it’s a much more intimate scale, more of a yarn or a tale than an epic.  And perhaps that’s where the film took a wrong turn, in going for the epic LotR-type treatment rather than a more modest tone.  That might have guided them towards filling in those gaps and capturing the missing feel.

Aurora 2.3 is out!  And let the two week countdown begin.

QotD:  “What is that resistance?  You resist it when you think about it.  You resist when you prepare for it.  You resist as you go to it.  You resist as you start it.  Then you do it, and you’re always glad you did it.  What is that resistance?”  — Unknown

QotD

“To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.” — Heather Cortez

“Yes, [those people] were extraordinary human beings. But their capacity was not extraordinary.” — Jack Kornfield

“To know the way and not practice is to be a soup ladle in the pot and not taste the flavour of the soup” — Buddhist Saying

What I Love: Vol 3

I love music.

I love that I love so many different genres of music.

I love being moved by music.

I love when I get chills up and down my spine from a piece of music.

I love the human voice used as an instrument.

I love a choir.

I love soundtrack scores.

I love music with complex layering.

I love instrumental pieces, vocal pieces, and much in between.

I love being surprised by music.

I love having all my music on one server for the ultimate 8 month long plus never-repeat shuffle mix

Another omnibus post

Wicked days.