Mix - Test Run

Posted Sun, 01/31/2010 - 15:06 by Tim

I did this about a month ago and ended up calling it Test Run for want of a better name. I had labeled it Test Run with the intention of going in and editing it later but I decided I liked it just fine as is.

82 minutes of stuff, as usual mostly 4-to-the-floor things but also not. A little on the mellow side.

Test Run (156 MB AAC file)

Your best option is to right-click and save the file. It will probably remain in that location until the end of Feb 2010.

All music herein copyright the respective artists. If you are the owner of any of the copyright and would like me to remove this mix please contact me and it will be taken down immediately.

Track List:

George - Slow Wave Sleep
DJ Sprinkles - Reverse Rotation
Pepe Bradock - Path of Most Resistance
Thomas Brinkmann - Isch (Soulphiction Remisch)
DJ Koze - Mrs. Bojangles
Conforce - Truth
Adam Marshall - North at Night
Newworldaquarium - The Force (Âme Remix)
Newworldaquarium - The Force (Âme's alternative version)
The Field - I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet
Mike Dehnert - Umlaut2 (New version)
Pan-Pot - Confronted
Ben Klock - Subzero (Sandwell District remix)
Carl Craig & Mortis von Oswald - Recomposed Vol. 3, Movement 4
WhoMadeWho - Keep Me In My Plane (DJ Koze Hudson River Dub)
Lawrence - In Your Eyes
Brock Van Wey - White Clouds Drift On and On
Low - Shots and Ladders

My Marilyn Experience

Posted Mon, 01/18/2010 - 00:56 by Tim

Today I went to a Peet's coffee after some some diving in Monterey. It was raining, and there were a number of people one might call itinerant taking shelter outside from the rain - dreadlocked drifter kids with guitars, etc. I live in San Francisco where there's some amount of that sort of thing so I didn't pay it much mind. Inside while I was standing in line waiting to order I noticed a woman with a piece of photocopied handwritten paper put inside a plastic protector sheet, along with a FedEx receipt, safety-pinned to her back. Odd, but again I see weirder things that that almost daily in my own neighborhood. But I was gazing in her direction when she looked at me. She smiled and said hello. I said hello back.

She asked me if I knew how long it took to get to Watsonville from Monterey. As it happened, I was going to Watsonville for the first time myself on an errand that afternoon, and I mentioned that and that I thought it took about 45 minutes. She said 'Oh, can I get a ride with you to Watsonville?' I hesitated, partly because she seemed odd and partly because my car was full of gear and I wasn't sure there'd be room. She said 'Please say yes,' and against my better judgement I agreed. She seemed harmless enough, and I figured it would be an interesting story if nothing else. As I got my hot chocolate and we were leaving, she handed a piece of newspaper to the guy behind the counter and encouraged him to get 'her letter' posted in the local paper. He looked confused and tried to refuse but another worker told him to just take it.

I brought her back to the car and made room for her. She told me that we needed to go over to the bus stop to pick up her suitcase. As we pulled out of the parking lot she said 'I've got man trouble. I'm suing 3 men in Miami, FL. Identity theft.' I just said 'uh huh' and we drove over to the bus stop. She wanted me to go get her suitcase but I wasn't prepared to leave her in my car with the engine running. She rolled down the window and yelled at some one standing there 'Excuse, could you please get my bag? it's the green suitcase over there.' The guy looked confused but brought the bag over, and then wandered off. She took a photocopy of the same handwritten page, wrapped it up in some newspaper, and called another person over and asked him to hand it to the man who had brought her suitcase, and to tell him to get it published.

She told me she was happy that I was driving her because it was easy for the men from the Brotherhood to find her when she was on foot, and that the Brotherhood does the Devil's work. I didn't say anything.

We drove off. I had to head into town to a scuba shop to return some gear I had rented. I asked her some very basic questions, and found out she'd stayed in Pacific Grove the night before, and was on her way to Davis, CA. She asked me if I lived in Watsonville and I told her no, San Francisco, and she immediately started trying to get me to take her to San Francisco. I wasn't prepared to be in the car with her for 2.5 hours, so I fudged a story about needed to see a friend in between. She continued to probe and asked if I could pick her up when I was done, and I hedged and said probably not. She told me that if I read her letter it might make me change my mind. I told her I was driving and I couldn't read her letter right now. She said that driving was good thinking time and she hoped I would use the time to think about it.

We parked near the shop, and I asked her to come with me - again, I wasn't prepared to leave her in my car. As I brought my gear to the shop, she followed behind me some, smiling. When I got to the door I looked back, but she was approaching somebody on the sidewalk, handing them another one of the letters wrapped in newspaper. I went into the shop and was returning my gear when I noticed she'd come into the shop and was just hanging back, not speaking to the counter people. When I finished up, she stepped up to them and offered them a letter/newspaper package, again asking them to publish it in the paper. She then asked if I was done and I said yes and we moved on.

Back in the car, I asked her if she had friends or relations in Davis. She said yes, 'I'm going to see a Jewish sister there who's an expert on the tracking microchips that the police put in everyone they detain. Which of course they do.' This wasn't exactly a conversation starter, so I asked her again about when she'd gotten to town. She said again she'd stayed in Pacific Grove last night, and that her hotel was paid for by some Seventh Day Adventists. She said that Pacific Grove was really beautiful, and we had some idle chit chat about that. I obviously thought she was nuts, but again on an interpersonal level she was mostly very nice; not threatening, not saying anything rude or completely non-sensical exactly. I asked her where she was from and she said 'I like to tell people I'm from Davis.' I asked her if that was where she was really from and she said no, she was born in Tennessee, but she was from Davis.

We headed north. She offered me some oranges and I declined. She asked me if she could use the mirror and I told her of course she could. We'd alternate between silent periods and then she'd make a conversational gambit. She asked me if I was married or had children. I told her no, and then added that it wasn't legal yet (I'm gay). She laughed and asked me how old I was (35). She said 'I know about guys like you. You get to about 40 and then you find some young girl and you get married. Oh yes, I know lots of young girls who marry the older men. You'll find your girl someday.' I asked her if she had any children and she got a little terse and said no, no children. She had never been married. She stated that a few times.

We passed a sign for Nashua, CA and she said 'Nashua, NH. It's a nice town.' I told her my brother lived in Exeter, NH, and she said that was a nice place too. We talked geography a bit, and I mentioned she seemed to be a long way from Miami and from her troubles. It got out that she'd really traveled quite a lot, and she seemed to know a lot about different areas of the country.

Eventually we got to Watsonville. She asked me a few more times if I wouldn't take her to San Francisco, but I was firm. She had originally told me she wanted to get to Watsonville because it was a better place to get a bus to Davis, so I told her I would help her find the bus station. She told me to ask the drive-in at any McDonald's or Burger King; they always knew where the bus station was. We happened to pass a Burger King right then, so I went into the drive-in and asked about the bus station. This confused them a fair bit, but eventually someone in there was able to give us directions. As I drove her towards the station, she asked me if I would be willing to donate to her photocopy fund so that she could make more copies of her letter because there were only 30 left. I declined.

As we got close to the station she asked me what direction the station was in. I told her and she said to pull over right there, 2 blocks from the station; she was going to get out and give out more of her letters first. She had motioned to the parking lot of a sketchy-looking taqueria. So, I decided to do as she asked. As she gathered her things, she encouraged me to take the letter back to San Francisco and have it published in the newspaper there. She also said 'If you find those 3 men and put them in the cemetery, you can keep the money. And it's a LOT of money.' As she got out and gathered herself, I told her to take care of herself. She looked me straight in the eye and said: 'Don't say that. Don't say take care. If 3 men are police officers, and are black ministers, and they tell you they're married to you and take all you're money, and try to put you into a mental hospital because they say you have poor mental hygiene and are unfit to take care of yourself...that's RAPE.' I didn't really know what to say to that, so I just wished her well and drove off. As I looked back she was already giving her letter to someone else in the parking lot.

About 30 minutes later I got a call from the scuba shop, asking about that African American woman that I'd been in the shop with earlier that afternoon. It turned out that one of the store employees had read the letter, been very perplexed and intrigued and weirded out, and googled her. He found the information on this site and other sites about Marilyn, and had read about her run-ins with the police and such. He called to check in that I was OK and that I knew what I was dealing with. I had already left her, so we ended up just trading stories, he telling me what he'd read and me telling him my part of the Marilyn epic.

I've attached links to her letter, which includes a copy of the letterhead of the hotel she stayed at and a copy of her room key, apparently. It's almost like she wants people to follow her. A friend of mine thinks it's very elaborate performance art. I'm not sure, myself.

http://skitch.com/timcosgrove/nx7ct/marilyn-1
http://skitch.com/timcosgrove/nx7c1/marilyn-2
http://skitch.com/timcosgrove/nx7ci/marilyn-3

The Power of Small Practice

Posted Sat, 01/02/2010 - 15:26 by Tim

One of my favorite lessons of the past year has been about the power and efficacy of making small efforts to produce change.

My window into this was handstands. I have had a semi-regular yoga practice since 2001, at times going to organized practices 5-7 times a week and at other times backing off that to 1-2 times a week, or no practice for a few months at a time, as my body and mind seem to need. Yoga has been great for helping me work out some issues I've had with my body, and it also gives me an opportunity to observe my mind during the typical 90 minute practice. I find I'm generally happier and emotionally more balanced when I'm practicing regularly.

Part of many Hatha yoga practices (the physical/pose-based part of yoga, what many people in the West think of as the entirety of yoga) is inversions. Numerous benefits are claimed for inversions; as a sort of skeptical Western practitioner, all I can say is that I feel internal change when I'm upside down, and it feels refreshing and good, both during and after the pose.

Any pose where your legs are raised above your torso and head is an inversion, and they come in many varieties. It can be as simple as lying on your back and raising your legs up the wall; the wall supports your legs and you can rest in that position without any effort. Slightly more vigorous inversions are shoulder stands (raising your legs over your head and then supporting your legs and torso above you by pressing your hands into your back) and headstands (pretty much what you'd think, though most people who did headstands as kids did a sort of tripod with their head and hands, and the standard yoga headstand uses your whole forearm to create the base). Barring having a specific injury or disability, anyone can put their legs up the wall; most people can learn to hold a basic shoulder stand within a month or two of starting yoga; and many people will be able to hold a headstand free-standing within a year or two, if not sooner.

Beyond that, you start getting into things that are more acrobatic, such as forearm stand, which is pretty much what it sounds like, and handstands. In these poses you are upside-down, so you are no doubt getting the same benefits of inversion as in other poses, but balance is far more difficult and much more strength is required. There are no doubt physical benefits to learning to maintain balance in inversion, but to me the primary benefit of poses such as these are as challenges to ego. First of all, most people will not be able to successfully hold these poses for some time, which makes them humbling. When you fail at forearm stand, you fail loudly and clumsily; if you're doing it in a classroom setting, the whole room knows you fell over. You have to be willing to accept other people seeing you in that state. Also, wanting to do these poses at all is, for me, pretty much an ego thing. If you're looking for the benefit of inversion itself, you can attain it much more easily in another pose. These more difficult poses are a mountain to climb, something to strive for, something to achieve. In the process, the practitioner can observe her relationship to her desire to do the pose.

So, doing handstand is for me something of an ego thing. Yoga has always given me opportunities to observe my ego in action. Initially I would look around me and see who was doing more advanced poses than me, and I would feel bad about my inability to do those poses. Then, as my practice advanced, I would check to see if I was the most advanced practitioner in the room. Later, I would do my best to shut out other people as I practiced, and congratulate myself for being so lacking in ego, the irony of which is not lost on me. I would also observe people going for more advanced variations of poses before they were ready to do so, while I would sometimes stay in more basic variations of the same pose, and make up stories about those people's practices and their relationship to their own ego, and again feel good about myself for recognizing that. All of this is my ego in action. Lately I've been able to be aware of my ego doing its thing as I practice and to have compassion for myself and for other students for acting on ego. But still, my feeling satisfied about this is coming from my ego.

This is all something of a digression. In short, doing handstands has primarily been a platform for me to observe my relationship to my ego.

Back to the point of the post: about a year ago I decided to try and learn to hold handstand. My entire work on this consisted of practicing handstand before yoga class. I typically arrive 5-10 minutes before class, to set up my mat and settle in. Part of my routine of settling in became doing a few handstands, either with the assistance of the wall or without. No more than 2-3 minutes at a time, 3-6 times a week or so. Handstand is rarely part of a directed yoga class, so these 2-3 minutes a day were the sum total of my efforts towards learning to hold handstand. As I progressed, I quickly learned that the wall was a hinderance to learning to hold handstand; I would rely on the wall to help me establish balance and never get into the right arm/body alignment to hold it on my own. So, I moved myself about 2-3 feet out from the wall, so that the wall was there if I fell but otherwise was unreachable for support. Over time I got better at holding my position, until one day before class I unexpectedly found myself staying upside down, away from the wall. It wasn't very long - maybe about 20 seconds - but it was enough for me to feel that I had successfully held the pose.

This was different from my typical M.O. for trying to learn something new. I typically throw myself into something full-force, spending as much effort and time as I have available. I tend to quickly burn out from my efforts and lose interest. Instead, this time, I only gave it a small amount of time, but I did it consistently, and without any sense of pressure about completing the task or attachment to the goal. And, eventually, I reached some version of the goal, and with a sense of ease rather than struggle.

I hope I'm able to use this type of striving/practice to create change in other areas of my life. Small efforts, consistent efforts, and with no sense of needing to achieve the goal in a specific time frame. It's a different way of going about things than I'm used to, and it worked better than my normal way of doing things.

IE can only render 4095 selectors from an external CSS file

Posted Wed, 10/14/2009 - 23:57 by Tim

I ran across this today: apparently, Internet Explorer (all versions, not just IE 6) can only render a total of 4095 selectors from an external CSS file. After that, it simply starts ignoring the selectors. If you don't believe me, see the CSS rendering errors for yourself (only visible in IE, all versions).

This has been remarked on before, but it's definitely not common knowledge:

To the Drupal developer: Why should we care? How often could this happen, realistically?

It's actually not as far-fetched as you might think. Imagine a large site, with many areas. styles.css is getting huge, and you have some ancillary style sheets. Additionally, you have contributed modules which add CSS to every page. This happens; you can't always trust a module developer/maintainer to know what they're doing. Now, you turn on style sheet aggregation. Suddenly, you have one huge style sheet. If collectively there are more than 4095 selectors defined, you will end up with a bunch of rules that don't get rendered.

Fun times! Moral of the story is probably: keep your style sheets short and simple, keep an eye on what contributed modules are doing, and envision a world without IE, or at least where IE behaves a little more like we'd like it to.

No kidding.

Posted Tue, 05/26/2009 - 16:13 by Tim

No Facebook, Unsatisfactory Tweet Block

Posted Mon, 04/13/2009 - 23:24 by Tim

Well, Facebook integration was more of a project than I could handle this evening, and the Recent Tweets block new to the right leaves a lot to be desired. But, I value my sleep. Revisions later.

UPDATE: ooookay, the aggregator doesn't work like I thought it did. Aggregated feeds are per user, not site-wide. Darn Drupal for being community- and user-oriented instead of ME oriented. Ah well, project for another day.

The Twitter module doesn't really work like you'd expect it to, btw. It seems more oriented towards getting Drupal content into Twitter, which I guess is fair.

Drupal for Facebook (or, Facebook for Drupal?)

Posted Mon, 04/13/2009 - 21:03 by Tim

I just got back from a meeting of the SF Drupal Users Group (my first). One of the presentations was on Drupal for Facebook, a series of modules that enable various kinds of Drupal integration with Facebook. You can use Facebook Connect (basically use Facebook authentication for your own site). You can embed an entire Drupal site into a Facebook application and have it exist there and be interfaced with there. I chatted with someone developing an arts site for at-risk youth in Oakland, and his thinking was that many young people interface with each other over the internet almost entirely through Facebook and Myspace, and so making adding content to his site via Facebook might streamline things for his contributors. You can also do milder versions of both of these concepts; have a primarily Facebook-based application that draws on a Drupal site for some content, or have pieces of Facebook-aware information on the Drupal side.

I remember about a year ago or so writing about how I was using this site less in favor of Facebook. I never have had great pretensions or ambitions for my internet presence; it's basically a place for people who already know me to catch up on things I'm thinking about, when I remember to post about them. Which, Facebook does for me, in a much more sophisticated and nuanced manner. Basically if you're my friend you're likely on Facebook and you likely keep up with me, as well as anyone keeps up with me, via Facebook.

But, I have no control over how Facebook presents my information to the world. And, it's a walled garden; Facebook pages can be indexed but they're much harder to get to and navigate if you're not friended to me. And, I don't really like that Facebook owns my content, and that the clever thing I said is stuck there.

So, maybe some sort of Facebook/Drupal hybrid is in order, with the content in each places being reflected in the other. drupalforfacebook.org is essentially that; a proof-of-concept site that the author of the module has put up. Content gets reflected in both directions. You can administer the Drupal site through a facebook page, which was a bit of a mind twister.

Anyway, hmmm. It looks like FB for Drupal (or vice versa) is easy enough to set up. Random project for this evening. But first, some cookies and milk...

Gosh this site needs some updating, cleanup, and something interesting on it.

Posted Sun, 03/08/2009 - 21:04 by Tim

Just saying.

Diving in Monterey

Posted Mon, 09/22/2008 - 14:25 by Tim

I went diving in Monterey this past weekend. It was really really cold, and also really amazing. Teaming with life, much more than the tropics. I saw a sea lion up close, about 5-10 ft away. He stared at me for about 20 seconds and then went on his way.

I also figured out how to use my camera properly on the last dive of the trip, and I got some really good photos. I was happy with the photos from Belize (which I haven't talked about here yet because I blog once every 4-19 months), but using the flash makes such a difference in color and clarity it's unreal.

Monterey is close, and if I buy my own gear I can go diving for the price of a tank of air. I'll definitely be going back.

Tags: HAARP SPINTRONICS GYROSCOPING TOM'S WEATHER MANIPULATION ATMOSPHERE CHEMTRAILS

Posted Wed, 08/06/2008 - 01:22 by Tim

DBOOTS seeks to inform us about the conspiracy of the HAARP project to control the weather, our minds, etc.

The government is also putting chemicals into our water supply, as evidenced by rainbows in sprinklers on summer days.

I think she may be Time Cube guy's niece twice removed or something.

(via)

EXOTIC WEAPONS THAT INDUCE THE
SO CALLED RINGING IN OUR EARS OF
TOO LOW N TOO HIGH FOR HUMAN
HEARING RANGE OF FREQ'S
EXOTIC WEAPONS OF PSYCHOTRONIC
WEAPONS THAT CAN INDUCE
DIFFERENT BRAIN WAVE PATTERNS,
OF OUR BRAINS ELECTRICAL IMPULSES
THAT SPEAK OUR BRAINS LANGUANGE
N CAN INDUCE ANY HUMAN'S BRAIN
SUBLIMINALLY, UNSUBCONSCIOUSLY
WHICH COULD BE A PROJECTED
VOICE IN A HUMAN'S BRAIN
(PER THE AIR FORCE)
NANOPARTICLES OF CHEMICALS
THAT SELF BOND INTO COMP
PROGRAM LANG/HIEROGLYPHICS
IN OUR ATMOSPHERE/SKY
OF TUBULAR TOPOGRAPY PATTERNS
IN THOSE HARMFUL AEROSOL
CHEMICALS OF THE CHEMTRAILS
THEY HAVE BEEN XING OUR SKIES