June 28, 2002

random thoughts

The answer seems so obvious, yet the record labels just aren’t getting it. People want to download music. People want the latest songs from the latest artists and they are even willing to search through hours worth of garbage, fight disconnects from their ISP and put up with low quality ripped songs. Hummm… I’m a record label, I see this and think, “Ah-ha! I start a server with my artists available to download for a minimum fee and the hassle is over.” The technology exists to prevent the files from then being shared, but this really would be too big of a deal at that point because for $1 per song (about the current rate of a music CD) who wouldn’t subscribe to a service like that?

Germany beat the United States, so now we will be cheering for Germany on Sunday. The final will be the first and only game of the World Cup that I will have watched. I find that hard to believe myself, but with the 5:30 AM game time… makes it tough when you generally work from 1-10 PM.

This weekend we’ll be traveling to Missoula to check out a teaching by Ven. Robina Courtin. I’m looking forward to this, but at the same time I’m not. Geshe-la always says you have to find a good teacher, one who kicks spiritual butt. I agree that learning face to face with an actual person is about 100 times more influential that listening to tapes or even watching a video, however every time a good teacher passes by our area it is usually a minimum of a two and a half hour drive ($120 in gas for the six days of teaching) and then you have to pay the “dana” (ok, you don’t have to, but…) and the “suggested donation” is usually $25 per person, so for one day you are looking at $50 for two people ($170 for two people to attend all the classes in Missoula). The teachings usually last for several days and of course you want to see them all, but I’m not a doctor or lawyer, so I can’t afford to ($290 total). I know it’s a donation - not a price, but I can’t NOT pay it because it doesn’t seem right to not pay this amazing teacher when everyone else is. I know this is all my karma. Nevertheless, it is still a real situation. How is my karma to improve when I can’t get the teachings that will help me to improve my karma? There is a joke that Buddhism in the United States is the Upper-Middle Way. I don’t mean to criticize the Dharma center because it does costs a great deal of money to have a teacher (especially of this stature) come to town. The fact that I live a two and half hour drive from the center is my problem as is the fact that I don’t make enough money to support my “Dharma habit”. I’m just venting a little frustration over the issue.

posted @ 8:58 AM

June 23, 2002

the vacation

“Hey, amigo… check it out we have T-shirts, sunglasses, Cuban cigars… no? Viagra?”

San Diego was beautiful, Tijuana was a great experience and Grandma turned 29 for the 51st time. We did pretty much everything I wanted to do. Here’s a rough sketch:

Saturday: Myself, the misses and sister-in-law arrived in San Diego around noon after a brief layover in Salt Lake City. Crystal clear day all over the Western States and I had the window seat. Mom (in-law) picked us up at the airport and just as we had suspected began “the great tour of California” for us. Explaining all the way to Grandma’s how California works the way it does- “oh, and now that building over there - that’s where…” I laughed, the girls cringed. Finally got to see Grandma’s house. It was everything and more. Walked down to the beach and splashed around, but didn’t really get in. That night we had dinner with a good portion of the family. Had the hottest peppers I’ve ever eaten and didn’t find them all that hot.

Sunday: Everybody (except for Grandma) in the rental van for trip to Old Town. We walked around and checked out the city that most of my in-law’s relatives helped found. Really very interesting. A weird thing was happening… my father-in-law was talking to me, making jokes and being very pleasant. This was a bit of a new thing. Shocking, but again - very pleasant. After the bro-in-law took us on an extended tour of the city (“waddya know, that leads us right back to where we started!”) we headed back to Grandma’s and then for the beach. I got in. Past my waist. This was a first. Turns out I really like swimming in the ocean. It was starting to get dark and I had to take off my glasses to get in but I saw this triangular black things in the water with long tails. The only reason I noticed the first one is that I felt something brush against my foot. We checked with the local David Hasselhoff and found out they were in fact stingrays and we should shuffle our feet to avoid a sharp pain which would pretty much disable us for about a week. Cool enough, back in the water.

Monday: Spent the day at the mall in Carlsbad, rode the bus around. Went to the beach, went to diner at the Olive Garden.

Tuesday: Went to the beach then the pool. Got majorly sun burnt. It was the first time in probably fifteen years that I actively stayed in the sun for the purpose of becoming tan. It was San Diego, I felt I had to.

Wednesday: We got up early to take one of my sister-in-laws to the airport then we (other sister-in-law, the misses and myself) carried on to Mexico. We arrived about 9 o’clock in the morning so the streets were pretty slow. Only one little girl tried to sell us Chiklets, I was expecting thousands. My sister-in-law is sixteen, looks a bit like Natalie Portman and takes after her older sister when it comes to modesty. Needless to say there were a few times where I thought that I was going to wind up severely injured because my wife was going to pick fights with all the amigos who kept looking at her little sister. After doing some bartering for a painting and sandals we made it back to U.S. soil just fine.

Thursday: Nothing too exciting. Chilled around Grandma’s. Took the plane back home.

Friday: Discovered that the internet had been disconnected.

posted @ 10:02 AM

June 14, 2002

no gui

I wanted it to be radically different… and it was, but it only worked correctly on IE 5.1 for Mac. So it’s back to the drawing board for the interface tweeking I mentioned yesterday. Guess I need to learn CSS a little better or tone down the changes a little.

We are going to San Diego tomorrow, so it will have to wait until we get back.

posted @ 9:39 AM

June 13, 2002

interface

Testing out the Styleswitcher to see what I can see. You shall now find “interface” under the menu options and by clicking on one of the sub-menus you’ll find that the interface changes. I’m not much of a programmer, but I thought I’d take whack at this one since most of the code was already in place… except for the CSS. That I am finally brave enough to hack around with.

It should be noted that these will only work in a standards compliant browser and have only (as of yet) been tested on IE 5.1 for Mac. If you have trouble getting them to work on your system, please contact me.

posted @ 9:35 AM

June 12, 2002

digital dharma

The folks at DigitalDharma.org have done an amazing job bringing the teachings into the 21st Century quite nicely. So far I’ve watched The Book and How To Do A Daily Practice. That was nice because ACI Course Three is a detailed explanation of how to do this, but seeing Geshe-la explain it was much clearer. Also a recently added PDF file on the ACI site explains in writing how to do The Book.

posted @ 8:43 AM

June 6, 2002

world cup 2002

It’s almost as if it’s not even happening. I can only stand about ten minutes of the sports channel before I must, in order to maintain my sanity, switch the station. In my ten minutes of searching I have yet to be able to see any highlights from the World Cup. Even though Team USA beat the number five seat, Portugal, on June 5th. It was on the front page of the BBC news. It didn’t make ESPN highligts (at least that I saw). Am I doing something wrong?

posted @ 5:03 PM