Tuesday, July 31, 2007

My current favoite place

There is not much I like better than TV, but I have found something that consistently makes me happy, makes me feel smarter, and better informed. I present TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). Basically, it brings people in and lets them talk. You see wonderful presentations on a range of subjects. The best talks i have seen recently range from exploration of the earth, moon, and Europa to how we should reorganize our military. Most of the speakers are really good and compelling, others are just pandering there ideas and beliefs...but they do it very well. The videos can be anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes long, just when I am getting tired of something, it is over and I can move one to another neat idea.

cube

We had a zen breakthough

My girlfriend finally got on paper a few weekends ago. In retrospect it was the Zen talk that did it. I had covered shooting stance, had her dry-fire till her nubbins were wet with blood, covered sight alignment. I didn't come out last weekend expecting her to hit the ten ring every time, but I was hoping that she had not lost much of what we had gained, though our hard work. Out of an entire mag, only two were on paper. I was near desperation. I had to go kung-fu spiritual on her. "Imagine you are a bird...flying...then pull the trigger so fast you don't know what happened." It worked, that whole zen like state, pulling the trigger slowly, while trying to foget about the big bang that is coming got all twelve rounds on paper, and many in the area where she was aiming. She when from no holes, to seeing the brass come out of the gun (I still close my eyes!).

It is hard to get better at shooting, when you can't even tell where the bullet is going. Now that she is on paper, the nature process of self correction can take place. And only a few more hundred thousand rounds before she can do it while running upside down on the ceiling like that matrix show.



cube

One of my favorite things

Time is money and I have to little of either. Recently, I converted reading all of my lovely blogs over to RSS feeds. Being using Mozilla Thunderbird as my access client of choice. Liked it because i received posts like emails. Saved me from clicking around the net going to sites that were not updated. Then I upgraded....unsure of what transpired to during the upgrade to break the time-saving functionality I so much loved. Quick search on RSS readers shows that Google has one. Need to sign up, no problem - I sign up with my MSN Hotmail account. Now I can access my RSS feeds anywhere in the world. More access means more time to read, which means I can read more. I can even store posts offline and take them with me. Videos play inside of the reader, because it is web based, pictures show up. This is currently my second favorite thing on the internet.

cube