The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

   -William Butler Yeats, January 1919

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I’ve been having some problems with a WordPress plug-in that I recently added that was supposed to display recent my Random Fate posts, Twitter posts, and shared items from my feeds on Google Reader, but it hasn’t been behaving consistently. So there have been some blank “daily digest” posts.

Just wanting to explain…

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From Gizmodo.com:

Pole Dancer Doll Doesn’t Really Set the Perfect Role Model

There’s so, so many ways this is just wrong…

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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I’m an information junkie. I have a computer dedicated to running various Yahoo Widgets displaying weather radar maps (national and local), the local five-day weather forecast, a mini world map showing where the sun is shining, a Gmail checker, a network monitor, a system monitor, my instant messenger application (Digsby), a scrolling RSS feed (Snackr), TweetDeck, a Google Voice window, Skype, and µTorrent. This is all running on a 22″ widescreen monitor. I’ve run out of room on it, and I think I need another monitor to fit it all in.

And this is just for displaying information, not playing games like on my main computer.

Yikes…

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…people link to photos that I have taken and don’t credit me.

They’re stealing both bandwidth and credit from me.

Argh!

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Years ago, I received one of those multiple forwarded emails titled “Instructions for life in the new millennium from the Dalai Lama”. I’ve subsequently found out that the list was NOT from the Dalai Lama, but I still think it’s worth working on living according to the list anyway.

Here it is:

Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

Follow the three Rs. Respect for self, Respect for others, and Responsibility for all your actions.

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

Spend some time alone every day.

Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.

Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

Be gentle with the earth.

Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.

Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

By no means do I practice all of them every day, but I still try.

From a discussion at work today:

“Dude, this is a zombie project, it won’t die and it eats our brains.”

“I know… I’ve gotten out the garlic and stakes to kill it and I’m getting nowhere.”

“Well that’s why, you don’t use garlic and stakes on zombies, that’s for vampires.  You use flamethrowers and chainsaws for zombies. You’ve got to use the right tools for the job…”

We’re too geeky to live sometimes…

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The elevators in the building where I work have TVs installed; they are usually playing MSNBC. This morning they were playing a video from a police camera of an incident here near Austin where a 72 year old woman was tasered at a traffic stop.

Regardless of which side of this story you believe or whether the action itself was justified, listening to the cries of an old woman as she’s being shocked and the angry, authoritarian tone of the much younger police officer lecturing her is not my idea of a good start to the day.

The sounds that woman made as she was being tasered are haunting.

Maybe I should start wearing headphones and listen to music as I walk to my office in the mornings…

…I’ve just discovered that neither fan in the case of my main computer (the one running three monitors) is working. I’m still trying to find the root cause, but I more than suspect the noisy power supply that is permanently attached to the case.

Damn it, I didn’t need this right now.

I recently relocated this computer, but the issue existed for at least a few months before the relocation.

Sigh…

It never just rains, it pours, doesn’t it….

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I work in downtown Austin, almost dead center in the city, in a building on the corner of 6th Street and Congress Avenue. When I leave work, I drive by that corner. Today, there was a very interesting tableau that definitely shows where the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” came from.

On the corner, standing on an upturned bucket, was what I gathered to be a performance artist, dressed in black, with a hood, black fabric covering his face, long sleeves, and gloves. None of his skin was visible, and he was standing still in a pose that looked like he was Death Incarnate making some unknown proclamation. In front of him carrying on what seemed to be a one-sided conversation was a slim man dressed in a ragged dark burnt orange T-shirt with a long beard and wild tawny hair surrounding his face like that of a lion. On a park bench nearby a large but not fat man was sitting, singing “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone” very loudly but with a surprisingly good voice. He’s there frequently, and has quite the repertoire of Blues songs.

The light changed to green, and I drove on.

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Cross posted to Random Fate and The Moderate Voice .

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There is nothing to see here. This is a test post to Random Fate from software I’m using to keep a personal journal.

I ran across this when I was reading a post at Balloon Juice the other day (I can’t find the original post, so I linked to a Geek Cool kind of post), and I think it’s very good:

The artist has a MySpace page which you should visit if you want to find where to download the song.

I may not have focused enough on the video to really understand what it’s about. I think I can extract some meaning, but I may not be catching it entirely since I didn’t focus on it. The point is, I like the interpretation of the song (which I first heard as performed by Chris Isaak), and in exchange for distributing his music free, the artist requested that the downloader tell others about his YouTube video. So, here it is. I like it a lot. I hope you do, too, download the song, and tell others about it.

How else do we reward those outside the system that produce artistic works we enjoy?

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I’m typing this using a netbook, which although ironically enough is regarded as a crippled and very slow system is at least an order of magnitude if not more faster than what is used on the currently orbiting space shuttle, not to mention the Apollo spacecraft that went to the moon.

I can remember the first landing on the moon, I watched the TV broadcasts.

Yes, I’m old.

However, the perspective is needed.

What is on my lap now, regarded as incredibly slow and crippled, is far more powerful than what we use in orbit now and what enabled us to get to the moon.

Think about it.

I’ll be posting more, but for now, this is a test post to see if it shows up in my LinkedIn profile. With the economy the way it is now, networking may be a lifesaver.

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I am test posting using Raven, software from a company named Zoundry. This post is to see if it is compatible with the version of WordPress I am using.

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I have changed hosts in an attempt to consolidate all the myriad sites and domains I have accumulated over the past five years. I haven’t yet recovered the archives for Random Fate, and I’m considering leaving them in backup for now to focus on new content. (UPDATE: Archive recovered at the cost of losing the recent posts and comments) Hopefully I can rebuild a readership like the one I had three years ago, otherwise the sixth (yikes!!!) anniversary of this weblog will be a sad thing to contemplate.

I managed to upload my old database for the weblog, but that overwrote my last few entries. Now, I’ll try to reconstruct at least the quotes. Sorry to those who made comments that are now lost.

The Final Days

Jewish ‘modesty patrols’ sow fear in Israel

Manufacturing activity falls to 26-year low

Why Obama, Congress must curb CEO pay

Halliburton Tries To Patent Form Of Patent Trolling

Flickr set of behind the scenes photos of Obama watching election results

I’m at a lacrosse game today, watching my son play. My wife and daughter are out of town at a dance competition. It’s been a busy weekend, so I’m taking this opportunity to see how effective posting from my iPhone is. I don’t know how well I can compose without a full-sized keyboard. Of course, time isn’t my only constraint on writing, so is being blocked. Sigh….

So it’s been 16 days since I’ve posted.

Yep, it is now mid-August, and I haven’t posted for more than two weeks.

Obviously, for me anyway, this blog obsession has receded from the fire of the initial years to a very, VERY slow burn of the current time…