I know this video is old-hat to the majority of my fellow netizens. But the MP3 player just shuffled up the song that the video is set to and I was moved to post this. Hopefully the one person out there who hasn’t yet seen it will, and will enjoy it as much as I do. The song, if you’ve ever wondered is “Praan” by Garry Schyman. One translation I’ve seen goes thusly:
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
If you’d like to purchase an MP3 of this magnificent tune, you can do so here: Praan.
Anyway, for whatever reason this really resonated strongly with me today, so I thought I’d pass it along.
Regular readers may recall a prediction that I made on November, 28 2004.
I said, in part, that I thought Barack Obama might very well be our first “African-American” Vice President, perhaps even President.
That was nearly 4 years ago!
In the name of full-disclosure, I had also picked Wesley Clark as our next president prior to the 2004 DNC and we all know how that panned out.
The Obama-Biden team’s Presidential Transition Project already has a website up which documents their transition into power and solicits ideas from the public.
I submitted the letter from my previous post.
Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.
Like many folks out there, I found myself more engaged in the political process this year than I’ve ever been in my 24 years of (off and on) voting. When I woke up today, something felt different, at the risk of sounding cliché, I actually have hope for the future and believe that things are going to get better. If President Obama can just undo the damage that the Bush administration has done to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, that would cement his legacy in my mind.
Dear President-elect Obama,
Please bring back Habeas Corpus, stop the government, our government, from spying on us without just cause and without a warrant. I want to live in a nation that doesn’t torture, that doesn’t rush to war under false pretenses. I want a nation that holds its politicians, and indeed each of its citizens, accountable. Mr. Obama, you’ve talked a lot about “change” and we listened. Now show us the change. Repeal the Patriot Act. Position us, as a nation, to be at the vanguard of the coming wave of “green” technology and alternative energy. This is our “Space Race” and its implications for our future are even more profound. Give us back our freedoms and lead us to the future. That is how we, as a nation, can reaffirm our title as the greatest and most powerful nation on earth. Please, Mr. Obama, lead us there.
Here in my area of the country tonight is the night we celebrate “Beggars’ Night”. For some reason they arbitrarily pick a date for trick-or-treating but they can’t even bring themselves to call it that (wouldn’t want to encourage mischief, dontcha know) nor to so much as mention Halloween. What the hell is up with that?
Apparently, since adults have co-opted Halloween and turned it into a night for drinking and for women to dress as slutty sexy witches and devils and such, the powers that be have decided that it’s not a good night for kids to be out and about, especially if it falls on a Friday, Saturday or (gasp) Sunday. So, they move the date and call it something else.
I hate that. Halloween is October 31. When I was a kid we really looked forward to it falling on a Friday or Saturday, as that meant no school the next day. It’s really a shame how many of the simple pleasures of childhood have been swept aside in the name of “safety” and “convenience”.
If you remember and miss the days when MTV actually played music videos, this is great news (originally spotted at Gizmodo). MTV is making their collection of music videos available online. Right now there are a lot of videos unaccounted for, but they did just go online with this today, so hopefully it’s a work in progress.
Here’s one of my all-time favorites, “Learn to Fly” by the Foo Fighters. It’s got the Foo Fighters playing various roles (I’ll admit to being a bit disturbed by what a hot stewardess, the drummer, Taylor makes) and the boys from Tenacious D (Jack Black and Kyle Gass) appear as bumbling drug smugglers. Plus, it’s a great song. What’s not to like?
Today I got a mass mail piece from Time Warner. On the outside it said “Thank You”. My curiosity piqued, I opened it, thinking perhaps it had something to do with the ~$18 they’re supposed to be crediting my bill. Instead it’s a solicitation urging me to switch to their digital phone service.
Hey Time Warner,
Right after several hundred thousand of your customers were without cable service for a couple of weeks (or more) probably isn’t the time to try to sell them your digital phone service.
I mean really! My power was out for nearly a week, my cable for over 2; my phone (and DSL), on the other hand, worked the entire time.
There’s an informercial that’s been airing for a few months now for something called a Shamwow which is apparently some sort of super-absorbent towel, or something. Anyway, at one point, the pitchman - a spikey-haired douche bag with a Janet Jackson microphone tells me:
You’re gonna spend twenty dollars every month on paper towels anyway.
I am? Goddamnit! What am I, using them to dry off after I shower?
Someone needs to put a stop to me and my conspicuous paper towel consumerism!
Honestly, I don’t think I spend that much on paper towels in an entire year.
Thanks but no thanks, Vince - you can keep your rags.
Sunday, September 14 the remnants of Hurricane Ike rolled through my area. No rain to speak of, but the wind blew 60-80 mph all day long. By 3PM or so most of the area was without power as trees across the Miami Valley snapped or fell over, taking powerlines with them.
Not realizing at the time just how widespread the damage was, I wasn’t too concerned about the power, thinking it would be back on in no time. As it turned out, things were much worse than I’d realized. The Governor promptly declared my county (and several others) “Disaster Areas”. By the time I conceded that I needed to get some supplies (Tuesday), they were in short order. ‘C’ or ‘D’ batteries were no where to be found and Kroger was selling ice as fast as they could bag it up. I got ice, hoping to save my freezer full of Vermont Mystic Pies (tragically, that endeavor was doomed to failure), peanut butter and bread. I spent a week bored out of mind, reduced to eating peanut butter sandwiches and fast food and very thankful for Tim Horton’s coffee, having a gas water heater, and my XPower Powerpack 600HD, which I used to power my laptop and DSL modem and then recharged in the car while I drove around searching (in vain) for some sign of repair crews actually repairing. I know they were out there, working hard, It just would have been reassuring to have seen them doing something other than driving to and fro.
DP&L reported that 300,000 of its 515,000 customers lost power Sunday, Sept. 14.
Here’s the breakdown of DP&L customers without power, day-by-day:
Sept. 15: 300,000
Sept. 16: 200,000
Sept. 17: 105,000
Sept. 18: 80,000
Sept. 19: 65,000
Sept. 20: 51,000
Sept. 21: 38,000
Sept 22: 28,000
Sept. 23: 13,000
Sept. 24: 8,000
My power was restored just as I was getting ready to leave for work Friday night, the 19th. It was then that I discovered that my cable was out. Does the torture never end?
Finally Tuesday night around 5PM two trucks from Time Warner Cable showed up, they spent the next several hours circling the block, working on the wires, finally getting my cable back on at 8:50PM. Supposedly they will credit my bill for the time from 24 hours after the power was restored until the cable was restored, 73+ hours. Personally, I don’t think I should have to pay for any of the time that service was interrupted, but according to the Public Utilities Commission, they are only liable for the time after power was restored. Oh well.
In summation, I would just like to say this to the Tropics:
Keep your damned storms to yourself! We don’t send you our blizzards, do we?
Seriously, there is just something terribly wrong about suffering this sort of inconvenience at the hands of a hurricane/tropical storm while not enjoying any of the benefits of a tropical climate.
That’s all I’m saying.
I’ve got a laptop that I’ve had for, I don’t know, maybe 7 years. Anyway, lately I’ve been thinking it’s probably time to upgrade the operating system from Windows 98 (I know! crazy, huh?). A while back I set it up to dual-boot with Kubuntu 8.04, and that really served to highlight just how dated Win98 is.
So, I’ve been seriously debating ditching 98 altogether and just running Linux, or possibly installing XP. Last week I was perusing eBay and came across a pretty sweet little IBM NetVista box for sale; 2Ghz P4, 512M of Ram, a $71 ‘Buy it now’ price (+$20 shipping) and best of all, it came with XP Pro installed. This set the wheels to turning;
I’ve got an XP Pro CD, I could use this computer’s activation key, install XP on the laptop, install Linux on the new ‘puter and add a new member to my computer minions, all for less than I would have paid to buy XP for the laptop (and with no “piracy” issues)!
Done, done, and done!
I just finished installing XP Pro on the laptop, activating it with Micro$oft, and updating it to SP3. The “new” NetVista is contentedly crunching numbers for BOINC, and I feel like a frugal demented genius… or something.
