Airports, shoes, and a horribly screwed up emerging police state

Shoes, again Shoes, again.

Once again, a very small thing pisses me off.

I live outside the US and my work brings me back often. My major contact with the Government is mostly airport security and customs. Customs never gives me trouble, nor really does airport security. But, today they asked me (and everyone else) to take off their shoes, even soft soled ones.

Why?

I will once again state that the x-ray inspection of shoes is one of those innocuous indicators of a super screwed up security policy.

As I predicted in an earlier post, the inspections are getting out of hand – see all the reports of groping by TSA checkpoint staff. Also, smaller airports are trying to kick out the TSA. And how about the rule against people congregating anywhere on the plane? That’s straight out of every police state’s book, verbatim.

This all reminds me of the whole Inquisitor thing by Prof. Umbridge in Harry Potter, Order of the Phoenix. Police states only grow and only major outcry has any hope of reversing the loss of liberties. My message to the redundant Homeland Security Agency, the TSA, and George and his cronies: Have you no shame?

Ah, for a refreshing Jeffersonian revolution. It’s been a long time since the last one.

Using an Apple iPod photo with Nokia Lifeblog

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I recently played with an iPod photo to see how it would work with Lifeblog.

I installed the iPod photo software on my Windows XP machine. This updated my iTunes. The cool thing is that on the PC you don’t need a helper app, such as iPhoto (which doesn’t exist on the PC) or Adobe anything (which is what is suggested by Apple). You can point iTunes to a folder and it will suck up the photos from there (nested too).

Needless to say, I pointed iTunes to LifeblogData/Datastore/Files, the folder that has all my data (all neatly organized by month I should say, which came in handy later on). After loading my songs, it started (very slowly) optimizing the images for the iPod (don’t know why), and then it took a while to load 4300 or so images (about 4 G) from my Lifeblog.

Yes, it worked. Better yet, I could view all the images on the iPod all together or in their subfolders which – yes! – Lifeblog had politely organized by month! How cool is that? My images were all properly rotated as in Lifeblog; though it wasn’t clear to me how the iPod was sorting my pictures, since some were out of order.

To see how well the integration worked, I transferred a new image to Lifeblog from the phone. It was transferred (updated) to the iPod when I placed it in the cradle – automatically! But, I still need to figure out some other things, since when I rotated an image after it had been uploaded to the iPod, the image wasn’t updated on the iPod side, even though it was on the PC. So, I’m still trying to figure out the synch there (isn’t that always the issue!).

In any case, this was so cool!

And since the iPod photo is only a passive device – all you can do with the photo is show it in different ways, there’s no manipulation or futzing – it’s a perfect companion for Lifeblog aficionados! I have my whole Lifeblog now on my iPod and I take the TV cable to bore the beejesus out of my family, showing them all my pics.

Meet me here!

Summary:
What: Bar meet with Charlie
Where: Frankie’s (see info below), San Francisco
When: Wednesday, Dec 8, 2004, 7:00PM
Why: Just to suck down some suds and catch up on stuff.

Frankie’s Bohemian Cafe
1862 Divisadero St
San Francisco , CA 94115
Phone: (415) 921-4725
Neighborhood: Pacific Heights

I liked this one. Thanks for all the suggestions. I’ll use them in future visits. ,-)

The Depths of Thought and the Inquiry into Our Spirit

We are animals.

In as much as we carry the legacy of billions of years of evolution, we are animals. The brief hiccup of time since we split from the chimpanzees has not been sufficient to allow us to escape our origins even though that same time span has caused enough change in us to fool ourselves into thinking we have left the animal realm behind. Cosmetic changes aside, is there any true aspect solely ours? Any aspect that no other animal can claim, either in fact or by analogy? There may be. It may lie in our minds. But, apart from those myriad thought processes we label as ours alone that are simply glorified and reprocessed animal thoughts, what part of our mind is it? It is that part that comes out when the body is fed, the urges are sated, and the mind is at ease and rested and allowed to roam untethered. It is that Inquiry, beyond pure feline curiosity, beyond the scientific method. It is that Inquiry that seeks to clarify and understand and to synchretize all our animal aspects, all our glorified animal thoughts and all our learning into a consistent and truthful Perception.

Being mostly animal, most of us never attempt that Inquiry, or if we do, rapidly fall back into the coziness of our animal selves. And cozy our animal selves are. Our animal selves carry in their code the evolutionary memory of all our progenitors, down to the pre-microbial molecular age. Our human self is young and fragile, barely walking freely, hardly recognized, not completely free from animal dominance. Our human self must work hard and still face illogical dichotomies and painful spectrums while trying to learn and grow. Our animal self knows and does with the reassurance of ingrained memory. Our human self is still developing and establishing methods and materials, a set back is devastating. Our animal self has perfected its style over millennia; a set back is patiently countered by slight changes in bone or bite, fin, fur, or feather.

But the few of us who do successfully delve into that obscured Inquiry gain something that can only be describes as completeness, smugness?, the state where we know and perceive more than before and where part of the anxiety of being is removed, assuaged.

The spark of Inquiry usually comes suddenly. We undergo an event, a defining event, that gives us a glimpse of something intangible that we recognize as different, much as we can recognize a misspelled word without knowing the misspelling. Our perceptions alerted, we are briefly lifted to a different perspective, above the fog, and when we return, try to capture that perspective again. That Inquiry is the never ending climb, back to that vantage point, back to the place where perception was a little clearer, the past a smidgen more understandable, the future a tad more hopeful, the present a bit more bearable. If our minds are closed at the time when we are briefly shown the different perspective, as is common, the opportunity is lost, the Inquiry forgotten, or worse, we are left with a deep sense of emptiness, a deep feeling of a missed accomplishment, a desire to regain a fleeting feeling without knowing how or why. Somewhere in between the two extremes of being alert for the spark of Inquiry and being totally oblivious to it is where one knows one saw something, knows one missed it, knows there is something more, something beyond and is willing to work hard at the climb, following the unmarked trail.

chillin’

Seated.

Hurtling in a steel pressurized tube, thousands of meters up in the cold atmosphere, over under and through cottony clouds of future storms or gentle mist, rattling through solid air, bouncing flaps of shaped metal holding me and a hundred others between earth and heaven, with me seated at 6L. And myself, hurtling towards middle age, in a pressurized society with expectations and conventions long adopted as I grew older and gained responsibility for others – Love! Love is what did it, oh, that Faustian bargain between pleasure and loneliness, between freedom of responsibility and responsibility to ensure the freedom of others while trying to keep them safe, close, protected, and happy. What are those things we give up as we age or do we not give them up but replace them with other things – the rediscovery of my ‘old’ self only to find that it is always there, under the surface, accumulated and showing in my ‘current’ self in ways only I can really see, only I can really choose, only I can say when to bring it out. But less and less do I bring it out.

And.

Fake it may seem, but the younger ones around me remind me that I too was unfettered and careless like them, exploring the world and challenging assumptions, that it is not hard for me to bring things slightly back to the fore, to reintegrate what I was with what I became, to recognize and nuture the core. And to figure out that the mix that the world now presents might not even had existed earlier, the old is new today just by the absence of what is normal today – technology, music, experimentation, populations, politics, travel, pollution, business, bodies, mores, morals, religion – though all were there then, they are unrecognizable now, unthinkable then, normal now, rare then. There are some things that never change, but get twisted in new ways or not at all, but all the same, the players are all different and mix-mess the message mixage such that the co-opting of the old is a rehash to the older yet beguiling to the clueless younger.

Time and again.

Idle time is growing and it’s when the Devil comes out only because the Devil revels in making us doubt, fear, hesitate, hate, greed, reach too far, have ‘good’ intentions, think we are right, try to do right when we say the others are wrong and we will fix it all! But, the Devil is just the backside of God, who wants us to have these whole ranges of emotions so that in the end God walks on the stage, brilliant and triumphant, soothing, calming, telling us we are right to be subject to the Devil, but now it’s time to go home, take a nice hot shower, change into fresh PJs, and slip into the freshly washed sheets of a comfortable bed with a down pillow to rest our weary heads full of all the worries the Devil has tormented us with, rest our tired mind so that we can have weird but entertaining dreams that only reflect the Devil’s torments, but are gone when we wake up, rest our aching brains, so that we can remember we do go to sleep to dream, because in the dreams we believe that it is all unreal, but that’s a disservice, since we need to also believe that reality is unreal, that we must laugh at it all and not take it seriously, lest we take ourselves too seriously and lose perspective, lest we forget that the only true thing is the Love that binds us together.

Asunder.

Not as long as there is Love – can’t live with it or without it, though the bargains we make for Love aren’t always necessary and we must learn to give and force the other to learn to give too, since Love is limitless like the Sun, more limitless than the Sun, since there is no physics to bind it to anything we understand, but we know it for what it is – it grows effortlessly, captures souls with ease, slices egos unheedingly, as hard to give as to take, as simple to dole out as to receive. Tying back to deals for Love, it’s worth it, the alternative of loneliness or togetherness without sharing and giving and taking Love and multiplying Love with little bundles of Love – children, creations, thoughts, kindness, charity, hope, help – is not what we are wired to do.

I have known.

And I have experienced Love at it greatest – bursts of energy, emotion, fire, fierce passion, intense anger, deep despair, fear of loss, fear of hurt, fear for the little bundles, fear of loneliness, but more importantly, the understanding that Love is long term and stings and burns and is uplifting and is exhilarating and is orgasmic and puts everything in contrast that it kills, it gives birth, it creates, it destroys, it Loves and Hates and Loves again.

Clarity.

In vision, the mind is as important as the eyes – to see the object, to see the context, to see the history, to see every detail from the visible to the invisible, from the world we live in to the fabric of the universe which so few grasp, composed of emptiness, of energy, of pinches in space, of congregations of multidimensional manifestation that in the end are all connected in so many levels, where one tug pulls the entire universe in unexpected way. Oh, how we are so blind for being able to see in restricted wavelengths, in restricted space, in restricted imagination, in restricted scales, in restricted dimensions. Yet, how clever we are in speculating, in working hard to reverse creation to tease apart the foundation upon which the whole universe works, simply because we are curious? no, simply because we need to know if Love matters.

Complexification.

Start with the basics – no, not food, security, shelter, don’t limit yourself to something as mundane as those human basics that are so far down the basics to the greater universe – basics, like energy, vibrations of the dimensions, some big, some small, some rolled up, some behind the curtain of other dimensions, then pinch them up in small packages that clump up and clump up until we can start to see them when we bash protons at huge massive speeds, than these clumps keep clumping until they start affecting other clumps in interesting ways and they start putting each other in relation to each other until we get somewhere semi-understandable such as an electron or proton or neutron, all three which form the basic for our world. Hydrogen, Deuterium, Tritium, BANG!, Helium, we’re getting somewhere, Lithium, oh real chemistry, and so on, to bigger and more versatile, like Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Phosphorus – the backbone of DNA – and mix it all together onto another complexity level, with heat and light from little basic hydrogen doing it’s thing in a tight hot party of the universal gaseous mosh pit, and that complexity becomes stuff and BANG that stuff add another level of complexity all by itself, such that now it runs away from the rest of the universe, learning from hydrogen and temporarily putting entropy on hold so that it can play some more over immensely long periods of time – or short, depending on your time scale – until BANG molecules form cells form organisms forms BANG more, and that complexity forms thoughts and societies and religions and all and that complexity is sitting on a plane contemplating his navel and BANG? no bang yet, until we reach that next level of complexity, helped by interconnections, hypercubes of societies, connections form mind to mind, jettisoning our crude prosthetics for ‘instant’ communication until we learn, like the cells did to change our ways of individuality and then societies or clumps again of cells form clumps in societies which form clumps of what?

Interesting.

I think, therefore I am partial to others who think, even more so to those who think better than me, those without shame to think. I hereby declare my thinking status, beyond the day to day operational ‘basics’ of food, shelter, security, society, ambition, fulfillment, but toward that next level which we will never know, due to our ever brief flare of living on the earth, out tenuous hold on the future as who we are is gradually forgotten by those who come after us, though hopeful that some little something is passed on, absorbed by the general family, the general society, the general species, such that, as I look back to that thinker who came down from the tree and gave me the chance to be who I am today, my thoughts today add up to something and way down the line someone will be thankful and wondering about that guy who climbed up into the sky just to cross his tiny world, quaintly having to physically transport himself in a crude potential energy releasing machine, hurtling him through the air through a thin veil of atmosphere, over a thin crust of cold rock, on a tiny molten pebble, spinning around a tiny hydrogen lamp, whirling among other hydrogen lamps clumped together, part of a neighborhood of similar lamp cluster, forming a super group of cluster, in a small section of an expanding fabric of reality in something he had no clue about, but tried to understand.

Love.

Charlie is coming to San Francisco!

Just wanted to let everyone know that I am going to be in San Francisco on December 8th and 9th. I had wanted to make it to Manic Monday, I mean Mobile Monday, but my schedule was already set.

But, ever the clever guy, Russ suggested I just let everyone know that I will be in San Francisco and that they can meet up with me (I’ve never done this before, though it seems a regular blogger thing to do).

I still haven’t decided on a bar to meet at, since I do not know the city that well, but I do know that it will be on December 8th in the evening (around 7pm?). Once I know the place, I will mention it right here. Feel free to suggest a place, especially if it has good beer and burgers (I’d like to eat something there). FWIW, I’m staying at a hotel near Union Sq.

Why come? Well, I don’t have any goodies, but I could bring a Nokia 6630 and a Nokia 7710 for everyone to fondle. 😉 And, if there’s interest enough, I could show Lifeblog 1.5 (I don’t usually walk around with my laptop) and maybe give out beta copies.

Of course, it’s not all about me. I’d really like to meet up with all of you and see and hear about the things from the mobile world that make you stay up late and wake up early.

Summary:
What: Bar meet with Charlie
Where: Frankie’s (see info below), San Francisco
When: Wednesday, Dec 8, 2004, 7:00PM
Why: Just to suck down some suds and catch up on stuff.

Frankie’s Bohemian Cafe
1862 Divisadero St
San Francisco , CA 94115
Phone: (415) 921-4725
Neighborhood: Pacific Heights

Looking for tips and tricks?

I’ve been looking at my logs and I see that many people are searching for tips and tricks for Nokia phones. I really don’t have any here, except on how I moved all my messages from my Nokia 6600 to my Nokia 7610 and subsequently brought them into my Lifeblog (click here to read it again).

What I really want to do here is, of course, put a lot of tip and tricks for Lifeblog. I must admit that I haven’t been using Lifeblog 1.0 in the last few months, because I was testing and demoing Lifeblog 1.5. I do have a few tips and tricks for 1.5, but I have to wait until you get it.

Today, our esteemed Lifeblog 1.5 Series 60 guru (Hugo) showed me one of his little tricks for using Lifeblog.

A neat reminder note in Lifeblog
1) Create a reminder note and put the date somewhere in the future by changing the date of the item.
2) Put it into your Favorites.
3) Synch.

Now the reminder will always be on the far right of your Timeline (right next to the current day) always reminding you. Also, with Lifeblog 1.5, you could create the note right on your phone.

If you’ve got any tips or tricks, please add them to this post or somewhere else more appropriate in this blog. Also, if you are wondering how to do something, don’t hesitate to place your question here. I can try to provide any tips I can.

Tchau!