From Grandmother Mountain Looking East towards Widow Peak
The New York Times has a wonderful presentation of a few of Ansel Adams photographs with audio commentary by Andrea Stillman, a former assistant. The presentation is great, the commentary is great but mostly this shows an alternative method of displaying photographs. This dovetails nicely with Brooks Jensen’s recent discussion of Folios. (Search for LW0421-LW0425) Brooks also presented yet a different method of presentation of photographs in his “Made of Steel” podcasts. (Search for LW0384-LW0389) All total maybe an hour of superior quality photography instruction. Three different means of presentation, all heartfelt and fitting to the goals. Check them out.
The Danish Poet is a 7 minute short animation that shows both the interconnectedness of life and power of Youtube to spread love. Put this down as one of the noble uses of the internets.
With beautiful Liv Ullman’s voice telling me a simple tale, all the way
from Denmark. A tale of a Danish poet. Oh, go ahead. You have time for
a sweet story, don’t you?
The Moon’s apparent size changes slightly, though, and a slight wobble called a libration is discernible as it progresses along its elliptical orbit. There is so much our brains can no comprehend on their own. Here is an example of how photography expands knowledge. I had never seen this before. Looking at the moon each night, I can not perceive the slight changes as shown in this little animated GIF. This is one of the advances that photography has brought to our understanding of our environment. This reminds me of a podcastBrooks Jensen made where he pointed out that it has only been a couple of hundred years since the development of photography, before which there was no photography at all, to now where millions, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions photographs are taken each day.
Having a organized and tidy desk does promote productivity, period. Mark over at Manager Tools has a great post today clarifying this. This is not only great advice for me but also for the people that I mentor. I like this quote because it is advice for us mere mortals! Horray for all us mere mortals.
All good career advice starts with the fundamental premise that for the purpose of the advice, everything else IS equal. It may not always be able to be purely applied (YES, brilliant geniuses can have AWFUL desks), but it is the best way to advise your charges (because they are likely NOT brilliant geniuses for whom standards of culture don’t apply.)
I recommend to anyone who is a manager or wants to manage themselves, get over to Manager Tools. There are great tools and resources there. Some are text, some are audio, all are priceless. Priceless in there value and price less as in FREE! I still can’t believe this stuff is free.
In the above picture of my desk we can see my home made bleacher for my hipsterPDA (link and link) with my custom vi key bindings card in the front. I still use the evil 3M Sticky Notes. Next to my eye glass case is a fun little retro PDA tool called pocketMOD. It is a PDA made out of a single sheet of paper. I haven’t used it but it is cute and my appeal to some. I’d like to figure out how to put callouts on pictures like this ala Flicker so that this things in the photo can be identified.
Found a new Linux podcast and it is great. A good mix of fun, personal and enterprise information. Their working on episode 4 as of this post. Check it out here.
Great short video interview between Robert Wright and Joseph Goldstein about living in the moment. I don’t think Robert gets it. There are more ways to experince life than the usual conditioned experince we usually settle for. It is well worth a look at this 4 min video.
National Geographic has a great feature on Buddhism in the West on their interactive website. I especially liked the slideshow and the video interview with the author. Well worth checking out.
Here are a few Dharma Podcast links. Some for these have excellent production values and some struggle in this area. My personal favorites so far are the Zencast podcasts.
Zencast - Great production, weekly or twice weekly, music and dharma talks with questions from the students.
Dharma Radio - Rev. Heng Sure @ Berkeley Buddhist Monastary- Bilingual (Vietnamese & English), sometimes too formal.
Infinite Smile - Michael McAlister - New to me, some recordings have volume issues.
Integral Naked - Ken Wilber and friends - Not strickly Zen but worth a listen.
Thanks to Ottmar Liebert and his recording of a mediation bell, I made a mashup recording that can be used as a zazen/zen sitting mediation timer. It has 30 seconds of silence so you can get situated and organized, then 3 strikes on the bell. This is followed by 30 minutes of exquisite, pristine, high quality silence. Monkey mind not included. Don’t blame the recording for any noise you hear. At the end of the silence the bell is struck 3 more times. The silence will continue for an additional 5 minutes to allow you to come out of zazen slowly without worrying about being startled by the next song in your playlist. (Brad Sucks - Makin Me Nervous is the next song on my iPod and while Brads music is great, it is pretty jarring compared to zazen.)
