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Swim Until You Can’t See Land
We salute at the threshold of the North Sea
in my mind
And a nod to the boredom that drove me here
to face the tide and swim
(Whoaaaa) I swim (Whoaaa) oh swim (Whoaaa)
Dip the toe in the ocean. Oh how it hardens and it numbs.
And the rest of me is a version of man
built to collapse into crumbs
And if I hadn’t come down
To the coast to disappear
I may have died in a land-slide
Of the rocks, the hopes and fears.
So swim until you can’t see land.
Swim until you can’t see land.
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
Up to my knees now, do I wait? Do I dive?
The sea has seen my like before though it’s my first
And perhaps last time.
Let’s call me a baptist, call this the drowning of the past
She’s there on the shoreline
Throwing stones at my back
So swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
Now the water’s taller than me
And the land is a marker line
All I am is a body adrift in water, salt and sky
So swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
Temple Grandin: The World Needs all kinds of Minds
Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works — sharing her ability to “think in pictures,” which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.
Sean Hayes: Garden
The Garden
When the morning breaks
We will be out walking
We will watch the sun
Rise above the wall
We will ask ourselves
What road to take
We will catch our hearts
You and I
decide
Where to take our journey
How high to fly
Love to love our turning
You and I
Take the road we take
Then we improvise
When the road it breaks
There will be surprises
Live to grow with fate
Wake to see your Time
Search your heart with mine
You and I
decide
You and I
Garden
grows around
us
slowly, very well
These were the words spoken by one of my young, student directors as she attempted to motivate her 3rd grade counterparts appropriately during one of our practice shoots:
Art of the CSA
CSAs require 90 seconds or less of our time and, when done well, can be artful while they make great impact. This is a particularly good example, thankfully tipped off by Julian Gough, who we tip our hat to for it:
Education at its Finest
BFIS and Habitat for Humanity in Senegal
A small window into the experience of students from the Benjamin Franklin International School in Barcelona who spent a week near Dakar, Senegal in Keur Mbaye Fall, working in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity.
“If we wish to teach fish to swim, it helps if we put them in the water”
Curious Herzog
Our man Werner Herzog reads Curious George in a tone that only the German filmmaker can muster:
hats off to @jeremyryancarr for this tasty tidbit
Designer: Justin Lund
Old pal, Justin Lund, is a gifted designer and is featured in this short film:
Go Malamud
Cory Doctorow writes the following about Carl Malamud:
Carl is the beloved “rogue librarian” who has done so much to liberate tax-funded government works, from movies to court rulings to the text of laws themselves, putting these public domain works on the Internet where they belong.
By the People is an inspirational and education piece on the history of the US Government Printing Office and the radical ethic that said that the governments documents belonged to the citizens who footed the bill for their production. Today, with the Internet making it more possible than ever for all of us to inspect the workings of our governments and benefit from their creations, that ethic is more important (and more endangered) than ever.
Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire
Author Michael Pollan says:
The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.
Marshmallow test: pass or fail?
I’ve never been into marshmallows but still think I woulda failed on principle:
Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.
MOBY in MPLS
Moby was in town @ The Current this past week and, in addition to hosting Theft of the Dial, left us with some great live recordings, including this moving Gospel rendition:
Humans Swimming
Are you a human? Do you like to swim? How about free-diving? How about static free diving?
The Great Battle of Internetâ„¢ (continued)
Condoleezza Rice’s missive to the EU
By Kieren McCarthy
Published Friday 2nd December 2005 09:07 GMTThe World Summit in Tunis last month was overshadowed by the global argument over internet governance.
Its biggest controversy came with the proposition put forward by the EU a month earlier that there be a new inter-governmental body that oversee ICANN. The US government – which currently enjoys unilateral control over the internet infrastructure – was furious and launched an enormous lobbying campaign, both public and private, across the board to retain its position.
Most significant among all those lobbying efforts was a letter sent from the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to the UK foreign minister Jack Straw acting in the role of presidency of the EU.
In the letter, Rice used strong language for a diplomatic missive, to stress how seriously the US administration was taking the issue and how determined it was to retain ICANN in overall charge of the internet. European diplomats privately confessed that the letter had a significant impact on their position.
The result was that the EU never raised its inter-governmental forum again in World Summit meetings, and the end agreement stuck with the US position.
This is the first time time the full text of that letter has been published:
7 November 2005
To:
The Right Honourable Jack Straw MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, London
Dear Foreign Secretary,
The governance structure and continued stability and sustainability of the Internet are of paramount importance to the United States. The Internet has become an essential infrastructure for global communications, including for global trade and commerce, and therefore we firmly believe that support for the present structures for Internet governance is vital. These structures have proven to be a reliable foundation for the robust growth of the Internet we have seen over the course of the last decade.
As we approach the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), we should underscore the vast potential of the Internet for global economic expansion, poverty alleviation, and for improving health, education and other public services, particularly in the developing world where Internet access remain unacceptably low.
The Internet will reach its full potential as a medium and facilitator for global economic expansion and development in an environment free from burdensome intergovernmental oversight and control. The success of the Internet lies in its inherently decentralized nature, with the most significant growth taking place at the outer edges of the network through innovative new applications and services. Burdensome, bureaucratic oversight is out of place in an Internet structure that has worked so well for many around the globe. We regret the recent positions on Internet governance(i.e., the new cooperation model) offered by the European Union, the Presidency of which is currently held by the United Kingdom, seems to propose just that – a new structure of intergovernmental control over the Internet.
The four principles the United States issues on June 30, 2005, reinforce the continuing U.S. commitment to the Internetâ„¢s security and stability, including through the historical U.S. role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file. At that time, we also expressed our support for ICANN as the appropriate private sector technical coordinator of the Internetâ„¢s domain name and addressing system. We believe that ICANN is dedicated to achieving broad representation of global Internet communities and to developing policy through consensus-based processes. We have also expressed our interest in working with the international community to address legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns with respect to country code top-level domains (ccTLD). We wish to underscore that, in our statement of June 30, we supported ongoing dialogue on issues related to Internet governance across international forums.
The United States and the European Union have long worked together toward the goal of global access to the Internet. The WSIS offers us the opportunity to reaffirm our partnership to spread the benefits of the Internet globally. At the same time, the security and stability of the Internet are essential to the United States, the European Union, and to the world. We firmly believe that the existing Internet system balances the stability and security we need with the innovation and dynamism that private sector leadership provides.
The history of the Internetâ„¢s extraordinary growth and adaptation , based on private-sector innovation and investment, offers compelling arguments against burdening the network with a new intergovernmental structure for oversight. It also suggests that a new intergovernmental structure would most likely become an obstacle to global Internet access for all our citizens. It is in this spirit that we ask the European Union to reconsider its new position on Internet governance and work together with us to bring the benefits of the Information Society to all.
Sincerely,
Carlos M. Guiterrez Secretary of Commerce
Condoleezza Rice Secretary of State
Hats off to Cox and Forkum for the comic
Solution Evolution
Over the years, I’ve had many different backup solutions in place in my home to back up the now >3TB of data I deem worthy of the trouble. I’ve used RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 6. I’ve used complete solutions and DIY on all the major platforms, as well as Linux flavors like Debian, Yellow Dog and Slackware. I’ve automated these processes, backing up crucial data online, offline, near-line and off-site, and de-automated them whenever I’ve slacked off on my documentation and have forgotten what’s backing up to where and when. Through this experience, I have a decent idea of what works well and what doesn’t.
To bolster available storage to these various configurations over time, I’ve added both internal and external drives, using LaCie almost exclusively for the external side of things. I’ve purchased dozens of these drives over many years and, up until the last couple, have had good experiences with them.
Case in point: yesterday morning, I woke up to find that backups had failed overnight, making this the third set of their products (I always buy them in pairs) that have failed me in the last 2 years. Over the last two years, I’ve lost 6 total, in each case just days after the manufacturer warranties expired. I purchased these drives based on logic that by spending $300-$400 on each, I was getting an acceptable level of reliability for less than it would cost for an enterprise-class solution costing significantly more. Note, it’s not the hard drives that fail, rather the enclosures LaCie builds around them. I end up using the drives in other ways, as noted below.
Thus, I found myself slowly starting to wake up from more than a good night’s rest. I started to realize that I have all of my critical project data in only one location. I had to decide how to proceed in order to keep it safe. Unsatisfied with my past methodology, I set out for some solution evolution.
After spending the morning reading reviews, again comparing complete vs. DIY solutions, I purchased a DroboPro:
Here’s the front:
Internal pic:
Back:
Yes, you can see a USB 2 port, 2 Firewire 800 ports and indeed that’s a Gigabit Ethernet port for iSCSI : )
The DroboPro was $1,289.95
The new drives: 4 x $119.99 = $479.96
Total cost: $1,769.91
That may seem steep, and it is, however, compare this to the cost of 6 failed drives over two years @ $300 each. And my time and worry.
The logic is that spending $1800 on consumer-grade hardware, while thinking it a less-expensive route, is actually more costly as time spent installing, configuring, maintaining and replacing these *solutions* is far more pricey than spending more upfront on a solution that will stand the test of time and allow for more flexibility, security and reliability.
You can count on me sharing my thoughts here on the DroboPro after it’s been in place in my studio for a few months.
* thanks to Chris Connaker @ Computer Audiophile for the images
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