...actual distinct voices speaking in my mind? Or is it just the weblog of James Lindenschmidt? Here you can see me wrestle with this and other questions, while spewing forth my writings, opinions, and hallucinations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

 

The Sanctity of Robert Johnson

I often borrow CDs and DVDs from my local libraries. This is often futile, since many of these CDs have changed hands so many times that some of them are unplayable, having absorbed 1,284 too many scratches on them. I went a few days ago, and saw Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings. The box was tattered, held together by industrious use of clear packing tape. It was obviously a very popular checkout, since Robert Johnson is (perhaps rightly so) considered the father of the blues, and therefore of all 20th-century popular music in the West. So I was worried that the CDs would be unplayable.

The CDs, however, are impeccable. They play perfectly. It's almost as if those who have checked it out in the past -- all of them, without exception -- have treated these CDs much more carefully than they normally do. I thought it was strange. But I'm pleased. So far, "They're Red Hot" is my favorite track. Good stuff.

^ posted at 2:21 PM

 

The Problem of Rank and Spirit

This problem is related to the pessimism I have been experiencing off and on for the past several months. I am not usually gravitated toward elitism. I place my abundant hope in the potential of the human spirit to rise above itself (this is more or less a Nietzschean outlook). Note that this outlook implies rank -- in the language of "rise above" there is a hierarchy between two states of being, and one is preferred over the other. But, it seems clear that humans are capable of growth; indeed I would argue that this capacity for growth is what defines us as human.

One question from this is: what constitutes growth? How do we know when we are growing? I mean spiritual and intellectual growth. The simplest answer (which in many ways simply restates the question) is that we create ideals for ourselves, and moving toward these ideals is growth.

It remains difficult for me to deny that people (especially people in America, with which I am most familiar) are sheep. This is the basic problem I am trying to address, for this is an elitist attitude, and I am in general uncomfortable with elitism. It is perhaps the difference between description and prescription; in other words, yes, most people are sheep, but they don't have to be. People (or at least a person) will always have the potential to rise above the barnyard pen.

Then there are the people who do actively seek to grow, but in misguided -- or perhaps evil -- ways. Here I'm thinking of, say, George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc. This cabal is expanding their agenda, imposing it upon the world. And they will profit by it, no matter how much destruction they cause. However, their spirits are so undernourished that they cannot see the damage being inflicted upon the world. These massive blind spots allow them to work their evil without the pangs of conscience that would stop most of us. I can only hope that one day -- perhaps next week, perhaps on their death beds, perhaps in a future incarnation -- they will finally acknowledge the damage they have done, unconcealing it in their consciousnesses, and begin to overcome themselves.

I was talking to a close friend of mine a few weeks ago during the Iraq hearings in Congress. She said that she is able to maintain her optimism by remembering that every soul is on its path. Evildoers and those who would spread destruction have lessons they need to learn. They will learn them eventually, though who-knows-how-much destruction will occur before they do. I admire this view because it points out that everyone is on their path, which tends to quell elitist viewpoints. We are all indeed on our paths, it's just that some are further along than others. So the quesiton thus becomes one of time. If time is linear, then there remains a rank of sorts; those who are further along their path and closer to "enlightentment" have a higher spiritual rank. However, there is increasing evidence (in, for example, mysticism and modern physics) that time is not linear. Given that, rank as applied to spirit becomes meaningless.

^ posted at 7:58 PM

 

One less reason to boot into Windows

I've found a DVD player for Linux that works. It's called Ogle. I had been using xine, which works great for .mpeg and .avi files. But DVD playback was always choppy. With Ogle, things seem to be smooth as silk. So far.

Now if there were only Pro Audio Recording applications for Linux, I wouldn't have to use Windoze at all.

^ posted at 12:09 AM

 

Back from Vinalhaven

Vinalhaven was gorgeous. It's visible from the mainland, which I hadn't realized it would be. It's a pretty big island, and pretty sparsely populated. Of course, the population increases fourfold in the summer. By now, most of the summer residents have gone.

Things seem different on the island. Time seems to flow differently; people seem to have a more fundamental awareness of the difference between urgency and importance. This was illustrated to me when the return ferry was delayed. On Saturday, there was a storm, and the last 2 ferries back to the mainland were cancelled. Then, Saturday night, the power went out. It was restored to most of the island at around 7am, but the ferry terminal was still without power. As a result, both the 7 and 8:45am ferries were cancelled, since they couldn't lower the ramp from the dock to the boat. Finally, they did so manually, and we were able to leave on the 11:15 trip. Ironically, this was the one we had originally planned to take. But since we had awoken at about 3:30 and were up, we went down to take the 8:45. It turned out we had to wait for a few hours. It was a beautiful day, though; clear skies, fairly warm (~50 degrees), and lots of big, pretty waves from the storm the day before.

The employee at the terminal explained over and over what was going on, as new people came in to find out whether they'd be able to get back to the mainland. Most took it in stride; a few were pretty angry. These were (mostly) people who wanted to get their cars over to the mainland, which often requires that reservations be made weeks in advance. But those scheduled to go on the earlier, cancelled trips were given priority.

By the end of the day, I was very glad to be home. But it occured to me that it wouldn't be such a bad thing if "home" were an island off the coast of Maine.

I did have another great realization. This trip was the first time since our daughter was born (she's 5) that my wife and I have been away from her for more than 24 hours. She spent the weekend with friends. Though we enjoyed each others' company immensely, we both really missed her. I have a feeling that future trips will include her, at least as long as she wants to come with us. She will, after all, someday be a teenager.

^ posted at 10:57 PM

 

Where do North Atlantic Islands Stand With Being?

Still reading Heidegger. His question, "where does it (whatever is being questioned or investigated) stand with Being?" is rapidly becoming my mantra. Heidegger basically argues that Being itself is not absolute in the sense that something does/does not exist; rather, he says, Being has a sort of "dynamic range." In other words, that something is is given. The question is, how much being does it have? I'm thinking that the more I can interact with other Beings, the more Being I myself have. Productive, synergy-building relationships are a goal.

On another note, I'm going to Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine, for a long weekend with my wife. It will be a sort of belated honeymoon for us, since we have rarely had a night to ourselves since our daughter was born. It's about a 90 minute ferry ride from Rockland, Maine, on the coast. It should be a good time.

No blogging this weekend...

^ posted at 11:14 PM

 

The Return To Philosophy

After taking much of the summer off, I've begun to re-read some philosophy. In many ways, getting an undergrad degree in philosophy is like taking a 4-year appetizer. In most undergrad classes, there isn't sufficient time to really treat a philosophical work with the attention it deserves. In addition, one usually takes 3 or 4 other classes, and one's time is limited. One of the benefits of not having classes now is that I can read whatever I want, and spend however much time on a text as I wish.

I at first tried to decide whether to read John Dewey's Art as Experience or Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics. I'm not sure why, but I decided to go with Heidegger first. It's been amazing. Heidegger has an uncanny mind. He relentlessly questions Being, that is perhaps his greatest contribution to philosophy. This book begins with the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and spends 50 pages analyzing the structure of this, the fundamental question of metaphysics. Here's a good passage about philosophy from that text:

"It is absolutely correct and proper to say that 'You can't do anything with philosophy.' It is only wrong to suppose that this is the last word on philosophy. For the rejoinder imposes itself: granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it, do something with us?"

^ posted at 10:40 AM

 

Information flow, spam, and advertising

I'm reading The Real Battle by Doc Searls. It's his report on the Digital Hollywood conference recently held in California. According to Doc, one of the main themes of the conference is the impact of the Internet and Digital Rights management upon Hollywood. As Lawrence Lessig (and possibly others) have pointed out, this is in many ways shaping up to be a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, that is to say, between the entertainment industry and the computer industry.

One of the problems with the broadcasting industry is that much money is made through advertising. But given the advance of technology, there are now many, many more networks and broadcasts than in the past. Therefore, the value of each one of them is smaller. In a paradigm where there are only a few stations (I'm only 33, and I can remember when there were 5 TV stations in the major city where I grew up), flow of information in the form of TV broadcasts were controlled by very few people. And now, with satellite networks, Internet radio, etc., almost anyone can broadcast.

As a result, it becomes more and more difficult to sustain an audience's attention during commercial breaks. There are so many other options to viewing commercials, most people would rather flip through one of the interesting programs rather than sit through a commercial. Now, a commercial is just another program, and nearly all of them suck.

^ posted at 2:09 PM

 

can you say DVD?

Since I got my DVD-ROM drive almost a year ago, I have never been able to get it to run right under Linux. Now, using xine, it works. This means that in less than one week using Linux Mandrake, I have been able to get more things working properly than in 3 years of running Red Hat and Debian.

Also, there is a program under Mandrake called urpmi (where do they get these names???) that does for Mandrake what apt-get does for Debian, namely making software installation effortless.

I'm now officially a Mandrake fan.

^ posted at 3:35 AM

 

email clients

I have switched back to Kmail as my favored email client. Though I liked Ximian Evolution, I stopped using it for (mainly) two reasons. First, it had more features than I comfortably needed. It's just too much for what I need, which is just a simple email client. Kmail, on the other hand is simple, but very powerful. It has filters, which are a must.

The second reason I switched is purely aesthetic. I love the way KDE, and therefore KMail, look. Evolution is part of GNOME, but it is still based on GNOME 1.x (technically it's based on GTK, which is the toolkit for GNOME). So it just looked clunky compared to KDE 3.x.

So I'm happy again with the mail client. I tried Evolution, and it just didn't work for me.

^ posted at 8:18 PM

 

we have achieved CD audio

I got my system to play CDs today. There is a plugin for XMMS, my favorite music player for Linux, that allows direct-digital playback through the PCI bus. The plugin is called xmms-cdread and it's available as a Mandrake rpm package.

I've also been playing quite a bit with the cosmetic trimmings. KDE3 is awesome. Everything looks fabulous. There are theme settings that allow you to mimic Apple's OSX. Pretty nice stuff.

^ posted at 6:50 PM

 

sound and security

btw, today I got my sound card working properly. Also, my friend Mark helped me to secure my machine, making sure my firewall is working properly. While no computer anywhere is completely secure, I feel pretty good about my situation. It would be very difficult to crack my machine.

The sound doesn't work quite as well as I'd hoped it would. It turns out that my sound card doesn't have a place to plug in the audio output of the CD player. Most sound cards, like a soundblaster, have such a plug, but my card is designed for recording, not for playing CDs. Oh well. As a result, I can play mp3s, ogg vorbis, etc., but I cannot listen to CDs from my computer. Oh well. Perhaps it's time for me to get an actual audio CD player anyway.

I didn't really have to do anything to get things working. There is a program called alsamixergui (great names these Linux hackers get) that wasn't set correctly. Basically, I had the outputs of the soundcard completely muted. I knew it was a stupid user error all along. Yeah, right. Thanks to my friend Mark for helping me troubleshoot this.

By the way, my understanding is that the ALSA sound system is going to be a part of the actual Linux kernel in the next release. So hopefully, all this stuff will be automatic, and therefore less of a headache.

There is now no reason whatsoever not to give Linux a try. Mandrake 9.0 rocks. I'm totally impressed.

^ posted at 1:55 AM

 

ouch

Today we were at a homeschooling group that we go to regularly. They have a large, old house that they're remodeling. The back step was in not-so-good shape, and they've been talking about replacing it recently. Well, today I gave them more incentive to do so.

When I stepped onto the back porch with my right leg, it didn't stop at the floor, breaking through the rotten wood. I was wearing shorts, and my right leg was badly scraped in 4 places, each about the size of an index card. One of the scrapes is on my outer calf, one on my outer thigh, one on the top of my thigh, and one on the inner thigh down near my knee joint. Of course, these all have begun to scab over, so every time I move my knee it hurts like hell. In addition, I seem to have pulled a muscle or something in my left leg around my knee. It hurts to walk on.

Yikes. Don't mean to complain, but that's probably the most significant thing that happened to me today.

^ posted at 1:45 AM

 

Mandrake, anti-aliasing, and Evolution

I've been playing more with my new Linux Mandrake setup. It's really good. KDE 3.0.3 is stunning. The antialiased fonts look amazing. Plus, it's faster and (so far) more stable than KDE 2.2.2. I'm really enjoying this experience.

I'm also getting used to Ximian Evolution, a new and very powerful email client. It has a ton of features on it, including calendaring. It's very Outlook-like in that regard. It probably has more features than I need, but that's OK. It has very powerful email filtering capabilities; I get enough email that filtering is a must for me. Otherwise my inbox is a jumbled mess.

I still haven't had time to troubleshoot my soundcard situation. It's most likely something misconfigured in ALSA, or perhaps it is a problem with aRTs, the KDE sound server. I hope to solve that problem soon. Regardless, a friend of mine is coming for a visit next week; he's a Linux expert and has promised to help me solve the problem, if I haven't figured it out by then.

I miss my mp3s and ogg vorbis files!

^ posted at 12:57 AM