The Rabbit Hole of Stuff

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This post by Leah McClellan “spoke to me” (as the saying goes.) Like so many of us, she “fell into the rabbit hole called stuff” and her house was “bulging and sinking at the same time.”

I still have way too much stuff in my life but I can do something about that. (Barb, on the other hand, likes her stuff and plans to keep it). From Ms. McClellan’s post:

1. The stuff you can buy is a distraction that won’t help you reach your goals
2. Stuff creates a false sense of self
3. Stuff can blind you
4. Material stuff keeps you busy with…material stuff
5. Stuff distracts us from ourselves

New blog theme

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Posting here feels like the mother who keeps her son’s room just as it was when he went away to college. It feels good just to come in and sit on the bed for a few minutes. I (briefly) considered abandoning this blog when I got caught up in Google+. Which is where I spend most of my online time these days. But — like a high school yearbook — it’s fun to flip through the pages here once in a while.

In the eleven years since I started posting things here, I’ve changed themes numerous times. Getting progressively minimalist over time. The current theme/framework is Genesis (by STUDIOPRESS). Gonna be hard to get more bare bones.

Going Clear

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Going Clear grabbed and held (and disturbed) me as few (non-fiction) books have. “Couldn’t put it down” is usually a cliche, but…

Reading this incredible story is as close to being in a cult as I’m ever likely to be. For my money, Scientology is far more frightening (and dangerous) than the Taliban.

Tom Cruise figured prominently in the second half of the book so I had to go back and take one more look at this video.

The race to build a better business class

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Probably my heightened awareness, but I’m seeing stories like this every time I log on. Airlines are racing to find a way to make business class seats more appealing. I found this NYT story especially interesting (and informative).

Lufthansa has a new business-class seat that can be yours for about $5,000 if you are traveling round trip from Frankfurt to New York. (Yeah, I think I’d pay that assuming I have the money)

Why so expensive? The story does a good job of explaining that, including:

“Each seat is hand-made and cost as much as a luxury car to produce. Business. First Class seats can cost between $250K and $500K.”

The Blast Shack: Part 2

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Bruce Sterling has written a follow-up to his 2010 essay on Wikileaks. Here are a few of my favorite snippets:

The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed.

Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks.

Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

iMovie Themes

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I’m exactly the sort of amateur Apple’s iMovie was created for. A set of simple, easy-to-use tools for editing those home movies. And it has some nice features I rarely use. Like themes. Here’s a minute of video and stills from Singapore (that I might have posted already) with one of the iMovie themes. Adds a little class I could never do on my own.

Penang Hill

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Sri Aruloli Thirumurugan is one of the oldest Hindu temples in Penang. It started off in the 1800’s as a small shrine to the Hindu deity Murugan – the deity associated with Thaipusam – by the Indian sepoys and sedan chair carriers, and is located at a mount within Penang Hill called Gun Hill.

Wikipedia

Mountain Stream

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Location on map »