Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness
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"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage." ~Anain Nin
Change your feeds! Hey subscribers! The new site has been live for a while now, and I've neglected to post the new feed instructions... please update this feed by adding http://birdonthemoon.com/new/index.xml to your blog agregator! Do it now! jaybird found this for you @ 10:51 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
Tubes: Indian village uploads itself onto Internet An Indian village has uploaded itself onto the Internet, giving the outside world a glimpse of life in rural India. Visitors to Hansdehar village's Web site (www.smartvillages.org) can see the names, jobs and other details of its 1,753 residents, browse photographs of their shops and read detailed specifications about their drainage and electricity facilities. Most of the residents can't yet surf the Hansdehar Web site as the village is not yet connected to the Internet. But the villagers hope the site -- and their imminent first Internet connection -- will put them in touch with the world beyond the flooded rice fields surrounding Hansdehar, located in a rich agricultural belt in the northern state of Haryana. "It will be a revolution," said farmer Ajaib Singh. He and other villagers hope the connection with the outside world will help speed up improvements to Hansdehar's woeful infrastructure and services such as a lack of a dispensary and unreliable electricity. The village has long been neglected by the Indian government, locals complain. "Now we can put our problems on the Web site, and then the government can't say 'we didn't know'," he said. jaybird found this for you @ 20:29 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
Web inventor warns of 'dark' net The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said. Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not "part of the internet model," he said in Edinburgh. He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter "a dark period". Sir Tim was speaking at the start of a conference on the future of the web. "What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said. "Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring." jaybird found this for you @ 08:22 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
Neo-Hesse: Webmagister Ludi and the Glass Bead Game We can now say the web is an exploration into our own psyches. The association of images and sounds is unique, and how we integrate our new behavior patterns is going to be reflected in how we create our own realities on the internet, even if those realities have not formalized themselves yet in our 3-D world of earth-fire-water-air. For what is the internet, but a continual hypertextualiztion of ideas made immediately manifest by a search engine or an available link. Web logic is not the same logic we use in a cause and effect relationship. Many times we are not aware of what information is going to be revealed to us through a search engine. Ideas are organized anew and not like the Dewy decimal card catalog system librarians are so accustomed to. We now access information by our moods or by our impressions or by audio stimulus. We have created a synaesthetic information environment where the association of ideas is not dependent on the syntax of the language, but on the mood obtained from a variety of media inputs. The age old adage of "a picture is worth a thousand words" takes on a new significance because any one of those thousand words can be searched to reveal a thousand more pictures. Frankly there is no one way to utilize the internet. There are no rules for information access, data organization, or logical understanding. Keep in mind, this was written ten years ago. jaybird found this for you @ 10:03 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
US plans massive data sweep The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity. The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy. "We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about. It's one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with." The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year. jaybird found this for you @ 17:01 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
happy birthday, birdonthemoon.com! It's three years old! Actually, that passed by last week, and I just now remembered it. I hope my own website will accept a belated birthday greeting from me. It's been a great run, and while I may not post four times a day anymore, I intend to keep going as long as possible, as long as the medium holds out. It's connected me to some truly spectacular people and communities, has reached 180 countries, with over 1.9 million visits since inception (that's just baffling). So, the good times will continue to roll for this little website, as it plays, frolics, and grows its way into yet another year of bloggery. As they say, w00t! jaybird found this for you @ 18:08 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
2005 stats in review Here's the stats for birdonthemoon.com over the years.. we've really grown, and I'm really honored that so many poeple are interested all of this wonderfully crazy nonsense. 2005: 609,816 visitors 115/175 countries so far under the belt. I need the following coutries and territories to complete 'my collection...' lemme hear ya holla! Ascension Island, Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, Antarctica, Aland Islands, Burundi, Bouvet Island, Botswana, Congo, Republic of, Cook Islands, Serbia and Montenegro, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Dominica, Western Sahara, Eritrea, Falkland Islands (Malvinas), Micronesia, Federal States of, French Guiana, Guernsey, Guinea, Guadeloupe, Equatorial Guinea, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Guinea-Bissau, Heard and McDonald Islands, Iraq, Jersey, Kiribati, Comoros, Korea, Democratic People's Republic, Liberia, Lesotho, Marshall Islands, Mali, Northern Mariana Islands, Mauritania, Montserrat, Malawi, Niger, Norfolk Island, Nauru, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Palau, Reunion Island, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands, Sierra Leone, San Marino, Turks and Caicos Islands, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan (c'mon Turkmenbashi!), Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna Islands, and Mayotte. jaybird found this for you @ 08:18 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
New commenting system Finally... the least wonky commenting option I could come up with was Haloscan, and it seems to be working well. I've gotten many notes about how hard it is to comment here, mostly because of the measures I've had to take to prevent comment spamming. Haloscan seems to handily eliminate that threat. Yippers. jaybird found this for you @ 09:57 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
The comment problem has been fixed. At least, I hope. jaybird found this for you @ 21:52 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
The Blog is going to have a massage Bird on the Moon is taking Friday off of regular blogging duties and will return rested and ready on Monday. jaybird found this for you @ 12:15 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
Daily Lush: The Hurricane There is little sense of impending disaster here. Instead, drunken tourists howl sports trivia at each other while a game plays on the oversized television. The elegant aspects of Pat O's are routinely offset by the bar's more craven business sensibilities: souvenir glasses, terrible music, and a smiling woman who walks up to couples with a camera and asks them if they wouldn't like their photos taken, for a fee, of course. Many drink Hurricanes, which, with its generous dollop of rum, is alcoholic enough to put even an experienced drinker off-balance. Drinking one is something of a baptism by fire for visitors, who can often be seen staggering along Bourbon Street for hours afterward, throwing money at local hustlers or staring in amazement at children tap dancing with bottlecaps nailed to the bottoms of their shoes. jaybird found this for you @ 07:47 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
The Pentagon is looking for a few good bloggers Jesus' General gets an inquiry from CENTCOMedy: I am a Public Affairs Officer writing from US Central Command. I would like to inquire about the possibility of you posting a link to our web site. I see that you are covering a lot of different types of stories in a lot of countries. I would like to get some of the stories out that are happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa. This is the area of responsibility for CENTCOM. Due to the nature of your blog, and the wide variety of information you cover, your blog is ideal for news stories. I have attached a couple of postings* that have been used by other Bloggers, please let me know. Hilarity ensues, via amberglow on mefi. jaybird found this for you @ 09:08 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
 The grassroots movement of the soul Yet another local variation on blogging is Bird On The Moon, a collection of consciousness-exploring essays, poems and links. "I'm still trying to figure out exactly what [Bird On The Moon] is," says creator Jay Joslin. "It's sort of a daily work in progress." A reader of other blogs for years, Joslin created Bird On The Moon in 2002 as a way to get his feet wet in the medium. He says that his personal experiences with writing (he's the author of two poetry and essay collections) made him want to explore the new possibilities with reader interaction that blogs have opened up. "I like to look at blogging as the grassroots movement of the soul," he observes. "I like to wonder how we can use this tool to evolve our knowledge of consciousness and the soul just a wee, little bit more." While the majority of Joslin's posts involve Zen-koanlike musings on a range of topics – from silence to quantum physics – there are also personal revelations. For instance, Joslin says that his recent post about nearly drowning in an accident on a waterfall provoked a flood of responses. "Every day, there are people that are in crisis and experiencing such tremendous life-changing forces," he says. "But their stories aren't necessarily being told. That's the whole idea behind Bird On The Moon. I really try to bring out issues and topics that represent the mystery of being alive." jaybird found this for you @ 20:23 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
Spiffy, but slightly wonky As you can see, the redesign mayhem is under way. I've taken many things into consideration in undertaking this effort, including (of course) your fabulous input. The entire site will be migrating over to this style within a few weeks. Alas, however, nothing is perfect. MT is lopping off the last 1/3 of coding, for no apparent reason other than it being Saturday. I put in a support ticket over at Six Apart, and they're either laughing their asses off or getting out the schematics. You'll also notice a new contact page. A heck of a lot more efficient, methinks. Try it out and send me a few words. I'll get inline comments back on soon, I want to discern the wonkiness that MT is throwing before reinstalling MT-Blacklist. Trackbacks are gone as they were being mightily abused, and also because I think the net has outgrown them. I'll probably go with the Technorati system in the future. On future entries, the title will also serve as the link. A lot less clutter. I've been up since 3:30 this morning for no apparent reason. I'm yawning now but so far sleep has evaded me. No biggie. Watched a few stupendously awful films, but noting could bore me back to sleep. So I decided to code all day. Yipsters! But the truly glorious gift of insomnia was another round of Perseid watching. I saw about 7 last night/this morning, and a lot more the night before. One was so brilliant... it lit the sky like a shiny knife's edge, and left a glittery trail of plasma. Just to think: we are not that far at all from a complete vacuum. The Earth's atmosphere is like the skin of an apple, I've been told, between our rambunctious civilization and the infinite expanse that holds us, much in the way a speck of sand can get blown in a gale. I think I'll try a nap, and check to see if I can get the templates working again. I'll update my progress if you are truly interested. UPDATE: Finally, a decent measure of success was achieved after some incredibly bizarre problems. All the archives, categories, and templates appear to be working, and comments are back. Please report bugs. Finally, I will retreat away from MT for some genuine experience: watching a huge thunderstorm roll in. jaybird found this for you @ 13:37 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
redesign - botm 3.0  Look for a brighter, cleaner redesign this weekend. Click on screenshot for mockup. Huzzah! jaybird found this for you @ 23:27 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
freedom on the internets A bill just introduced in the House could destroy universal, affordable Internet access everywhere. The “Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act” (H.R. 2726) would let big cable and telecom companies shut down Community Internet and municipal broadband projects being planned across the country. The bill would prevent state or local governments from providing “any telecommunications service, information service or cable service” anywhere a corporation offers a similar service. This outrageous legislation was introduced by Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) — a former SBC executive — and is a blatant effort by the telecom and cable companies to cement their monopoly control of communications at the expense of innovation, competition, and local choice. jaybird found this for you @ 07:19 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
atoms packed in an egg-carton of light? Scientists... have taken a step toward the development of powerful new computers -- by making tiny holes that contain nothing at all. The holes -- dark spots in an egg carton-shaped surface of laser light -- could one day cradle atoms for quantum computing. Worldwide, scientists are racing to develop computers that exploit the quantum mechanical properties of atoms... These so-called quantum computers could enable much faster computing than is possible today. One strategy for making quantum computers involves packaging individual atoms on a chip so that laser beams can read quantum data. jaybird found this for you @ 12:15 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
welcome wagon It's been a long time since I updated the sidebar, so please greet my new neighbors with loaves of warm bread and steamy pies. jaybird found this for you @ 17:30 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
modelling interconnectivity in real-time People on the Internet have talked a lot about how a sort of intelligence will form just by connecting everyone together. The issue is how we are connected together. Since it is an organic/chaotic system you can’t engineer it like you engineer a bridge, you have to get it just right, and I think a lot of it is trial and error. Although this isn’t a great metaphor, the amount of DNA that separates us from Chimps or even slugs is quite small. Similarly, throwing social software at the problem of freedom, democracy and leadership is like trying to predict — by looking at a bunch of DNA – whether you’re going to get Einstein, a chimp, or a slug. Some day maybe we will know how to figure this out, but right now, it’s a lot of tasting and stirring. So what have we learned? We’ve learned that conversations on mailing lists tend to explode in flame wars. We’ve also learned that if you make a web page, there is a good chance no one will notice. Mailing lists are like rooms that people can get into, but very difficult to get people out of. Everyone in the room hears everyone else in the room. Too much feedback. A personal web page .... No one can hear you. Not enough feedback. Life and good emergent systems live in the interesting place between too much feedback and too little feedback, that very special space between chaos and order. It’s the sweet spot of emergent order that we see in fractals, life, and the high of being "in the zone." My theory is that the critical mass of actors as well as the right balance of the cybernetic feedback systems is getting closer. Blogs allow you to more easily ignore stupid threads on other blogs, but participate in conversations. This is because blogs ping servers to let you know that they have been updated so they can be indexed immediately and those who have been linked to or mentioned will immediately know. They can read the post and assess whether the comment requires feedback or not. Speed has increased, feedback occurs, but filtering occurs as well. Although the dialog on blogs is far from ideal, we have broken past many of the issues in mailing lists and web pages without the additional feedback elements of blogs. And we’ve introduced new issues. People can still troll your comments section and following conversations across blogs is still difficult, although this is getting easier. jaybird found this for you @ 14:45 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
new spring hours That's right kids, you've noticed the past two weeks the weekned content has been lacking round here. That's because it's spring, and frankly it's too enchanting outside to compute heavily. Not to fear, the site is rolling along stronger than ever, and I'm always amazed at the response I get to this little mountain shanty. I'd highly recommend that you get out there and revel in this downright holy time of year and play with the goddesses and gods of the emerging green! jaybird found this for you @ 23:08 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
relaunching wingspan May I kindly direct your attention to the renewed and re-visioned Wingspan blog...? I started it as an mp3 blog, but never really did anything with it. There's a little project I've been working on, possibly for book 3, which I'm in the process of serializing and will be posting regularly to Wingspan Fiction Log. It is the biography of a certain Polish immigrant and philosopher whose contributions to the study of consciousness and ontology have been hailed by some and ignored by many. He is often quoted on this website, for better or worse. I don't know how regularly the installments will come, hopefully weekly. This should turn out to be an amusing project, so stay tuned, or, as Isadore himself once said, "stay enmeshed in a reality which has long since run out of room for more witnesses, so there's a little show off to the side..." jaybird found this for you @ 23:23 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
welcome wagon The sidebar population hereby adds six new weblogs to it's happy village of interconnected infoglots. Please do pay a visit: jaybird found this for you @ 12:45 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
become a cyborg It "turns the surface of the human body into a data transmission path at speeds up to 10 Mbps between any two points on the body... Bluetooth, infrared communications (IrDA), radio frequency ID systems (RFID), and other technologies have been proposed to solve the "last meter" connectivity problem. However, they each have various fundamental technical limitations that constrain their usage, such as the precipitous fall-off in transmission speed in multi-user environments producing network congestion... RedTacton takes a different technical approach. Instead of relying on electromagnetic waves or light waves to carry data, RedTacton uses weak electric fields on the surface of the body (*4) as a transmission medium. A RedTacton transmitter couples with extremely weak electric fields on the surface of the body. The weak electric fields pass through the body to a RedTacton receiver, where the weak electric fields affects the optical properties of an electro-optic crystal. The extent to which the optical properties are changed is detected by laser light which is then converted to an electrical signal by a detector circuit. jaybird found this for you @ 11:09 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
welcome wagon Meet and greet my new sidebar links by visiting their sites, offering baskets of cheese and fruit: jaybird found this for you @ 14:47 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
joy of joys! Finally, the database corruption has been defeated and bird on the moon rises again, albeit with patience and care. I've increased security big-time, not catching some previous vulnerabilities (I ain't tellin' what they were). Please report any bugs you see, and I'll know you'll see a few. I'm about 10% on correcting an import glitch on my entries: MT automatically added titles to untitled posts. That's going to be a long, boring fix. Flightpath and Wingspan are online, but not yet functional... I'll be bringing them into the new install tomorrow. Unfortunately, I accidently hit delete in my FTP client and lost all the files in my index directory named A through M. Luckily, I had a backup of all my directories on disk, but it was a few months old. I figured everything out the best I could. It's been a fun learning experience in database integration and repair, and in file importing. Thank the great gods of SixApart for that feature. I especially have to thank Anil Dash: he helped get the ball rolling on the tech support side. I'd like to thank Ursula for not sitting on the keyboard. If you're intrigued in what I blogged in the interrim, go here for my "emergency" blogger page. That helped a tish with the post-withdrawl shakes. Bear with any strange server responses, still gotta stabilize this puppy, but it's good to be back! jaybird found this for you @ 20:55 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
happy birthday, birdonthemoon.com!  It was a mere two years ago when I made my first post here, using Greymatter and struggling with the coding. The switch to MT was a breeze, just after returning from Haiti in May '03. About a month ago I upgraded to MT 3.14, flawlessly. It's been good times, folks, and thanks for the memories and the support. It will be interesting to see what life is like on the third birthday... /blows out candles, makes wish. jaybird found this for you @ 07:22 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
welcome wagon Let's have a nice and warm meet-n-greet for these fine blogs joining the sidebar today: We have one relocation: And we sing the "So Long, Farewell" song to the following which have shuttered their doors: NOTE: This site is quickly approaching its 2nd birthday. It's potty trained (mostly) and isn't putting everything it sees in its mouth. jaybird found this for you @ 11:48 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
Random windows on your world... unsecured network webcams from everywhere... jaybird found this for you @ 15:15 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
Psyching teh intArweb, or, imagining the evolution or devolution of the internet: jaybird found this for you @ 11:09 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
XLIII: Think about 43 things you'd like to with your life: finish reading Ulysses, stop trading time for money, visit Machu Picchu, or tell someone you love them everyday... and at least 38 other things. jaybird found this for you @ 21:28 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
this week's welcome wagon The sidebar is open, the barkeep is knowledgable, and the service... top notch. Visit these fine new additions: jaybird found this for you @ 14:30 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
welcome wagon Please honor these fine new kindred spirits on the sidebar with a clicky: ecology of the divine. jaybird found this for you @ 13:18 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | |
