My laptop is dead:(
Comments on Technology, Philosophy and the Humane Conditioner.
I have a pretty new laptop.
I just caught my cat Pissing on it.
Squatting there smack back on the QWERT side of the keyboard.
Dont Panic!
No, DO panic, what was I supposed to do?
I tried a little shake, but it was soon clear that the cats piss was all the way through.
Disaster!
I thought of options...
I unplugged it and took the battery out.
It was leeking this stinky, watery syrup. Horrible.
In the end, based just on the fact that I had washed a cheap keyboard and once dry that worked. I dismantled this tabula pissa.
I took out the hard drive and the case and took it to the bathtub
And showered it fully: the reasoning being that it would be better wet,
Than rancid with cat piss.
Will it live?
We shall see....
I have been to Disney 3 times in 2 days.
The third time was because, at pain of sanity, I had to bail and come back in the darkness. But there is a darkness, to me, even when the sun is high and bright in the Florida sky.
When I came to pick up my family at 11 last night, my daughters were so happy and excited and jumping and smiling as they recounted the highlights in the neon shadow of Space Mountain.
Disney is the Jerusalem of Consumption.
It is the Circus Maximus for we drones of the Western Hegemony.
The rides are fantastic. But those rides are instants in aeons of purchase and queue. Retinal jolts of excitement in a system designed to take as much of your money and time and focus as possible, whilst still making you feel that you are feeling happy.
Anyway, enough of my cynical hate crimes against Das Mouse und Der Kabal, let's see what the little folk think:
The horror...
The horror......
America is drowned in Jesus,
Like the seabed in the sea,
The facts of this immersion,
Come not from history.
The facts of this perversion,
Are the lies of centuries.
There is zero evidence for Jesus,
Not a jot, a dot, an iota.
And the weight of faith versus fact,
Infinity exceeds it's dismal quota.
Not one contemporary writing,
Mentions Christ, Son of Man,
The gospels manly fabricated,
By dishonest political hand.
Jesus did not exist,
The facts cannot be missed,
This is the epiphany of truth;
The flock are Judas kissed.
http://www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus
http://jdstone.org/cr/files/nohistoricalevidenceofjesus.html
The road trip part of the holiday is now over.
We drove the eastern seaboard.
Highlights were:
We have just got back from the worst statue based experience of my life. Imagine a prison camp full of Nazi Jobsworths, hours, literally, of queues and all for something that looks much more impressive from a distance. Up close she is a squat and unremarkable form, not twice as tall as the Gateshead Angel.
Avoid like the plaque.
Mind you, we are still having a great time!
I'm currently in the Big Apple, the American one, not Truro. The last time I was here I was 19, gosh that seems so long ago....
Its a family trip, with extended family, eight in all.
New York is great. Some observations so far.

This is the second of my attempts to express Buddhist Concepts as completely and succinctly as possible. As with the first bulletpoints, this is my interpretation and it is incomplete.
I hope you like:)

I'm not a Buddhist scholar but I am a Buddhist and I like to think that I like to think.
Over the last seven years I have been pretty deeply involved in thinking about Dharma - the teachings of the Buddha, and trying to make this fit in with my personal attempts at understanding life and reality.
The Buddhism I have studied is the traditional teachings of the Buddha known as Therevadan Buddhism. I realised as soon as I started dipping my toes in this that it was much more level-headed and rational than I would have imagined; Dharma has evolved and taken up the effects of the cultures it took root in, this is never a bad thing, but, I believe, that it might make the core teachings less accessible to western rationalists, such as myself.
The following list of 3 Bulletpoints and their subs I believe captures the very core of Dharma; everything flows from the three doctrines of existence; Anicca, Anatta, Dukkha.
I have used the original Pali terms not to be pretentious but because, as an understanding will show, there simply are not the words or concepts in English to capture the essence of these complex, composite terms.
Please note that this is my interpretation and it is not complete.
Annica, Anatta and Dukka, The Three Marks of Existence
The natural state of reality is systemless. It is disorder not order. It is less rather than more. It is simple rather than complex. It is low in value and information. The natural state of reality is devoid of complex and connected systems.
Persistence is existence into the future. Given the natural systemless state of reality the only systems that can persist are those that are able to defeat the collapse into the natural state.
Imagine a system at a point in time. If we accept the Law of Impermanence then it follows that this system must change at some point in it's future. This change can either increase the system's arcitechtonics (make the system more organised, structured, connected) or it can decrease it. The natural direction is for systems to decrease arcttechtonically.
All of everything is tending towards nothing and it is only the persistence of systems, you, me the galaxy, that holds this of.
The very root fundamental purpose of life, traceable through a linear and continuous, though vague, path down through the scaled of abstraction; Beneficial states persist.
The foundational fact of systems is that beneficial states persists. The beak of a finch, a job promotion, the distribution of matter in the universe, beneficial states persist.
The fittest survive. The beneficial persist. In many ways these are trivial and tautological, but in in understanding this tautology with the systems framework you can see why things are as they are. They are as they are because of enough impermanence (time and change and possibility) to allow increasingly more complex systems to emerge from more simple systems.
That is why we are here. The purpose of being here is to continue the persistence of systems. And the method of doing this is by increasing beneficial states within systems.
There is no fundamental meaning to life, in the way there is no fundamental meaning to a joke, but there is a fundamental purpose to life.
There was a point a few years ago when I really, really wanted to believe in the Buddhist concept of Rebirth; it was the one thing that was missing from me taking on The Dharma, in every aspect.
I have since realised that you don’t need the notion of Rebirth to understand the Four Noble Truths and the subsequent Dharma that stands on this. However, I did manage to reconcile rebirth with my understanding of science and cosmology and put my explanations here for your perusal.
Rebirth
Buddhists believe that individuals are the realisation, at any current point in time, of a changing aggregate of mental events and properties.
There is no thinker, only thoughts.
There is most certainly for Buddhism no concept of soul or self. No eternal non-physical substance. No Cartesian experiencer in our minds. This is the doctrine of anataman and it is key to Dharma.
But if there is no soul and no self... how then, can there be rebirth?
The unsatisfactory answer provided by Buddhist's (Though not, as far as I am aware, by the Buddha Himself) is that though here is no soul or ego, the aggregate of mentality, causally conditions the realisation of a new but related aggregate in a future reborn individual.
The metaphor often used is that its like a candle flame lighting the next candle, that this is the conditioning of rebirth to future lives.
Its an initially compelling metaphor but offers no explanation as to what is being conditioned in the future, or the mechanism of this conditioning.
Rebirth, I believe now, Isn't needed to understand and benefit greatly from Dharma. But a couple of years ago I did come up with a way that I could make sense of rebirth alongside a scientifically and ontologically consistent world view.
I do believe all is impermanent
I do believe there is no soul.
Madonna went from "St Madonna Of The Yummy"
With the ever flat tummy
To "The Crone you would Bone"
At exactly the point
That Lock Stock was DVDd
But her Hard Candy
is actually pretty good.
As a boy I loved The Who, for all the reasons people loved, and love, The Who.
But then came the 90's and The Who didn't really fit with the non-prescription pharmaceuticals of the Era, so I put them on hold in terms of my listening.
Then as the 90s came to an end I started to get very much back into them. Until....
Townsendpaedeogate in 2003.
Sex with children is fine if by "children" you mean "consenting adult humans who have parents".....
But the accusations against Pete Townsend where not implying that simple tertiary relationship. So, being a great follower of tabloid-herd mentality, I decided to throw away my MP3 Who Discography and place the The Who's corpus very much along side Jordi Chandler's police statement.
BBC4 on a Friday Night
But last night, my Wonderful Wife and I stumbled upon a BBC showing of a two hour documentary about The Who. From the first moment we were gripped. Golly-gosh what a rock and roll story like no other. What a band!
There were many moments where I felt like I was watching Napoleon commanding battle or Michaelangelo painting, such is the status of their product and magnificence.
Is he or isn't he?
In the documentary they mentioned Townsendpaedogate and everyone came out to say, "of course he isn't a kiddiefiddler, no way Jose." But you can't just follow what you hear unquestioningly like you are just part of a flock. So this morning, listening to The Who, I asked myself this simple question:
Is the evidence for Townsendpaedogate significant enough to outweigh the facts that everyone thinks he is innocent, including the English legal system and the fact that he is a musical genius.So in my head I visualized a 3 axis mind-graph, with the axes being Evidence (of paedophilia), Opinion (on evidence), Quality (of Music).


I have written poems to my iPod Touch and even... though unpublished.. a sonnet and perhaps... in my head a number of eulogies and threnodies.
But just when everything about it couldn't get any better. It actually does.
It actually has become even better, than the best it already was.
It actually is the first time in my long and promiscuous affair with technology that something has become an order of magnitude better without any physical change its its form.
There are some great games on the touch natively. But now, thanks to some free software, you can turn your iPod Touch into.... into a ...... into a nigh on fully functioning Game Boy Advance!
Labels: Poems
Today I had the kids at home all day; they are both under six but talking.
It was one of those days when I try to avoid them as much as possible, even though I am their guardian. There is an age old principle in parenting, if they are crying, they are probably not dying, and this something I adhered to. But come about three I decided it would be good to at least give them one activity that didn't involve asking them to leave my office when there was an advert on whatever TV channel they were watching.
So I decided upon that stalwart, The Park.
They got dressed up as a bunny and a dog, as often they do, and I knew that I needed to get changed.
And for that, I needed underpants.
My domestic assistant does my washing. It's not a sexist thing, it's not a lazy thing. I do my things, she does hers. One of hers is doing my washing. And I must say, apart from the occasional fabric over-softening, She can't be faulted. But today, for the first time since I hired her, I was out of underpants.
There weren't even any available dry "one dayers" that any right minded guy would resort to. It was not a conspiracy, it was a black hole of underpants caused by the collision of various domestic singularities. It was the Perfect Storm (welcome to the first ever use of a storm metaphor to represent a lack of underpants).
I had two impatient kids dressed as super-sized pets standing in the hallway and I has no underpants. But I had options. Until you're strapped to the nuke, you always have options.

The Passion is the BBC's new Easter Special; designed by The Hegemony with just one purpose:
To get bums back on this nation's pews; for just one reason:
To counter the damage done by Richard Dawkins and Tom Cruise to the notion of religious belief, think, "Children of God in Need".
It's an ambitious project - 2 hours of TV that needs to open everyone's eyes to the teachings of both the Kingdom of Heaven and the Word of The Lord; a scope probably not matched in breadth and complexity since Peter Jackson's LOTR Trilogy.
The Passion, based on a script written by The Disciple Formerly Known as Saul, could well have been the epic that it needed to be in order to meet the BBC's conversion targets, but there is one critical flaw.
It's not the miasma of textual contradiction inherent in the script or the fact that The Disciple Formerly Known as Saul was of questionable veracity before two millennia of editing, re-editing and censoring of his original narrative.
It's not even that Pontius Pilate speaks like Rab C Nesbitt.
It's the fact Jesus, in the show, is far too smug.
OK, so he is the Son of God. He knows he's special, but Nazarine or No-zarine, there is just no call for smug.
This Jesus walks the messianic walk, and all that jazz, he can even do humble, but there is always that smug smarmy "holier than thou" look on his face.
If that's the Messiah....maseltov!!! 
So this is just launched... I shall give it a whirl....
Hummm..... It looks just like the Desktop version....
Categories>Comedy>Late Edition... here it is playing.....
Its fast....to play and browse.
The pictures are a little bit thatcopyofTheMatrixIboughtonPatPongin2003
It is steaming smooth and sound is in sync.
This is great.
This is new.
The is the BBC on my Iphone in My time.
We were thinking of getting a telly for the bedroom.... but now... maybe not.
I love it when a Saturday Morning has a lil paradigm shift.