Community

I believe the religion of the future holds a consciousness of community. A recognition in our place amongst each other, together as one society. That people would look at another member of their society in suffering and realize that they are part of their society, and as a result the entire society suffers. Everywhere in history we have had opression, resistance and recovery. It is a ever-evolving cycle of truth and lessons which we can hopefully emerge from to a point of global understanding.

A Picture Share!

Bay bridge traffic

A Picture Share!

Whaaaaa?

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search

...everybody's doing it

Kimock, Holmes, Mathis & Walter

If my camera phone mobile blogger was working correctly, you would see a picture of this incredible new incarnation of The Steve Kimock band right here.

Intead, I'll tell you about them, as I got a chance to check it out this weekend.

Steve Kimock and Rodney Holmes have invited Reed Mathis (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey) and Robert Walter (20th Congress) to join them for their upcoming tour which will take them pretty much all over the country.

The band is ripe with potential, fluid in exporation and definately has the ability to reach those 'peak' moments we like oh so much.

Check out their dates and if they're anywhere near you - go see them.
Works well with Champagne, too!

A Picture Share!

NY state of mind...

We are now Renting Music

I am trying to put together a photo / music montage and iTunes has really made it incredibly easy to search, locate and purchase any song I could think of - the only problem is that Adobe Premiere Elements doesn't recognize the MPEG-4 Protected File format and I cannot import the song into the video.

When I try to convert the song to MP3 in iTunes, I get the above error message. Nice.

As a result, I'm stuck with a whole bunch of purchased music that I can't do anything with unless it's iTunes or iPod related. It feels like I just spent 99 cents on a bumper sticker that says "Digital Music Revolution?"

Apparently I can try to burn the songs to disc and then re-import it using another program and then they won't be write protected so I can use them. That would be great except now iTunes isn't finalizing the disc burn for me and has been churning for the last 10 minutes. Coincidence?

I don't think I'm trying to do anything illegal, and I understand all of the arguments for protecting copywrites - but something about all of this feels a little too qwerky to be practical.

Tech-nolo-gee: making life simultaneously simpler and more complex, by design.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Internet has the potential to contain all of the knowledge inherent in the universe (Helping Friend Book reference) and The Wikipedia is on a quest to achieve that.

It is, as advertised, a free encyclopedia; containing intelligent definition and commentary about anything you might be interested in knowing more about, and it's built entirely upon user-submissions.

Be it Mexican Jumping Beans, why we shake hands or who was Nick Drake? - you can find out about it with a quick search.

While this information is readily available through the net, the Wikipedia strives to consolidate it in an easy to use and effective mechanism...and it works! I keep finding myself going back. It even has a Current Events page.

And in writing about it, I just found the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation: Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

Not a bad mission, and in fact, very Gamehendgian of them.

A Picture Share!

Yeeeeeah....

NOLA

Like everyone else I've spoken to this week, my heart is heavy with the pictures coming in from the Gulf Coast. New Orleans has held a special place in my life for the last five years as a destination of pure jubilation and joy, providing countless memories and incredible weekends of positive musical, spiritual and emotional energy.

To see the city in ruins...i cannot explain my thoughts. Word do not come easily. It is an unbearable sight. The temple has fallen.

...but will be rebuilt.

I took the day off today and came back to find my staff put together an appropriate Newswire piece on how people can help the disaster, along with your comments. This is truly a community event, and one we should all pay attention to and hold deep in our hearts and give what we can to assist those whose lives have been tragically hit.

Let us take a moment to pray and hope that the Crescent City will one day rise and we can once again savor the essence of "takin' it easy".

My thoughts are with all our brothers and sisters without homes tonight...