My Shakuhachi Yuu

First a little disclaimer: I am NOT a musician, or a Shakuhachi player (yet) giving a review from an area I'm an expert in. I'm, in Kung Fu Panda terms, at Level Zero. I am just sharing my impressions of the Shakuhachi Yuu I acquired for Xen Meditation.

It began when a friend of mine showed me an Asian flute she had in SecondLife. It was a really wonderful thing for a mere $75 linden - you can get your own here (its' on the table to right). It seems to play a random series of patterns and I found it quite peaceful to sit on this mountain top and play it. I found that affordance of SecondLife to be very refreshing. I am working, on a side note, on a collection of peaceful places in SL for people who's real life doesn't allow them access to places you can expand and connect with the universe, or at least feel connected to a natural environment.

After a few days of enjoyable playing in SL, I decided to attempt to learn to play in real life. I went to Amazon and looked for bamboo flutes. I found a bamboo shakuhachi for $14.95 (and $8.00 shipping - yikes!). So I ordered it. I did do enough research to find that the shakuhachi was the zen meditation flute I was looking for.

But it was very superficial research. The flute was of reasonable quality but impossible to play for a beginner teaching themselves. I am in a small southern town so there is no local shakuhachi master to teach me. I searched the internet for instructions and found some help but after a few days I realized It was going to take quite a while and a great bit of effort just to master the basics. I read in one article that someone had found a cheap flute like mine that the instructor could play easily but was very difficult for the student to play. The cheap flute I bought was an EE. That means as Shakuhachi's go it is pretty small. My bottom lip filled the hole. One instruction video on youtube said just try to get a sound out of it with all the holes uncovered. Which I did for about 3 days with wildly uneven results. As I kept looking for more instructions on how to play the shakuhachi - I kept finding more information about the flutes themselves.

One thing I discovered was that flutes sold from $14 (like mine) to $3,000. The majority of what I would call "regular" flutes were in the $300 to $2,100 price range. $300 would be out of the question for me right now, so the $2,100 just seem even more impossible. Then I found one called the Shakuhachi Yuu. It was not made out of bamboo or wood but rather ABS plastic resin. It was less expensive that it's bamboo counterparts at only $125, but the most compelling feature was that it had an adaptor (and additional $27.50) that turned it into a Native American style flute allowing you to play it right away regardless of your ability to make the embouchure (the way you hold your mouth to play the flute). It also was waterproof, a big selling point for me considering the amount of spit I blew down the other flute trying to get a note out of it.

I found where they were also being sold on eBay. So I bought the flute and the Yuu adaptor there. It arrived Express Mail extremely well packed. It looked better in person than it did in the photos on the web site. It's lightweight and feels really solid. It came with instructions on how to put it together and take it apart, a certificate for a free lesson with Michael Chikuzen Gould (worth $50), an end cap for the mouthpiece, and a tube of cork grease.

The Yuu adaptor was a godsend.

There are several dynamics in play when learning to get sound out of a shakuhachi by yourself. One is how to blow the edge of the end piece. Another is how hard to blow since you can bend the pitch a whole tone or more. Still another is how to hold all your fingers correctly as you can make vast changes in the sound by partially covering a hole (something you don't know you are doing until sound is actually coming out of it). By installing the adaptor, you can work on how hard to blow and how to hold the flute without worrying about how to hold your mouth. Now instead of hoping all the dynamics come together at once simultaneously and consistently, you can work on how to blow, and how hard to blow and how to finger separately. I'm practicing longer because the frustration level has dropped and I can spend part of the time practicing actually playing the flute.

The flute itself is really attractive. It looks like a  bamboo shakuhachi. I can also play it without the worries associated with having a $500 flute and I'm sure it will be much lower maintenance over time compared to organic material. And if you are wondering, per Wikipedia, ABS plastic is recyclable - though I can't imagine why you would recycle your flute.

As far as sound goes, it sounds great. I was reading that the sound of the shakuhachi is not created by the material the flute is made from, it's created by the "void" in the flute - the hollow space. That is where the sound comes from. There are several sample mp3s on the website, I encourage you to check them out.

Shown at right the Shakuhachi Yuu with the adaptor installed next to the EE Mid East Bamboo Shakuhachi

You can see the size difference. The price of the Yuu with the adaptor was well worth it considering the progress I'll be able to make with it teaching myself. Also when you factor in the durabilty of the instrument and the mental destressing that will come as my ability to play rises, it's well worth roughly two months of regular cable (no HBO), or one month's cell phone bill, or 8 DVD's.

Learning to express yourself musically will also allow you to tap into new areas of the brain too.

I give the Shakuhachi Yuu two enthusiastic thumbs up. It is one of the few recent things I've purchased that the experience far exceeded the expectation.

Now, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, son, practice!

Or put a more Xen way, how do you reach the mountaintop?

You ride the wind.

SecondLife and the Enhanced You

I attended an interesting presentation on SecondLife (also called SL) entitled "Is there life after SecondLife - Pouring New Wine into Old Bottles" by Geoffrey Edwards at Monash University Behavioural Studies yesterday. Some of the points he made (and I am paraphrasing from a mediocre memory)..

There is a distinction between the body-as-source-of-organic-experience (BaSoOE) and the body-as-performer (BaP) in SecondLife. But the body-as-performer can give back to the organic body. Shift its self concept somewhat. I.E. create new wine (new identity) to put back into an old body.

One of the things that makes this possible is that SecondLife has certain "affordances" available to the BaP. An affordance, in his presentation, was a relationship between the body and the environment. It isn't in the body nor is it part of the environment. He gave some examples of SecondLife affordances:

• The ability to alter your surrounding environment
• The ability to examine the world from a viewpoint that is semi-independent of the body
• The ability to change your physical appearance and avatar
• The ability to change your species or gender and thereby changing others expectations of you
• The ability to have multiple virtual identities (either by changing our avatar or an alt)
• The ability to act and communicate with no fear for our safety
• The ability to acquire new skills that require a great deal of learning or are impossible in real life (such as learning to dance the tango, fly, or do tai chi)

He went on to say that our sense of identity is a function of the "cross product" between the BaP and the BaSoOE. These affordances (and I'm inferring now - not relaying his content) allow us to make discoveries about ourselves, to find what is the essence of us in such an environment.

The presenter had designed clothes in SL and enjoyed it so much when he went back to RL, he learned to sew and to design clothes (I stifled myself from commenting on seeing SL clothes in RL). The point is he found something satisfying in a virtual world that he took back to his real life.

Many people in SL are using it in ways that, to me, are simply another way to pass time. If they weren't going "woot" at a party, they would be watching a DVD. These folks have the right to express themselves in this way.

Others, are using the affordances of SecondLife to overcome limitations that real life (which can be extraordinarily uneven in it's endowments) has handed them.

Of those people some essentially never come back to RL. Not sure why they should if they are truly content in-world. Some however, like the presenter, take the growth experience return to RL and remake themselves incorporating the things learned in SecondLife.

I think this is an excellent application of the technology that so many struggle to understand. Understanding the opportunities is a step toward using them productively.

Where the Economic Crisis REALLY Began

A lot of folks are blaming Bush, and trying to blame Obama for the economic crisis. Some more rightly but not right, try to blame the greedy CEOs on Wall Street. None of those are where the economic crisis really began.

It began when national news became a place where one news reporter started interviewing another news reporter about what's going on in the world. When the mainstream media shifted from peddling INFORMATION to KNOWLEDGE (albeit faulty knowledge) the whole country naturally made many wrong choices that lead us to this situation.

How bad is it? Well it's this bad. The Jon Stewart Show on Comedy Central is the only hard hitting news show left. Recently when Jon took on CNBC and MSNBC as being founts of "bad ideas." NBC had to use the time tested technique of ignoring Jon until he went away. They had to ignore him because if Cramer's illegal trading techniques hit mainstream, he could be looking at AIG Bonus style scorn with the average American.

I've been having a hopefully friendly back and forth with @aptuscollab on Twitter (I'm xackr there) about the concept of a "Knowlege Economy." My fundamental problem is knowledge is a soft term. In the article that started the tweetfest, one of the participants in developing a "knowledge economy" said "we're not even sure what that means." @aptuscollab explained it as "making money from your brains." My critique was it was a buzz word. We have an old term I like better "Information Economy." If we properly manage the information, we can glean the knowledge ourselves. The problem with knowlege is it includes inferences which may or may not be correct until tested.

It's the problem we face with the "news" media. They are no longer giving us information, they are giving us their "knowledge" of the situation. This knowledge is in part based on the facts and in part based on the agenda of the organization, which is funded by the people we probably most need to be protected from.

Now take the bad knowledge and misinform a whole country for a long time, and kaboom! It will eventually run into reality.

We should not be just standing outside AIG protesting, we should be outside NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, etc. raising holy hell for not telling us the facts and giving us bad knowledge instead of good information.

We need more fact-based news programs and not juicy rehashes of gruesome court cases.

It's the responsible thing to do.

Customizing the PortableApps Menu

A video blog today - it's in HD so hope you have a big screen!




Watch it on youtube in HD.

This is food?

One Computer - Many Work Environments

NOTE: Currently this tip works for Windows only.

When dealing with either multiple personas (I'm not just Xackr) or multiple clients it can be problematic to quickly set up your work environment if you use a lot of web-based tools. Firefox can easily be customized to open and be ready to go with your workset, but what happens when you use the same tool such as Gmail, Facebook, or Google Calendar for several of your identities or clients?

One way to address the problem is the use of a portable USB hard drive and PortableApps versions of software. An alternative, albeit a slower one, is to use SD cards one per instance. I use both for different reasons with my USB drive being my backup of my SD Cards.

So we take a standard USB portable drive, I have a Seagate 250GB Go Drive I got on sale for $35. I prefer the Seagate brand, just because over the years I've had other brands die on me. Now we take that drive and we partition into multiple partitions using the Disk Manager (right click on My Computer-> Manage->Disk Management). Find the USB drive in the list.  If the existing partition takes up the whole drive and you have Vista you can shrink the volume, if you can't shrink it - just delete it and start over. You want to create a partition for each of the instances you'll need. Drives have to have a letter so you'll max our at at 26 and you'll probably see system problems if you add much more than 10. If you have 10 online personas you really should consider cutting the computer off and going outside and getting some sunshine. Just an idea. When sizing the drive keep in mind the amount of data you'll want to store if you are going to save photos, docs, etc. related to that instance.

So now you have several partitions. On ONE and only ONE of these partitions you will install a set of PortableApps including Firefox (and Thunderbird and Sunbird if you like). If you want to fast track it, you can download and install the portable apps suite. I also HIGHLY recommend Keepass password keeper. When dealing with complexity, you should get in the habit of opening your password manager FIRST and using it everytime you sign up for an online service.

If you are a web application developer, you can also install XAMPP or XAMPLITE to have an on demand Apache/MySQL/PHP/Python development environment on EACH of the partitions. PortableApps can handle starting and stopping the service with a control panel.

Now you are ready to configure FireFox with your BASE add-ons. Install all your standard ones, I use NoScript, Firebug, Greasemonkey, etc. Add any additional apps you want to use across all partitions into your PortableApps configuration. Once that is done, copy the first instance to the other ones you want to use.

To really expedite things, add a shortcut to the different LaunchPortableApps.exe to your QuickLaunch bar. Once there open the shortcuts up and rename them to something more recognizable.

Once that's done, you can open each FireFox instance and set it up to open with a bookmark folder that contains your most frequently used online tools. If you have developed the good habit of adding each password as you go to Keepass, you can also check the remember me or have FireFox remember the password without fear of finding yourself struggling to remember the password later on.

There are certain apps, such as SecondLife, that are NOT available in a portable form. For SecondLife you simply build a command file (also known as a batch file) that passes command line options to the viewer to startup as that person. You can even, if you have the horsepower, configure it to run multiple viewers on a single machine (yeah you CAN do that).

Soon I'll show you how to customize each instance of PortableApps, so you will know instantly where you are.

Overall, being able to run a preconfigured Firefox for multiple personas/clients should save you a tremendous amount of "getting ready to start" work effort.

One caveat. You can only run one instance of FireFox on the local machine at a time. So to change browsers you will have to EXIT the current instance of FireFox and start a new one. Unlike Flash Drives and SD cards, startup time is negligible on a USB 2.0 hard drive.

One last major benefit is when you travel, you can now easily carry everything on just the drive and use it on any Windows computer. Backing up your work is as easy as copying the contents of the drive to another USB drive.

Enjoy!

Is SecondLife Evolving The Human Race?

In SecondLife (also called SL) the Sun rises and sets every 4 hours. Which means at times it can feel like time lapse photography. It also means a day in SecondLife is 6 days in terms of in-world experiences. Not only are the days faster, travel is instantaneous and effortless. Other than the occasional crash and relog, all of these activities are completely safe to your virtual well-being.

With no fear of actual physical harm and your true identity disintermediated, relationships are accelerated. Things you would never consider doing in real life are easily considered because it's safe. If you are using a free account you can even reinvent yourself if the experiment goes wrong and create a whole new you.

Unlike the streets of New York where people are reluctant to take on other people's problems, it is rare to find a situation where some avatar won't stop and take the time to help someone in trouble or learning the game, often even giving them Linden (the currency of SecondLife).

This faster paced life combined with the freedom to experiment with new things eventually means that the resident of SL will experience a spectrum of feelings that are often stronger and deeper than their real life counter part. Because nothing you can do in SL will cause you to die, you must learn to effectively deal with these new feelings. Some people do so by leaving SecondLife (I suspect many of them come back and start over as a whole new person). The feelings have still been felt and must be dealt with. The same safety and anonymity that gives you freedom also gives some people the freedom to be crueler or meaner than they would ever consider being in real life. I hope so anyway.

There is a line in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes that goes "that which doesn't kill us only makes us stronger." In the virtual world of SecondlLife nothing kills you, so if it doesn't drive you away, it ultimately makes you stronger. You learn to deal with feelings that are foreign yet strong. You gain a lot of "experience" in a very short time. You can lead a somewhat sheltered life in SecondLife but I believe most do so after having at least tasted some of the wilder parts of the metaverse.

In SecondLife, I am constantly around people from all over the globe. I find that they are much more like me than they are different from me. I think I had been in SL about a year when I stopped referring to myself as an American and started calling myself an "Earthling." I have sincerely come to believe that war is the product of governments or those who would govern and not the effort of the average person.

SecondLife also gives you the ability to be and do things you could not ever consider. I can sit on a mountaintop in a Japanese Zen Garden and play the flute while I meditate. It's a matter of just wishing I was at the Zen Gardens of Achemon or Yorokeikoku Teien. I honestly believe that, after nearly 3 years of play, my mind accepts the SecondLife experience of meditating on a mountaintop as being very nearly real. Especially if I put on Logitech Headsetthat disconnects me from my current reality and use by big immersive Apple Cinema Display.

So what?

In SecondLife I have also experienced some of the kindest and wisest people I have ever known. I have even evolved I believe. I am reminded of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. I think Wikipedia sums it up brilliantly...

" Experience is the aggregate of conscious events experienced by a human in life – it connotes participation, learning and perhaps knowledge. Understanding is comprehension and internalization. In Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, experience is shown as the best way to approach understanding of reality and attain enlightenment – Hesse’s crafting of Siddhartha’s journey shows that understanding is attained not through scholastic, mind-dependent methods, nor through immersing oneself in the carnal pleasures of the world and the accompanying pain of samsara; however, it is the totality of these experiences that allow Siddhartha to attain understanding.

Thus, the individual events are meaningless when considered by themselves—Siddhartha’s stay with the samanas and his immersion in the worlds of love and business do not lead to nirvana, yet they cannot be considered distractions, for every action and event that is undertaken and happens to Siddhartha helps him to achieve understanding. The sum of these events is thus experience." - Siddhartha entry on Wikipedia.

Ultimately Siddhartha finds peace. I think those who play SecondLife long enough and do not approach it as a passive entertainment media where you bash system generated monsters or bad guys, ultimately find at least the desire for something more than just the baser activities of life. If you stay long enough, you will eventually find the classes, the discussions, the people who are trying to grow.

I think even SecondLife is feeling that pull, as they try to deal with the more overtly sexual aspects of the game. I think the reason they feel that pull is that SecondLife and it's residents are evolving faster than their real life counterparts.

Eckhart Tolle talks of "A New Earth ," I would be more prone to call it the original earth, but I think the widespread acceptance of his book points to a desire to have a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationship to this life. Like Siddhartha, we glean that knowledge from our experiences. With much experience, the ones who are manipulative or delusional fall away and we find that there can be joy in just being what we are. What we are in SecondLife is our design. We can use the tool to remake ourselves again and again, throwing away what is inconsistent with our essence and accentuating what we really are as the sum of our experiences in SL helps us learn what that is. When you take away the option to kill or destroy, you begin to evolve more toward a life of harmony and peace. I sincerely believe such a life has one result - contentment.

I won't go so far as to say SecondLife could save the world. There's no reason to. I do sincerely wonder if the accelerated pace and the opportunity to grow and remake yourself does not create a better person. A better person who will return to reality (hopefully) and make it better too. I think today there are only a few of those people inworld, but I see lots of signs that that population is growing, while the others are becoming stagnant as the long term population grows "wiser" about the game and maybe even evolving as people.

Is SecondLife evolving the human race? I guess we shall have to wait and see.