Blog has moved.

I am consolidating all my blogging into the Zen in the Art of Ukulele blog at book.zenuke.com. Please update your bookmarks, etc.

Orange Pushups Song

Occasionally, I'll dream a song (i.e. I'm singing it in the dream) and I wake up with a fragment in my head. That happened last night and I woke up to find this song snippet recorded in my iPhone..

Baby let me buy you an orange push up
It's so satisfying I won't give up
Lick it from the top
Push it from the bottom
You'll be so glad that we went and got 'em
Oh Ooooooh love an orange push up

Okay I have no idea why I was dreaming that, so if you are some amazing dream interpreter feel free to leave a comment. Also if you don't know what an orange push up is read all about 'em here. Of course they are no longer satisfying by themselves they have to have Scooby Doo on the box. Sheesh.

Zen In The Art of Ukulele

I have begun work on yet another project. In my pursuit of becoming a "real" Second Life musician I came across a nest of ukulele players on YouTube. It was love at first sight. I think partly because most of the uke players I initially encountered were not "stinkface" musicians but "smileyface" ones.* People like jaaaaaaa, russbuss415, and evilhamster95 . Serious musicians, especially highbrow ones, will cringe. Fine with me. In fact let's take a break to be entertained by Eric (evilhamster95)....


Wow. I feel better already. So in the process of the light coming on about the uke. I decided to chronicle my attempt to master the instrument. This tome will be called "zen in the art of the ukulele". As I progress (or flounder) you can witness the spectacle or play along at zenuke.com.

These notes will be folded into the piece I'm generating on playing live music in SL, which I have decided to add to the SL Wiki under playing live music.

Peace.

*I have since found plenty of "stinkface" uke players but I suspect most of them are guitarists who have also taken up the uke.

Graduated Seminary Yesterday

Yep. You probably didn't know I was an ordained minister. It's okay until my brother called the other day I had forgotten it myself. A long long time ago I had read a book by Abby Hoffman called "Steal This Book." Ironically, I bought the book. In it were all sorts of tricks to get things for free, essentially by stealing - or taking advantage of loopholes I guess. One of the free things in the book was to become an ordain minister in the Universal Life Church. The process was fairly uncomplicated you sent an S.A.S.E. (self addressed stamped envelope) to them and they mailed you back your Ordination Card. I did that. The Universal Life Church has only one precept "Do only that which is right." It continues.."Every person has the natural right (and the responsibility) to peacefully determine what is right. We are advocates of religious freedom." Okay I can live within those guidelines and actually like the idea of letting everyone determine what their own relationship with their Supreme Beingness is. As long as that belief doesn't encroach my right to be - it's all good.

So when my brother called and said HE had become a minister too. I decided to revive my preacherhood and take back the moniker of the Reverend Catfish String. Not as a way of saying "hey I art more holier" more as a way of saying "hey I am trying to walk a spiritual path too".

But being so free and open the Universal Life Church has NO seminary to speak of. And I felt a little guilty just deciding to paste the title on without any effort to "earn" it. So for my as yet to be named church, I instituted our seminary. I also graduated. Took about two hours.

I watched "Pale Rider" with Clint Eastwood. I'll probably watch it again to pick up the finer points of preachering but I think I got the big ones.

1) You can give hope to the lost and lift their spirits by slamming a sledge hammer into the nards of the bad guy.
2) Turn down 15 year olds wanting to learn about love and stuff.
3) Turn the other cheek? My ass.

So I'm ready to go out into the world and give hope to the hopeless. But no coddling you whiny rich bastards that are ruining everything.

Amen.

In love with my Mac Mini

Okay if it was a girl. It would be the kind of girl that you treat with respect. Like Teal (another story).

The Mac Mini has proved to be one of the smartest things I did. I got the screen calibrated last night so at last it looks as beautiful as it works. I am thrilled with the simplicity of it, the small footprint (ignoring the power brick of course) and the Mac OS. I used Macs many, many years ago. I started on Macs and being a visual person the "Dock" is much smarter to use than the Windows Vista counterpart.

The Mac comes loaded with "lifestyle" software to manage photos, music, and movies. It also comes with email, web editing and calendaring. When you add OpenOffice 3.0 (now native to the mac) or just use Google Docs online - it's a complete info worker workstation. I also added a simple paint program called Scribbles which is a lot of fun (though not entirely useful). The biggest drawback I've found is just one screen. I've gotten kind of spoiled by my two computer, two screen PC command center - but when I think about what it's doing for the juice it's pulling - it's pretty clear I'm being a bad Earth Citizen.

At some point we have to examine ourselves and not just fill our life with being critical of others.

When I did that I saw wild excessive consumption and I think what I do is meager compared to some.

I do like the idea of reducing, and reusing. The Mac Mini will allow me to downsize my entire setup.

I bought the bargain basement Mac Mini (because I was originally only going to use it for GarageBand). You can get one here.

Apple Mac mini MB138LL/A (1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, Combo Drive)

A Message From the Maker (see Note too)

I dreamed this morning that God spoke to me. He said (in red 24pt. Helvetica type)....

"Keep your promises."


Note: I use the traditional form of "God" and "He" out of habit. I don't believe God is a) an entity we can comprehend and b) a guy. I mean look at flowers. A guy did that? I don't think so. And I don't think of God so much as a being as I do a "be". That would take a long time to explain. The main thing is "keep your promises". Which would also imply be careful what you promise. They say we will be "accountable for every word" on Judgment Day (not that I believe in Judgment Day) BUT if there IS a Judgment Day AND you talk less - your trial will be a LOT shorter. The jury will thank you and all the people waiting to go after you will be very glad too. But really "keep your promises." So that means when someone is staring at you with Bambi eyes and saying "Do you promise?". It probably would be a good thing to say "Nope." They will be crestfallen and then you will be tempted to cave and say "okay, okay. I PROMISE." Then they have you. So stick with "nope" or better yet be like a good lawyer and say "maybe".

Blogging From Firefox

Well, well, well. It appears that I can update my blog from my Firefox browser using an add-on called ScribeFire. Pretty interesting.