It is said that a butterfly flapping its wings can trigger a tornado. A seemingly small action or occurrence can lead through a chain of events to a major response,
possibly in a distant location. In this chaos example the trigger event is harmless
in itself, but causes a catastrophic response. But lets look at a reversed scenario, a negative event - small or major, it doesn't matter, but negative - causing
a benefit, the proverbial silver lining. The greater the benefit, the better. Think of something good in your life, and retrace your steps to some mishap which
was an essential step along the route to arrive at your destination. The good thing may simply be being alive. Stories abound of people missing the train,
only to hear on the news later that the train was derailed, causing many casualties. When they realized they had missed the train, they were probably upset,
but relieved later, not to be among the casualties (albeit, in this example, the relief would be tinged with sadness for the actual casualties). Nevertheless, it is
a silver lining, one less person a potential victim.
The chain of events which lead to me sharing my life dream with a delightful cat may have started with the Big Bang, and later with the primordial ooze, but in more
recent history, I can trace at least a few mishaps and syncronicities which were essential links in the chain leading to this beneficial outcome.
A blog(ish)? Yeap, not a real, proper, blog engine run blog. Just a simple DIY version pretending to be a blog.
A luddite manual version, with basic html, tables, and email comment. I tried, I really did, to run a
Wordpress
blog, but my coding skills are limited. I may be able to change some obvious text, or insert some script by following instructions, though when it
comes to fixing anything in php or CSS, I am lost. Life is too short for non-web developers to learn all that. Well, maybe in time, but I have content to create.
There were other things I did not get on with, so here I am, back at my trusted old website. But I like some aspects of blogs, and I know visitors do too.
New content is up top, you can check it out, or move on. Blogs are interactive. They are the water cooler area, somewhere to hang out and chat, talk shop.
Some of the cool stuff about blogs is something I have not yet figured out how to include (I am investigating
FeedBurner for RSS ), if at all possible, so there are some
short comings. If you want to comment you have to send me an email, though I made it as easy as possible, its just not immediate, and I know some of you don't
like to give out your address, but rest assured, it is safe with me, and unless given in the body of the message because you want it to be public, I do
not publish it. If I can't get RSS to work on this site, the only option is to bookmark it, and check out the updates.
On the bright side, I think a simple website is less code heavy, quicker to download, and I try to make it easy to navigate, and blend as
many of the advantages of each as possible. The overall experience should not be too different to a 'normal' blog, with some of the advantages of a 'static' site.
So cheers, here is to blogg(ish)ing, eh, whatever.
Yesterday a friend complimented me on the aesthetics of my todo board, but continued after a brief pause, “Personally, I'm a starer.”
I had to laugh, I knew exactly what he meant. My father is a starer, I am a starer. We stare. When trying to work out practical solutions,
we just sit and stare, or stand and stare. Sometimes hour after hour. If someone was to ask us what we did all day, we might
answer “I designed”, my father would say “I am thinking”. Could we say “I was staring”, especially since it might be into empty space?
Actually, our answer would be correct, we design, we think about the problem, the possible solutions. We see the space or object to
be changed with our physical eyes, we see other things in our mind's eye. The images alternate, blend, with no deliberate action.
Let the force be with you. I remember on many occasions seeing my father look at his model train board, about 2 x 3 meters in size,
for hours on end, then grab a box full of track pieces and assemble a complex route system, as though he was laying them out on
an invisible chart. I never even saw him making notes. I need to make notes to hold on to my ideas, but many are created in the
same way, by staring into space. My house and workshop were designed to a large extent by staring. Many a sketch was
abandoned when I stared at the project. My friend is building a house he designed by staring. Its a lovely house, you'd never guess its
strange beginnings.
So, any time someone asks you what you are doing, when you were staring, say you were creating your next masterpiece.
And where does that leave the todo board? I still need reminding to eat, do the laundry, cut fire wood, pay a bill. Staring wont do those jobs, alas.
If you have a google toolbar,
you can use it to search for any word on any page. Type the search term into the field,
use the drop-down menu and click on highlight, but don't click on go. This will highlight the term on the current page
and take you to it. When typing in a phrase, use quotation marks, this will ignore any words contained within the phrase
which may appear elsewhere out of context.
