Attaining the Crest of the Curve

Sorrento 2007

Yesterday was my best day of the week and it shouldn't be. I was groggy from having stayed up till half past three and was up again at eight. I've often wondered if I do my best work, whether editing videos or writing, when sleepy or when pushing myself into the morning's wee hours.

I stayed up Thursday into Friday morning to finish my video, The Amalfi Coast from the Emerald Grotto to Amalfi. It was exactly a week since I finished my last video, A Visit to L'Isole di Capri.  Both come from videography I did on my 2008 walking tour of Naples and the Amalfi Coast, the best videographed of all my foreign travels. These two latest videos are the longest I've done since I started posting to Facebook on December 7 and to YouTube on January 4. My first YouTube video, Training To Fight 2, featuring Arron, was 2 minutes, 5 seconds long.

I'm starting to feel competent using iMovie. I started relearning Final Cut Pro ten days ago. FCP has features I want to use e.g. alpha channels, more control over audio, and animation but I can do a lot with iMovie I discovered its undocumented features. Most operations are as set but I've found out that most these defaults are easily modified. I can, for instance, start a project using a theme. When I cancel the theme I can modify its defaults i.e. beginning and closing titles, default transitions without losing what I've already edited into the video. The theme's special transitions then become available to me. Titles can be modified using Apple's built-in Fonts panel, not the Fonts panel that came with iMovie. I can choose from my computer's entire font collection, add shadow, outline and color, far beyond what Apple made available in iMovie's own font panel. David Pogue's O'Reilly manual has been invaluable. It is truly "the book that should have come in the box."

I went into photography and videography two years ago not only to explore my latent artistic bent, nor only to find another way to earn a living but, most important, to pursue necessary personal growth changes. I am back to 1969 when I paused medical school after getting overwhelmed by what I was doing. I was overwhelmed by what I was. I've made many adjustments but at core are still essential adjustments. I need to learn my own work ethic.

Learning to use iMovie has proved once again an old dictum. To succeed with a new skill one must go through and complete the learning curve. If one stopped short of achieving the crest of the curve, he would just have wasted his time. The goal each time is mastery. One needs focus and perseverance. I am learning the importance of attaining the crest of the curve.

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Dan Andrews Location-Independent Lifestyle

Kalanchoe in the Window

Early this morning, while waiting for my video to export, I checked my email. Someone had started following me on Tweeter and this person's location was the Philippines. I followed the link to Dan Andrews's site, Tropical MBA, and watched several of his "Lifestyle Business Podcasts."

Since signing up with Tweeter everyday I get notice that someone was following me. Most of these are businesses trying to create themselves on the Internet. They have something to say but after a couple of weeks I lost interest. Business has never interested me. This is why I remain poor. I don't have the patience to study business situations nor the boldness to pursue strictly business algorithms. My older sister gets nonplussed when confronted with the simplest mechanical problem. My Waterloo is business.

Despite my allergic reaction to business ideas, Dan's ideas persevered. It may be it's just the lateness of the hour. It was three this morning. I had wasted yesterday afternoon but after I finished watching The Time Traveler's Wife last night I took advantage of the return of creative energy and finished editing my Amalfi Coast video. But I don't think so. We become persuaded by ideas we'd already been primed to accept. Truth is simply what aligns with what we already believe.

Andrews and his buddy, Ian, are traveling in SE Asia. They are in Manila as of last notice. They both love to travel but not as much as they love travel when mixing business with pleasure. Location Independent Lifestyle is doing business where you enjoy spending time. It is doing business and earning money without being tied down to a location. It is creating business opportunities where you like to be.

Dan Andrews's idea to combine business with lifestyle is precisely what I've formulated over the last 20 to 30 years. I remember when the idea first occurred to me. I had just come back from Barre where a nine-day meditation retreat shocked me out of complacency. By sitting with physical and mental pain instead of running away, the quality of mind shatters through its normal states of operation. One experiences breakthrough moments. I experienced happiness for the first time in my life.

Coming back home I wondered how I could have time to continue meditating and deepening the practice. I knew happiness was real because I had experienced it beyond reasonableness and doubt. I experienced happiness under the most counter-intuitive circumstances. I didn't have a job, was not earning money, and the relationship on which I had laid great store had just broken up. Happiness did not depend on material accomplishments, on money or any of the usual methods we think we'd achieve it.

My money supply was very limited. I was not ready to stop earning money. I knew I would have to go back to work, save money so I could stop working permanently. The only opportunity that came up meant returning to doing medicine. I took it but set limits. I began working just one day every other week. Through the next 13 years I built up my work week to three days a week. My boss persuaded me to take advantage of the company's IRA plan. The diversion granted me two very important gains. I salvaged my professional self-confidence and I saved enough money to live on for a while.

When I took a leave of absence from clinical work two years ago, I had decided I wanted to work creating digital media. I became excited with video editing in 2006 when I took a week-long seminar on Final Cut Pro. This became the nidus for my vague plans. Four years after that seminar I have at last started creating videos good enough to post on the Internet. I've learned to take photographs of acceptably good quality. I am far from the quality I need to have to venture into business based on the skills I've learned but I have more of an idea of where I am if I still don't know exactly where I am going.

Dan Andrews is making his dream of freedom in my hometown, in my own backyard. He has the advantage of looking American and of having had an American childhood. Both attributes still count for something in developing countries. They count for a great deal in the Philippines where people are still struggling to find their own self-worth after centuries under Western powers. Moreover I have an attribute that goes counter to progress so that in effect I am working with three disadvantages.

Nevertheless listening to Dan last night I was reminded again of some of the ingredients for the success I've begun to envision for myself. His website blog and podcasts are the latest in a series of encounters just in the past week pointing me to a resolution of impediments. Creativity is easy enough in certain states of mind. How one thinks is the key.

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Costiera amalfitana - The Amalfi Coast from the Emerald Grotto to Amalfi.mov

Video of trip from Sorrento to the Emerald Grotto then by launch to Amalfi, 2008.

Purim in Israel with April

My sister is in Israel, a guest of the Swedish Theological Institute where she is studying liturgical music. Part of the program goal is to educate the participants not only about the religious sites of Jerusalem and Israel but also about the Arab-Israelite conflict. 

I sent her a message on Facebook: Did you talk about the origin of the conflict? How the West agreed to the recreation of Israel on Palestinian land? Before that, how the Jews were forced out of that land by foreign conquest? Who has right to the land under our feet? In the Philippines, Christian Filipinos pushed Muslims out of their land leading to the conflict there. But did the Muslims own the land? 

Possession of the land is at the heart of many of the wars fought throughout history. Even if humans did not progress from hunter-gatherers to farmers growing plants and animals, land would still be at the heart of conflict. We need land to live. At the fundamental level we need plants and other animals to get the oxygen and food we need just to maintain the metabolism vital to being alive. When we see that possession extends beyond land but to control, what we call politics when it involves groups of people we call nations and churches, we can see why conflict arises between individuals and peoples.

My conclusion is that if we can be impartial we might see there are no victims or aggressors. It's human nature to covet and think something belongs to them whereas possession is really a legal invention to support the psychology of the self. Possessed of a self we feel, in James Cameron's words, "entitled" to take what we think or feel we need. Laws are useful to mediate conflicting claims. When they work they make physical aggression unnecessary. Laws arise from rules we learn about human nature. If we understand how rules come about, we can legislate more wisely. But if we understand human nature, we won't need rules to live peacefully We're all aggressors when we don't understand the nature of the self.

April and her colleagues are going out to eat. It's Purim in Jerusalem and everybody is out celebrating, based on the account of the rescue of the Jewish people from slaughter as recorded in the Book of Esther. Our religions, literature, art, even culture itself documents the problem we have co-existing with each other on an increasingly small planet.

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Purim in Israel with April

Did you talk about the origin of the conflict? How the West agreed to the recreation of Israel on Palestinian land? Before that, how the Jews were forced out of that land by foreign conquest? Who has right to the land under our feet? In the Philippines, Christian Filipinos pushed Muslims out of their land leading to the conflict there. But did the Muslims own the land? My conclusion is that if we can be impartial we might see there are no victims or aggressors. It's human nature to covet and think something belongs to them whereas possession is really a legal invention to support psychology. We're all aggressors when we don't understand the nature of the self. Visiting Spain I understood why the Spanish came to the Philippines. Our human story has lessons for us all to learn if we can get over the bias of belief.

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Blu-Ray Players Adds Astonishing Connectivity to Our Post-modern Lives

Blu-ray technology is changing how we view video content. Despite what naysayers proclaimed initially that entertainment delivered by disk was going to be completely supplanted by Internet-streamed content, the Blu-Ray Disk player appears to be staying around and may even become part of the future way content producers deliver products to consumers. The introduction of BD Live, an implementation of Java on the disk, is why.
The process from science to consumer production has taken taken ten years. The first of prototype implementation of blue laser technology was unveiled in October 2000. The project was officially labeled Blu-ray in February 2002. Sony shipped the first BD-ROM players in June 2006. HD DVD had beaten it to the market by a few months. I bought an HD DVD player later that year. Blu-ray players were vastly more expensive then.

I gave in and bought a Samsung BD player in late 2007. A year later newer BDs were unplayable. I managed to upgrade the firmware despite Samsung's awful support for Macintosh users and that allowed me to view most of the new releases but BD Live that began appearing on BDs were beyond the capacity of my player.

This week I decided to try the new LG BD player with built-in WiFi. The alternative was to buy a cheaper player without WiFi, just so I can watch the new releases without crashing my player. I bought the cheaper model with just 1 G built-in memory. I brought it home thinking I would probably have to exchange it for a cheaper, non-Wifi-capable device. Unlike the Ethernet-connectable Samsung, connecting the LG player to the Internet was instant. Whew! But when I tried to check for upgrades, the player once again crashed. I tried BD-Live on some disks I already owned. "BD Live content is available only on some players," the dialogue said. I was going to return the player yesterday when I discovered the problem. I needed to plug in more memory.

I had an old Cruzer USB flash-memory unit that I used at one time to transport files home from my computer at the office. I plugged this to the LG player and everything worked! I plugged a Windows-formatted USB hard drive with 80 gigs and that worked, too. Now I could download additional content from BD Live sites like Warner and Lionsgate.
Bonus View and BD Live, implementation of Sun Microsystems's Java platform, changes the whole entertainment experience. Right now I need a BD Live disk in the player to access additional content like live weather and news reports but the technology has turned my large-screen HDTV into an Internet device! Non-HD streaming content is still unviewable (I require crisp resolution on my screen or great audio or not I would not watch the video) but downloaded HD content is absolutely thrilling to watch. And download is fast!

I decided to learn content-creation software because of my interest in media. After all, I tell people I left the Philippines to access media that were few and far between in the 1970s. Mass media connect people and disconnected was what I felt back then. Pundits warn against over involvement in virtual connections and they may have a point. Nerds are antisocial humans but with their narrow focus they have brought profound insights into our modern world.

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A Temple in Turkey Older than Civilization

"Standing on a hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins." Patrick Symmes's article in the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek tells of a find in southeastern Turkey that suggests that 11,500 years ago hunters-gatherers in the last Stone Age built and used temples on a potbellied hill (in Turkish, Göbekli Tepe) before humans turned to farming, then utilitarian pottery, cities, kings, and much later, writing and art.

One of the most influential books that I read when I was just discovering the excitement of books was an ancient cloth-bound book on Greek gods and goddesses illustrated with black-and-white photographs of statues culled from Europe's art and archeological museums. I was fascinated by stories of the origin of things I was learning then through the lenses of science and history, even more fascinated with how people before my time thought about themselves, their lives and the forces that created and shaped both. My interest turned to the culture beyond the native one I saw around me and forty years later turned me into a tourist in Europe.

Our theories about the past will keep changing as we add knowledge to what media and the Internet have transformed into a truly communal store. Long after I am gone people like me will continue to wonder how the commonplace articles surrounding us came to be. More than these solid shapes and manipulable objects I am intrigued by what women and men thought and felt in centuries before mine. Artifacts dug up from the past thrill me with the magnificent possibility that people long dead, most forgotten, were essentially not unlike me. They elaborated theories about how the world operated, why this, what that, and while hiking the wilds of speculation built monuments memorializing their insight, allowing them to enter other aspects of human experience: the sense of the sublime, beauty, and awe.

"Religion now appears so early in civilized life that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it," writes Symmes. In our modern (some say, post-modern) world we cut up the universe into manageable pieces, calling this piece religion, that piece history, this art, that philosophy. Post Aristotle and the classical Athenians we speak of the many "-logies"—mythology, theology, archeology, biology etc. They all fascinate me. 

I have few original insights but they are mine so constitute the composite self that is my ultimate obsession. Teachers of writing say: write about what you know. Few may agree with me but whatever we speak or write about is ultimately self. I enjoy reading what someone else adds to my words and images but writing for me is first of all self-archeology. It is archeology and rocket science. Putting thoughts and feelings into words is exploring the last frontier: my world. 

In Duende Culture I want to write about those aspects of my world we call culture and history, our stories about where we've come from, about the origin and evolution of self.

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