Oxherding Chapter X

Well, Google's taken over the former blogspot.com pretty effectively.  Not an issue for me... I feel pretty comfortable dealing with both large and small leading-edge companies, after working with Intel, Nortel, OASIS (the standards organization - oasis-open.org), Bay Networks, Digital, as well as earlier government-related work in the DC area.  Anyway, my stance on the relationship I experience with Google is that it is mutually beneficial: They allow me to fairly quickly make the information here available to anyone who is interested in these topics, while they can also mine it, in order to monetize it over time.
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Coming back to this blog after following the other path is kind of cool, and a good way to skate the evolutionary edge.
It's easy to get distracted by the Internet of samsara, the portal to more distracting (and amazingly-interesting) content than any human can possibly follow. My balance of attraction has always wavered between unprecedented opportunities for egoic gratification and the deep-time perspective of ephemeral being, the flash of lightning, the starry starry night twinkle of the midnight Rhone pouring out of the lake, gazed upon from le Pont des Bergues.
It's really better to give up the illusion of understanding it all, for even seeing/hearing/experiencing everything open to a human now is so blatantly impossible. However, that does not leave us in simply a blooming, buzzing confusion. We can still see The Spike, walk through Sandymount to the Strand - either physically or via some Google-related facility. No Google will ever capture the experience of waiting a bit in the company of a lovely lady on a motorcycle as the commuter train blocks the Sandymount road, then accompanying her as she turns off the engine ("to save the petrol") and walks the substantial machine the next several hundred meters home to her family, chatting about the state of the world and the preferred eatery in the town center... and the cool cider afterwards.... but it can transfer the glimmer, the spark of the event far beyond time and place to another consciousness, your consciousness, in some skeletal form.
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But still, an oxherder must return to the market.
Leaving a trail is useful; making a map may be better.
One of these days, I suppose my favorite mapmaker, Ken Wilber, will get a comment or two here.
His (very!) few Shadowed spots infuriate me like the misguided views of a beloved younger brother, although in truth he's a few years older than me. When a man who has attained the recognition that every view is correct speaks of silliness, watch out!
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No exciting pix with this post - Working erratically on some multi-media material with a more geographically and symbolicly diverse focus. With the realization of widespread 4G LTE availability, the real-time publication opportunities are becoming much more interesting, but the key will always be communicating meaning, to the extent that meaning still has meaning.
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Now that most of the nearby trails which I wish to share have been mapped into OpenStreetMap.org, I wonder if you, my occasional reader, will have more interest in following specific tracks, rather then being able to see the entire network of trails. For instance, would you like to see a handful of 20-to-50 kilometer loop rides, or specific to-and-from routes?
Do you want to travel from Lexington to Walden Pond over car-free paths? (I call suburban sidewalks car-free; with their occasional and respectfully-avoided walkers... a different breed from those pedestrian-only sidewalks of town centers.)
Or would you ever want to receive a live (or minimally-delayed) GPS track visible on a map, with occasional audio and/or video accompaniment, commentary, etc.?  A kind of voyeuristic mobile webcam?  Would you ever take a break from your other computer-based tasks to see what's going on here or on a related web site?
I've discussed the timestamp contest idea a bit elsewhere - offering extra merit for correctly identifying the timestamp of an ongoing or stored bit of media. For I may be jealous of my privacy, may take the opportunity to control my own metadata, to conceal, modify or or reveal it as desired.
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Thanks for reading.