Stephen's Personal Blog

Meditation is the art of breath. It is consciousness. To define what
consciousness is would take away from all that is. You are not who you claim
to be when you define yourself, nor when you define others, you take away
the essence of what you observe and experience.

Stop whatever you are doing and my guess is you are reading this email
(smile) Take a nice deep breath in and out of the body. Experience your
lungs as they fill with air and then feel the release, you have now
experienced the space between thought. This is the act of being present.

Presence is not judgment or labeling something as AKA Good nor Bad but just
experiencing being in the present moment. When you are in the present moment
all else falls away, for the act of being is everything at once. Touching
nothing, experiencing everything. If sharing Physically with another when
this occurs then you my love have entered the “Garden of Oneness” where
consciousness meets it’s perfect mate. Nothing of this place can ever or
will ever compare to souls merging “The Two become One”

If this has not yet happened for you then enter the Garden of Breath alone
and be present to observe and experience the space between. If this has
happened for you, then you my love are blessed beyond measure.

This is part of a sharing for Kristen Elizabeth as she enters into marriage
this day.

Always all my heart
Rebecca Ann

This is no way to build an operating system. Microsoft Watch opines, based on the D6 conference stage show:
Windows 7 will ship in 2009, almost certainly in time for holiday PCs. Microsoft disclosed today that there would be no major architectural changes from Vista, which would greatly reduce development complications.
Check out this comment, in another of Joe Wilcox’s blogs, that appends some internal e-mails released during the dark days of DoJ.
MSFT has worked on WinFS for more than a decade without success in making it fast, reliable, and easy-to-use enough for release. The Longhorn “reset” in 2004 was in large part the realization that WinFS was still not ready for primetime.
At the June 2004 WWDC, Jobs blew away the MSFT engineers in attendance by demonstrating lightning fast Spotlight searches on Tiger (OSX 10.4). The court-released MSFT emails show how flabbergasted they were, and the imperative of getting the Tiger preview DVDs back to Redmond for reverse engineering. Comments by MSFT’s Jim Allchin and Lenn Pryor were priceless.
Here’s Pryor:
” You will have to take Vic’s disk…I am not giving mine up. Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f*cking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.”
Here’s Allchin:
“Yes. I know. It is hard to take. I don’t believe we will have search this fast.”
http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/card/archives/2008/05/no_way_to_build_1.html

Record heat will be found for a second day for some this afternoon while our northern counties should keep the thermometer below the century mark. A very weak frontal boundary will work into the Oklahoma and Northern Texas Panhandles bringing slightly cooler temperatures and even a very small chance for a shower this afternoon…while our central and southern counties will be right back in the triple digit heat. Cooler weather and lighter winds will briefly make its way in by the end of the week.
http://www.newschannel10.com/Global/category.asp?C=72487&nav=menu429_3

Apple is expected to launch its Back to School promotion tomorrow, and on the eve of its launch, we’ve learned that Apple is indeed going to be making it their biggest ever.

According to our sources, Apple will be offering a free 8GB iPod Touch ($299) to college students who buy a qualifying Mac (MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, Mac Pro). Alternatively, students may choose to get an 8GB iPod Nano ($199). The promotion will run from June 3 to September 15th, 2008.
Free iPod Touch with Mac Purchase for College Students?

Apple.com Store

Although I rather like Windows Vista — I think the amount of Vista nerd rage out there is completely unwarranted — there are areas of Vista I find hugely disappointing. And for my money, nothing is more disapponting than the overall fit and finish of Vista, which is truly abysmal. It’s arguably the worst of any operating system Microsoft has ever released.
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You’re never more than two clicks away from some discontinuity or visual gaffe that zaps you right back into the seven year old Windows XP “experience”. Or worse. Consider Chris Pirillo’s observations on his Windows Vista beta 2 install:

Windows Calendar font and icon alignment are all wonky.

The Windows Media toolbar pop-up preview window is using Arial.

Safely Remove Hardware dialog is in Microsoft Sans Serif.

This goes on for about, oh, eleven pages. Granted, these comments refer to the beta, but the shipping version of Vista is every bit as schizophrenic in design. There’s very little consistency.

It also seems every individual team at Microsoft has a profoundly different idea of what the user interface should look like, as Paul Thurrott notes:

And what’s up with the glaringly inconsistent UI across Windows Vista and all of its applications? Some windows have menus, some don’t, and some have hidden menus. Some have these new black toolbars, some don’t. And so on. Why isn’t there a team of people just working on consistency issues?

Aren’t these trivial, nitpicky complaints? Yes. They are. And that’s entirely the point. This little stuff matters.
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Whatever Happened to UI Consistency?

The banana we eat today is not the one your grandparents ate. That one – known as the Gros Michel – was, by all accounts, bigger, tastier, and hardier than the variety we know and love, which is called the Cavendish. The unavailability of the Gros Michel is easily explained: it is virtually extinct.

Introduced to our hemisphere in the late 19th century, the Gros Michel was almost immediately hit by a blight that wiped it out by 1960. The Cavendish was adopted at the last minute by the big banana companies – Chiquita and Dole – because it was resistant to that blight, a fungus known as Panama disease. For the past fifty years, all has been quiet in the banana world. Until now.

Panama disease in Hawaii
Panama disease – or Fusarium wilt of banana – is back, and the Cavendish does not appear to be safe from this new strain, which appeared two decades ago in Malaysia, spread slowly at first, but is now moving at a geometrically quicker pace. There is no cure, and nearly every banana scientist says that though Panama disease has yet to hit the banana crops of Latin America, which feed our hemisphere, the question is not if this will happen, but when. Even worse, the malady has the potential to spread to dozens of other banana varieties, including African bananas, the primary source of nutrition for millions of people.
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Banana: R.I.P.
By Dan Koeppel

This week Viacom (VIA) CEO Philippe Dauman warned Wall Street that ad sales aren’t going well: The 7% growth the company had in the first quarter will be more like 3% to 4% in Q2. Philippe singled out weakness in automotive industry, in addition to the already decimated financial/mortgage business
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Earlier this year, CPG companies like Procter & Gamble (PG), under pressure from their own rising food, commodities and fuel costs, shifted ad planning from an annual to a quarterly basis and making shorter-term ad commitments. That means media companies that could once make reasonable projections for FY revenues now have to update their assumptions every few months. “The planning cycle has changed,” Wenda tells us. “This is wreaking havoc on media company forecasting.”
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http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cheerios_and_tide_why_media_is_having_trouble_with_ad_forecasts

Today, buckling spring keyboards are never or almost never shipped with computers. Fortunately, Unicomp has accomplished what Matias couldn’t and produced an excellent keyboard in the Customizer, which is based on the actual IBM Model M design. Keystrokes are crisp and precise. The “shadow key” problem that bedeviled the Tactile Pro is absent, and the Customizer itself is solid, recalling a slab of stone (see the picture below), unlike the fragile, mushy keyboards most PCs ship with. It’s also been durable, and in the months I’ve pounded on it..
Product Review: Unicomp Customizer keyboard

I like the old loud clacky keyboards. Maybe I’ll get one of these.

Monday morning while riding her bike around Soncy and I-40 with a friend, Tasha Enloe was struck by a truck and died quickly. Medivac pronounced her at the scene. Her friend is unharmed.

CSStars encourages people to give to her MS Bike Tour fund raising effort. Her goal this year is $1000. At the time of this writing she is $100 away.

A memorial service will be conducted at Boxwell Brothers Funeral Home, 2800 Paramount Blvd. in Amarillo tomorrow at 11:00 am. For cyclists who wish to pay respects by riding to the service, meet at the Gold’s Gym (Blackburn) parking lot on Tues May 27th. Leave time is 10:30 am. I think this is really on the 26th. It’s purpose is intended to honor Tasha.

She will be missed.

You don’t have to mod your classic Xbox to run the best free media center application around anymore: Dedicated developers have ported the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) software to the Mac, and its killer features will convince you to abandon Front Row forever. The latest XBMC on OS X beta dropped last week, and it’s as stable and useful as ever. Dubbed the “throw out your Xbox” release, XBMC for Mac 0.5 beta 1 adds the key feature that finally puts your media center Mac under the TV where it belongs: remote control support. Let’s take a look at how you can (and why you want to) replace Front Row with XBMC on your Mac.
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XBMC Turns Your Mac into the Ultimate Media Center

In April of 1985, the Coca-Cola company announced that it was re-formulating its flagship carbonated drink, which to the horror of Coke fans everywhere, included a switchover to high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Soon, the rest of the soft drink industry followed suit, and the classic taste of cane sugar-based sodas became practically extinct. Today, only a few small boutique soft drink companies still make sodas with refined cane sugar (or sucrose, made from sugar beets) a costly ingredient when compared with HFCS — but true carbonated beverage connoisseurs know and can tell the difference, as corn syrup has a characteristically cloying sweetness when compared to refined sugar. For nostalgic Coca-Cola lovers, unless you live in a foreign country that classic taste is but a distant memory.

Every late March and early April, for the two to three weeks leading up to the celebration of the Jewish Passover holiday season in the United States, Coke fans living in major metropolitan areas with large Jewish populations get their Real Thing, if only for that brief fleeting period. According to Jewish law, nothing made with chametz (any of a number of proscribed cereals and grains, including corn) during passover may be consumed — so in order not to lose sales from observant Jews during that eight day period, a small number of Coca-Cola bottlers make a limited batch of the original Coke formulation, using refined sugar. Needless to say, stocks run out quickly and fans of Passover Coke have been known to travel many miles seeking out supermarkets with remaining caches.
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Kosher for Passover Coke: Its the Real Thing Baby

Apple is moving toward the release of a redesigned MacBook, a new report emanating from the company’s Asian Mac manufacturers claims.

AU Optronics Corp. and Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corp. have been signed-up to produce flat-panel screens for the new MacBook models, confirmed the Commercial Times this morning, citing “sources”.

In line with Apple’s continued marketshare growth for its laptop offerings, Apple has set strong targets for sales of the new device, which MarketWatch claims is set for launch in the third quarter of 2008 (so that’s somewhere between July and September, people)
MacBook upgrade set for Q3

Writing in the Vatican newspaper, the astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space.
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The search for forms of extraterrestrial life, he says, does not contradict belief in God.
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Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God. And some aliens could even be free from original sin, he speculates.
Vatican says aliens could exist BBC News