The Sitting Tree

As many of you (what a paradox that is) may know I am a student of Tom Brown Jr’s Tracker School, and I have learned a lot of amazing things there about nature, our role on this Earth and about our spirituality.

Well, Tom Brown III is Tom Brown Jr’s son, and head instructor at the Tracker School, and he recently put out a blog, and even though he is listed as a friend here I wanted to write an entry specifically to tell you guys about the blog. Why? Because well, after reading the second entry I realize how Grandfather’s wisdom is reaching out through so many very different channels. From the music of Joe Paulik to Tommy’s new blog to me expressing in real-time to friends, family and even strangers (in some cases) my continued astonishment at just how relevant Grandfather’s philosophies are to so many different things that have absolutely nothing to do with tracking, survival or awareness.

Definitely worth reading and bookmarking on your RSS reader:

4 Directions ~ 4 Elements

Check it out!

ps: Those two new blogs are still coming. I have a name for the dog community, and possibly for the tracking blog as well, which may end up being a blog about tracking, or a community like the dog one for tracking, or just for dirt time in general. I’m not sure at this point.

I was reading an article stating to avoid Cesar Millan’s techniques called “Cesar Millan - A Quick Fix” and suddenly a light bulb went off. Just like the diet industry does with dieting, they are perpetuating the idea that Cesar’s goal is to provide a quick fix for the behavioral problems.

They are thinking of it in terms of dog training. Where you teach a dog to sit and then the dog knows how to sit for the rest of his life.

Just like a diet, you do not employ Cesar’s methods for one day, it is a lifestyle change, and one that is very beneficial for you and your dog.

Stay tuned here because I’m going to set up a couple blogs soon that will be getting regularly updated. One will be a blog for the rehab of my dog Lady, which will chronicle my daily life with her of being calm and assertive and techniques I use to combat certain behaviors or teach her how to do certain things. I have tried several things and have realized the truth that not all techniques work for all dogs. Hearing this and experiencing it is different, and when you have that experience that you find a technique that works for YOUR dog, it is such a wonderful feeling of empowerment.

The second blog will be dedicated to my tracking adventures. I may make it a community where people can set up blogs to document their tracking adventures as well, and even share track drawings, however, I am not 100% sure how I want to do this or how far I want to go with it.

Please feel free to comment on either of these blog ideas. They are both definitely going to happeand I’d love to hear feedback from anyone who still reads this blog.

When the MP3 revolution came, I was skeptical about it at first. I was like, no I don’t really want to have all my music on a hard drive. What if the hard drive ceases to function? Then I lose all my music. This actually happened to me and I lost a lot of music I was not able to get back. Now this was before iTunes, before anything was available to be purchased on mp3. So what was done? You either bought the CD and then ripped the music to mp3s on your computer, or you just straight up pirated the music from Napster or anything else that was around at the time (Most of them obsolete now). I was somewhere between the two. I bought a lot of CD’s, but then I also downloaded a lot of music as well. Then a year later I lost all my MP3s in a hard disk crash. I was able to replace only the songs that I had on CD. From that point on, any music I really liked, I bought it on CD. Hard copy. Something that is permanent.

There is a lesson to be learned here. Now, if I lose all my music, I can just re-rip all of my CDs to AAC (the successor of MP3, fact, not Apple propaganda), and since I’ve bought a lot of music off of iTunes, I can redownload the songs I’ve lost, at no cost. Wait a minute. I have to download them, from who? From Apple. What if I no longer have an Internet connection? What if Apple goes out of business? What if the MafiAA forces Apple to shut iTunes down? That last one no where near as far-fetched as it sounds and actually has come REALLY close to happening. If any of those things happen, you cannot retrieve your music. Worse though, it is not music you downloaded for free, it is music you paid good money for.

So what’s the solution? You could burn the music you bought from iTunes to a CD-R, right? Well, CD-Rs aren’t like pressed CDs where the digital information is etched into metal. The data is imprinted on a film of dye on the back of the CD-R. This is significantly less permanent than a CD, and it has been proven that CD-Rs will not stand the test of time. It is even questionable if pressed CDs and DVDs will.

Read the rest of this entry »

My co-worker just IM’d me and said I’m missing free food in another room. A St. Patrick’s breakfast, so I ask “What kind of food?” To that I get the reply “bagels and doughnuts.”

This is the prime example why people are unhealthy in America. Bagels and doughnuts are not a balanced meal, and here comes everyone flocking to the place to eat this up, while a very small minority of people (a.k.a. me) say “no thanks.”

It just seems that everywhere you turn around everyone in society is perpetuating the wrong things. Is it so hard to offer a healthy, balanced breakfast? It can’t be that hard. They also had free coffee and orange juice. Well now! Let me drop what I’m doing! Coffee is coffee, but orange juice? I have absolutely no idea what orange juice they have. None at all. I promise. Swear? but I can bet you my bottom dollar that it’s the cheapest most unhealhty orange juice you can get, if it even is real orange juice to begin with.

I had breakfast at McDonald’s a few months ago (yes, yes, I know. I try to limit it to one to two times a year) and I had an orange juice thinking that at least I can have a healhty beverage. Nope! I have had real orange juice many times and this tasted like some watered down sugar water that had some artificial flavors in it or something. Now I remember being a child and eating at McDonald’s and thinking how good that orange juice was. One word: ignorance.

Also it’s very hard to remember when you go without something for such a long time. You forget how bad it is. I find I always will inevitably eat something that makes me feel like I’m dying and only then remember! That’s why I have come up with the idea of a DO NOT EAT list. However, I have yet to implement it. You may be reading this and say “Alex, what are you nuts? How can a cheesesteak sub or potato chips make you feel like you’re dying?” Well to that, my friends, I answer this: Stop eating unhealthy for long enough for your body to get used to it and then you too will see what I mean. Stuff that tasted like cardboard before will actually taste good, because we are destroying our tastebuds with all the excess flavoring in our food. Not permenently though, because it is one of the most amazing traits of the human body that it can adapt and get used to almost any conditions. Unfortunately we as Americans are adapting it to the wrong conditions.

We don’t need excess sugar, salt, butter, etc. in our diet. Your palate has become accustomed to that through years and years of eating all the wrong food. The entire American culinary system is based on drenching food in excess crap that we don’t need, and also providing portions so large it’s impossible for anyone to eat out and lose weight unless they refuse the large portions, get kids meals, or have enough willpower to stop eating at the right time and save the rest for later, all while giving the waitress a list of things not to put in their food. If that’s not bad enough it is a self-perpetuating paradox. No restaurant will survive if they stop putting excess salt, sugar, butter, etc. in their foods and start serving smaller portions because that is what we have been accustomed to as Americans and thus a very small minority of people would accept those changes.

Take Asian cuisine for example. There are hardly any (if any at all) true Chinese or Japanese restaurants in America. If you go to Japan and eat at restaurants their food is completely different than it is here. You can eat out at a restaurant every day in Japan and not get fat. The only Japanese food in America that is really Japanese that I know of is sushi and sushimi. That is due to the nature of what it is. You can’t really make sushi fattening or make it bad for you because then it wouldn’t be sushi.

I think there needs to be a new word proposed for the english language, and that word is genorance. As genocide refers to the mass-killing of people, genorance then refers to the mass ignorance of people. You can also think of it as genuine ignorance if you like.

Apparently Google has jumped on the bandwagon of targeting ads based on what you do online. This involves tracking your every move on Internet websites and storing them as cookies on your browser. They devised a way to opt-out of the program via a cookie, but this is not really that great, since most people who care about their privacy regularly delete their cookies anyway.

Google has apparently created an opt-out plugin for most browsers which they have made available as an open-source project on Google Code. This satisfied my concern that Google could potentially put malicious code into the plugin in order to spy on users. After examining the source however, it seems that all the plugin does (at least in Firefox) is check to see if the cookie is there when you load the browser. If the cookie is not found and third party cookies are not disabled, then it adds the opt-out cookie.

This solution is still not really satisfactory to me because you really have no way of knowing exactly what Google is doing when it sees that cookie. It is similar to the robots.txt file in web servers. It provides to web spiders a list of files which they are not allowed to go through. In other words, it is telling the web spiders the files you do not want it to know about, making the point moot, because it can then choose not to obey and spider through all your hidden, but publically available files.

I always turn third party cookies off anyway because I don’t believe they have any place on my browser. When I’m on a website I am on, I am on it to see that website’s content, not to have information placed on my computer by third party sites. I suggest you do the same, and I also suggest the Cookie Culler addon for Firefox as a way to selectively remove cookies from your system, as well as the Ad Block Plus addon, for getting rid of the majority of ads in the first place. It even blocks Snapshots, which I use here. Heh.

Users of Apple’s Safari web browser will also be happy to find that there is an Adblock plugin for Safari 3, as well, that uses the same filters as the Firefox plugin.

If you get Adblock Plus and do not want the Snapshots plugin to be blocked, you can find instructions on how to remove it from Adblock’s list at Snap’s Frequently Asked Questions page.

I recently have been introduced to Cesar Millan, who is better known as the host of the National Geographic show The Dog Whisperer. At first I was somewhat skeptical mostly because I hadn’t heard of him and it was just a co-worker telling me of his methods, but after reading some web pages about how to take care of your dog, with lessons taken straight from Millan, I decided to order the Mastering Leadership DVD box set.

I didn’t find anything cruel about his methods. None of them actually harm the animals, and if you think that his methods “upset the dogs” then you are also asserting that you have some kind of empathic ability to read the dog’s emotions. After only using his methods on one walk, the change in my dog’s behavior was a night and day difference. Now people will argue and say that the changes are only temporary because it’s an easy rebuttal. See, it’s difficult to see into the future, and thus impossible for anyone to really be able to combat that argument. I’m not saying this is their intention, but it is definitely the outcome.

Cesar Millan says that it’s the people that need the training, not the dogs. He is right on so many levels, except that he is committing a generalization here because not all humans are completely ignorant of Mother Nature, although, regrettably, most are. Let me talk about the different arguments I have seen the past couple days against Mr. Millan’s methods: Read the rest of this entry »

I did some work tonight and LiCe v0.1.79 is now out. Half of the changes were already implemented but not put out because I had to get the new “modules” into Subversion.

The changes are as follows:

• Clicking inventory spotlight icon now cycles through different icons.
• Moved Inventory Spotlight over to LiCe Bags. It can run standalone.
• Assimilated AlexBags into LiCe and changed all references to LiCe Bags.
• Throttled Status Bar updates, now uses /set STATUS_UPDATE_SPEED (delay in seconds)
• Removed /esc main menu failsafe since there is a main menu button now on the default UI.
• Added LiCe Combo Damage module. Shows total damage of multiple hits that occur close enough to each other to show simultanious damage numbers.
• Added preliminary capability to add what I used to separate in lua file into separate addons. LiCe Combo Damage is the first of these. Support is very minimal. Saved variables and setting integration has not been done yet.
• Added LiCe UI Screensaver. Fades out UI 5% every 20 minutes for 30 seconds.
• Took out reloading of UI during theme change. It was not needed.

I’ve also been using a new addon called PitBull which I believe to be amazing. It is a Unit Frames addon that completely replaces the player, party and raid Unit Frames, and it is what I have been looking for to replace ArcHud. I will be writing a review shortly with pictures, and I have actually wanted to write it the day after I started using it but things have been really busy at work and I have not been able to get away to write it.

I now (as of yesterday) hold a plane ticket to St. Croix in late March. One of the instructors at the Tracker School is taking ten people in two separate groups on a six-day semi-survival adventure in the wilderness of St. Croix. I am going to be getting lost on an uninhabited part of a not-so-deserted island.

Why do they say getting stranded on a desert(ed) island anyway? How do they know the island was once inhabited? And most of these islands are in no way deserts but tropical paradises. Weird.

So far all I know is that the first three days will be spent on learning about the ecosystem of the island– The plant life, and, of course, the animal life. We will be making fish hooks and fish spears, and also going snorkeling. We will be camped somewhat close to the ocean. The final three days will be spent venturing further out into the wilderness, and doing some caretaking as well as honing our survival skills.

The reference to Lost above are due to my astonishment at their determination to get off the island. (also with Cast Away, etc.) I personally would love to be stranded on an uninhabited island and would never want to return to society.

I will be doing some major LiCe development coming up this Sunday morning. I will be making it a lot more modular and also optimizing some things.

I wanted to do it now but the queue monster is on every night on my realm all day long pretty much starting at 4PM PST and it doesn’t let up even at 8PM PST (which is 11PM my time). What this means is that in a coding environment that requires logging out and logging in often (reorganizing the parts of the addon into smaller modules) this is a hair-pulling experience when there are server queues.

I may do some things that do not require restarting the game to take effect, such as optimizations on the GPS system, etc.

So I’ve been all hyped about the coming out as well as my reception of the Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display. I’ve been a big fan of Apple’s displays because it seems that every other LCD manufacturer can’t produce a quality LCD display. If they aren’t defeating the purpose of a digital display by only having a VGA jack on it, they produce a display with a viewable angle so narrow that while you’re head is at a position where you see the bottom of the screen perfectly clear, the top of the screen cannot be seen correctly unless you move your head about an inch. The viewing angle on all Apple displays I’ve used has been such that you can view it from any angle and it looks exactly the same (although in areas with black there seems to be a glare - usually noticeable in video games)

Though I received my 24″ LED display yesterday, I cannot say whether or not the same holds true, as I was not able to even connect it to my PC, my Macbook Pro (1st gen 17″), or my Powermac G5- All with DVI ports I may add. The reason for this is because Apple chose to ship a brand new display with the complete inability to connect it to ANY other computer besides the new Macbooks which have only been out for about a month now. No, seriously, I’m not making this up. Apple really did this. Read the rest of this entry »