Category: Personal

Higher Law

I was listening to WYCE the other day and this sweet song came on; it turned out to be Higher Law by Victor Wooten.

And it had all the hallmarks of a late 80s/early 90s Tackhead [wikipedia] song, say, Strange Things-era. The vocal style, the guitar, the drums, even the lyrics — they all sounded heavily Tackheadish. (Maybe they and Tackhead share a common source I’m not familiar with…) I checked it out and one member of Tackhead, drummer Keith LeBlanc, is credited with vocals on that album and that track specifically, but I did not find the hand of Adrian Sherwood anywhere in it, which surprised me.

Maybe “Victa” digs Tackhead, or maybe they both dig the same people.

Web Apps

Daring Fireball: The Location Field Is the New Command Line is a few months old, but I just got around to reading it.

Web apps are really great for cross-computer compatibility. Now that I work on my linbox during the day and just use my mac for my own computing at home, I appreciate being able to use, say, del.icio.us (or reddit) to move bookmarks back and forth. I have fastmail.fm for my mail, but I mostly use Mail.app or Thunderbird to access it — the magic of imap means I don’t have to use a web app to get cross-computer access to my mail.

I am a bit stymied by my own lack of knowledge of how to program web apps. I’ve dabbled a tiny bit in Ruby On Rails, but I can tell I’m not going to really “get” it till I buy the book. I’ve played a little with what they now call “ajax” — javascript which communicates with the server and modifies a page directly without reloading it — heck, I even helped Topher put something together for a real live page using it — but I haven’t done anything with it for my own sake.

My web design skills, both in terms of presentation and in terms of javascript wizardry, are so sadly lacking. I’d really like to beef them up.

I had a lot of fun recently putting together a shopping cart for a small local web-based business. I was at first trying to adapt an open source cart to their needs, but their needs were very well defined and peculiar, and I was spending more time taking unwanted features *out* of the carts I was looking at than it would have taken me to write a new one, so I trashed it and wrote a new one. Perl/MySQL. Pretty simple. I didn’t touch the frontend at all, I did it all using HTML::Template and handed the templates over to the site owners to customize. It worked out great.

I enjoyed designing that web app, and it’s not that hard. Maybe I’ll try and think of a project I want to work on of my own that I can do some neat stuff with.

Not that John Gruber is Nostradamus, but I think it’s true that there is still a big future in hot web apps, and I’d like to have more skill with that than I have.

On the Radical Acceptance of Everything

It is an axiom of Focusing that nothing inside gets healed or changed when we argue with it, preach to it, punish it, set goals for it or do any of the other typical things done to “unacceptable” thoughts, feelings and behaviors. The only process that has a chance to heal or change them is to let them inwardly be, and for the central I to extend to them listening, acceptance and empathy. Yet this process has been used, not just to listen to and heal “nice” feelings like sadness and guilt, but addictions and sexual compulsions, murderous rages-the inner parts people have that make them feel they can’t trust their entire inner selves, that lead them to believe there really are parts of themselves that are wicked, prone to evil, “naturally” cruel and selfish, un-Godly, untrustworthy. Brought back into the light of compassion, into the family of the Self, these parts reveal themselves not as devils and monsters, but as protectors and guardians of the Self’s very existence and integrity. Partly for this reason, Cornell sometimes describes her work as “the Radical Acceptance of Everything.”

Could it be true that there is no id, no fundamental Devil Within, no yetzer hara, or evil impulse, as the Talmud calls it? And if we don’t have such a thing inside us, does that mean nobody does? Or do some people have it-and then who knows who they are, who decides? And if nobody has it, then isn’t that the height of New Age softness and fuzziness, denying that evil and sin exists, glibly calling it “sickness” or “ignorance” and tritely claiming that “everything happens for a reason”? If there is no fundamental evil impulse, then what is the nature of evil? And where, of course, is God?

Thoughts on the Radical Acceptance of Everything.

I’m very interested in Focusing lately. Ann Weiser Cornell’s version of it especially.

There is a lot of great information on it at focusingresources.com.