Site Map

I've been absent from this site for quite some time. Life and work just gets in the way, and submitting posts to this weblog is too cumbersome to do on-the-fly.

As web technologies have improved and matured over the last two years, I took another look at "blog services". Most important for me is the ease with which new entries can be made offline, and the automatically posted online. This way, all entries exist independently locally - the web journal is just a copy of it.

As it happens, I'm trying out the wordpress service in conjunction with Journler and MarsEdit. Thus far this combination of tools has passed usability tests, and I've been able to create new posts FAST, as well as retaining an offline original. The service is hosted by wordpress, so no maintenance for me, and more time to focus on content, work and life.

So I'll give it a try. You can find the second / new / alternate / possible replacement journal at pbruiter.wordpress.com. 

I was just reminded of the funny performance of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" by the original members of Straight No Chaser at the Musical Arts Center, Bloomington, Indiana. December 7th, 1998. Thank you youtube...

I *do* love Christmas, in a cultural tongue in cheek kind-of-way, and although Ayyam-i-Ha is now competing very well at our homely Bahai life, I cannot refrain from wishing you all a merry Christmas and a happy new (Common Era) year ;-)

Three (in)significant things happened today. Strangely, they propelled me into hyper drive, with my mind barely able to keep up. Unggh. Toooo many ideas. Too many film scenes. Playing through my inner eye. Too much understanding all at once. If only I could project and record my thoughts real-time. Perhaps Strange Days was onto something?

So what happened, you ask?

First, I discovered a major development in the web community. No one will realize the significance of this, except a handful of web specialists. It was only because I subscribe and meticulously track one of them - Tim Bray - that I was alerted to this. Talk about a small technological standard evolving, which will change everything. His post concerning this is here.

Second, I was alerted to the new web-based music service imeem. This site is a clearinghouse for all major music labels and allows people to listen to any music - at full length and (mostly) CD-quality - for free. It is add-supported, so the free is free as in beer, not as in speech, but it's a major breakthrough.

Hmmm - you think. And?

Well, I thought that too, until I started to play around with the site, and I realized what it did to my head ;-) I could access music from various geographies* and moments in my life. I an hour, I had relived many different parts of my life. This is a completely new experience, in that I can travel back and forth along my lifeline, so I can see where I've been. Which then helps me see where I'm going.

Imeem has been able to create a sweet spot in usability, back catalog, ease to find things, jump around among music genres and periods. And it will need to refine and improve over time, as the voracious appetite of the public will demand more, but overall, it's a great new way to access and enjoy art.

The freedom I experienced is creatively intoxicating. Yet one more piece of evidence that art wants to be free. Needs to be free. And the artists need to be free to keep making their unusual observations. I can feel a whole new way of remuneration bubbling under the surface, can't you?

To top all this, I was wondering how accessible back-catalog TV has become. Youtube et al. do provide short clips of course, and the various online sources I mentioned before do provide some access. But think of any great TV show from the 70s or 80s, and you're out of luck. Not available on cable syndication, unless you get lucky, and not available on DVD, unless you want to buy a whole tv-season worth.

Then I rediscovered AOL video. Not a great experience, in no way comparable to imeem, but there are at least some shows I could revisit one by one, streaming down to my desktop. A clunky and buggy interface, a painful way to search, and no way to skip forward in the stream make this not very future-proof. But perhaps the imeem model can be applied by some smart start-up?

It's only a matter of time before all art will be easily accessible. And I can see books, fine art, music, movies, tv shows all ubiquitously present in our lives. Which will lead to wholly new inner realities, more ways to mash up various art forms. It's not the technology that matters, but how it is an expression of our understanding of the world.

"Are we there yet?", asks Isabella. "Almost, smarty-pants. Just do your homework and get enough sleep." As we find new expressions for our understanding of the world, we will most likely find ourselves very very interconnected, and ready to face any global challenge that may come along. Whether we like it or not ;-)

* Until imeem, I could not access European music from iTunes, being in the US myself. Or music from Australia or South America for that matter, as the iTunes store limits access to geography. This is of course based on the property rights that are divided along those lines, and has nothing to with the art itself.

Back into the fray, or would that be out of the fray ;-), today is turning interesting. Dhammapada XV verse 205 would sum it up, and here are two different translations for your enjoyment:

It took four years and lots of other more urgent home and house projects, but we finally made a real effort to clean up the yard and various sections of our "small private park" ;-)

I pruned the trees (again) and cut some back and we said goodbye to the occasional dead Rhododendrons and some vague weeds that had grown to brush size (oopsie). Our red-rock paths - overgrown in the previous two months with some weird grass-like weed that came out of nowhere - were cleaned up and replenished with new rock.

We attacked our driveway, had it leveled and refreshed with more clean blue-grey rock, and we weeded and mulched all flower beds, both in our back yard, as well as along the front side of the house, after Nishat and Isabella planted close to 300 new flower bulbs: scilla, a dozen hyacinths, some more daffodils and lots of tulips.

Here's some pictures of the flickr set: 

Some pictures from our trip to the US Open, last Labor Day. Perfect weather and a great day of tennis made this quite unforgettable. For more details, browse the flickr set: direct link to the US Open set.

A new documentary opened last Thursday, in a way a follow--up on last year's environmental wake-up call An Inconvenient Truth. According to the New York Times, the 11th Hour is "an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity", and "is such essential viewing."

As hard as this movie may be to watch (again), the alternative of putting our heads in the sand is becoming less and less of an option. And as this issue of abusing our living environment heats up really nicely, it is slowly becoming apparent that we're facing a moral issue, one that will need to be resolved by unity, collaboration, selflessness, sacrifice and consideration of forces that are able to inspire behavioral change.  

The 11th Hour is produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and deals with the state of our environment. It was directed by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners and financed by Adam Lewis, Pierre André Senizergues and Doyle Brunson. Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures. Its world premiere was at the 2007 60th Annual Cannes Film Festival and is to be released on August 17th, 2007.

With the contributions of over fifty of the world's most prominent thinkers and activists, including reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, the film documents the grave problems facing the planet's life systems. Global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction, and depletion of the oceans' habitats are all addressed. The film's premise is that the future of humanity is in jeopardy.

The film offers hope and potential solutions to these problems by calling for restorative action by the reshaping and rethinking of global human activity through technology and social responsibility and conservation. Scientists and environmental advocates such as David Orr, David Suzuki, and Gloria Flora paint a portrait for a radically new and different future in which it is not humanity's intent to dominate the planet's life systems, but to mimic and coexist with them.

Via my Google news feeder, I was alerted to this (thanks Child of Africa!):

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?

One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future. Check it out.

Finally some pictures of our Paris trip, in May of 2007.

Note: these pictures are pulled from my flickr account, where they have titles and descriptions. Here's a direct link to the Paris set.