Author Archives: bluedepth

Dell Exec: The iPad Is Too ‘Shiny’ For Business | Cult of Mac

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Dell Exec: The iPad Is Too ‘Shiny’ For Business | Cult of Mac.

I read this article and found myself agreeing wholeheartedly. Here where I work we’ve got many iOS devices and they are all working quite well. That Dell has the temerity to criticize iOS devices in the enterprise setting really strikes me as sour grapes that their stupid Streak tablet failed to catch hold. Then again, it was trying to use Windows on a tablet, which I can pretty much guarantee is going to flame out before it even gets going.

The article states that the fellow from Dell Australia went so far as to claim that it would put a burden on the IT infrastructure. I call bullshit on that. I’ve been working with a gaggle of iPhones and iPads and frankly, I’ve never had one person come to me seeking support for their iPads, mostly because the devices are built that well. Now perhaps they are all quietly suffering in silence, but I think it has more to do with how well the devices are constructed and how integrated the entire experience is. The hardware and the OS work so tightly with each other that there is little room for bugs to rear their ugly heads.

Gunnar Glasses

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About a year ago I discovered a company that made eyewear expressly for use with computers. Since I spend a majority of my day looking at computers it made a certain amount of sense. The glasses were not terribly expensive and they were polarized, tinted, and many reviews were positive so I went ahead and got a single pair to use. The company’s name is Gunnar, and they make a lot of "precision eyewear’ for gamers. I figured if it was good for gamers doing what they do, then it’d be fine for me.

I’ve been wearing my Gunnar glasses on and off since I bought them and they have served me well. There is a very slight magnification factor which I appreciate, I don’t need glasses right now, but I figure they may help combat eyestrain, and that they do nicely. The yellow tint may be helpful, the polarization definitely helps, but above everything else I have to say that my eyes don’t dry out so fast while I wear these glasses. Often times they’ll get a little too teary and I have to dry them, but it’s far better to have more tears than a deficit.

A few weeks ago, wearing my glasses I discovered that one of the very tiny nuts that hold the frame together had fallen off. I looked all over for a little brass-colored metal nut the size of a quarter of a grain of rice. So I contacted Gunnar customer service and asked them if they sold a repair kit for my glasses. The response I got back was amazing. Not only were they sorry my glasses failed, but they wanted to ship me free of charge a repair kit in the mail. I gave them my address and yesterday they arrived. It was an informal package, pretty much a sticky note with the pieces taped inside, then put in a mailer and sent via the postal service. When I opened up the mailer I could feel the little metal nuts poking through the sticky note paper. I opened everything up and there were 4 sets of plastic washers, metal washers, and the nuts. I sat at my desk with a pair of needlenose pliers and assembled the lost washers and nut on the one frame post that didn’t have any of that and tightened it down firmly like all the other posts.

It’s these little things that I appreciate. Other companies could just have rolled over and said “Buy another pair of glasses” but not this company. Because they are excellent glasses and the company has done right by me I want to recommend Gunnar brand as a good company to deal with and to buy from.

SupportPress In Action

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My first week with SupportPress has been magnificent. It was just in time as well, as we are looking down the barrel of a bunch of employee location movements which always requires lots of tickets and tracking because there are just so many discrete pieces to work with whenever someone moves from their established location to a new one, even if it’s temporary.

It’s also been a series of lessons when it comes to introducing new technology to regular folk. The adoption rate was much higher than I hoped for, as people were actually jockeying for “first ticket” so that felt really good. I’d estimate about fifteen percent of the staff have moved their communications channel to the help desk completely over to the new SupportPress system, while the rest have yet to break their old ways.

The old ways we still will respect. Having this new help desk system has given me moments of decision to make and learn from. Do I force people to only use the SupportPress system? Do I turn the office into a BOFH zone by forcing my clients to fold their entire communications structure into a ticket? Turns out I rejected that choice and elected to endure the steeper path of being, in what really turns out to be a human bridge, for my clients. So when someone drops by, someone calls, someone emails, or someone iChats us up, each time it calls for a ticket. SupportPress in this regard is really great, as we can create tickets on behalf of our clients and fill in all the details as if they penned the tickets themselves.

Another choice was one of statistics and performance. Now that the SupportPress system is providing us with ticket numbers and categories as well as ticket ages, the data is ripe for analysis, categorization, and the temptation to turn all of these raw numbers into performance metrics is very strong. This, as it turns out, is just another BOFH move that I simply cannot take. I refuse to use the raw data to measure any kind of performance metric – there is more to my life, to my assistants life than how many tickets we land or how old the tickets get before we tend to them. Here is a central tenet of mine, this system is meant to help only. It will never be used as a dashboard, it will never be turned into a yoke, or a bridle. The same way I rejected the before-mentioned BOFH move of forcing tickets out of clients, this is somewhat like the other side of the argument. The reasoning behind it is that I want people to use this resource. I want my employees (singular notwithstanding) to not fear that they will be lined up against some artificial measuring stick and slotted. I refuse to have First Trumpet, Second Trumpet, and Screwup Trumpet chairs in my orchestra.

There are other things that have occurred to me but I have rejected out of hand, brought about by SupportPress. I have considered and rejected a “Zero Ticket Friday” policy as fundamentally broken. What is so special about Friday that all tickets should be closed? If I institute that policy and some tickets are stuck in the waiting queue, do I penalize people for it? If you start making accommodations for things like “tickets can languish in the waiting queue forever” then what the hell is the point of the first move on this policy? Eventually it’s the self-defeating policies like these that create the bullshit of “It’s Friday, lets push all the tickets into the waiting queue.” It’s just dumb. So we aren’t doing it.

One thing that has come of SupportPress that we’ve noticed is that some of our clients have reacted less-than-happily about the sheer flow of SupportPress notification emails. The system sends an email when any ticket moves or changes, so clients could have at least two tickets (a start and an end) or up to double-digits especially if there are a lot of phase changes and clarification messages flowing back and forth. I personally don’t have a problem with notification floods as I am rather OCD about managing my email. I’ve written before on how I manage my Inbox – that any email has four potential destinations after they have been read. An incoming message can be stored in Evernote, sent to Toodledo, adapted and stored in SupportPress or outright deleted. Yes, I still use Toodledo, but I use it in conjunction with SupportPress. Some tasks, such as weekly reminders and such really fit better with Toodledo than SupportPress. Nobody really cares that much about getting constant notifications or trackability about daily, weekly, or even monthly tasks that I work on. Much of the regular things I do at work are “Andy does it, so we don’t have to worry about it anymore.” and so everything gets done and people can move on. That’s really helps illustrate the core features of SupportPress. SupportPress is designed to capture the discrete, non-repeating, highly interruptive traffic that any competent Help Desk must endure. There have been a lot of whitepapers written on the economy of interruptions surrounding Help Desk environments so going into it here would just be needlessly duplicative. The only really important thing to state about interruptions is that they are a necessary evil. People have to stop us to get help, it’s the nature of the beast.

SupportPress shines brightest when it comes to creating an abstraction layer between clients and the Help Desk. I like to think of the system providing a certain amount of slip between ticket arrival and first contact. In this way, SupportPress slays the interruption dragon that besets us. Instead of people electing to visit us or call us, which are the most interruptive, they can issue a ticket. We are notified that a ticket has arrived and that fact can be temporarily slipped in time so that we can conclude whatever function we are executing without having to endure the most dreaded thing of all, a context switch. Much like computers, interrupts and context switching is the number one gross consumer of time. These interrupts and context switches also threaten our quality of work. We can switch quickly but regaining traction once we’ve switched back to what we were thinking about before can be sometimes a maddeningly slippery proposition. I can’t count the number of times that interrupts and context switches have caused me lost time when dealing with a columnar data procedure such as checking items off of a long list. Where was I? Am I doing everything right? Why do I have this nagging doubt that I’m missing something? It’s this that I wish people would understand, and why when we ask people to issue their problems via ticket, why it’s so helpful to us.

So then we revisit an earlier point I had made, that I have elected to not force people to create tickets only. While this is true in spirit, I dearly wish people would on-their-own elect to use the less interruptive technologies available to them. The best thing for anyone to do would be to issue a SupportPress ticket outright, but if not that outright, then email or instant message also works well, because those technologies also include a modicum of temporal slipping that we really crave when we are knee-deep in some elaborate procedure. So while I refuse to force people to do a certain thing, I respectfully request that they do what they’ll do a certain way. Then it comes to how best to encourage people do change their course? First you have to let them know what it is that you’d like them to do, in a way, this blog entry may help with that as I suspect some of my coworkers read my blog and maybe they’ll notice the hint. One thing that can be done is rewarding people for using the ticket system by prioritizing those people who issued tickets with more force than we would otherwise pursue an incoming interrupt and context switch. It isn’t outright sabotage, but it does show that there is a preference and it’s in everyones best interest to respect us with the grace of a non-interrupt, and hence, non-context switching request. We’re driven to help and that is our passion and our purpose, but there is a best way to do it and for me at least, SupportPress is it.

So how much did it take for implementing this solution? We already have an iPage hosting account, wmichalumni.com, and frankly any host worth their salt would be just as good. I just like iPage because they are professional, no-nonsense, and cost-efficient. Any host can (and should) allow you to set up a free copy of WordPress.org. WordPress.org is an open source and free bit of software that creates a WordPress.com blog on a host that either you own or rent. The infrastructure of WordPress is actually perfect for what we are trying to do. The fact that it’s free is just a cherry on top. Installation of WordPress.org, at least on iPage is remarkably simple. It takes about 5 clicks and some little typing or usernames and passwords and preferences and the host creates a perfectly functioning WordPress.org instance for you. The theme, which is what SupportPress really is comes as a ZIP file for $100. Once you buy it, and then upload the zip file to your new WordPress.org site, everything else is pretty much a freefall into implementation. Falling down a flight of stairs is more complicated than installing SupportPress. Once the system is going, creating users is a snap, then introducing them is equally as easy, and before you know it, you’re up and running and your total outlay for the project was $100 for the theme and whatever you are paying your host.

So, then that begs the question of why we don’t self-host. I chose to not self-host because there is a field of tar which would ruin usability. iPage has unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and since we are already paying for it to do other things, it’s arguably ‘free’ to do our SupportPress infrastructure. I don’t have to endure needless bureaucracy and it’s available anywhere and anytime without me having to muck about with VPN technology or anything else. It’s not that what I am avoiding is that onerous, but this way is far far simpler and is much more satisfying to me in that the path that I took got it done. From zero to implementation with nobody to argue with, nobody to ask, nobody to cajole, and nobody peeking over my shoulder.

I think that any Help Desk, especially one in academia, but really this extends to any other industry as well could really benefit from SupportPress. I like to reward products that please me and do their jobs well. When I find a product, like SupportPress, I flog it for all it’s worth. My only regret with SupportPress is that I didn’t have this technology 10 years ago. I am blessed to have it now and I plan on continuing to use it and I plan on taking it with me wherever I roam in the future. If anyone has any questions about anything I’ve written here, you know where to get ahold of me. I welcome questions on this, SupportPress is that good.

Sticker Shock

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Today on lunch I decided on a whim to visit Sawall’s Health Food Store on Oakland Drive in Kalamazoo. This is a specialty store catering to the rich who want food that is alternatively sourced. That they cater to the rich is something I knew when I walked in there, expecting a little elevation in prices. But what I found really surprised me. I was looking at local distributors for the Medjool Dates that I so love and the Turkish Figs that I really enjoy as well. I didn’t really expect any local distributors to carry either so when I saw the Dates in both prepack and free-pick bins I smiled at finding another local distributor. Then I looked at the prices.

Sam’s Club has Bard Valley Medjool Dates on sale for $7.48 for a two-pound plastic bin. That’s $3.74 a pound. Nuts.com has Medjool Dates for sale at $7.49 a pound and Sawall’s sells Bard Valley Medjool Dates for $9.95 a pound! Obviously someone is getting the short end of the stick! Sams Club has probably leveraged a volume discount from the Bard Valley Dates grower, that’s the only bit that makes sense. So when Sams stops carrying my beloved Dates, and I bet they will as it’s listed as a “Seasonal Item” then I’ll be down to Nuts.com or Sawall’s. These prices are not prohibitive, but they are rather surprising and just seeing how the balance tips when you compare these local distributors and online distributors versus Sams Club really is a shock. $4 versus $8 or $10. If I didn’t know any better I’d say that Sams has the same screws on the date farmers that they have on the Pickle manufacturers, selling product for pennies on the dollar, at least when it comes to pickles.

As for the Turkish Figs? Nothing. At least locally. So Nuts.com will always be my vendor of choice at this point to obtain the figs that I really enjoy eating. It’s only prohibitive that I am not only paying $6/pound for the figs but also a UPS shipping charge of a few dollars more, effectively pushing my per-pound price of figs to about $10/pound. It’s not the end of the world, but it does mean I have to be careful and buy just the right amount so I can eat through them fast enough and not have to worry about spoilage, even in the fridge. I don’t really know how long Medjool Dates and Turkish Figs last in the fridge but I really don’t want to try my luck with such expensive treats.

At least in a pinch, if I really have to have them, at least there is Sawall’s, but the price… wow. It’s all a-blinky.

Publicize!

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WordPress just released the ability for me to publicize my blog posts on Tumblr, so this post should end up being linked to Twitter, Facebook, and now Tumblr.

As I do almost all of my blogging on WordPress, this is a good thing. I notice that the different services shine all a little differently. I don’t get any replies on Twitter about my posts, Facebook may earn a comment or a Like, and since I manually haul out to G+, that is its own ball of wax.

Speaking of G+, one thing I have noticed is that people get very bent out of shape when I post a password protected WordPress post to that service, way more than any other service by far. I think it’s because people have taken the art of engagement very seriously over in G+, since it’s not really going to unseat Facebook when it comes to uniq’s. People just don’t seem to understand why, at least on G+, what hides behind those protected posts. I protect them because I have to prevent a certain audience from gaining access to what I write in those posts. There are some people I just can’t trust with ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ so I have to make the posts protected after a fashion. It’s something I never expected that I would have to blog about, but if I do, then the people who throw fits hopefully will read it and understand that their concern is misplaced. The protected posts really aren’t that interesting for regular folken, they are written for a different audience. Close friends and family pretty much, so not being able to see the protected posts really shouldn’t upset you – you aren’t missing anything.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of this whole sharing to Tumblr thing. Frankly my tumblr doesn’t get much traffic or followers. We’ll see.

And for those who continue to read the tripe that I write, I thank you. I promise poor quality and rambling on in the future. Gotta keep up my standards. 🙂

Sherlock

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We sat down to eat dinner and enjoy some television. Our DVR had recorded the entire second season of Sherlock. When I say “second season” I mean three shows, each one exactly an hour and a half long. They are on WGVU’s PBS Station and they are underwritten, so there are no commercials.

These shows are superlative. They are so far beyond the lame floppy gasping wretches of American television programming that there really is no use even starting to compare. The first season takes your breath away and the second season is equally amazing. This show is beyond a pleasure.

If you get PBS and can find this show replaying, you really owe it to yourself to watch it. If you have Netflix then by all means order up the first season, pour something delightful to drink and enjoy every moment.

Throw It Back

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I used to fret and worry about my relationship with alcohol. What did it mean? Is the drinking itself bad or is it the reason behind the drinking the really bad part? Maybe it was a combination of both. Next month I’ll turn 37 years old and quickly plowing myself into my 40’s. So what preciousness is to save that I’m holding onto?

Americans have a really funny way of dealing with alcohol. We used to love it, then we hated it, then we prohibited it completely and all the while our relationship and use of the substance has not changed. I notice this a lot when I go to purchase alcohol from shops, especially here in Michigan. People are so, I suppose the emotion they must feel is embarrassment, because the shops all reflexively wrap bottles of alcohol in brown paper wrappers. Like it’s shameful or embarrassing to be seen in polite society with a bottle of Jack Daniels, Jamesons, or Captain Morgan. Wine never really got the sharp end of the stick, and neither really did beer. Both of those spirits are too weak to be of mention. You’ll go to the bathroom a lot before you’ll feel much in the way of an effect from those particular drinks. It’s the harder liquors that surprise me. First off, Michigan rigidly controls the price of spirits right down to what retailers are allowed to sell the spirits for. It doesn’t matter who sells what, they all get their prices out of this dog-eared pale-blue booklet that the state hands them. I sometimes wonder why the state of Michigan thinks it’s the sole arbiter of the price and availability of spirits in their state borders? As if they could control their citizenry with laws. Hah. But there it is, artificial price fixing for no good reason. A 750ml bottle of Jameson’s Whiskey is $25 in Michigan and $17 in Illinois. The only reason I’d buy liquor in Michigan is out of laziness.

And as it turns out, my favorite liquors are Jamesons, what a shocker, and as funny as it seems, the low-brow rums, Bacardi’s Oakheart and Newfoundland’s Screech. I don’t really care for the specialty long-aged rums and apparently I prefer just the english-speaking rums of the world, as the rest aren’t very much to my liking. But really where it’s at is my relationship to a bottle of Jamesons.

What is my relationship to alcohol? I drink liberally and I become intoxicated and I enjoy myself. I do not make a mess of myself by drinking beyond my personal limit, nor do I operate any machinery while under the influence. That last bit is a lie, of course, as machinery includes my iPhone and my computer, so a few bouts of drunk twittering won’t send me to jail. I’ve never operated a motor vehicle, and almost always I’m the designated driver because, well, lets face it, I have control and money issues. So back to drinking. It’s a joy. It brings warmth and happiness into my life. Not that my life was bereft of warmth and happiness before, but while intoxicated it makes many things feel better. Many things are easier to cope with. I wear my emotions on my sleeve and I share my feelings, some would say, too readily. There was a humorous picture of a boy stating what I often times find myself thinking, especially sober, and that is “We’re all thinking it, I just said it.” So we get down to the reasons why I drink.

I like to drink because it feels good. I like to drink because it tastes good. Wine is principally what I’m getting at, as there is a universe of delicious flavors in wine and more people should go exploring to see what they like. Beer? When I was a kid and very sensitive to bitters, beer was awful. As I age however, beer has become like water. It’s a drink with food, it makes you belch, and makes you have to see a man about a horse quite often. In many ways, beer and wine are somewhat okay ways to replace water, especially if you question the quality of water. I personally have never felt that the water where I live is good for me. Now, before people get really worked up, the gentle reader should be aware that I was raised on the worlds best water. The city supply of Syracuse, New York. That water is drawn from Skaneateles Lake and is some of the best tasting water on the planet. I am sorry that more people don’t understand just how wonderful it is to walk up to the tap in your house, turn it on and be able to drink what comes out without even a single iota of worry, and enjoying the taste, which is the way water should taste. It should not taste like a chlorinated fish bowl. So the water is a big reason for the more simpler spirits. But that doesn’t touch on the stronger ones. Here again I like the taste, or perhaps, in the case of Jamesons, I’m genetically predisposed to enjoy the taste, I do sometimes wonder about that. I also enjoy the feeling it gives me, and then, and what everyone really wants to know, is the social aspects to my alcoholism.

I drink because Hell is other people. This is very general and expansive and it’s not really meant to hurt others feelings, but lets face it, unless I’m in love with you or we are exceptionally close, Sartre’s statement about Hell being other people eventually finds it’s mark. I can endure a lot of things from people, especially when I have no other choice. I can be whatever I need to be to endure the situation. That’s the blessing that comes with a monumentally strong sense of self-monitoring. In work meetings I can be calm and reserved and measured, that sort of thing. Generally however I can’t stand humanity. In all the ways we are unique and special and loving, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s the baser things that bother me, the odd behaviors, the many varied ways we abuse each other and in many ways, so effortlessly and lets face it, callously. It can range from being a real prat to being incidentally and nebulously a horrible human being. So what comes of all these unpleasant feelings? Being exposed to people who chew too loudly, snort, wheeze, moan, whine, or in one way or another do whatever they can to be as awful to others as they can, where is there to go? Where can anyone go if they are trapped in that situation? I am forever thankful for alcohol. “Please pass the wine” is a far more pleasant thing to say than dragging out (or dragging up) the varied unpleasantnesses that surround some social situations. I find that it’s almost always more preferable to prepend potentially unpleasant social interactions with a precautionary buffer of alcohol in my system. If I am nursing a beer or a glass of wine, of throwing back shots of Jamesons, I can eventually reach a place where the things that upset me no longer really bother me, and in a way, alcohol makes everything better. So yes, I drink, at least as a partial reason, to cope with the people in my life. I am not going to point fingers at who makes me drink, that would just be courting disaster, but in a general sense, Hell is other people.

So to get back to the beginning, is it a problem? Should I be concerned? The answer is, I don’t give a damn. I’m not going to fret over what drinking means to me, I’m just going to enjoy my life and all the things in it and if I spend my time in a beer bottle or a bottle of Jamesons, then that’s where I want to be. For pleasure, for joy, for happiness, and to escape Hell, at least for a short while. Anything can be endured as long as there is a break to it, a stop, a discontinuity to horribleness. In many ways, alcohol is a blessing to endurance.

SupportPress

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I just rolled SupportPress out to the rank and file at work. Or at least I thought I did. My day was going so well, so smoothly. I got my introduction email with graphics sent out (or so I thought) and I got all the invites shipped out as well. Everything was going just peachy – until I looked at the sent mail and noticed that when I sent the message by copying all the discrete addresses that only the first address took. So I didn’t send out any message at all!

To really get a grasp on how irritating this was, I couldn’t send a message to the LDAP alias that expands out to all the people I work with, the address is dar-staff@wmich.edu. The SMTP server at WMU was rejecting it out of hand. Turns out I figured out why – it was the screenshot graphics. That system they have rejects mail with pictures. So I had no choice but to copy down all the addresses from our Wiki and do it manually. Turns out when you copy that kind of information into Sparrow, it only looks at the first address and ignores everything else. It was my thinking that it would see the commas and figure out I was copying in 48 addresses. No, just one really long address.

When I noticed this, all I had was my iPhone and I was having lunch with Scott. I was cursing Webmail Plus and the LDAP directory for placing artificial limits on email and so I figured I could get the list of addresses and paste them into my iPhone and use the Mail app in my iPhone to do the heavy lifting. Turns out it suffered the same mental block, treating the addresses I pasted in as one giant address. So after lunch was over I was in my car trying to tap and copy one address at a time in. This is another bad idea because if you tap and don’t hold the iPhone thinks you want to email to just that one person and so dumps the draft you were working on and starts a new draft with an empty email. The forwarded bit with all the text and graphics? Lost. Three times lost. I was successful in the end, shipping my intro email out to all my coworkers despite all the technology surrounding me meant to make things easier.

Alls well that ends well, so we’re up online with SupportPress and I have to say that I am very happily surprised with what I see. Clients see a very simple version of the site and it’s compatible with every browser, every computer, including iPhone and iPad to boot! Now that I’ve let the genie out of the bottle it will be very interesting to see how it is received. There has been lots to say on that topic before, and in another post, a more private one, I’ll go further into the nitty gritty details.

So despite technological hurdles, I was able to get my automated help desk system off the ground and show it off to people. Monday is going to be a rip-roaring day, indeed!

The Avengers in IMAX 3D

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We just returned from watching The Avengers in IMAX 3D at Celebration Cinemas in Portage. The movie was still as top notch as the last two times we’ve watched it but this was mostly a back and forth for me because classically speaking, IMAX sets off my acrophobia.

My experience with IMAX is set up around the design that many of the early cinemas had, which placed the audience on a kind of escarpment at a sharp angle to the movie screen. Each row of seats top was at the bottom of the next row and vice-versa to the other row. This leads to a very steep sense to “stadium seating” and so became synonymous with the IMAX experience. I was sure the theater that they built would throw off my acrophobia and prevent me from watching the movie.

Turns out, when they built the theater in Portage, they elected to go with a more conservative, relaxed, laid out design where the rows are arranged not very much differently than I am used to with how the seats are arranged at the Rave downtown. Stadium style seats, yes, but not with a pitch so sharp. The pitch is more like a amphitheater than some sort of “trying to screw you” design that IMAX prided it’s earlier self on rendering. Perhaps it’s because this theater had to cope with 3D technology when it comes to playback that lead to the seats being oriented that way. For that I am grateful. The screen is imposing and beautiful and vast, but it isn’t enough to immediately cause me to flee in acrophobic terror.

That all being said, and the presentation was well worth the high cost, even still, there was one problem. The 3D was applied post-processing, essentially painted onto a 2D movie. Without natural 3D capture several scenes that I was presented with caused my head to hurt, my eyes to ache and my tear ducts to water. About halfway through the movie my eyes were in full rebellion, watering like crazy. I would have preferred the movie in 2D and frankly, I’m growing very tired of this 3D whizbang. Perhaps it shows off my age, perhaps my eyes aren’t as young and spry as they used to be, but I had a very hard time processing focus while watching that movie. I had to really concentrate to bring some scenes into focus when watching a movie shouldn’t require the audience to do anything actively. Just sit back and watch.

All in all, I can’t see going back to the IMAX theater for many movies, maybe only for very special ones. The Avengers is a special movie, perhaps The Hobbit, Dark Knight Rising, and Spiderman may be worth it. But I don’t know if my eyes will stop watering and if I’ll have a booming headache tomorrow after my system starts to return to normal after coping with what I was exposed to at IMAX.

It may be that IMAX is a young mans thing, and I’m fine with that. After what I saw and what I felt, I’m amazed that more people weren’t grabbing their heads and wiping their eyes right along with me.

Buddha's Fingerprints

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I was midway through “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book” by Daniel Ingram and decided that I really couldn’t finish reading that book. It wasn’t because the author or what he wrote was difficult to understand or really any concrete reason honestly, however as I was reading there was a mounting feeling that continuing to read the text would somehow damage my recent spiritual explorations. This isn’t the first book that I’ve cracked open on the subject of Buddhism, and it isn’t the last book that I have either slogged through out of some sense that if I start something I really ought to finish it or in the rarest cases, stop reading half-way through.

I’ve also run my toes through other books, most notably some core Zen books that I found free online. I didn’t really get along with Zen either as I didn’t have the chops for it. As I read along with the Zen teachings I discovered that a large part of the foundation of Zen is wound up with cults of personality and pretty hardcore physical abuse. Teachers are pseudo-deities and they are fond of beating their students to a pulp. Uh, no thanks.

So it brought me back to this book by Mr. Ingram. The writing style of the book was very conversational, very colloquial, and around page 140 or so it became exceptionally particular and rather obnoxiously dismissive. What struck me in the earlier chapters was this feeling of threat from this particular book. Not the general threat in the sense that the words were in themselves threatening, but threatening to my own spiritual development. I started to feel a kind of chafing as I was reading about how there were all these steps, and these stages and how everything was so meticulously laid out. It started to upset me, in a very deeply spiritual sense. That any random persons spiritual journey can be laid out with such rigor, such structure really repels me. That people are just machines playing back music and that the music never ever changes from person to person. I suppose I was chafing against dogma, and that dogma was of the core teachings of Buddhism which I don’t necessarily ascribe to. I’m all for the cessation of suffering and a lot of what the Buddha had to teach makes sense, but it’s one thing to see the morality as waymarkers versus seeing the morality as a pair of manacles tied to a chain and led through a machine.

It comes down to reading a buddhism book and not believing in buddhism. I suppose any book and faith could switch places. I have no interest in the Koran because I have no interest in Islam. I have no interest in the Torah because I have no interest in Judaism. And really, why exclude the 800 pound gorilla in the corner? I have no interest in the Bible because I have no interest in Christianity. The big three are stultifying. So rigid, so structured, so planned out. There is no soul in these faiths. Nothing to explore, nothing to discover. Everything is safe, paved, prepared and many of them have little rest areas in which you can get off the road and have a snack. Even as it appears Buddhism is very much like this as it turns out. Everyone reads the texts and then goes about mindlessly following because, really, what else is there? So you learn all these new words and vocabulary and you notice names that ring dim bells in the other texts you have read and over time you come to the stark realization that the author is beating around the bush and in a way, brought on a crisis of faith in a religion that I don’t believe in. For Buddhists it’s all about being and not-being, ultimately the realization of Nirvana by becoming enlightened. It’s all very important sounding but my problem is I know too much about the structure of the Universe. I have more than a passing idea about QM, Brane Theory, M-theory, String Theory, GUT, TOE, the list goes on and on. Ontology and Cosmology and, well, lets face it, I’m too smart for my own good. I’ve dabbled too much. I’ve in a way, seen too much and imagined too much. When I read about the cessation of dualities I can’t help but think of Bohm’s Implicate Order, and when I think of that I think about the potential of living in a holographic universe, which then brings up threads connected to the Everett Interpretation for QM, that each observation causes a split so that every potential possibility is realized. The raging undercurrent of all of it is, that as I read about the experiences this man, Mr. Ingram has with meditation I think about his brain. About how it processes information, so up along with this goes what I know of behaviorism, Jungian analysis, and the real thorn-patch of quantum neurodynamics. So I see all these learned sages going on and on about attaining this and that and getting teachers to teach you this and that and I find myself wondering "Don’t these people know that what they are seeking is actually extending their consciousness into the quantum foam that exists between their synaptic clefts?" And then I imagine David Bohm looking all sternly at me and giving me a ‘tsk tsk tsk’ gesture. If it wasn’t for anything else, I have Tielhard de Chardin on my shoulder like a little angel whispering in my ears about the noosphere. Perhaps Eckhard Tolle is a little devil on the other side, I haven’t made up my mind. But this is what gets me. How can anyone know what another persons spiritual path is going to be? Just because 2500 years of people all referring to each other and repeating each other lends some small credence that there is something worth exploring, there is a part of me that blanches when told that this is how it really is and that in a way I could obtain a map of what is to come and follow it.

I suppose in this sense, following a map is what dogma is all about. If you reject the map, or you don’t follow it, then you should feel bad or foolish because you aren’t doing it right. You aren’t doing it the way 2500 years of much wiser people have done it in the past. And how dare anyone buck a 2500 year tradition? Uh, well, hate to break it to you, but I’m kind of a pain in the ass if you haven’t noticed yet. I’ll ignore 2500 years of learned thinking if it means I get to explore on my own.

And so we get back to faith in a central pillar of spirituality. I knew when I lost my faith in Christianity, when I was 8 in the library of my grandmothers Presbyterian church, that my faith, that my entire spirituality would have to be formed not from things I could find to follow but made up of the experiences of my life. That the only really honest faith, the only true spiritual path I could ever know and feel any amount of strength in would have to spring up from deep within myself. I can’t hear God from without, I have to hear him (or more entertainingly, her) from within. And when I mean God, I don’t mean some objective father(mother) figure in the sky, somehow judging me as I lead my life, but really God as a handle for really what can only be regarded as my own soul. In that way I am a proud secular humanist. Secular in that I reject all faiths, humanist in that the only faith left is whatever I find when I turn my sentience inward. So in a way, coming back to this book, I had to stop reading it because it was pushing me too hard, offering a map, dogma, too strongly.

So I have questions, and the answers I seek seem at least on first glance to shimmer on the horizon like a mirage in front of the Buddhism banner, but then as I approach the mirage falls apart and I find myself wandering around again. Funny how much real human spirituality includes the notion of wandering around in a desert for a very long time. For that we can blame Moses, who apparently needed a map! Getting back to it, the best way for anyone to find, well, actually, I haven’t the foggiest idea what they should do. I know what I should do, and for me, more specifically and clearly, it’s exploration that has to continue forward without structure, without a map, without dogma. So I can’t read that book any longer.

Does that mean I will stop meditation? Absolutely not. There are answers in meditation, I just know it. I can feel it. But like everything in life, nothing comes free and easy. This pursuit will take me probably the rest of my life, but in the end I can sit back and laugh and notice that it was right all along because it was mine. True, it’s a frankensteins monster made up of things I’ve picked up from wiser men than I, but at least it’s my monster. This monster not only sings “Putting on the Ritz” very well, but also dances. I couldn’t very well leave out that reference, now could I?

This also pretty much concludes any other readings or pursuit in the direction of the banner of Buddhism for me. It’s not for me. While I respect Buddhists more than the other faiths, they all are hamstrung in the very same way. Too much structure, too much plan, too much dogma. In a way, when I ask myself “Am I doing it right?” the only honest answer is “Absolutely, because it can’t be any other way.” Now when I say I won’t follow the Buddha it doesn’t mean I won’t raid his tent for neat ideas and shiny bits. I rifled through Jesus Christ’s footlocker, I have no compunction with dashing the Buddhas tent and sorting out his goodies. It’s just, I’m drawing my own map, and I’m drawing it as I walk along, french curves, spirals and mad meandering squiggles all.

Faith is like a fingerprint. No two are alike. Dogma is meaningless because of this one central idea. How can you share what can’t be standardized? What you need is 30 kiloqualms over there. What is a kiloqualm? That’s a silly question! It’s obvious! (to me) 😉