What if we start thinking of our creative process as a spiritual practice?
Journal
Bird-Brained
Relocating to Florida has introduced me to a wide variety of new sights and sounds. This area is rich with diverse animals and birds from all over the place.
Recently I discovered an app from Cornell called “Merlin Bird ID”, that allows you to record bird calls and helps you identify what you are hearing. You can also upload an image of the bird you just captured to identify as well.
I’ve captured 15 species so far including osprey, burrowing owls, great horned owls, egrets, black-crowned night herons, ibis and more.
Each bird listed in the app will give you a synopsis of the species that includes other user’s audio recordings. I like to play them at full blast for the birds around me by way of communicating. It’s probably gibberish to them, but may be enough to draw them closer just out of their curiosity. I need some binoculars!
Cape Coral is home to a whole parliament of burrowing owls and the community goes out of their way to protect and care for them by placing signs and even wood perches for the owls next to their hollowed out homes in the ground. Eventually, I’ll convince T to do the same here at the house. That way I can set up a remote, wireless trail cam to view them any time and not disturb the owls.
Polaris Dawn
After a two hour delay, the Space-X Falcon launched at 5:23am from Kennedy Space Center carrying four civilian crew members into the highest orbit ever. There, they will perform some of the longest EVA tests. Again, as civilians- impressive.
With my sleep now ruined, I’ll publish this and try to grab a little more.
3,287
That’s how many pages I need to print from 24 years worth of writing on this website. Printing them from the library and over time may be my best bet I think. Let them worry about the paper and ink costs.
Season Finale- Radio Denbow
You can catch up on previous episodes on the Podcast page.
Neuroplasticity
What am I doing? Why did I start an online course when my brain is already overwhelmed with these other self-inflicted endeavors?
Fortunately our brains have the ability to change, grow and reorganize its neuron pathways to make new connections and remap from how it previously functioned.
Does this explain why my head hurts right now?
Intro To Digital Humanities
Did I just enroll into a distance-learning course from Harvard at the last moment? Verification complete- the course starts today, September 5th.
Welcome!
Introduction to Digital Humanities will orient and train you in a wide variety of digital tools and techniques that allow humanists and social scientists to ask new research and teaching questions and make new claims using data.
The course will teach you:
- What the term “digital humanities” means in different disciplines.
- How common digital tools work and examples of projects using them.
- How various file types can be used to create, gather, and organize data.
- How to use command-line functions to analyze text.
- How to use free tools to create visual text analysis.
I did the same thing nine years ago when enrolling for courses at Stanford. What have I done? What I always do: I am doing it because it stimulates my brain and I enjoy it.
A Look Back
Once again, I find myself working behind the scenes of this website. This time, I am organizing the backend, the stuff that no one else sees. I am also wrapping up the migration of writings from my previous sites into here for posterity. Such as it is.
It’s been fun to look back and see the previous designs of this site in all of its iterations. I’ve learned a lot, experimented quite a bit, and still have a ways to go. Nowadays, I care more about substance than style and will make an effort to keep the experiments to a minimum. Until then, here are a few screenshots of this site through the years. I wish I could have done the same during the early years.
Back In Time
With the help of the Internet Archives and their Wayback Machine, I am slowly cutting/pasting/posting some of this website’s missing articles that somehow did not migrate and log.
The Machine only takes snapshots and not the full site, so I’m positive there are a lot of posts missing and maybe gone forever.
I was missing four years from 2013-2017 and I have regained a lot since my last post on this. I’ll finish porting over the rest tomorrow. For now, I am hopeful and in debt to the Internet Archive organization. Now my website’s Archive Page has listings for the previous twenty four consecutive years.
BLAugust Wrap-up
Thirty one days ago I decided to write a post to this website every day in August, hence- BLAugust. But didn’t you post only photos or quotes on some of those days, Chris? Yes, because this site has my name on it and I was busy re-decorating a master bedroom and bathroom.
The WayBack Machine
Have you heard about the Internet Archive? I have but somehow always forget that it is available. It is a library of books, software, music, websites and more. A perfect blend of old and new knowledge. This is truly a national treasure.
Did I mention websites? It’s true- the WayBack Machine deploys spiders across the world wide web to take snapshots of websites. They send them out everywhere and my old websites were caught at least two times a month. This is how I discovered a problem with my own personal archives.
There are missing records.
I verified this when I searched the Archives Page on my own site. From September 2013 until November 2017, FOUR YEARS of my writing cannot be found.
I did a cursory search on one of my hard drives just for the year 2015 that turned up 37,000 results, none of them were my writings. I’ll need to check the rest but for now I am bummed. No idea what happened but hope I can find them, post them, back them up online and in print.