jonvon.net Mostly a personal blog, with some content regarding Lotus Domino http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/ en-us Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:05:57 -0400 darn good salad Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:05:57 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/darn-good-salad.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/darn-good-salad.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/darn-good-salad.htm
i have a friend who, when reading some of my recipes (like the magic cereal post and some other things i haven't published here), said, "it's like you are trying to make human rocket fuel".

yeah, actually, that's totally it. plant based, human rocket fuel. my philosophy has sort of evolved over the past couple of years into: every meal can be a healing, cleansing, powerfully nutritive event that literally rebuilds you while simultaneously protecting you from disease and lowering stress.

did you know food could do that?

i had a particularly productive day in the kitchen today, and i wanted to write down what i did so that i can replicate it later.

dressing (measurements are approximations, just do what makes sense to you...)

BASE (these are my usual suspects when it comes to dressing)
1/2 cup olive oil (first cold press organic - the "cold press" part is very important nutritionally)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
juice of 2 or 3 lemons
1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar
1/2 tablespoon basil
1/2 tablespoon thyme
1/2 tablespoon rosemary

SALTY STUFF
5 or 6 cloves of garlic, minced
1/4 onion, sliced thin
4 shiitake mushrooms, stemmed, minced
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds
2 pinches or so of Celtic sea salt
2 tablespoons of tamari

put the onions and garlic into a pan with olive oil and let them simmer for 10 minutes. the heat is very low, just about where it would be if you were simmering some soup. it's setting "2" on my stove.

add the shiitake mushrooms, pumpkin seeds, tamari and Celtic sea salt. keep the heat low and let sit for another ten minutes or so.

SWEET STUFF
handful of blueberries
1/2 orange

put the base, the salty stuff, and the sweet stuff together in a food processor. mix it up with the big blade for a good long time, pulsing here and there and pushing the seeds and stuff back down the sides with a rubber spatula. you should end up with a consistency that is something like thousand island dressing. it will have a slightly purple color because of the blueberries.

put the dressing in the fridge, let it mellow for a bit.

topping (a nice vegan approximation to Parmesan cheese)

salba seeds (also called chia seeds)
unhulled sesame seeds
nutritional yeast

put the salba seeds in a coffee grinder to about the halfway point - 2 tablespoons maybe? grind them into fluffy powder. put in a bowl.

same thing with the unhulled sesame seeds.

now mix in some nutritional yeast, so that it's about half salba/sesame and half nutritional yeast. take a whisk or a fork and mix it up until it is well blended.

put this stuff in a jar and set aside.

note: you will want to store it in a dark place when you aren't using it. sunlight destroys the B vitamins in the nutritional yeast. in fact when you buy nutritional yeast it should be in a bottle that is completely opaque. i never buy it from a bulk bin for that reason.

the salad

ok here is what i used today and it was amazing:

1/2 cup fresh dandelion greens, minced
1/2 cup fresh spinach, minced
1/4 cup hemp seeds
2 big carrots peeled and grated (the food processor is my friend)
1/4 cup salba seeds
1 cup mixed greens (i buy these prepackaged/organic)
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
1.5 oranges (you used half an orange in the dressing)
1/2 cup strawberries
1/4 cup tamari roasted almonds (yes the raw ones are better for you but i can't resist the taste of these)

and that's it!

spoon yourself out some salad. put a few big dollops of the dressing on top. sprinkle a generous amount of the faux Parmesan topping on top of the dressing. mix it up and eat... omg so good.

it's probably impossible to completely understand what this combination of ingredients can do for us, but here is a breakdown of a few things just to give you an idea as to why this salad is, to my mind, a great example of plant based "human rocket fuel". :-)

greens are "super foods" unto themselves. they are packed with calcium and iron and protein (spinach is ~40% protein in easily digestible amino acid form!) and vitamins and fiber. i don't eat nearly enough greens. we should all be eating a big serving of greens in some form or another every single day. chimps (our closest genetic relative) eat 50% greens.

hemp seeds - packed with protein, they have all of the essential amino acids. they are also high in omega 3 and 6 fats. hemp seeds are considered a super food.

salba/chia - these tiny unassuming seeds have omega 3's and 6's in the 4-1 ratio needed for human health. they are also considered a super food. they also have quite a bit of protein.

blueberries and carrots - lots of cancer fighting antioxidants.

nutritional yeast - again, another super food, contains all the essential amino acids (proteins our bodies can't make) along with a plethora of B vitamins. there are so many B vitamins in nutritional yeast, if you eat enough of it, your pee will turn "vitamin yellow". this is not an active yeast; i've never had a problem digesting it.

the pumpkin seeds, dandelion greens and spinach are high in iron. the citric acid in the lemon and oranges facilitates absorption of the iron. great for the sisters around that time of the month. :-) also great if you run a lot and therefore spend a lot of time crushing red blood cells with your feet.

the unhulled sesame seeds are high in calcium.

the topping is a powerful mix of perfectly balanced omega 3/6 fats, B vitamins, proteins, and calcium! it's great on soups, salads, or anywhere you would use Parmesan. i put it on top of peanut butter sometimes if i make some peanut butter toast and it's great!

bon appetit! :-) ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/darn-good-salad.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/darn-good-salad.htm?opendocument&comments Lotus Notes: The Long Goodbye Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:33:00 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm
Mom told me that she didn't think it was a good idea. She told me to stay put where I was. It would be better that way, she said.

This was, for me, a signal that hit me in a kind of underground way. I heard it loud and clear in the emotional spectrum, or else I would not have remembered it after all these years. But, it was a signal I didn't accept, somehow, intellectually, or maybe consciously, is a better way to say it. My own mother didn't want me around. I couldn't, wouldn't, hear her. We moved to Tampa.

I still live there. My daughter is nine. I don't talk to Mom anymore.

There were Christmases at her house that I, and my family, were not invited to. It should have been understood by me, I mean, clearly, but I didn't get it for a long time. I get it now. So, we don't talk. It's more complicated than that. A lot of stuff going on under the hood. But when it comes down to it, my old family life is long gone and over with.

They say if you don't understand the story you are in, the story will live itself through you. If you do understand your story, then you can do something about it. You become the lucid dreamer. You can change the course of your dream.

Due to divorce and remarriage, Mom became a sort of Medea figure.

In the ancient stories, Medea is abandoned by her husband, Jason. She takes revenge on him by, among other things, killing the two sons they had together. In some sense this same energy plays itself out in my family. Like I said before, it's more complicated than that. But when I think about what has happened to us over the years through the lens of this story, it becomes apparent to me that I can stop "killing myself" trying to be my mother's son. I'm not sure why, but that life is gone.

Mom doesn't know the story she is living out. And she doesn't want to learn anything from me. She never has. And I'm OK with that, now. I've gotten a little smarter emotionally, and I've healed some, and become stronger. I've got to live my own life.

What the heck does this have to do with Lotus Notes? Why bring my personal history into what is going on in the community now?

Because what is happening is, for me, and for a lot of other people, as personal in many ways as a family crisis. What is happening now is going to change what a lot of us do for a living, it is going to change who we hang around with, what conferences we attend, what communities we are involved in, and it will change what we do every day. For some people this isn't that big a deal. For some of us, it matters a lot.

So what is the story that we are living inside of?

The story is that many years ago, IBM abandoned Lotus Notes as an application development platform. It took a long time, but the competition finally figured out how to capitalize on this fact. And now, from what I can tell, Lotus Notes is absolutely being demolished in the enterprise.

Going back a little, in 2002 Al Zollar announced the "two lane highway". J2EE was going to be the way forward.

This was a huge signal to the community that Lotus Notes as an application development platform was dead in the water. But the notion of the demise of Notes was derided and laughed at by the community. We fought both IBM and the public perception that "Notes is dead". Folks within IBM Lotus fought that perception too, and they continue to fight it. But the ground has been shifting underneath all of our feet for a long time.

Like the signal I received in my personal life ten years ago, the underlying message from the guy in charge of IBM Lotus was as plain as day. It was obvious to the analysts, and to the competition, but it wasn't obvious to the faithful. We couldn't hear it. We wouldn't hear it. Why would they throw Notes away? Why would they throw away the incredible utility of the NSF?

For several years it seemed that IBM hadn't, after all, thrown anything away. Clearly, strong steps forward were made. Features and performance improved in versions 6 and 7. A modern look and feel and a whole new set of capabilities surfaced in version 8. But something else has been going on at the same time. Along came Connections - based entirely on Websphere and Java. The Sametime software has become, more and more, based on Java and Websphere as well. And Quickr, again based on J2EE, is replacing NSF-based Quickplace. The NSF just isn't present in any meaningful way in IBM's new Social Software stack.

But something equally important has been happening for a long time. IBM, as far as I can tell, sells Lotus Notes mostly as a messaging platform. They tried to sell a different email engine under the Workplace brand, but that effort folded when no one, anywhere, bought it. Goodbye Workplace.

A lot of us including me felt a little smug when that happened. We knew all along that Notes was an amazing piece of software. The powers that be at IBM didn't know it, but we did. But now, maybe they were finally getting it? Maybe with the demise of the Workplace brand, I thought, they'd finally get off our lawn and let us get back to doing what we do best.

But. Something about that thing about IBM selling Lotus Notes as messaging, and only as messaging, has finally caught up with us. Something about IBM fundamentally not believing in Notes as an application development platform, and refusing to market it as application development, has created the reality that we now face in the marketplace. And the competition is at long last eating Lotus Notes for breakfast. And honestly, I think at some level in the IBM organization, there are those who are relieved it's finally going away. Because what they want is to sell the really expensive Websphere stuff. Domino, I'm guessing, just doesn't net them the rivers of cash from the Fortune 100 like the big iron stuff does. But Domino getting its clock cleaned by Exchange and Sharepoint leaves a huge hole in IBM's strategy.

I didn't truly receive the signal that Al Zollar sent back in 2002. But I jumped on the bandwagon as best I could. I learned Java. I wrote Java code. I downloaded Eclipse, and wrote code in it too. I even wrote articles about IBM's new direction on SearchDomino, and they were positive. I was there, supporting whatever the direction was, as best I could. Our team at work is starting to write XPages applications. It's good stuff. But it seems, it's too little, too late.

See, where I work, they are abandoning Notes mail for Exchange. And last week we were told that the political winds at high levels in our company are whispering "Sharepoint". We responded by saying that we were ultimately agnostic about what code we wrote in. And this is essentially true. But we know in our heart of hearts that we will not be as productive as we were, no matter how good we get at Sharepoint development or any of the technologies in the Microsoft stack. We were also told, by the way, that any of us who wished to remain "pure Domino" developers would be given personal assistance in finding a new job.

Let that sink in for a moment.

I just didn't get it until it started to happen to me. But it's hit home now. Thinking through this, maybe from now on I'll be a little better at paying attention to the signals that my biases want me to push into the background, into the underground. Examining my biases is an opportunity to become more conscious. And when I become more conscious, I am able to make better decisions.

But here's the other thing. And this is what really got me thinking about this, and resulted in this blog entry. The same fellow who told us that he'd help us all find new jobs if we wanted to leave, also told us that on the Gartner "Magic Quadrant" concerning web development, or application development (not exactly sure what the "quadrant" covered), there were things like Java and .Net and Sharepoint. Lotus Notes was not on it, at all.

The reason, when asked, that Gartner gave as to why Lotus Notes isn't on the quadrant for application development, is that IBM does not sell or market Notes for that. When I understood that, it really hit me in the gut. Suddenly I got it. All of the stuff everyone has been saying forever about the lack of marketing sort of came together.

The community howled, for years and years, that if IBM would just market the product, the market for Lotus Notes would improve. IBM, to everyone's great surprise, started a marketing campaign in late 2009 centered around the slogan, "Lotus Knows". I didn't think about it until recently, but the Lotus Knows campaign is not about application development with Lotus Notes. The campaign is about "Social Software".

Step back and put the whole picture together. IBM does not sell Lotus Notes for application development. What do they have instead? Websphere. And Portal. And what is Lotus finally, after all these years, actually marketing? Social Software. Collaboration. I always assumed collaboration included Lotus Notes. But I'm not so sure anymore. But even if it does, it doesn't matter. Lotus Notes can be used for collaboration. But fundamentally it's about application development. And that can be just about anything.

Like a scene from an absurdist play, IBM engineers continue to work hard on Notes and Domino while IBM refuses to market its capabilities. The application development possibilities continue to grow in incredible ways. Who is it that is telling the world about those possibilities? It isn't IBM. It's people in the community like Nathan Freeman and Tim Tripcony and many others. And who are Nathan and Tim telling talking to about this stuff? People like me, of course. They aren't sitting down with the corporate strategy people high up in my company. And why would they?

IBM isn't selling it. IBM isn't marketing it. No one, at the customer-corporate level, knows what the engineers working on Domino are doing. They don't know, and they don't care. Why? Because, apparently, Domino does not show up on "the quadrant". When corporate level strategy folks are trying to make decisions, they don't have any guidance from IBM, or the analysts, or the trade magazines, or anyone, concerning the actual core capabilities of Lotus Notes, because Notes isn't allowed to compete with Websphere. "IBM Lotus" shows up on the quadrant for "Social Software". What does that mean? It means Connections and Quickr and Sametime. Somewhere in the middle of that stuff, if you ask enough questions, is this little old "messaging" engine thrown in that IBM can't seem to get rid of, called Lotus Notes.

We've been carrying the banner by ourselves for far too long. Now we see the results.

It took me, from 2002, until now, to say goodbye to Notes. Which means, it took me almost as long to say goodbye to Notes as it did for me to say goodbye to my own mother.

Coda:

To think about quitting my job to go into consulting is ridiculous, based on what is going on in the market, and what others are saying, and the recent dismal experience of folks with more experience and more connections in the industry than I have. To move to another company to do Domino again is equally ridiculous for the same reason. Where I work, we will likely continue our Domino practice for a few years while we begin to learn the Microsoft way. But we are quick learners, and we will likely supplant our Domino applications as rapidly as we can. What choice do we have? We've seen the story we are in. We'll each play the part that makes the most sense for us.

Additional reading:

Microsoft, IBM, and Jive Get Together Atop the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software
"IBM is a leader by virtue of being ahead of the market with a strong market presence," the analysts write. IBM is not only an established technology vendor, but the report points out that IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 offers a comprehensive social software suite and that the company offers many flexible deployment options."

Looking beyond the magic quadrant to find the nitty gritty
Gartner's "strengths" and "cautions" have to do with a vendor's "marketing effectiveness," "messaging," and "awareness."

Jake Howlett: Why My Sudden Interest in SharePoint
"…what am I supposed to do when a good customer decides to leave Domino? Wish them luck and let them go; after years of building a relationship with them? Not likely."

Notes and Domino development. Any future in it?
"…this is not about the product but about how it's perceived and understood - Notes and Domino are seen as yesterday's news."

What's happening to app development?
"I checked out the IBM marketing blitz on LotusKnows (www.lotusknows.com.au) and it's all generic commoditized services, (Calendaring, Quickr, Telephony, Connections, portals). It has NOTHING to do with custom application development or the great ROI you can achieve leveraging app development."

Things I learned at the DNUG conference in Berlin
"Attendance at DNUG conferences is down. …It's the customers that are staying away. If you look at the conference guide listing all attendees, you can't help but notice that the largest contingent are IBM and Business Partners. …Many business partners are developing an exit strategy." ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm?opendocument&comments jonvon´s magic cereal Sat, 6 Mar 2010 14:56:01 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm ingredients

go raw simple granola cereal



i get this in the local health food store for ten bucks. you could also try sprouting your own seeds, which i haven't done yet but i really want to try and hopefully will this spring. i'm not sure what homemade sprouted flax/buckwheat groats will look like. the ones i buy look and taste like granola cereal. i think sprouting my own will be healthier and cheaper. we'll see...

manitoba harvest shelled hemp seeds



manitoba harvest chocolate "hemp bliss" hemp milk



fwiw, the manitoba harvest hemp products are better tasting than anything else out there, in my experience.

vegan gorp made of roughly equal parts of:
organic walnuts
organic sliced almonds
organic pumpkin seeds
organic hulled sunflower seeds
organic dried fruit (cranberries, blueberries, whatever you can find)
organic dark chocolate covered raisins

fresh fruit such as:
organic blueberries and/or
organic strawberries

directions

mix together:
one tablespoon of the cereal (sprouted flax / sprouted buckwheat groats)
one tablespoon hemp seeds
two or three (to your own taste) tablespoons gorp (hint: that gorp recipe is awesome)

add a tablespoon or three (whatever you like) of blueberries or strawberries or both. basically whatever fresh fruit is in season. sometimes i use organic frozen blueberries. if i take the cereal to work in a jar (which i do every morning during work days) the frozen blueberries keep everything cool, which is really neat.

add some chocolate hemp milk over the top and you have jonvon's magic cereal. during the week i put the hemp milk in a separate jar and add it on top when i get around to eating.

i usually eat another piece of fruit as well, like an orange or a small organic apple. i like really small apples. just the right amount for me and very tasty.

advanced vegan fu

i add two pills of chlorella that i take with water. i highly recommend doing this. chlorella (an algae grown in japan) has lots of protein, minerals and antioxidants, is extremely cleansing, and will help your body rejuvenate itself and make you look and feel younger. i say this out of my own personal experience - your mileage may vary, especially depending on what the rest of your diet looks like. (in case you are wondering, i am not affiliated with any of the companies that make the products.)

along with the chlorella, i drink organic matcha tea. the chlorella will clean you out due to the high amount of chlorophyll. the antioxidants in the matcha will come along with a "push broom" and sweep up the junk.

i used to have some problems here and there with my mood when drinking matcha but when i drink it in context with the "magic cereal" and the chlorella, i don't have any problems at all. everything is nicely balanced for me. my energy levels, mental clarity and immune response are all incredibly strong these days. sometimes people cough in my face and i just think, no problem. i very rarely get sick now and when i do, it never lasts long. the cereal/fruit/chlorella/matcha routine works very well for me and sets up my whole day.

warnings

fiber intensity:

whether or not you are a vegan, this is a LOT of fiber. you will likely get thirsty. so plan to stay hydrated. have a bottle of water near you the rest of the morning and afternoon and drink, lots, if you get thirsty.

if you are NOT a vegan or vegetarian, you might also experience some bloating or gas. you might even consider doing half a tablespoon each of the base ingredients and work your way up.

if you overdo it, if you add more than a tablespoon of the primary/base ingredients (hemp seed and flax/buckwheat groats), my experience is increased thirstiness due to the extra fiber. you may need to sit and be quiet while you digest too, if you feel nauseous at all. that feeling may be (if your experience is like mine) your body telling you it needs to concentrate its energy on digesting all that fiber.

basically what i'm saying here is, don't overdo it with the base ingredients, and don't underestimate the amount of fiber. the fiber is really good for you and will help you avoid colon cancer. but take it easy and work your way up.

note: the gorp is not nearly as fiber intensive as the hemp/flax. the flax is really the most intense ingredient in terms of fiber, from what i can tell.

i started out doing four pills of chlorella, but toned it down to two. starting out you might consider one and work up to two.

expense:

when you add all of this stuff up, including the chlorella and matcha, you are spending around 100 bucks. here is a rough estimate of what i am spending:

cereal ingredients: ~ 50 to 60 dollars
matcha: ~ 10 dollars
chlorella: ~ 24 dollars

i was spending about five dollars every morning buying fruit and kashi bars and peanuts. the cereal ingredients last about three weeks or so, the matcha about a month, and the chlorella maybe month and a half or so. i don't quite have it down to a science with that. but... when i add up what i was spending ad hoc, 25 dollars a week for junk, that's about a hundred dollars or so a month. so in the long run i'm doing way better with the cereal routine since it is my health we are talking about and over the long haul the costs are almost equivalent.

one morning i forgot my cereal, or didn't have time or something, and i fell back to my old kashit/fruit/nuts junk food routine (as i think of it now) and after eating, i felt as though i'd poisoned myself. the benefits to the "magic cereal" routine were so obvious to me at that point that now i work extra hard to make this happen for myself every day, especially during the work week. sometimes i vary a bit on the weekends with other things.

sprouted ingredients:

sprouted ingredients are alive. in other words, they are literally "sprouting" - they've started growing and have sort of been "arrested" in this early growth stage. this means that all sorts of biochemical things are going on with the plants. there are amino acids and things available during sprouting that aren't available at any other time. sprouted foods are very healthy to eat (really darn fascinating). but... because they are in that state they are also more prone to having bacteria attach to them. humans aren't the only ones that want to eat them! and they are more susceptible to infection than they would otherwise be.

i keep the sprouted stuff, and the hemp seeds, in the refrigerator. but even that doesn't keep them good forever. i never have a problem with the hemp seeds, but the flax/buckwheat DOES start to go bad. i rarely get to the bottom of a package before they start to go bad. i can't smell them going bad, but i can tell after i eat them that they've started to turn. if that happens i take a couple of echinacea and that solves it for me. but then i have to get new cereal. this is partly why i am interested in doing my own sprouting. the ingredients will be fresher that way. the cereal is sprouted at a facility somewhere, then shipped, then it sits on the shelf, and then finally i buy it. i put it right in the fridge, but it would be better if i did it myself.

so, for this reason, i always keep the two main base ingredients separate from the gorp and put them together on the fly "at run time". that way if it turns out the flax is starting to go south, i don't lose the other ingredients.

i don't ever have any problems with the gorp and i don't keep it refrigerated. it sits in a big glass jar on the counter.

good luck and let me know how it goes. :-) ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm?opendocument&comments dinner with trond Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:00:00 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dinner-with-trond.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dinner-with-trond.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dinner-with-trond.htm tuesday night at lotusphere is chock full of parties and receptions. it is always a busy night. from what i can tell it is the busiest night at the 'sphere for that kind of thing. between invitations from ibm for various things, and invitations from business partners i always have more events to go to than i can possibly attend.

there is an annual dinner (for several years running now) that i am guessing not a lot of people know about that is put on by a company called symfoni. the fellow who puts the dinner on is trond-are utle. he had a blog a while back, blogging under the monicker "Air Play". trond is the COO of symfoni and a super cool guy. trond invites several bloggers every year to come along. his idea is that we are famous (or infamous perhaps?) people in the community and the employees and customers who are invited to the symfoni dinner "get to" hang out with us.

well let me tell you, from my perspective it is exactly the opposite. the truth is, i've had the immense pleasure of hanging out with some of the coolest people i've ever met, any time i've gotten to go to trond's dinner. people like arne for instance - one of the smartest guys around and a much more prolific blogger than me.

with trond having fed me at least three times over the past five? six? years... i started to feel a little guilty. i wanted to give something back. trond never asked me for anything at all, i just wanted to do something cool for him in return.

one thing i've been getting deeper and deeper into lately is poetry. i've been writing poetry on and off since high school, but the last maybe six years or so i've been exposed to a lot more poetry and a lot more poets. i've performed my own poems here and there, and whenever i do a reading it seems to impact people pretty strongly.

so i decided to ask trond if he'd like me to read some poetry at his dinner. i had a pretty good idea that it would work because they always rent out a private room, and the last few years there was a microphone.

the one thing i didn't think about was the fact that trond had never read even one of my poems. he'd never seen me read a poem. for all he knew i was some sort of hapless american idol wannabe poetry nerd. if you think about it that could actually be a pretty bad combination.

so. i didn't think about that. mainly what i was thinking was that i'd never done anything like this before. normally if i read some poems, it is in a room with a bunch of other poets. like at a coffee house or something. i was also surprised at myself for having had the sheer balls to write and tell him that i wanted to read poetry at his very expensive dinner.

neither one of us knew what we were doing. i just had this feeling like it would work, and that i'd be able to "give back" a little, and sort of "sing for my dinner", even though trond never said one word about anything like that. he always just sends me an invitation and is always happy when i show up. which honestly still blows me away.

well. it turned out that trond was more nervous than me about my performance. when i told him i might have about ten minutes of material he got kinda jittery! and who can blame him? for all he knew, i was going to go up there and recite some really boring lines. or maybe i'd trip over my own tongue. or do something really silly, try to sing or something. i mean there are a lot of crazy people in the world, and who knows, i just might be one of them.

so i tried to explain my plan. see, i had picked out three poems and put them together sort of like how a dj puts songs together in a specific order to get a particular effect musically in order to pull the crowd into whatever place they want take them. the poems i'd picked weren't meant to get people to dance of course. but they were chosen with intention.

the first poem was by a poet called rolf jacobsen. rolf jacobsen is a norwegian poet. i figured i'd read english translations of scandinavian poets out of respect for the people in the room, and as a way to connect them to the poetry. although later i learned i butchered the pronunciation of his name. :-)

the jacobsen poem i read is called the silence afterwards, and it brings the reader into contact with the kind of knowledge that is behind words. it brings the reader into silence, into a place in which a person comes into contact with the voices of trees and rocks - our ancient ancestors. the poem invites us to forget sales statistics and brunches and gas ovens, fashion shows and horoscopes, military parades, architectural contests, the possibilities of winning on the numbers...

people were discussing these sorts of things at the symfoni dinner. well not exactly, but you know, we are worried about a lot of things, and our minds are on technology, and how it impacts us. we're all making a living that way, after all, me included.

the second poem is one that i wrote myself. it is a poem about a poet called federico garcia lorca.

lorca was shot at the beginning of the spanish civil war by franco's men for the crime of being seen as a leftist, or for the crime of being gay. one of those, probably both. in the poem we go underground, to a secret place where lorca disappears and the soldiers cannot find him. it is an intense poem, full of both grief and triumph.

the third poem i read is by a swedish poet named harry martinson. it happened that karl martinson (the texas swede) was there at the dinner, and later he told me that his family had done a geneological search to see, among other things i'm sure, whether anyone in his family was related to this poet, since they had the same name. it turns out they weren't related. but i thought it was neat that he knew of the poet, and that the poet was important enough for his family to spend that kind of energy finding out whether or not they might be related. think about that! poets in the U.S. are certainly not held in that kind of regard.

martinson's poem, the cable ship, is a funny story with a fascinated meditative center about some guys on a fishing boat. martinson spent a lot of time at sea and wrote quite a few poems about that. in the poem, they've accidentally pulled up a transatlantic cable - a huge phone line running between continents. they try to listen to it:

"It's some millionaires in Montreal and St. John talking over the price of Cuban sugar, and ways to reduce our wages," one of us said.


they try to patch it with some rubber and let it go back to the bottom of the sea.

so the idea was, first we come into silence. we forget technology. we forget project schedules. we forget the banalities of the day. we move into silence. the knowledge that goes beyond words. foundational and intrinsic universally interpenetrating meaning from which we all spring and to which we all return. we connect to our ancestors, the trees and the rocks. then we go underground with lorca. we think a little about the struggle between ugliness and beauty. we remember that some people have died for poetry. we go down and down and walk in the land of the dead.

and then, at the end, we remember that we do live in a real world, with things like sailors and boats and transatlantic phone lines. we dredge up the line, with martinson, and remember that we do in fact work with technology, and we remember that it is good to laugh.

there was an energetic design too, here, something like a roller coaster. we get in, we go down, and then we come back up. simple, really. much simpler than the dueling dragons. :-)

but it worked. oh man, the whole room seemed to be entranced. even the people serving the food, i could feel them standing very still. everyone listened intently. later the ibm guy had to get up and give a little speech, and he said he wished he'd gone before me, because who could follow that act? he actually used the word "experience", that the performance had been an experience.

man that might have been the best thing anyone ever said about me, reading poetry. i hope i see that guy again. somehow i left there without talking to him.

after the dinner was over i was milling around with joe litton and i ran into this fellow who, it turned out, worked for one of symfoni's customers. he was a german fellow, living in sweden, super nice guy, very friendly. he had this idea that companies like symfoni must be going around hiring really expensive entertainers like me to come and liven up dinner parties like the one trond had just thrown. omg. that might have been even better than the ibm guy's comments. sooo funny. i had to explain several times that i was trying to pay trond back, just a little, for all the free food and good times he's given me over the years.

i'd like to point out though, that if anyone wants to hire me and pay me "a lot of money" to come read poetry at your dinner party, dude, i am so there. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/dinner-with-trond.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dinner-with-trond.htm?opendocument&comments symfoni´s global calendar Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:09:04 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/symfonis-global-calendar.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/symfonis-global-calendar.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/symfonis-global-calendar.htm symfoni tuesday night of lotusphere. the last few years i've tried to make it a point to go, even if i have other invitations to other things that conflict. there's just something really cool about hanging out with the scandinavians and learning new (for me anyway) words like tak and how to say cheers and so on.

this past dinner something really cool happened there that i have another blog post (still in draft) queued up to talk about. but for this post i wanted to write about symfoni's new global calendar product that they are about to launch (or maybe they have by now?) that has an Adobe Air front end. Trond showed it to me briefly one day at the Dolphin rotunda and i asked him to send me some data on it, and he did (pasted below).

i thought it was interesting that they were using Air to leverage their code to PC, Mac and Linux. and the Air UI looked pretty cool.

anyway here is the text from Trond's email (slightly edited). seems to me like these guys have been working really hard the last few years and have expanded their product line quite a lot. some of their old software was the standard clunky old Notes stuff some years ago, but these days everything looks really slick. i wouldn't be surprised if they've started penetrating the U.S. market with some of these products.

Hi John,

Here's a few screenshots, don't know if you wanna use any:

- http://twitpic.com/z6col (notes version)
- http://twitpic.com/yt8wr (notes version)
- http://twitpic.com/z6d4z (air version)
- http://twitpic.com/z6cxx (air version)

About Symfoni Global Calendar (GC):

GC collects calendar appointments from any user or groups of users in your organization (Domino or Exchange!), and gives you lots of ways to browse, consume and otherwise interact with this information. It answers questions like "where's my team now, or next week", "what is John doing tomorrow" etc. It even enables push-back of appointments from the client into someone's calendar (this is a role based right), so Sue at the front office can help me add "sick day" to my calendar because I CALLED IN sick... ALSO, the new version will support shorthand entry like "meeting with Tron tues 2pm-4:30 @corneroffice", OS notifications/popups like "your meeting is in 10 minutes" or "You're tracking John, he just finished his meeting".

GC has a classic Notes client and also a web interface, but this spring we're releasing the brand new standalone client based on the Adobe Air platform. This client runs on Mac/Linux/Windows, is light and fast yet integrates very well with the OS for start menu icons, popups, alerts etc.
]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/symfonis-global-calendar.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/symfonis-global-calendar.htm?opendocument&comments the future of the email market for Lotus Mon, 7 Dec 2009 10:03:22 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm
1. 70% of the email market in the corporate world (i actually don't know what market segment they were talking about) has gone to exchange.

2. many customers who have been with Notes for a long time, let's say really any release before 8, but mostly like 4, 5 or 6, have switched or are switching to exchange for email.

3. Lotus is winning many new customers (customers who never saw the pre-8 clients).

so the result is, Lotus is winning new business, while the old business where impressions of the clunky client, the "two lane highway" / workplace years, and the years of non existent marketing (thank god that is behind us) have stuck, like flies in poisoned molasses.

i get this picture in my head of two rivers side by side, running in opposite directions, and masses of salmon swimming like hell in each respective direction.

so my question is, does this bear out to what other people are seeing in the marketplace?

and yeah, this hits home for me for reasons i'm not going to talk about outside of what i just did, because i don't usually blog about work, and this is as close as i ever want to get. mainly i'm just trying to gage what is going on out there.

also up for discussion:

i've also seen: independent developers who have had a lot of trouble finding work, and business partners who do things other than development like making products, who are doing very well with Notes.]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm?opendocument&comments a tale of two macs Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:41:01 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm
the fellow who called did so from the center of Happy Apple Nirvana. i could feel him smiling from deep within the center of Brahman's navel (or is that Atman, i can never keep them straight) as he told me with complete and joyous calm that the computer was ready to be picked up.

i went into the store to pick it up and while i was there i grabbed a fire wire cord and a game for my daughter. everyone i spoke to was sooo happy and listened so well and was genuinely interested in everything i had to say. all my questions were answered quickly and efficiently and with great energy and near manic attention to detail. i'd stepped back into Happy Apple Land, after my sojourn in the bowels of, oh, i don't know, Apple Purgatory?

i remember going to see my sister when she was in college. she was majoring in theatre in a small college near (or in?) st. augustine. st. augustine is a touristy place. there is an old spanish fort there, and lots of historic places to see. if you are into the hyperreal, ripley's has a museum there. there are horse drawn carriages that trot down cobbled streets. there are great beaches, and an old cathedral, and so on. we went there a lot when i was a kid. we always had a blast there.

the st. augustine i knew from childhood is the one i have just described. but my sister lived in an apartment that was just behind that st augustine. it was a poor neighborhood. there were gangs there. the place where she and three other students and various others lived was pretty much a hell hole. the kitchen was unusable. literally. i had one of two lifetime run-ins with the paranormal on the metal fire escape stairs that led up to her front door. little claws running along my back. spooky as hell. the week after i visited, the whole neighborhood was effectively shut down due to a gang war, and armed gang members had to escort my sister and her friends from block to block whenever they wanted to walk anywhere. like say to the store or whatever.

so there is st. augustine. and then there is the st. augustine behind st. augustine.

now i've learned, there is Happy Apple Land, where everyone is a "genius" and they wear cool blue and orange t shirts, and they are all very happy to answer all of your questions, as long as everyone is staying inside the preconfigured Apple Swim Lanes.

but. go outside the swim lanes and suddenly you are being escorted through dangerous territory by rival gang members. this metaphor is actually quite a bit more apt than you might think.

this is a tale of two macs. or, two macbooks, to be a little more precise.

first off, for those interested, when i got my machine back, i had to move the data over from my old machine. except i couldn't do it the cool way. cuz i had vilefault enabled on the old machine. and i couldn't turn it off as there was not enough room on the hard drive for a complete copy of the Home folder. so it goes.

i didn't want to repeat the merry go round from before. so i just went with a brand new account and transferred the data over, directory by directory, file by file, the old fashioned way. and that was fine cuz it forced me to actually look at the data and think about what was there. i trimmed some of the fat. no biggie. and the firewire cable worked great.

i bought a macbook last january for my wife who was starting a master's program in humanities. her program is online and she needed a reliable machine. she needed a new machine, anyway, actually, as her old macbook just doesn't work anymore. at all. we can't even turn it on. it was the last of the motorolla macbooks and it's toast. so as it was in its final throes we went down and got her a new machine, an aluminum model, which apparently they don't make at the moment, in the macbook line.

so. around the time my machine came back, her machine started throwing kernel panics. oh and the iSight camera had stopped working a while back. but the kernel panics, well, when that happens the machine freezes, and whatever she was working on just goes away. poof.

so she put her data on a thumb drive. transferred it to my machine. and i took hers in for service.

so i walk into the Apple Store and say, hey, i need to drop this machine off for service. i know what's wrong with it, basically, and can someone take a look. and the person i am talking to starts telling me i need to make a genius appointment. i say, no look i just want to drop the machine off. and he gets offended, cuz i cut him off mid sentence.

he doesn't know about my very recent history with his store. he doesn't know that for me, just walking in there is now stressful. especially if there's a repair involved. all he knows is some asshole who needs to grow up and learn how to be polite just cut him off mid sentence and now his day has become stressful.

see at some point there is this big feedback loop that keeps getting worse. but i realize, right there, he didn't deserve that. so i try to smile and be a sane human being for the rest of the conversation. and i do that. so i pull out my Pro Care card. and he makes an appointment. and says that you know, someone will get back to me in a week or so. and then i say, well is that true? i mean, i'm a member of Pro Care (which always sounds like a dental plan to me), thought you guys were supposed to do this a little quicker in that case (or something along those lines). and now he has to remake the appointment. and he gets snarky with me several times. in fact at one point he stops himself and says, was that snarky? i'm sorry.

we were both kinda riding the edge, trying to be basically human to each other. but i did maintain my cool through the rest of the conversation. but see, what happened was, i walked into the store without an appointment. and this effectively puts me outside the swim lanes. and so, apparently, this causes dissonance in the mind of any Apple Store employee i talk to. they just can't handle it.

oh and btw what i learned was that, when doing a "quick drop", tell them you are a procare member, NOT a guest. cuz that way they will click the Member button on the web application screen instead of the Guest button. and then things will, theoretically, go faster.

so after putting in my data multiple times (like, i don't know, four or five times including associating my apple id with my procare id, which somehow was never done before) we finally get the order put into the system, and away goes my wife's macbook into the bowels of the store.

it has been, i think, eighteen days from that day. and to my knowledge nothing meaninful has happened yet.

which is why i have not written anything about this from before, because i figured it would save me some time to just write it all up at once.

but i've apparently gone inside the badlands. i'm in the Apple Store behind the Apple store. i'm at the part where various Apple employees try to walk me from street corner to street corner. but no one is really handing off anything. nothing is really happening. like i'm unstuck in time, or, i dont' know. pick your own vonnegut/kafka metaphor.

of course this is all ridiculous. it's not like anyone is losing any limbs, or anyone is dying. it's not like my parents innocently named me Harry Potter. the Apple Store didn't give me cancer. i must say though i'm glad my cholesterol is coming down because they might have given me a mild infarction or two somewhere along the way.

so the long boring stupid story is that, some days later they call and say that the machine needs hardware replacement parts. (see i totally knew that. i'd done my homework.) and they would have to ship it off somewhere, send it to a "depot" of some kind, as they didn't have the parts in stock. and did they want me to make a back up of the data?

so i go by the store, since this is all on my voice mail, and also whenever i call them back the phone rings and rings and no one picks it up. and i tell them, no, i don't need a backup. just please send it off so i can get it back and return it to my wife and get my macbook back from her and then i can install Notes 8.5 and i can go on with my life, get back to work on my novel, and basically return to normal. or what passes for normal for me, anyway.

ok so i didn't really tell them all of that. but that's what i'm thinking.

so they are all like, ok cool, we'll do that then.

and then a week later someone leaves me another voice mail. with the same message. they are going to ship it off, but, do i want them to back up the data first? just in case something goes wrong or they have to replace the hard drive.

i thought it was the same voice mail from before. i seriously didn't think it was a new one. and btw the last conversation we had with them, which was last night, they admitted it was the logic board. which has nothing to do with the hard drive. but let's forget about that for now. and get back to the 99 dollars they apparently really, really, reeeeally want to charge me to back up the data that they know i do not need backed up.

so i go by the store. in person. i talk to a guy in a cool orange t-shirt. i get his card. and i say, you know, it's funny. i had the same exact conversation with a guy, right here in this spot, a week ago. the same one! we are talking about exactly the same thing. we are talking about the fact that i don't want my data backed up. i just want you to send the machine off for repairs. that's all. no data backup needed, just send the machine off. now. thanks.

i was very nice. very polite. i smiled as often as i could. i just want to point that out. because after a while i get to thinking, this is just bad karma. i've done something wrong and i deserve what i'm getting. i was mean to an Apple employee who wasn't listening to me and wanted to unjustly charge me money for something that was not my fault. who just wanted me to line up and get into the Apple Certified Swim Lanes, where as much as possible Apple gets to push the hard work of fixing their broken shite onto their customers, and where possible, they get to charge us for things we don't need and should not have to pay for.

but i digress.

so this time i get a business card. the card is somewhere else and i don't remember his name and that is probably good because otherwise i'd likely blog it right now. but i have a business card and until last night it was squirreled away in my wallet.

so then today or yesterday or maybe wednesday (today at the very latest) i should, from the time of my last redundant conversation, be picking up the machine, with its new logic board. except i'm not.

do you know why not?

because yesterday morning, i got a voice mail asking if they wanted me to have them back up the data. because they needed to ship the computer off to a depot, where they can replace the hardware that needs replaced, because they are not able to fix the problem themselves. and this time he kindly leaves the price tag for me on the voice mail, in a cheerful, blustery voice. the cost is 99 dollars, and can i get back to them and let them know.

see how they did that?

lol!!

i mean that is just awesome. its like they've been up night after night reading Kafka, and figuring out how they can make the Apple Store more Kafkaesque. i mean it's only an Apple Store. how much harm can they really do to the world? they could get as Kafkaesque as they want and really, probably, no one would be harmed, per se. they aren't going to give me H1N1 just because they ship my laptop off to, er, Antarctica? by mistake or something. it's all ok cuz they all wear these really great t-shirts and stuff.

ok. so. this is the part where i make a declaration!

i'm never buying anything from Apple ever again. the Apple stock price can climb all the way to the moon, large swaths of which Apple will undoubtedly one day own, but i don't care. i might just give up computers altogether. eventually. at some point in the distant future. or, whatever.

i'm likely not going to blog about this again. so this is the end. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm?opendocument&comments good news bad news Fri, 2 Oct 2009 09:23:53 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/good-news-bad-news.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/good-news-bad-news.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/good-news-bad-news.htm
it turns out the bad news is that what he was calling to tell me was that i forgot to initial a checkbox allowing them to charge me one hundred dollars for diagnosing whatever was wrong with my machine.

omfg...

they are trying, really hard, to lose a customer.

let me put this another way.

they called me. during dinner time. to scold me. as though i were an idiot child.

i had to tell the poor guy who i unloaded on not to take it personally. cuz as i told him, "you are the fourth or fifth person i've spoken to about this issue and i'm really pissed off". just so he would understand that the undercurrent of anger on my side of the equation wasn't anything against him in particular. and then i directed him to the place on the form in question where a manager had initialed saying there would be no charge.

hello? anyone? fucking? in there?

his response? he said he was directed by a manager to call me up and inform me that unless i came in and initialed that check box, that they would not be working on my machine.

this is the part where i get surly.

un. fucking. believable. the sheer arrogance is completely astounding.

dear apple store managers, everywhere in the world, and especially in Tampa, Florida.

you do not get to call me up and harass me. ever. you don't get to have your "administrators" (or whatever you call them - geniuses? hahahahaha) call me up and tell me that from now on i will be required to initial that check box. let me fill you in, all you Apple store managers who are undoubtedly completely and blissfully unaware of this blog entry, that relationships with customers are just like all relationships. there is give and take. it is ALWAYS A NEGOTIATION. you don't get to set arbitrary rules, no matter how great your hardware is.

have you got that part? get smarter already. christ on fucking crackers.

i'm pretty sure that by the end of the conversation he'd said he was going to work on the machine. although i'm not 100% certain. i suppose i'll find out eventually.

how much worse can this get? i've been patronized by the good people at the Apple store for the last time. i can tell you that for sure. i'm really not sure at this moment what i'm going to do when i walk into their store to pick up the machine. i may walk out with my money back instead. not sure how i can even use the machine with any semblance of joy after this.

maybe i'm getting old. but it seems as though we keep lowering the bar, and lowering it further and further, and when we've got it lowered that far, we lower it some more. i want to teach people how to start thinking. i want to show them there is a better way to live. maybe that's arrogance on my part? i don't know. but i don't think it is.

last night my daughter read me "a couple of stories". she's doing so great with that. i am continually astounded at how many words she knows, and even words she isn't sure of, she often figures out very quickly. she is truly mastering reading. i'm incredibly proud. can you tell? so in between stories i said to her, hey if you get to read me stories, i get to read you a poem. so i did, and wouldn't you know it, i turned to a Rilke poem that kind of put things in perspective. here is an excerpt from The Man Watching:

What we choose to fight with is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!

... When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

my "triumph" over the situation with the computer definitely makes me small. i'm not sure there is even a triumph there. it's such a stupid thing. i ought to be out wrestling with angels instead:

If we would only let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

...whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

anyway. maybe that's the universe or god or whatever you want to call it (myself? or just plain old Rilke) telling me, i've got better things to worry about than this. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/good-news-bad-news.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/good-news-bad-news.htm?opendocument&comments new macbook, bad experience Thu, 1 Oct 2009 17:38:32 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/macbook.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/macbook.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/macbook.htm
really nice machine. i was sooooo excited when i saw the keyboard back lighting. omg i love that sh1t. it's the little things. i love the aluminum body, just everything. it's wonderful and i can't wait to try Notes 8.5.1 on it.

got it home, ported my data from my old macbook over. on my old macbook (which still works as long as it is plugged in - needs a new battery i guess - for the second time) the data is encrypted with FileVault.

all the data got ported over. i didn't have a fire wire cable around so i used the network cable and it worked fine. or so i thought.

once the data was on the new machine, i tried logging into my account. of course this would be the same account i had on the old machine. i've typed the password about a zillion times, no way i've forgotten it.

so i type it in and it comes back with an error. something about FileVault (don't remember now the wording).

so i google the error and after searching some i finally find what looks like the right set of instructions.

the first thing i have to do is figure out how to enable root level access on the machine. then there were five or six more tasks after that, all looking at least that herculean.

ack.

so, hey i just bought the machine two days ago right? i also bought AppleCare to go with it (don't leave the store without it man, trust me on that one), and i am a ProCare member (don't get me started on ProCare - those f$kers won't even look at your machine without paying for it - a hundred bucks a year!!), and i've bought, let's see now, including this new machine, four Apple laptops, one iMac, and two iPods over the years.

they ought to roll out the red carpet for a customer like me, right?

not so much.

first off, the first tech who looks at the machine says, oh, we'll just change your password and you'll be all set. he wasn't looking at the error. he wasn't actually reading it.

see how i did that? cuz ya know, when there are errors on the screen, i like to, you know, actually read them. i'm curious like that.

then i explain to the tech guy (i'm using the term lightly at this point) how i already looked up the error and told him how the first instruction was to enable root level access on the machine. he looks at me with slight terror, his eyes getting sort of big and wide, pupils dilating (no i'm not making this up or embellishing) and says, ooohhh, it's a File Vault error. we'll have to check it in and have them look at it.

so we do that. and he says someone will call me.

now having tried to call the Apple store one time and having been completely befuddled and denied by their automated telephone system, i realized that this was a "don't call us we'll call you" kind of scenario. but i'm a patient guy. even when it comes to the long awaited MacBook Pro (insert gilded choirs of angels singing hallelujah here - i've really wanted one of these machines for a LONG time), i can be patient with them while someone monkeys around with the significant task of getting FileVault to give up its encrypted ghost. i mean, i figure that is going to take someone with both brains and time some significant effort to come to grips with. right?

so it's been two days and i haven't heard anything. no calls from either confident or frantic tech people. nothing. i'm starting to get nervous. so i go into the store on my lunch break and give them the repair number and they disappear. for a while. i start to realize right then - ah, no one has even looked at it yet.

another tech fellow comes out. he is introduced to me as their "administrator". um, yeah, not sure what that means in the context of an Apple store. but i'm not impressed. by the title anyway. i'm more than willing to be impressed by his technical skills. but he simply says, we are going to have to wipe the drive and charge you 85 dollars.

now wiping the drive doesn't bother me. i can just disable FileVault on the old machine and push the data back over again. no biggie, right? but the 85 dollar charge? THAT i have a problem with.

it isn't MY fault that "Snow Leopard" can't handle the encrypted data. it isn't my fault that their software can't, in this instance, talk to their own software. but the fellow is insistent.

so i start to get surly. he brings out another geek. oh my she looks very smart and very geeky. just the sort of person who can listen to the problem's description and make an intelligent assessment of the situation. right? right?

not so much. she listens to me talk to the fellow. i explain again what happened. by now it is painfully clear than no one on their "technical staff" has even thought to GOOGLE the error message that they clearly do not understand. they don't get it. talking to them is like, well, talking to a deer that has it's eyes caught in the headlights. no one is home. all the fellow can do is to repeat his assertion that because it is a "software problem" (apparently these are magical words that mean "we automatically get to charge money") and they are going to levy their 85 dollar fine. no. matter. what. cuz ya know, i'm so stupid, pushing their bright shiny buttons on their perfect, beautiful screens, and so this means i obviously deserve to pay them for the privilege when the machine locks up tighter than a.. well something that is locked up really tight. uh, davie jones locker? or something?

anyhoo.

now. now............ he's got me steaming mad. this is the kind of mad i just don't really GET any more. i've grown up a lot. honest. but i'm losing it at this point. i say to him, WE ARE DONE HERE. YOU ARE GOING TO TAKE THIS COMPUTER BACK AND YOU ARE GOING TO GIVE ME A FULL REFUND.

and i put the computer down on one of the many large wooden desks that now populate the new fangled store. and we stand there and he and the geeky girl who is supposed to be All That sort of stare at the computer, and stare at me, and finally he picks it up and says, "OK" with a hint of triumph in his voice, as though he's won some sort of argument he was really hoping he WOULD in fact win. or... something. by this time i'm not at all convinced i can accurately predict what he might be thinking, since i'm not entirely sure he IS thinking. i mean i thought i could at least assume if not predict rational customer service. am i crazy?

and so he goes over to the register where they are now going to give me my money back. theoretically.

now at this point i am ready to disavow All Things Apple. For Fucking Forever. all over an 85 dollar charge. but the charge is so unwarranted and unbelievably stupid, and the service has been so painfully slow and so painfully unintelligent. and i expect more from Apple. i'm sorry, shame on me apparently, but i just do expect more from them. because their machines rock. and because they look so nice. and because they cost a lot of money. (that last one is kinda important methinks.)

now i know better.

so i suppose in order to do a refund, he's got to go and get the manager. and she comes out. and she's very nice and she wants very much to help me and figure out my problem. so NOW after all of THAT, i finally have someone who, holy crap, is actually listening to me. i guess threatening to return the merchandise will do that?

she doesn't understand the problem i don't think, she even looks at me with some suspicion, and says that they haven't seen that problem before, and that they have transferred data from some machines that had FileVault installed, but... well, i guess she decides to take my word for it. maybe it's my earnest insistence that i've been wronged. maybe it's that, over and over again, i am able to explain the problem logically. maybe it's that i'm pissed off. really bad, by now. maybe it's that i suggest to her that she can GOOGLE THE ERROR AND SEE THE RESOLUTION ON THEIR OWN F@#$@#$@ING WEB SITE???

who knows what part of my tale (the one i've burned up my entire lunch hour telling to various suspicious, uncaring, and unthinking people, people who think that whenever they smile at me, i'm supposed to just jangle up 85 bucks out of my pocket like a broken one armed bandit), finally gets through to her.

her solution? they'll wipe the data for me without charge. i tell her i've got a ProCare card. cuz i know this is the part where no one looks at my new MBP for days or weeks. she says, oh that's good it would have been 3 to 5 business days before they could have turned it around without ProCare. but since i do in fact have it, they can get it done in 1 to 2 business days instead.

i think to myself, yeah, it's been sitting in the back room without anyone even looking at it for two days. already. right? right? but i'm emotionally spent, i've already totally lost it once, let it go, let it go.

i told this story to a friend of mine at work. he said, thanks for telling me that. i'm never buying Apple.

i love Apple computers. i've watched my daughter do amazing things with her iMac that i know she would not have been able to do with a PC. but god almighty frankenchrist people. Apple really needs to train their people on THINKING PROACTIVELY and on giving good customer service and on LISTENING CAREFULLY and on RESEARCHING THINGS THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

the manager, who was a sweet girl in her way, expected me to thank her. she gave me this look, saying something along the lines of how she had helped me, and it was obvious, albeit unspoken, that she expected me to thank her. i was so worn out at that moment that i did just that. i said "thank you" and walked out.

but what she didn't realize is that she did the absolute MINIMUM to keep me coming back. and i do mean the minimum. she basically came out and did some triage, mostly treating me with respect but here and there lapsing into suspicion or some kind of wariness. and then had the, god what do you call it, temerity? to expect to be thanked for what she did. as though LISTENING INTELLIGENTLY is a SERVICE that goes beyond the call of duty.

but that isn't enough. not by a long shot, when you have already been treated the way i was, after spending close to 1,600 dollars on the machine in question.

i'm disappointed and a bit shocked.

and i'm waiting, i guess for two days, to hear back from them. i fully expect to have to go visit them before they call me, but maybe they'll surprise me. we'll see. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/macbook.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/macbook.htm?opendocument&comments today´s breakfast Thu, 3 Sep 2009 10:25:20 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/todays-breakfast.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/todays-breakfast.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/todays-breakfast.htm
here is the recipe for the smoothie:

one cup strawberries
half cup blueberries
two bananas
seven leaves of romaine lettuce.
1 cup of water.

blend...

and that's it! simple to make, tastes great, and very cleansing. i added the blueberries for the antioxidant boost, you can also make it without them and it tastes great that way too. romaine lettuce has a high chlorophyll content which is very cleansing/detoxifying.

i'm sort of slowly heading toward going "raw" as a vegan. this is the next step on the journey for me - one i've known i was going to take but haven't had the time yet or the inclination to follow. but i'm getting there, it feels like it is time to start moving that direction. so i started reading this book:

12 Steps to Raw Foods: How to End Your Dependency on Cooked Food

i don't know why but i had a good feeling about this book. it hasn't disappointed. i love the way it is written, and i love the stories mrs. boutenko tells about her own family's history. basically the short story is, they all had really awful health problems. they did the raw vegan thing and everyone started feeling better, rather dramatically. she had a diabetic son for instance who was cured, her asthmatic daughter? also cured. she and her husband had all sorts of problems - all cured by eating raw, vegan foods.

but then they ran into problems after being raw vegans for nine years. it seemed their diet wasn't quite cutting it. so they added in greens, lots of greens, and things got better again.

so i'm experimenting with the green smoothies. i figure its a great way to start inching my way toward going raw. moving away from cooked foods is i think a bigger deal than i imagined it would be. it turns out there are opiates created by cooking food. grilled meat for instance has highly addictive toxic substances that are also found in cigarettes. 100 grams worth of grilled meat equals 800 cigarettes worth of these toxic addictive chemicals.

but this addictive property of cooked food isn't just limited to meat. it doesn't matter what kind of food it is, when you cook it, addictive chemicals that often have opiate effects, are created. here are a few other things i've learned about cooking food:

- many fats cooked at temperatures over 300 degrees turn into trans fats. different fats have different temperatures at which they go toxic.

- vegetables and fruits naturally contain enzymes that help digestion. at temperatures over 118 degrees, the enzymes disappear. (there is a restaurant in orlando called Cafe 118 for this very reason). when the enzymes disappear, the body has to make up for it by manufacturing enzymes to digest the food. this is hard on the pancreas and is stressful. i read recently that the enzymes created by the pancreas go around killing cancer cells. by diverting them to digestive activities, our ability to fight cancer is limited.

- many other vitamins and nutrients disappear in even light cooking. for instance falcarinol, a cancer fighting nutrient found in carrots, is halved when carrots are blanched.

- the pH of foods changes when foods are cooked. they become more acidic. the more acidic a food is, the harder it is on the body. one way the body adjusts by pulling calcium out of the bones to change the pH back to where it needs to be. ever notice Tums and Rolaids are made mostly of calcium? there's a good reason for that. raw foods are much more alkaline. the blood stream has a certain pH it has to maintain - it's basic survival. so the body will do everything it can to adjust to whatever dietary choices we make.

so... for all of these reasons - the pH of foods, toxic chemicals created by cooking, nutrient density, and the resulting health and wellness of eating raw - i want to move in this direction.

honestly it feels like moving toward a completely raw diet is going to be harder than going vegan was. but i am already experiencing benefits from eating the green smoothies. so... i'm going to continue experimenting in that direction.

if you want to read more, some of it is in the book i linked to above, and some of it is in the Thrive book i blogged about before. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/todays-breakfast.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/todays-breakfast.htm?opendocument&comments a note on praise Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:53:43 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-note-on-praise.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-note-on-praise.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-note-on-praise.htm "confused a lot of people in the community".

it's interesting to me that praise confuses people. just read that post again at face value, without any knowledge of anything else, and you will see what i meant.

in fact, for the rest of this post, just assume i don't know whatever it is you are thinking about, because it is highly certain that i do not in fact know what is in your mind. it turns out, lucky me, i am neither psychic nor omniscient. in particular, i don't know the gossip. i just don't care about it. at all. it's just sort of congenitally outside my radar, like a lot of other things. let my complete ignorance of basically almost everything be your guide, from here to the end of this post, should you make it that far.

what i wrote the other day was simply in praise of a friend, as a means of encouragement during some turbulent times. that's all. yeah there is a lot of controversy going around lately. but none of that stuff adds up to anything. it's weightless, from where i am standing. this is thankfully easy for me to say since i'm not in the middle of it!

my unasked-for advice to the innocent bystanders is, don't invest any energy in those barbs as they go sailing over your head. otherwise they may sink down into your unsuspecting heart. for those of you in the middle of it, apply what i said to nate to you. just pretend i said it about you, because on some level i really did. i have a great deal of respect for everyone in this community. it is often that those who work the hardest and give the most, get the most flak for their trouble. i've seen it up close, i know what i'm talking about.

when it comes to things that are made, like software or gadgets or cars, it's necessary to be analytical, it's important to be critical, and it is important to be vocal about it. critical thinking keeps us honest and healthy. the big corporate machine gets in the way of good sense. a lot of things go wrong all the time. and look, everyone gets into arguments. it's called being a human being. if there isn't any friction at all ever, then something is wrong. either everyone is lying, or nothing is going on at all, and the whole thing is lying dead on the floor. or maybe too many are towing the same line, like good, respectable, non-thinking bigots, or beaten down indentured servants. we've all got at least a bit of all of that in every one of us.

when it comes to our friends, though, it shouldn't come as any surprise when we offer praise, should it?

lately i like to thumb through Robert Bly's The Winged Energy of Delight in between programming tasks, or before i go out, or when i come back in, to keep my mind fresh and my soul feeling alive. i can fly and get grounded at the same time, reading this book. i become present to myself. it's a book of translations, done over a period of fifty years. this is a book full of the best kind of magic.

today i found myself in Sonnets to Orpheus, VII, by Rilke. i love this poem. i feel both more human and more divine after i read it. i hope no one will mind if i post it here. it is offered only as one possible window into joy.

To praise is the whole thing! A man who can praise
comes toward us like ore out of the silences
of rock. His heart, that dies, presses out
for others a wine that is fresh forever.

When the god's energy takes hold of him,
his voice never collapses in the dust.
Everything turns to vineyards, everything turns to grapes,
made ready for harvest by his powerful south.

The mold in the catacomb of the king
does not suggest that his praising is lies, nor
the fact that the gods cast shadows.

He is one of the servants who does not go away,
who still holds through the doors
of the tomb trays of shining fruit.]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/a-note-on-praise.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-note-on-praise.htm?opendocument&comments dear nathan t freeman Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:31:42 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dear-nathan-t-freeman.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dear-nathan-t-freeman.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dear-nathan-t-freeman.htm nathan t freeman,

thank you for all you do for the community. i'm frankly astounded at your participation, energy, commitment, intelligence, and good will.

i could of course write this about many, many people. but today i wanted to tell nathan that i appreciate his efforts on behalf of the community. read: his efforts on MY behalf. i'm not writing this because he's on the verge of quitting anything, or doing anything dramatic, but because i owe it to him. plain and simple.]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/dear-nathan-t-freeman.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dear-nathan-t-freeman.htm?opendocument&comments vitamin supplementation for vegans Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:17:49 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vitamin-supplementation-for-vegans.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vitamin-supplementation-for-vegans.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vitamin-supplementation-for-vegans.htm
if you get plenty of sun then you don't need vitamin D. in fact you can get too much D from too much sun! your skin makes it like crazy when you are in the sun. i live in florida and this summer i've gotten quite a bit of sun so i'm not even thinking about it at the moment.

B12 however is another story. i eat a lot of B12 fortified nutritional yeast, and a few other things like brown rice miso which i think has B12 in it. but i still take a supplement several times a week.

want to learn more about B12? check out these articles.

basically the gist of the issue is that we need B12 for a healthy nervous system. modern farming practices have destroyed the organisms in the soil that create B12. and also in modern society our food is very clean, so the B12 from the soil is often washed off. there just isn't any way around it, we have to supplement with B12. also as people age it may become harder to absorb B12, leading to shrinking brains!

once you decide you need to take B12, you have to decide what kind to take. i am taking Methyl B12 based on articles like this one:

Clinical Use of Methyl-B12 in Autism

the relevant part for me was:

Experimenting with different members of the cobalamin family, Dr. Neubrander was able to ascertain that the benefits of methylcobalamin far surpassed the cyanocobalamin and hydroxycobalmin forms primarily used for autism prior to 2002. Since every cell in the body expresses the folate/methionine cycle, defects in transmethylation can affect vital biochemical reactions at many places in intermediary metabolism.

basically what i get out of this is that the methyl form is the most effective - you get the most bang for the buck. another explanation is (quite readable) available here. i tried the cyanocobalamin form and it kept giving me a sore throat! it is actually grown or synthesized using cyanide and is not recommended for smokers! so yeah, the methyl b12 form is the one for me. i feel much better taking the methyl form (i didn't try the hydroxycobalmin form). also i had to take quite a bit more of the cyanocobalamin form to get the same result - there was a definite difference in the way i felt between the two forms.

B12 is water soluble, so there isn't any danger of taking too much, you'll just pee it right out.

i'm a layman so if you have any concerns talk to a doctor - but if you are going vegan, you will definitely want to at least get educated about this issue.]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/vitamin-supplementation-for-vegans.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vitamin-supplementation-for-vegans.htm?opendocument&comments vegan lunchbox Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:01:47 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vegan-lunchbox.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vegan-lunchbox.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vegan-lunchbox.htm
anyway it is called Vegan Lunchbox. the recipes for lentil rice balls (sorta like meat balls) and momma's sneaky tomato sauce (or is it spaghetti sauce, can't remember) are in heavy rotation at my house.

Jennifer McCann is the author and she has a really cool blog also called Vegan Lunchbox! she focuses a lot on how to make meals that kids will like (especially lunch) but the cookbook is very well rounded, lots of recipes of various kinds.

i get the feeling reading her cookbook that she has enough know-how to be one of the hosts on the food channel - if only there was enough interest in veganism! all that to say, i'm seriously impressed with her work. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/vegan-lunchbox.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vegan-lunchbox.htm?opendocument&comments vegan cookbooks Thu, 28 May 2009 12:43:57 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vegan-cookbooks.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vegan-cookbooks.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vegan-cookbooks.htm
here is what i wrote back:

this is probably the best book out there in terms of explaining nutritional basics (very cutting edge stuff actually) and has a lot of interesting recipes:

Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life

it's a lot to get your head around. start slow. what i did was start by getting rid of starches and substituting fruit and greens. if you go totally cold turkey all at once you will be hurting!

this woman, dreena burton, is obviously into the same information stream as brazier:

Vive le Vegan!: Simple, Delectable Recipes for the Everyday Vegan Family

...because the recipes look a lot like "Thrive" recipes, but are more focused on stuff that tastes good. she obviously knows what she is doing.

if you get these two books you will be leaping ahead of the curve. a lot of vegans start out trying to emulate their old diets, buying soy this and soy that to sub for butter and cream cheese and so on. this kind of eating is referred to by many now as the "junk food vegan" diet, where you have gone from processed foods to more processed foods. the mantra in The China Study is "plant based whole foods". that is what you are after. Thrive will give you the information you need to meet your protein requirements and sooo much more. it's also about stress management. you'll see. so fascinating...

dreena burton's book will give you recipes that taste good. brazier gives you good recipes too, but you can kinda tell he is after the nutrition more than he is the taste. but brazier gives you the theory, and that is vital to understanding how to do it right. and i make his recipes all the time, moreso that burton's actually. he is easy to understand and the material is fascinating. i still go back and read his book, again and again, trying to get all the principles down solid. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/vegan-cookbooks.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/vegan-cookbooks.htm?opendocument&comments understanding cholesterol Tue, 26 May 2009 14:36:17 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/understanding-cholesterol.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/understanding-cholesterol.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/understanding-cholesterol.htm
only animals make cholesterol. therefore, if you do not eat animals, you are not consuming cholesterol in your diet.

humans are animals too. we make our own cholesterol. the cholesterol our bodies make is good for us. cholesterol made by other animals is not good for us.

it's just that simple. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/understanding-cholesterol.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/understanding-cholesterol.htm?opendocument&comments the fisheye lens Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:43:16 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-fisheye-lens.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-fisheye-lens.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-fisheye-lens.htm
*backs up slightly*

see, today i was at lunch and i was thinking, why do i care so much about things all the fucking time? i mean, there is a lot of stuff i don't care about. in fact i keep discovering that i care less and less about a lot of stuff. and when that happens it is really wonderful.

but the more that happens, the more i can see that there are other things i care about in a different way. in a truly passionate way.

*backs back up to tha place he just backed up to*

see... today i was at a restaurant. i'd been sitting working on the novel (yes a few ppl have seen fragments of it, yes it really does exist, yes i am making progress, no there are no parts of it yet available for general consumption), and i'd put the macbook away and was waiting for the credit card to come back and it hit me.

the way i see the world, well, it's like i'm looking through a fish eye lens. all the time.

the stuff that seems important to me seems, well IMPORTANT.

see what i mean? i just did it. right there. that's the fish eye lens. in the moment i'm looking at whatever it is, it LOOKS BIGGER than it does when i'm not looking at it. i mean if it looked that big to everyone then there wouldn't be any reason to write about the fish eye lens, because everyone would be looking through the same one. this would also mean that the entire world would be a lot more hysterical. so it's really a blessing that only certain people are afflicted with the fish eye lens way of seeing.

at first i thought, oh, it's the artistically minded people who see with the fish eye lens. maybe i am still thinking like that. i'm not totally sure i've convinced myself. maybe it's creative people. or people who think in creative ways.

these people spend all their time at the borders, LOOKING out for what is coming next. or maybe they are in a laboratory of sorts, PEERING into a microscope in the process of discovery.

when you see something in the fish eye lens, sometimes what happens next is you tell someone about it. it might be the sort of thing where you are accosting random passers by. you become the guy with the sandwich board on, warning everyone about armageddon or imminent alien invasion or... whatever. or, it could be the kind of thing where you go and talk to people you think could actually do something about what you just discovered. people with money or power or influence in one way or another. you might get a little hysterical along the way.

hysterical is the wrong word, actually. but i imagine that is what it looks like to anyone who has never SEEN through the fish eye lens.

this lens. it is a gift that a person is afflicted with. that is the way of gifts. it's always a blessing and a curse at the same time.

what do you do when you've been given a gift like that? why, you juggle flaming bowling pins in public, of course. or toss molatov cocktails at your friends. or call it the way you see it. it's all good.

the other thing you might do when you are in a moment in which you SEE, is you might buckle down and work, quietly, or not so quietly as the case may be, on an idea. like for instance you might spend five years working on a novel, and have, oh, four and a half chapters to show for it.

(hey, its better than no chapters.)

you might write a bunch of blog posts on going vegan. (idiot! idiot! *smacks forehead with palm repeatedly*) you might even try and interrupt the happy arc of the yellow bubble with your shining wit, insight and passion.

a lot of stuff can happen. and it's all of it a pain in the ass.

we are pretty much in the grip of a cosmic joke. better to just laugh about it. go home, eat some good food. have some fun. do something naughty. or nice. or whatever works for you. cuz let's face it. the fish eye lens will be back tomorrow. it never gets tired. it never gives up. and we'd die without it. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/the-fisheye-lens.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-fisheye-lens.htm?opendocument&comments a simple breakfast idea Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:04:51 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-simple-breakfast-idea.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-simple-breakfast-idea.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-simple-breakfast-idea.htm
in the U.S. our food system and our restaurants and even the nutritional education at the grade school level is organized around meat and dairy marketing and consumption. when the entire culture is organized that way, and you've been eating that way your whole life, and someone says to you, no, see we did all this really great science that proves a plant based diet is waaaay healthier for you... well what are you supposed to DO about it? it can be overwhelming.

so here is one thing i do almost every morning that is easy and fast. i make some Oatmeal ("porridge" to the Irish among us ;)

we use Bob's Red Mill Organic Steel Cut Oats, takes about ten minutes.

i toss a bunch of stuff into the bowl before adding the oatmeal, like blueberries or whatever fruit is around (grapes or strawberries etc), and almonds, cashews, salba (aka white chia) seeds, and pumpkin seeds. you get the idea - whatever you like in there. honestly i can't eat oatmeal without some fruit in it. adding the nuts makes it really yummy and adds protein and plant based fat too. and because this is a vegan meal there is zero cholesterol.

i ladle a layer of oats over the fruit and nuts. then i put down a layer of nutritional yeast (1 to 2 tablespoons). then i add another layer of oats, and mix it up. sometimes i dump it into a thermos cup and take it to work or if i have time i eat it right there in the kitchen.

why the nutritional yeast? well it boils down to vitamin b12. this vitamin is manufactured by small organisms in the soil. our soil has been decimated by years of pesticides and fertilizers, so many of the organisms are no longer present. also, we clean our veggies and fruits very well, and the dirt is pretty much gone by the time it makes it to our plates. so, ironically, the b12 isn't there. for vegans it's imporant to add nutritional yeast (fortified with b12) or some kind of b12 supplement. besides its really good for you. it's high in protein and i like the flavor. i put it on my spagetti sauce last night and it was awesome.

it's a great way to start the day. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/a-simple-breakfast-idea.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-simple-breakfast-idea.htm?opendocument&comments beginnings and ends Mon, 9 Mar 2009 12:57:48 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/beginnings-and-ends.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/beginnings-and-ends.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/beginnings-and-ends.htm
there are beginnings, joyfully received.

and there are ends which are, let's face it, despised, but nevertheless embraced.

if you aren't in a good place to have a good cry, don't click the second link. but do go back when you can, it's a lovely piece of writing. really damned lovely. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/beginnings-and-ends.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/beginnings-and-ends.htm?opendocument&comments containers Wed, 4 Mar 2009 13:04:26 -0400 http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/containers.htm jonvon http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/containers.htm?opendocument&comments http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/containers.htm
the idea is, raw ideas need a form in which to operate in the real world. this form or "container" provides a structure for those ideas or energies or practices to operate within safely.

for instance i have a friend who went to a conference a long time ago, back in the 1970's. they were talking about archetypes. it was held at an ivy league school, don't remember which one now, and robert bly was there, and i think maybe some jungian scholars or mythologists or... anyway, some people like that.

my friend lived a few hours away, but it took him four days to get home. he had a breakdown. the discussion of those archetypes just blew his mind apart.

he was susceptible to this because, one, he is incredibly sensitive and a gifted mystic. and two, there was no container.

what looked like a mental breakdown to the health professionals he worked with was likely something very different. but what could they do but give him some drugs to calm him down? there aren't many john wier perry's in the world - practitioners who see a larger picture than say, the one pharmaceutical companies are interested in.

my friend made a comment about his breakdown. he said that for a long time he was angry that they didn't have a proper container for the material they were discussing at the conference. i didn't ask him what that container should have been. i think this is one of the jobs that stories do in human cultures all across the planet. they contain symbols. those guys were discussing the raw data, as though they'd pulled uranium out of a nuclear furnace and were passing it around for inspection. my friend was sensitive to those energies, moreso than anyone else in the building.

there are a lot of examples of containers, or forms. everywhere we look there are containers. a temple or a church is a container. and it is also metaphorical of a different kind of container - the container of the human body - that holds sacred energies inside it.

a poem is another container. i had a dream a few years ago and recently i decided to turn it into a poem. when i did that, i created a container around it. suddenly this dream had the ability to radiate power to those who beheld it. before that, it was "just another crazy dream" story. the whole thing changed when i put it in the proper container for the energies it held within it.

i don't want to get too far afield here. believe it or not what i really want to talk about is this debate i keep hearing snippets and soundbites about regarding the implosion of wall street.

i think what we had from the Great Depression onward were containers that held the financial institutions inside certain boundaries for their own good. for instance banks were not allowed to make insurance policies, and insurance companies were not allowed to act like banks.

then we had a lot of talk about how the government should get out of the way of business. we had a lot of deregulation. the bill that was signed by clinton dissolving the line between insurance companies and banks brought down an important wall in the temple of finance. the guys on wall street, the super genius math wizards, so sensitive to the energies that were being unleashed, went crazy. all kinds of dangerous financial packages were created and traded among the banks. there are billions of dollars worth of assets that remain clouded behind mysterious facades, and it may be impossible to suss them all out. are they worth anything? the big banks/insurance companies such as the remains of citigroup are trying to figure it out.

this is, i am sure, just one example of where the debate on deregulation went astray. conservatives should be about the business of constructing proper containers, and then maintaining those boundaries, across time, across generations. i hope this is where things are going. i'm not sure enough people get it yet.

conservatives, or conservative minded people, should not be saying, like a dull mantra, over and over again, that regulation and big government is bad bad bad. i hope the debate will move to higher ground. i hope we can start looking at what is proper to do in business and what is not. the bread and butter local community banks are not suffering like those on wall street are. we ought to be looking to them for leadership. ]]> http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/containers.htm http://www.jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/containers.htm?opendocument&comments