Martian Intuition - Personal

on Optical optimism

2009-07-29T03:18:00Z

Swirling thoughts in a bright, radiant pool,
how do I pick from you the path to ride?
The commitment to follow taken to seriously,
reluctance replaces recreation.

So how is the vast emptiness bridged on
beams of light? Optical optimism. Imagination.
Creation forms in emptiness.
Subtle gifts spring from stillness.

on Much Needed Change

2008-10-19T05:45:00Z

Obama '08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

What kind of presidential candidate evokes such vibrant artistry? (and from a yogi, no less.)

The kind for which I will vote.

on Violet Resonance & Creativity

2008-06-01T21:16:00Z

This morning, I dreamed vibrant purple light washing down through my aura.

The memory is simply that: an indigo-violet crystalline veil expanding around me. Now, I'm riding those waves into the midday, as they reverberate through conscious thought, inflecting royal harmony into ideas & actions.

Any satvic inspiration, spark, seed can only become manifest with the rajasic fire of action. So the idea to create becomes the action of creation, and eventually the tamasic form created. (Satva, rajas & tamas are the gunas.)

The fountain of creation ever-flows. Each detachment, emptiness, really avails one to new opportunity. Leaps happen when we trust & let go; the quantum leap a sub-atomic example of our universe's proclivity for such non-deterministic behaviors.

In yoga & meditation, we practice release, opening to that from which we emerge. Chant & prayer are tools to entrain the mind when it's too noisy to just be still. As we build the muscle of mental release, the fabric of ourselves changes; a creature of grace & openness, where prosperity & abundance replace fear & longing.

So, the memory of that purple dream echoes, infusing my consciousness with divine appreciation. I'm lucky a pinch of indigo works so well with orange.

to the West, to San Francisco

2007-12-20T21:39:00Z

On December 9th, after over twelve-years living in Austin, ten of them working as a pro web developer, I accepted a web dev position in San Francisco with Scout Labs. January 7th I start the job: front-end Ruby on Rails web development.

The company's product, the Scout, already received a revealing write-up by TechCrunch. The possibilities of the Scout are just beginning, and I'm ecstatic to become part of the team building this phenomenally useful tool.

Over the past three days, I visited the city to hunt for an apartment, when ideally I would be wrapping up my life in Austin. With little time to ponder the possibilities, much less explore and find vacancies in the neighborhoods of SF, I homed-in on the SOMA/South Beach area. SOMA gives me walking proximity to the new office, the Embarcadero, Whole Foods, & many public transit possibilities (Caltrain & Muni blocks away; BART Powell Station a 15-minute walk away). My beloved bicycle, already my primary transit in Austin, now becomes my only personal vehicle.

Thanks to a reference from a friend, I found an ideal one-bedroom with a view & quickly decided to take it.

Now here I am, flying back to Texas for two short weeks of project-wrapping, car-selling, move-out-prepping, traveling to Dallas for family Christmas, & saying "see ya later" to many loved friends & beautiful connections.

California, here I come!

Polite & Beautiful Spam

2007-11-06T21:28:00Z

Googling revealed words originally by Bette Davis, Richard Nixon, & Aldous Huxley.

What Is: Gödel, Escher, Bach

2006-07-12T05:24:00Z

In what 750-page tome do you get fugal themes of formal systems, Tortoise & Mr. Crab, canons of dialog, artificial intelligence, genetics, hardwired behaviors of a wasp, consciousness, records that break record players, & etchings of strange loops?

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

The obvious: a wandering, contrapuntal, conceptual interleaving of the works of mathematician Kurt Gödel, composer J.S. Bach, & artist M.C. Escher.

So, how does a man describe a book that's taken four-years to read? The beauty of the writing is the opened & changed mind of the reader. Questions, anyone?

Formal Systems

Learn TNT, the formal typographic numbering system with the power to blow itself up.

"Some programmers think Ruby is wrong, it's bad, because the programmer can blow it up," PragDave quipped during his talk at the Austin on Rails meeting.

Those high-school geometry axioms & proofs are actually meta-level statements about the system & instances of the system. You might have been taught meta-programming without realizing it.

Meta-Programming

What is data? What is executable code? This border line is a manifestation of early computer systems, where, by mechanical design, data was handled by code.

Now that we have highly abstracted, dynamic languages, such as Ruby:

What happens when the high-level language is powerful enough to reflect on & redefine itself? How do solutions change when the solution-domain expands to include introspection, extension & adaptation of pre-existing elements & structures?

Welcome to the next level:
The Paradigm of Organic Programming
and
The Corollary Paradigm of Whimsical Gem-hued Language Guides.

Recursive Themes

So what happens when you reflect, iterate & transform symbols? Patterns. Iterating structures. Recursive themes.

These are the fundamental building blocks of organisms. There is only structure upon structure upon structure upon structure, ad infinitum. At what point to these reverberant structures become conscious? When does discernment and free will become apparent?

Genetics

Late in G.E.B., we read an illustrative discussion of genetics. Those tangled networks of amino acids act the role of data, program, and factory. Deep cellular mechanisms manufacture proteins with tertiary structure of unexplainable complexity. Higher-level themes emerge from, build & support their ancestral building blocks.

Perhaps the most pervasive concept begins to crystalize:
The Strange Loop

Glossing the Details, Confusing the Reader

Our minds are build to perceive solid, so that we can survive, but the universe is really very very strange, not so solid.

Everything is so complex, we live in a constant state of discernment. Except for yoga. That's when you practice stepping out to the meta, into the infinity beyond senses.

Externals

G.E.B. @ Wikipedia
G.E.B. @ Google Book
G.E.B. @ Book People

New Motorcycle Obsession

2006-01-28T22:05:00Z

Most of the conscious energy that I have remaining from programming Ruby on Rails & general life-n-love, I've been pouring into my new obsession: a motorcycle (a 2006 Suzuki SV650S, to be exact.)

The original (and still prevalent) intention of this new acquisition is energy efficiency. I've received reports that this bike gets around 57-MPG highway and 47-MPG city. Not so bad for an almost 90-horsepower, twin-cylinder, fuel-injected two-wheeler! We'll see the results from my real-world usage.

This is my first motorcycle. My only other riding experience was two-weeks ago, taking the MSF-certifed "RiderCourse," motorcycle training & safety course here in Austin. (Jon is a great teacher... highly recommended!)

Being my first motorcycle ever, I dropped it during a practice U-turn on a narrow street, a very low speed high-side to the right. A stupid newbie accident, it actually scraped & cracked the beautiful front fairing. Fortunately no real damage, accept to my ego ;) Thank god I'm in this for the economy, and not the tough motorcycle-man image!

After three evenings of quiet-street riding in my South Austin neighborhood, this Saturday afternoon I rode out into the traffic-laiden streets of downtown Austin for the first time.

All went beautifully, and I am one step closer to selling my not-so-efficient SUV.

Re: Why Is Mars Orange?

2005-11-11T22:19:00Z

I guess I didn't really answer the question before:

Orange resonates inside of my brain.
A resident buzz, warm & blissful, fuzzilicious, a multi-timbrel hue,
just a pinch of ultraviolet makes it sing.

Orange represents a mode of my synapses' frequencies,
vibrations within the cortex, increasing flow of energy.

The color orange has a secret, one day I may divulge,
if only words can paint a hue as vivid for you.

Why Is Mars Orange?

2005-11-08T21:46:00Z

...asked an anonymous observer through my personal window of logged HTTP referrers, here at marsorange.com.

Orange is:

the second chakra, Swadhisthana, corresponding to the element Water and is traditionally associated with the sexual impulses and sexual energy
easily mistaken for green by a quarter of human males (a.k.a. color blind)
a color of vurt feather which Jeff Noon neglects to mention. ha!
the warmest, most fuzzilicous of all hues

A Live Worm in My Salmon

2005-10-26T23:18:00Z

I usually to eat fish less than twice a week (it is the only type of flesh I consume at all) and tend to be picky about the source & species of the fish. Too much bad-business & ecological harm is masked by the consumer-driven/petroleum-sustained market, including: carcinogenic farm-raised salmon, mercury poisoning in big fish & general overfishing.

For lunch today, at one of my favorite local restaurants, I decided to enjoy a special dish: a steak of fresh wild Alaskan coho salmon.

The delicate flavor of this particularly fish, the creamy texture of the slightly-seared flesh melting on my palette & the light citrus high-note of the glaze, all came together to produce one of the most pleasurable salmon experiences in recent memory.

That was until midway through the luscious, tender cut, I found a small, transparent-white worm wriggling around in the flesh! Had I eaten one already? I immediately took my plate into the kitchen and showed the head chef my discovery.

He quickly apologized and explained that even if I'd eaten any of them, I would probably be fine. Fortunately, this does seem to be the case:

Most of these parasites cannot adapt to human hosts; quite frequently, if an infected fish is eaten, the parasites are simply digested with no ill effects.

Anyway, for now fish is off my list; I may still occasionally indulge but with even greater caution.

If you eat fish regularly, I highly recommend referring to a resource such as Best & Worst Seafood Choices or The Fish List to guide your choices.

Update: it's been eighteen-hours since the incident, and I have experienced no ill effects!

Update #2: the head chef of the undisclosed restaurant let me know that he notified his supplier, and they refunded his money for the salmon, and he promptly through it all in the trash.

Frio River @ Garner

2005-09-17T14:36:00Z

Mars + Kim commune with the damselflies
at the Frio River camping in Garner.

Damselflies like this young thing, Argia sedula (not a rare one),
danced with us in the river all day & night.

All is full of love.

In The Wake of Hurricane Katrina

2005-09-02T02:09:00Z

The Interdictor blogs from a high-rise in New Orleans that is home to a server colocation facility with a still kickin' 700KW diesel generator and buried fiber optic connection to the internet.

Katrina Info Map is a growing (practically out-of-control) Google Map with markers added by anonymous internet users with information about conditions in the damage area.

Current NOAA satellite images of the area are available. Bridge & roadway destruction and flooding of neighborhoods are apparent in many images. (Image orientation makes navigation a bit challenging; this information was quickly deployed to the public.)

Craigslist Katrina Survivor Resources provides People Lost & Found, Temporary Housing & Volunteer listings.

To Happiness!

2005-05-19T21:39:00Z

A photo of my sister's first dance with her husband.

Peace + Love + Happiness to Natalie & Ken!

A Shot in The Light

2005-05-14T17:20:00Z

The glow of connection.

Sparks of energy swirling, lighting every corner of my body.

Those moments echo with warmth & purity.

Ruby Studded Days

2004-12-31T17:44:00Z

Between learning probably the most advanced web application framework and an upcoming project to develop a custom email server filter module, both in Ruby, a 10-year-old object-based scripting language born in Japan, I am one busy coding monkey.

At this point, I am convinced that Ruby is not a programming language in the traditional sense. Ruby is expressive codespeak. The most challenging aspect of learning it, is unlearning the convoluted tricks that the utilitarian languages of my last 10-years tattooed into my brain.

This shift of thinking is akin to a shift I experienced around 1990 from line-number-based BASIC programming [on my family's TI-994a!], to modular HyperTalk/Pascal/VBScript/PHP.

Mars now waxes nostalgic to the late nights he spent in high school whipping up HyperCard stacks on his sister's Macintosh Classic II. Mars dearly thanks Natalie for having that little toaster at home where he could use it!