ContentedLife

I’ve become quite a fan of this sound device since I got it about a year ago.

For its price, the sound quality is excellent. It’s fairly packed with features, has a good range of options for input and output connectivity, plus MIDI. And it works flawlessly, out of the box, with Linux — no special setup or drivers required, ALSA knows what it is and how to deal with it in any mode.

The same is true of Mac OS, but only in the basic mode which restricts you to 16-bit 44.1kHz I/O – a driver is required for Advance mode to get up to 24-bit 96kHz support (either in, or out – we’ll come to this under Limitations). This driver can be downloaded free from the Edirol website, and seems to work fine on my new unibody Macbook Pro with OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, though I haven’t used it extensively on there yet.

I guess it probably works in Windows too, but I wouldn’t know anything about that 🙂

The sound quality (for what I’ve used it for anyway) is very good. It’s stacked with features, and quite versatile… within certain limits.

First we’ll take a quick look at the features packed into this gadget, which is information you could probably find elsewhere but I include for ease of reference, and after that we’ll get to discussing those limitations in more detail.

(more…)

One of my favourite places in the whole world: Durdle Door, on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset.

Well actually, the Door itself I can take or leave, although I quite liked being able to catch sunset through it thanks to the fact that I was there on a very spring-like day in January. You can’t get this angle later in the year.

But I love what surrounds the Door, and the walk to it and past it from Lulworth Cove (I never head towards the Cove…)

I even enjoy the drive to get there, at least the last 20 minutes of it when I come off the main roads and snake up a single-track road to the viewpoint overlooking Tyneham and Kimmeridge, where I stop for 5 minutes to enjoy the view and watch the clouds doing a dance that I have never seen them do anywhere else, as the sea breeze rising over the Purbecks pushes them away. All the way down here the sky could have been grey and overcast and drizzly and unpromising, but here is where the clouds are turned back, they shall not pass, and the sun shines on the Lulworth ranges. Then I continue along the range road to Lulworth, and realise that once again I don’t have enough change for the car park…

Climbing the hill above the main car park, heading away from the Cove, provides a measure of whether I’m less fit or more fit than on my previous visit (this time, less fit. Oops.). Detour to visit the hidden hill, with its portal to another dimension, to stand atop it and face the full fetch of the Atlantic wind. The perfect diffraction patterns of the bay to the east of the Door, flashing with a million reflected suns. The sound of the sea just to the west of here, in one particular spot where it sends waves of almost orgasmic energy through my body. The cliffs and rock formations along the beach, so striking it’s enough to spark an interest in geology in someone whose idea of hell, once upon a time, was to be dragged around a museum looking at dusty display cases full of rocks. “They’re just rocks”, I thought, but of course now they hold the secrets of the Earth’s past, and the history of life itself. Rocks are beginning to come to life for me, and this place is the catalyst.

Butter Rock marks the farthest west you can walk along the beach. From certain angles it reminds me of an Easter Island statue, except that it faces the beach rather than out to sea as they do. It seems to be the quiet guardian of this, the quieter end of the beach. Tourists at the Door end can be raucous and rowdy, but the guardian keeps this space for those of a more meditative persuasion. Few come here, and those that do talk in hushed tones or keep a contemplative silence. Even dogs are calmer here.

This is the only place to which I return regularly, and know I will continue to do so. Normally I like to explore new places, rather than revisiting old ones. But this place is special. It’s where I plug in to the grid, recharge with energy from all the four elements: earth beneath my feet and in magnificent display, water as the sound of the sea, air as the breeze that almost knocks me over as I stand atop the hidden hill, soaking up its power, refining my balance, and fire from the sun that has shone on me on every visit so far.

This is my power place.

How about you? Where do you keep returning to, not due to lack of ideas for alternatives, but because you love it so much, because it works for you?

Police are calling for flag burning to be made illegal. Why? Allegedly because “Britain [has] come to be seen at home and abroad as soft on extremist demonstrators.” (my emphasis).

Oh really? That’s why we’ve just had a successful prosecution of a demonstrator for inciting racial hatred. If demonstrators really are extremist, they can be prosecuted under existing laws.

This government has introduced 3000 new criminal offences in 9 years. Despite early release of prisoners, the prisons are full already (it doesn’t take a genius to work out that’s going to happen, but seems to have taken the govt completely by surprise!), and yet the police continue to ask for more and crazier laws. Why? Really, why? Could it be that in order to create a successful totalitarian/police state, anyone who refuses to be cowed by the climate of fear created by the State, anyone who does not buy into the whole War on Terror story, must be kept in line by other means?

This should come as no great surprise; we already lost the rights of assembly and peaceful protest some years ago on the back of the Mayday anti-capitalist shenanigans. Which kinda proves the point that if you fight fire with fire, a lot of people are going to get burned. All those “anarchists” smashing up McDonalds managed to achieve was to hand over a load more power to the State. Nice work.

The greatest threat to our freedom and way of life in this country is for stupid laws to be passed which take it away. The idiots calling for and creating these laws insist that they are trying to safeguard our freedom, but it is they, not terrorists, who are systematically destroying it. We need to work against such stupidity, but it should be done carefully, with cunning rather than blind rage. They are big, we are small; we cannot fight them head on, but we can (quite clearly) outsmart them.

“Do you believe in God?” she asked. The trouble is, “God” is such a loaded word/concept. So is “believe”.

My current quest is for experience. Belief is, by definition, outside experience: it’s an attempt to explain experience — at best your own, at worst someone else’s — to cage it and control it. Having been subsumed by beliefs of one kind or another for so long, for now I’m quite content to avoid them wherever possible. So what I’m left with is a kind of day-to-day “this is how things seem to me to be”.
Now that I’m over the existential angst that is probably an inevitable initial reaction to a pretty steep drop from absolute certainty to near-absolute uncertainty about everything I held as important, it works for me and I don’t feel any burning desire to “know” more.

Instead, I notice the way that certain ideas resonate with me, as if I hear the ringing of some crystal of “truth” that they contain, “truth” in quotes because it is a truth for me, for now, rather than for everyone for all time. Today, for instance, alchemy; one of my keywords on a certain social connection website. Someone asked me why it was there, so I explained that it was in the sense of self-development rather than turning base metals to gold, but this got me asking myself why I’d put it there, and realising that the key component of alchemical transformation is fire, and it burns. There’s nothing like going through hell to achieve enlightenment. Perhaps indeed it’s the only way. Death and rebirth. Fear is conquered after the first Bad Trip. And so on. Anyway, then she mentions Crowley and that’s synchronistic with the part of the Illuminatus! trilogy I’ve just got to on 3rd reading, the black mass, and all the while I was reading it I was observing my own reaction to it, the fear and disgust which can only be a residue of Christian upbringing since I have no direct experience of such rites. Do I want to? Not especially, but neither do I want something from my past to continue to hold such power over my present. It maintains, and is maintained by, a lack of belief in my own power, my own ability to experience all manifestations of life without being possessed by any one of them.

I poured a glass of wine and then returned to the slightly over-ambitious cooking project underway (sesame-crusted marlin steak with steamed broccoli and cauli and red leicester cheese sauce — only over-ambitious because it involved doing everything all at once (including washing up when I discovered I didn’t have basic implements like saucepans and wooden spoons), and because I’ve never before cooked (or eaten) marlin (bought on impulse with no clue what it would be like), nor made cheese sauce. But it was fine. Actually it was lovely. And for someone who is addicted to complex carbs, a surprising lack of craving for starchy accompaniment.)

So, after a digression of a few minutes, with many sub-digressions, not unlike the above parentheses, I returned to my wine to find a small fly floating in it. A tad larger than your common or garden wine-seeking black fruit fly, and stripey, but presumably a drosophila of some kind. The alcoholic kind, it seemed.

I fished it out (no pun intended, but by now you’ll have forgotten that I was cooking fish, or at least I had, so even if I’d thought of the phrase at the time, I wouldn’t have been aware of the pun; the pun (which, please be assured, was really not intended) arises only now with hindsight and the benefit of reading back through what one has written and editing or augmenting or clarifying or deleting it, which is a capability I would very much like to have with the spoken word also (except that no-one would then be able to follow what I was saying due to my propensity to insert vast parentheses (and sub-parentheses) in medias res (not to mention gratuitous Latin, but let’s not mention that lest we lose our way)), and (after checking, re-checking, and still not being entirely sure that I’d closed the same number of parentheses that I’d opened) I’d have to recap. QED.)… Where was I? Ah yes. I gently lifted the fly from my wine. It began to move drunkenly on my finger. Not dead then. Now, some people would have killed the thing there and then for the heinous crime of wine invasion, but I’m a softie so I deposited it gently out of harm’s way, took another gulp of what was still a reasonably subtle, pleasant and drinkable Californian chardonnay (makes a change, especially for Gallo), and started to serve my dinner.

After dinner I did a few more bits of washing up, and again returned to my wine to find the same bloody fly in it once again. (Ok, I can’t say for absolutely sure that it was the same fly, as although I’m not a speciesist, they probably do all look the same to me, though I’m sure they’re all really nice and I don’t believe any of the stereotypes etc, it’s just that most of my friends are humans rather than fruit flies, but don’t get me wrong I have nothing against fruit flies as long as they keep themselves to themselves and don’t take our jobs, and sure I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one but it’s not a speciesist thing, I just think we should stick to our own kind…). Anyway, blatantly it was the same one, back for more. Observing more closely this time, I saw it was not floating but swimming, not drowning but waving, lazily, probably quite happy there.

There was a point to this story, but it has been bracketed away. I got so carried away interjecting with gay abandon (absolutely nothing intended whatsoever) that the paultry substance of this tale has been utterly swamped by the deliberately meandering style. Let that be a lesson to you. If a fly’s been swimming in your wine, don’t drink it afterwards. There must be strange stuff in their wee.

I don’t have many ambitions. In fact I try to leave the Future well alone these days, since it tends to have no basis in reality.

But there is one thing that I want to do — on such a deep level that I know with almost absolute certainty (as much as anything can be certain, and considerably more certain than the day-to-day things that most people take as certainties without question) that I will do it, somewhen. I know this, or strongly suspect that I know this, because I have no idea WHY I want to do it, or HOW I’m going to do it… and I feel a certain amount of fear about it. But it is just there, hovering, glittering in the hyperspace of my backburner consciousness, like how my innocent and what-might-now-be-called-Aspy hyper-literal imagination used to interpret the phrase “since you were just a twinkle in your father’s eye”.

I will go to Burning Man.

I probably will not go to Burning Man until I can chill out a bit about it, so to speak. Having this level of certainty tends to provoke expectations of epiphany. I need to reach the point of knowing, on that same deep level, that (a) life’s purpose is revealed in every moment, and (b) life’s purpose is to wake up enough to see what is being revealed in every moment and receive it. One of the appeals of BM in contrast to other festivals, which always seem like temporary opt-outs from the real world and I have adjustment difficulties at either end of them, is that it’s a completely blank canvas. It’s not a gig, it’s not a festival, it’s just a gathering in the desert, and nothing is there except what you bring. I feel that may make it easier to bring home and integrate whatever I experience, because everything was done by ordinary people, rather than a faceless organisation. And because I will be determined to contribute, and to feel like a contributor rather than a spectator. To be through doing, not viewing. To be consciousness moving matter, instead of a disembodied lost soul.

I have a lot of work to do.