A cool hypnagogic experience

When I'm ready to fall asleep and I allow myself to fall asleep but there is some stimulus which prevents me from falling asleep I sometimes have interesting hypnagogic experiences. psychill/psybient music seems to work best for this.

Last night I was listening to In Search of a Meaningful Moment by Shulman. I chose that album because I vividly remember listening to it when I was with a friend I had argued with earlier that day, and I was wondering if listening to it would lead to any useful insights regarding the argument. Suddenly I found myself being/creating a physical structure. It was the structure people construct to further their own aims/agendas in social situations. I was experiencing this as a physical structure existing in some other space. Then I heard some talk about shamanism, dreams and boundaries between states. I was amazed by how it seemed relevant to my experience, perhaps describing the nature of my experience, and then I woke up refreshed.

I just searched through a few tracks and found it after 5:00 in A Magnificent Void. Then I searched Google and found that the quote is from the movie Waking Life. How appropriate!

[ copied from my last.fm journal ]

Canada now has a National Do Not Call List

Canada finally has a way to stop telemarketing calls. You can add your number to the National Do Not Call List. Then, after 31 days, if a telemarketer does call the CRTC may impose a penalty of up to $1,500 per violation for individuals and up to $15,000 per violation for corporations.

Certain organizations such as charities and political parties are exempt from the National Do Not Call List. If you want to stop those calls, there is another service called iOptOut. It's not run by the government but it seems legit.

The Veil quotes are from a poem by Khalil Gibran

I finally found the source of quotes in The Veil by Children of the Bong. It's the poem The Farewell XXVII by Khalil Gibran.

The Olympics suck!

Before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing I read about various things being done for the sponsors and I was horrified. For example, the athletes couldn't bring their own food and beverages into the Olympic Village. To make things even worse, the sponsors were McDonald's and Coca-Cola, who offer so much unhealthy food and beverages. It all seems so out of touch with ideas that are supposedly associated with the Olympics.

It seems that the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver will be just as bad if not worse. They've already trademarked lines from the Canadian National Anthem and passed a law protecting various phrases which cannot be trademarked, such as 2010 along with winter. Oh, and guess what: Coke and McDonald's are sponsors again.

Ideally this corporate pageant needs to end, and a new organization needs to take over. I'm not counting on it though.

The bloat of Rockbox

I really like Rockbox (an alternative open source firmware for some portable media players). It's usually much better than the original firmware. However, it sure is getting bloated. The recently released version 3.0 only leaves 1.12 MB of buffer* when running in RAM on my Archos V2 Jukebox Recorder. The bloat might not matter on other platforms with more memory (such as the Video iPod, which has 32 or 64 megs) but it has gotten to the point where it might be best to run an old version on platforms with less memory, such as the Archos devices which only come with 2 megs. I'll continue running my old version from November 2007 which I stripped down and put into ROM, resulting in 1.735 MB of buffer.

* The buffer is filled with MP3 data from the hard drive. Then the hard drive is spun down and data in the buffer is played. When little remains in the buffer, the hard drive spins up again to refill the buffer. If less buffer space is available, the hard drive needs to spin up more often to refill the buffer, resulting more power usage and more wear and tear on the hard drive.

I saw a green flash today!

I was at Pt. Pelee and the sun was setting over Lake Erie. The water was calm nearby, though there were waves further out from a wind from the East. The sun was very red and quite bright. The sky was clear and there were some typical bands of colour parallel to the horizon. I wasn't paying very much attention to the sunset because it wasn't exceptionally nice and the sun was bright.

When only a little bit of the top of the sun was visible, I decided to watch the sun until it disappeared. I was expecting it stay red and just disappear behind the horizon. However, as the remaining visible sun shrank to a point, it became whiter. It also seemed to get brighter, but I'm not certain about this. Then I remembered about green flashes. Right after becoming white, the sun started turning green. It reached a very pure green colour and it seemed quite bright. It gave me chills; I realized "This is it, I'm actually seeing a rare green flash!" After reaching pure green the spot shrank and faded and disappeared. It all happened very quickly, maybe within two seconds. It didn't feel too short though.

I'm so glad I saw that.

I tried out Delicious again

Social bookmarking theoretically seems like a good idea. In 2006 I tried out del.icou.us (now called Delicious) and I found it made bookmarking more work and didn't offer any significant benefits. I tried it again today and I came to the same conclusion. The main problem is that tags don't seem to be worthwhile for bookmarks, and the other notable problem is that it's less convenient to use than the Firefox bookmarks functionality.

Pt. Pelee tip photos in chronological order (2003-2008)

Point Pelee is a peninsula extending into Lake Erie. It is the southernmost part of Canada's mainland, just crossing the 42nd parallel. (It is not the southernmost point of Canada however; that is Middle Island, and Pelee Island is also further south than Pt. Pelee.) It is the site of Point Pelee National Park, which features marsh and Carolinian forest habitats and a major migration route.

The tip of Pt. Pelee is an interesting place. The shifting sands and changing weather conditions mean that it's constantly changing. Here are some photos I took there, in chronological order.

2003


2004










2005


2006

2007






2008