This morning before I did anything else, I went for a brief walk around the block even though it was raining out and I couldn't find my umbrella because it was something I planned last night. It occured to me to be a good idea a week ago, and then Philip Li who gave the Qi Gong workshop gave it as a suggestion to us, so I figured it was meant to be. It felt really nice. I'd like to make this a part of my daily routine.
This morning, I managed to wake up early and go to a Qi Gong workshop hosted by LAMAS Qi Gong Canada that started at 8:30am. I had been looking forward to another free session with Philip Lai after experiencing his teachings at the Ottawa Writers Festival on Earth Day. His instruction is very charismatic, and he's more interested in spreading the teachings than making money, which I really appreciate.
I like Qi Gong because the moves are very simple and this allows me to more easily focus on the breath. I experience the flow of chi much more with this than in Tai Chi, which I have done just a bit of from a book and by a friend's instruction. Memorizing the moves in Tai Chi is quite challenging for me, and my mind gets caught up in this struggle.
LAMAS Qi Gong is hosting a 2 day intensive workshop that I would like to attend, but right now I'm not working enough to have money for much more than my basic expenses. I told Master Lai this, and he told me to call a week before the workshop starts for the possibility of a reduced rate. I thought this was pretty generous considering that the workshop, a total of 15 hours, was only $200 to begin with.
I thought of this one while cleaning, in a similar vein to grooks :
If you make a boo-boo
Remember, love what you doo-doo,
Because one thing that nurtures growth is....
POO-POO
Yesterday I attended the Spring Action Juggling Club for the very first time. There were 4 olympic trampolines ocupying one half of the gym, and another half-gym for the jugglers. I was quite pleased to come across the opportunity when talking to some jugglers I met at the Earth Day rally. There I met the experienced performance duo The Cowguys among other great jugglers. There were 4 unicyclists there, and one even rode a Giraffe Unicycle. I love being around people who are much better than I at something I aspire to excel in. I left the space feeling very excited.
I just made a daunting comitment: I signed up to be a presenter at Ottawa DemoCamp . I will be showing off my pLAySVG libraries and their resulting artistic generations there. I would like to thank my excellent room mate Mark Tovey for the tip and the encouragement to go present. Well, now I have some great motivation to make my code more presentable. Ikes, I have no user documentation for it ! Well, at least my code is somewhat documented ...
Today I'm going to a meeting that I called to discuss the possibility of a block party in my area of town (I live north of Preston at Sommerset). If you or anyone you know is interested in getting involved in such an event, please contact me.
I've only attended one block party before, and I really liked the atmosphere. We just moved into this area in September, and already we have a sense of neighbourlyness that I would really like to encourage. My vision for a block party includes
Happy Earth Day everyone ! My plans for today consist of going to the Earth Day Rally , possibly going to the talk at the writers festival talk Empowering Youth To Change The World afterwards. As well, in the evening there is a screening of the movie You Never Bike Alone about Critical Mass which I will likely attend. It can be nice to live in such a happening city.... but it's still a concrete jungle...
I sure wish that my university taught me something about Free Software development. In fact, I wish there was a whole university dedicated to advancing the Free exchange of software and media. A university where students actually contributed to the richness of the internet rather than doing usless exercises. I say this because I'm having to lean this on my own -- mind you, I feel well-adapted to autodidactic modes -- but these are important skills that "industry" as well as hobby programmers like myself need to know.
On a related note, Right now people are currently working on building The New University Co-operative. I went to one of their meetings to pitch the idea of having a media lab that ran on Free Software, and that facilitated the development of open content, but my presentation was a little bit premature given the stage of development they are at. I'm going to keep dreaming about this kind of thing, but before I can even decide if I want to commit to making that kind of thing happen, I need to get rid of the debt chains of the Old University Profiteers.
I jumped from my old blog http://wikinator.blogspot.com to this blog so that I wouldn't get kicked out of my gmail account when I logged into my blog under another gmail account. I stopped using Thunderbird for my mail and am quite happy to use the snappy interface of gmail.
Managing online identities can be a very tricky thing. Getting involved in the Facebook community has been both exciting and frightful for me, especially after seeing this animation about the evils of Facebook. I tell people I'm not too worried because I'm not so much of a threat to the state, but maybe that's just self-deprication. Did you hear that Big Brother, I'm out to get you !
So, for a while I've had a blog, and had a lurking sense of "what's the use blogging if it never gets read anyways", but now that all my blog entries get imported into facebook, people might actually read what I'm writing because tons of people I know are up there. Maybe that's the scaries thing of all, being in the light of eyes. Well, I'll just have to dance off the stage fright :-P
