I’ve recently come across some fascinating new people thanks to my new addiction to twitter. One person in particular lately has really grabbed my attention and I’ve been spending some time learning about him. Gary Vaynerchuk is a passionate and interesting character. He is most known for his great video blog Wine Library TV, which is a fantastic example of adding an online social presence to an otherwise traditional business.
But he also has a more personal video blog where he has recently been posting some clips that have some really great insights into the state of the web and social media. In particular, in one of his most recent posts, he presents his thoughts on how our online social presence will have an affect on how we behave online. Some may not agree with his thoughts, but I think he hits on something that we should all really be considering. And I honestly think he’s dead on… So much so that I wanted to spread the word and share this video. Here, decide for yourself, and then go visit his other websites and learn a bit more about this guy. His passion is contagious.
So I realized why I haven’t been posting in this blog… like ever. It’s honestly because I don’t really have a good sense of what to write here. I had originally set out to make this blog be a chronicle of my experiences as I set out on a 2-year adventure into learning more about shamanism (which I’m still not quite done with by the way). But I just haven’t felt yet like the details of those experiences have been something I’m ready to share here.
Instead, it has started to occur to me that I want to write about the direction that I’ve started moving in because of these adventures and not necessarily directly about them. Lately I have been very inspired at my job and have been doing a lot of research into social media and how these new social web tools are influencing culture and how we communicate with each other. And I’m finding some interesting parallels between my business research and my spiritual research. So my new plan is to turn this blog more into a platform for me to discuss and advocate my thoughts on social media, but I’m hoping to bring my own unique take on how this all relates to the spiritual awakening that I’ve undergone and continue to see happening in others around me.
So stay tuned for new posts coming soon with a new theme and direction for this site. I’m excited about this!
I haven’t posted here in FOREVER, so I thought I’d make a short post (or maybe a couple) to start to catch up. All I’m going to do for now is make a quick list of some of the things that I’ve been up to or interested in lately. This will hopefully act as more of a reminder to myself to expand on all of these topics in the coming days as I try to start to write more regularly again. Here’s a quick rundown :
Xaphoon Bet you’ve never heard of one of these before! I hadn’t either until someone in my 2-year shamanic studies group mentioned it to me. It’s more fully known as the Maui Xaphoon and was created by a guy in Hawaii. It’s nickname is the “pocket sax” and it actually does sound surprisingly like a sax. More like a cross between a clarinet and a sax, but the sound is amazing for such a tiny instrument. I’ll have to post some samples of my playing once I get a little better.
Other new instruments In addition to the xaphoon, I’m still continuing my quest to collect many different musical instruments. Not too long ago I got a 2nd native american flute, and I try to practice on the flutes occasionally. They are such great wind instruments because they are very easy to play. I also got this bell tree, which is a nice addition to the collection. I had been wanting to have more bells to represent the direction of the east (not sure if I’ve made a post yet about the shamanic meaning of relating sounds to directions, but I will soon). Oh, and one more instrument that I’ve actually had for a while but should include here since I’ve never written about it is my Slide Didge. Its a light-weight, collapsible, portable didgeridoo! It’s absolutely fantastic to travel with. And the fact that it slides is not only great for portability, but you can also get some amazing sounds other didges can’t create by sliding it while playing.
Shamanic studies The shamanic studies program that I am participating in, which was the original inspiration to start this site, is still going on. I can’t believe we’ve now finished 7 out of our 10 meetings. There is so much that has happened that I have not yet tried to capture in writing here, but I do still intend to. Just last night I had someone point out to me that it would be a good exercise to try and articulate through writing all that I have been learning lately. Writing doesn’t always come easy to me though, as is obvious from the infrequent posts to this site.
Vedic Astrology This is a topic I may be writing more about soon. Interestingly, it was through someone I met in the shamanic group that I even learned about vedic astrology. I’ve always known some basics about western astrology (like the fact that my sun sign is gemini), but the more examples I see of the amazing predictive power of the vedic system, the more fascinated I am to learn more. My friend even told me she thought I would make a good astrologer. We’ll see on that one, but plan to see me write more about this line of research soon.
Qi Gong I’m getting ready to start back into my Qi Gong class. You may recall this post, in which I mentioned starting the study of Qi Gong energy work based on teachings that I have received from my shamanic teachers. Well, I don’t think I ever followed that post up, but I did participate in that class for a few months and get some great results from it, but then of course the twins were born and I got so busy that I decided to stop for a while. Now that the boys are 1 year old though (can you believe it?), I find that time is starting to open back up to go to classes again. Maybe I’ll actually start to write about those experiences too if I stick with it this time.
Twins! And speaking of babies, I don’t mention them much on this site, but I hope to start writing more about the experience of being a father to twin boys. I will hopefully be doing that writing over at Dawn’s the Joys of Twins site once we give it an overhaul and set it up to have multiple authors.
I guess thats good for now. I have some other topics I can think of, but I think they might belong in a different post.
So Dawn and I have been recording video of the boys since they were born, but we have just now gotten around to actually capturing any of it to the computer. Here is my first test video posted to YouTube of the boys laughing :
I admit it, I’m a coffee drinker. I say that because I haven’t really
been sure for a while. I’ve gone through this vicious cycle for years
where I claim I’m not going to drink coffee anymore because I need to
cut back on my caffeine intake, to being a several cup a day drinker.
Of course, when I’m on that side of the cycle I always seem to have
this feeling of guilt of having slipped on my promise (again) to stop
drinking coffee.
Well, now I think I’ve just decided to accept the fact that I’m a
coffee drinker, and stick to it! If you’re wondering why I’m making a
big deal out of this at all, refer back to The Jaw to understand why I
might be a bit averse to consuming caffeine. Or, I should say, in the
past I’ve been averse to caffeine. I think I have now come to terms
with the fact that I just love coffee, and anything if done in
moderation can be a good thing right?
And now, to an actual point. That point is a new place to buy coffee
that I found that I have to mention for the benefit of any other coffee
lovers that happen to read this. I just ordered my first coffee from Coffee Fool, and I must say, it is damn good! I read their “manifesto”
on their homepage, and thought to myself that it was worth a shot to
see if I could really tell as much a difference as they claim. And
wow, do they have good coffee. I may not be a coffee connoisseur, but
I will say they have definitely made me a coffee fool.
So, recently I’ve been trying to stay on top of all things Web2.0. Part of my new job as Technology Director at FG SQUARED is to stay on top of new trends on the web and decide if these things are useful to us or our clients. I figure I’ll start making the occasional post here to also share some of what I come across.
The theme for this post is clips and stickies. There seem to be a lot of emerging ways to save and share small pieces of webpages rather than bookmarking entire pages. I like this concept and have already found that it can be quite useful for grabbing bits of interesting information that I come across that I may want to act on later, but don’t want to clutter up my bookmarks with.
Here are a few to check out :
Google Notebook - This was the first of this type of web app that I came across and it continues to be my favorite for its simplicity. Highlight a section of a webpage and store it to your notebook for reference later. And you can create multiple notebooks for storing related bits. Don’t forget to install the Firefox addon to get the most out of this.
Clipmarks - Similar to Google notebook, but has a social networking side to it. This also has a Firefox extension needed to really use it. With clipmarks, you can not only store “clips”, you can then share them with the community and they can be voted on ala Digg. You can also clip and post directly to a blog (although I tried to do this once and the HTML it generated broke my layout here at bardospace… i had to do some manual tweaking to get it to work)
Stickis - Now this one I’m just starting to play with and I’m not sure what I think of it. Basically, you can leave a sticky note directly in your browser with a note about the page you happen to be on. Then, all of your notes get listed back on the stickis site, so you can browse through them and when one looks interesting, clicking it takes you back to the site you were on with the sticky note on top. More interesting is that you can subscribe to friends stickis. So if I subscribe to your sticki account and I happen to browse to a page that you found interesting, I could see your note and get your ideas on what you thought (provided you made that sticki public of course). And to top that even, you can subscribe to your favorite blogs as stickis… just tried this out and its wild. If I happen to browse to a site that one of my favorite blogs like lifehacker has written about, I can see the blog article about that site as a sticki sitting on top of it. Very interesting concept for cross-referencing info on the web.
There are others like this, but these are a few I’ve tried recently. Let me know if you’ve come across any other neat tools like this.
So I stumbled across this concept of a “tumblelog”, a new style of blogging that takes out all that boring commentary crap like this that I’m typing right now.
It’s an interesting concept, but we’ll see if it is actually engaging enough to stick around.
Oh, and not to be left out of the fun, I decided to setup my own tumblr account at http://tumblr.bardospace.com, so you can check out all the random tidbits I come across during my day.
Here’s the snippet from lifehacker where I first learned about this :
The Wikipedia explains that a tumblelog is a variation on traditional blogging that favors very short, mixed media posts with little or no commentary. In essence it’s a lightening-fast way to publish the stuff you run across on the web every day, and the layout includes large text, photos, links, and video frames. A really great example of a well-done tumblelog is projectionist.
Tumblr is a new service that publishes tumblelogs.
So, about that Naming Ceremony I mentioned previously… It’s now been a couple of weeks since we did it, but I still want to at least capture a few thoughts about it.
I’m very excited that we were able to have a ceremony celebrating the twins birth and “officially” announcing them and Naming them to our friends and family. And of course I’m also happy that we were able to do this using traditions and beliefs that Dawn and I both share. We have both studied similar spiritual traditions, and to share our beliefs with family members that may not have been exposed to this before was nice. And I was impressed how open everyone was to the whole experience.
Dawn has some additional words to say on the topic in her blog.
In fact, it has now gotten to the point that whenever I think about posting, I think about all the different things that have happened in my life since December (when my last post was) and get overwhelmed by how much I want to capture here. And then of course I just put it off some more and never do it.
So, with that in mind, I decided my best bet was to just start with the now and not worry about the stuff I missed… except as it makes sense to bring it back up. Specifically, I’m going to try to get back to focusing on topics I originally intended for this blog, and why I separated it from my Livejournal and built this domain around it.
That said, I’ll end this post and leave it as a marker for myself that I decided to start again. Next up, my thoughts about this past weekends Naming Ceremony…
Just a quick update to point out something I added to my site. If you visit the Links page, you will notice that there is now a box that shows my most recently shared links from my Google Reader account. Google Reader is Google’s RSS reader that I use to track all of my favorite blogs and news sources. When I find stuff I think is cool, I can mark it “shared” and then Google provides a nifty little piece of Javascript that lets me embed my shared items here on bardospace.
So, now, if you have the inclination to check in and see what I’m reading about, just visit the links page at bardospace for my most recent shared articles.
