As I recently posted on twitter, I wasn’t entirely successful posting a photo a day on flickr (mostly because I take way too many photos that need some level of editing and insist on posting them in chronological order, etc., etc., etc.). But thanks to an iPhone app called Everyday I’ve been capturing an image of yours truly almost everyday since buying the app in early 2011. I wasn’t as strict as I should have been framing the photos, so it’s a much more jittery video than it could have been. And except for my hair growing out (and being wonderfully styled) the passage of time isn’t as obvious and will probably require a much longer time span than just one year. Oh boy.

On a much more beautiful and celebratory note, Kathy Craven’s boyfriend, Mike Cardwell posted the following video highlighting how they celebrated the coming of the new year. Enjoy.

New Year’s Eve from Michael Cardwell on Vimeo.

This is how my family and I spent the last few hours of 2011. This is an in-camera effect using bokeh. No animation of any kind was used in this video.

Best viewed Full Screen.

Thanks to everyone who helped on this project!

Kathy Craven
The Craven Family
Ryan Nielson
Aidan Cardwell
Kellie Martin
Nick Loring from Digital Graphics Plus
Chris Altsman
Brett Brinkerhoff for letting me borrow his rig

Happy New Year!

Catch Mike’s work at Market Match Media and can be contacted at Michael@marketmatchmedia.com

So around Wednesday, the last week of the break, Tricia asked me what did I want to do with my Christmas break. Was I thinking of going anywhere or doing anything special? Number one, I wouldn’t think about going anywhere without including her and number two, there was only half a week left of my break. So, after a brief pause I told her that I was already doing it. She looked at me, puzzled. I’d spent my days mostly on the computer, laboriously updating hundreds of feature images in my blog after the move to my new blog host and chasing down other bloggy stuff. Hmmm. That was the short, mostly painless version. I really did enjoy having the time to do all of this silly bloggy stuff. But the real story goes back to Thanksgiving week when I began to investigate upgrading my Godaddy hosted blog(s)… Here’s the long painful rendition…

Tuesday, November 29th
Still waiting for last Godaddy website hosting update. Ack. Tech warned that it could be up to 72 hours… Has it already been 72 hours? Damn. I was just in the process of trying to develop the habit of doing at least three posts a week, but I had a post disappear between issuing the last update and when the site was updated. So, as always, I plan something and then have to adjust said plan to wait for other things first. Damn.

So, I had been trying to decide whether to re-up my Godaddy hosting plan or go with something else. Of late I had been depending less and less on my FTP access to my go daddy site. I’d been wanting to move everything away from my expiring MobileMe iDisk hosting, but was getting discouraged because I’d been running into server errors, etc. I purchased a year’s worth of SquareSpace, but I wasn’t impressed with what I could do with the site that didn’t look like a blog (and couldn’t get a “magazine” theme with rotating gallery up top). Damn.

I very briefly experimented with the Onswipe theme to make the main blog more iPad fun. Alas, because I had far more Twitter posts than full-feature posts, Onswipe didn’t really work. Then last week it dawned of me that I could create twitter-specific WordPress blogs and remove them from my main blog so that themes like Onswipe would work. Doh! Now I just have to wait for my hosting plan to return from the “upgrade.”

Friday, December 2nd: Friday Sick of Hosting Problems
Friday on a week that didn’t quite equal a full week doesn’t quite feel like a proper Friday. I’ve been sick most of the week and slept all of yesterday, so my poor sense of direction/focus isn’t all that unexpected. Add to that I’m still waiting for Godaddy to pull their heads out of their asses.

Two weeks ago I talked to a tech about upgrading my old hosting service to their new shiny “4GH” and he suggested that I enable a service that would automatically require that they move me to a newer server and then after that the upgrade would just be a check-box. Or so he said. I enabled the first part and it took a bit over 48-hours before I had access to the backend again, signaling that that step was completed. So I contacted Godaddy on the 25th to renew my hosting plan, indicating that I wanted to be moved to the 4GH plan. The tech said no problem, it should take between one to 72-hours for the update and that I should get an email indicating that the change was made. Seven-days later I’m still seeing the “pending account change” status. I contacted their tech on Wednesday and got a trouble ticket and they told me that the connection had timed-out and that’s why the upgrade hadn’t completed. So I waited until today to re-check the status. No change. The tech escalated the trouble ticket and suggested that I might sign up for a one-month hosting plan, move my blogs to the new server then after the month move it back to the “fixed” hosting plan. I told her that I can’t see putting more work into something when they haven’t delivered on the original upgrade. Why should I spend more money, buying a month’s worth of hosting? I ended the call thinking that if I’m not back with backend access in another 24-hours that I should take my business elsewhere.

I don’t know where I’d switch to. I’m thinking that if the problem isn’t resolved then I will cancel my renewal and create a new service and move to the new service. Time to research the alternative hosting services. Ack.

Sunday, December 4th: Web Hosting
I think I know the Godaddy.com hold music by heart now. Sad. They resolved my upgrade issue after seven-days, so that I’m not getting the “pending” message anymore, but, the upgrade to their 4GH plan, the one that I requested didn’t go through. Ah, right. And now I can’t Dreamweaver or Transmit to log into the site so that I can back things up. So…. brain-dead decision, I thought maybe it was a password problem and because I had access to the hosting dashboard, I decided to change the password to something less cryptic. Now the password setting is twirling the “pending change” icon of death. FUCK.

Just called tech support… yeah, something is happening… it’s been escalated to the next level tech support and I should expect another email with another ticket number. Damn. I was actually thinking that I’d like to avoid the hassle, cancel my previous “upgrade” (the one that didn’t happen), and then open another hosting account with the vaunted 4GH service. But now, well, I haven’t posted to my blog in over a week and I’m tired of having to work with tech support just to access my own damn content. Time to move my Internet tent. Damn.

Tuesday, December 6th: Loyalty
It’s completely illogical for me to feel anything or to feel bad about canceling my godaddy hosting account. Sorry if you were expecting something more personal or something along that line. I guess it comes down to caring about things that one spends a lot of time doing and I spend a lot of time in this space, writing, researching, reading, connecting, and so anything that gets in the way of me feeling connected or threatens my continued connection causes an emotional reaction. So, I was looking through my records and I’ve been registering domain names with godaddy since the end of 2006 and started hosting my sites with them since January 2007 and in Internet time almost five years is forever. Yeah, I’m a bit depressed about having to cancel the hosting and hassle of looking for a new provider and then having to build everything back up. And even though these words are not reaching out to the Net (yet), thank god that I found this program (DayOne) that prompts me to do my daily writing. What a godsend. Okay. Back to the business of getting back online.

Wednesday, December 7th: Moving
There’s generally an assumption that anything “Internet” is less than “In Real Life,” that it takes less time, less energy, less meaning. I don’t think that is so. I’ve been working on getting my website/blogs reset/set-up since the 25th and it there hasn’t been anything about this process that’s been “less” anything. So, today i’m now in the process of moving my blogs/websites to a new host. I’ve got the skeleton of the new blog setup on the new host and the right domain name pointed to the right host. All I need to do with wait 24-hours for the information to filter across the Internet so that it works with my browser… More waiting. Damn. I’m going to be glad when this process is over and I can get back to creating good content. Ack.

Thursday, December 8th: Living Online
I started this post yesterday, but got interrupted when I accidentally over-wrote my new wordpress blog with another that I was setting up for Tricia. Live online/die online. Damn.

Friday, December 9th: Living Online, continued
Still struggling with getting a different domain name to work with my old hosting account, so that I can move the main domain name to my new hosting account. This is turning into the proverbial removing the table cloth without losing the table settings trick. Ack. So, besides accidentally 86-ing all the work I’d done yesterday last night when I was creating a separate blog for Tricia (ARGHHH!), I’m now reconciling myself with the idea that I’m going to have to manually reset the main image (feature image) for every single blog post… currently there are 957 posts on this blog. [fail trombone]. Well, back to work.

Saturday, December 10th: Silent Blog
Since my godaddy hosting troubles around Thanksgiving I haven’t posted another blog post. Thank god for Day One, the app that I’m using to record my thoughts (and the fact that the app bugs me every day to write something…). So, I have posts to upload… I’ve just been frustrated at not having a reliable … host. Well, the blog is up on the new host, but I need to transfer my main domain name to the new host and that requires that I get another domain name take over that spot and … well, I’m going to have to call godaddy to get it up and running. Damn. Moving one’s blog is a royal pain in the ass. Oh yeah, I’m having to manually set up the “feature image” on all of my posts and edit the categories to make it run with all the different devices (web, iPhone and iPad). Yay. Be back after the Godaddy encounter.

Sunday, December 11th: Manually Moving Blog Content
Last few days have been spent manually moving my blog media, resetting categories and resetting feature images on the new blog host. Yeah, really exciting. I decided that I’ll go back as far as 2008 to make changes (I have posts that go back to 2003).

Last step was to replace the primary domain on the expiring godaddy account so that the majority of hosted images would point to the new host. Looks like the transfer worked and the temp primary domain seems to work, but I can’t access the admin functions. I can probably do a WordPress reinstall if necessary, but I’m keeping the temp godaddy going just as an image/content backup reference/resource. Time to move my Internet flag to the new place. Onward and upward.

Wednesday, December 14th: blogs and webmail
I’ve been spending the past four days working on bringing my blog back up, mostly resetting, copying and posting images, resetting categories and today trying to get my hosted email account to work. No luck with the email. But they warn that it can 24-hours for the changes to take effect. Where have I heard this before and why does it bother me. So, around 2:30 pm (ET) on Thursday it should all work perfectly. Ack.

Tuesday, December 20th
Going back to add “feature” images to old blog posts and ran into “video pulled for copyright claim”… damn. The internet is not reliable. Surprise.

Tuesday, December 27th: Sometimes Whining Works
That’s right, sometimes whining works, especially on Twitter. A couple days ago I was taking some time to clean up my inbox and working on a bunch of things that hadn’t been working on my blog and ran headlong into a conflict between my flickr widget and my dynamic feature image function and then once I got that working I couldn’t get a plugin called Onswipe that creates a special iPad theme to work. So I did the most constructive thing that I could imagine, I whined on Twitter:

“Frustrated w/ blog,fixed dynamic content display (java script), now onswipe won’t work.If I wanted this much troubleshooting I’d run windows” @jbb

Then within less than a day I got the following message:

@JasonLBaptiste
@jbb hey joe, what’s up? How can we help? j@onswipe.com

So another day later I wrote Jason an email explaining my problem and what I’d been using with my wordpress blog and a bit later got a response with a zip file of an updated version of the plug-in. I’ve been working on the blog today and it’s been mostly good. Onswipe works, but there are some things that don’t quite work.

So, it’s not enough to just complain, but to complain to the anonymous internet! Who knew?

Tuesday, January 3rd: Bloggy Status
So after all of this, what’s the scoop? Godaddy was sacked as my hosting service because they couldn’t deliver on their promised vaunted 4GH service at the beginning of December. I moved to FatCow and they’ve been decent. Moving everything over has been a hassle and took over a month to reset all of the broken links and images. When I dug deep to get conflicting plug-ins to work together I decide to sack my previous expensive theme and go with one simplistic theme that should work across computers and iPads (making getting Onswipe to work with my blog moot). I love StudioPress and might use them for my separate photography and video specific blogs, but it turns out that simpler can be better, hence the move to the MINIMATICA theme by One Designs.

So, the move had nothing to do with SOPA, but I’ve been slowing moving my domains to hover.com for quite a while and the SOPA bullshit has made the decision all the better. My hosting account with godaddy expires in seven days on January 10th. Thus will end five-years of service. Weird that I’d feel funny about that. Thus are the reflections of one who lives so much online.

This time last year I was spending a conspiratorial week traveling from Orlando to Southern California and then up to Northern California and back with my brother and his bride-to-be to do their wedding. It was meant to be in secret for reasons that escape me at the moment but the plot had been uncovered by older sister Kathie earlier in November, resulting in a lot of hurt feelings and a lot of shrugged shoulders from moi and brother Matt. Family. I guess the secrecy was an ill-fated attempt to keep things simple, and given all of the little elements Marty planned for our few days in Northern California, it wouldn’t have been possible to pull it off given the huge entourage any family event tends to create for us Bustilloses. Ack. We say that we believe in Family but the belief is a lot more manageable in theory than the real thing when planning a four-day adventure/wedding get-a-way in Sonoma.

One full-day was spent slowly creeping through Southern California traffic resulting in a 10 P.M. arrival in Sonoma, with a 6 A.M. call to meet at the front-desk the next day, which happened to be Thanksgiving. Ugh turn oh-my-god when we were driven out to an open field where two giant hot-air balloons were being prepared to take us and those others gathered aloft over a cold but sun-drenched Napa Valley. Once we were back on earth we were treated to a hearty breakfast buffet, which required naps when we got back to the bed-and-breakfast. The day ended with a Thanksgiving dinner aboard the Napa Wine Train.

It had pretty much been a perfect day with a good measure of adventure, beautiful sights, family and wine-induced reflection. So, a number of co-workers had been sending Thanksgiving emails and there were still some family tension over the “secret wedding,” all of which led to the following email sent to co-workers, family and friends:

Subject: Many Thanks Indeed 

Date: November 25, 2010 10:48 PM 

T-Day On the wine train in Napa. OMG I ate way too much. I thought, before I drop into a over-eating induced coma, that I’d drop y’all a line. I just wanted to share how thankful I am that I get to work everyday with some of the most dedicated, brilliant, creative and funny people I’ve ever known. I know that there have been more than a few times over the past year when I’ve been a little too quick with the quip or verbal jab and with the double load I haven’t always entertained the most positive attitude or disposition. I apologize for not giving y’all the support or attention that y’all deserve. I’ll strive to do better, but more than that, I just want to say thanks for being there for me and for making me feel like an important part of a fascinating family. Happy Thanksgiving, xo, jbb 

You know what’s changed in the past year? Well, no secret wine-train wedding ceremonies for me this year. That was fun. Sadly I still haven’t been as connected with my work-team as I’ve been in the past and tend to spend too much time with my nose to the grindstone and not enough enjoying the journey. Ack. Well, one thing that’s changed: I’ve been fortunate enough to have spend the past ten-months trying to step away from the wall of computer monitors and enjoying the journey with a very classy and secretly-geeky lady. Damn. Happy Thanksgiving y’all. The next 365-days are going to be amazing.

Uploaded by nevasmusic on Aug 8, 2011

This is one of my songs ‘Isolated Movements’ in it’s earliest most raw form. I had just written the gist of it, threw down a couple of tracks and was showing it to my friend Neely. She loved it so much she made me sing it again and recorded it while we were driving down the street.
Bonus Video: Michelle Branch

I just had a chat with Karl Peterson, current month 12 student, he called to share that he’d met a professor, Jim Groom, at the University of Mary Washington who’s doing a course on Digital Storytelling as an open university course. According to Peterson, Groom has no formal ed tech training but is mirroring a lot of what we’re doing in emdt. You can visit his course at http://ds106.us. Awesome.

Then when I was on the ds106 site I noticed a Internet Radio player and on the player at that particular moment was someone I’d met through twitter @DrGarcia, the Gypsy Rogue Scholar. Woe, I know that she’s mentioned doing an internet radio show, but that’s way too “we’re all connected” for me. And as I’m writing this, they’re playing a mash-up on copyright, my area of concentration. The universe is scaring me.

You can get more info on radio-ds106 at http://ds106.us/ds106-radio/ and http://bit.ly/radio4life. Yeah, there are more of us experimenting and creating new media in education (mostly ’cause the old system is dead).

This is a vent and a bit of a rant. It’s probably unwise for me to share this, and so I want to offer a blanket apology to anyone who feels that I’m being unfair or that it’s wrong for me to write about this. I guess that’s kind’a what this comes down to: as a writer (and photographer) I’m compelled to share my work with the biggest audience possible. In the pre-Full Sail days, it was the need to share that motivated me to post my musings and photos. But I had little concern about who was watching/reading because the truth was I was probably my own audience of one most of the time. Since then I’ve become aware that I have students, co-workers and the occasional relative visiting. Believe me, that makes me a bit more cautious, but the artist in me still compels me to share.

So, it saddens me when I get the pull-down email from someone who feels that I’m invading their privacy with my work. Okay, it more than saddens me when the email accuses me of being careless or even mean-spirited with my postings. “Really Joe, you should know better!” Here’s what I do know: when I pull out my camera I’m just trying to capture enough of what’s happening so that those who were there can enjoy the memories of a shared experience. I’m not trying to capture embarrassing moments or looking to make anyone look silly. Although, I’m the first to admit that there have been a few whom I’ve consistently caught with food in their mouths (sorry M Haynes). But the point is that I’m just making the effort to capture the moment, not to embarrass anyone.

At the same time I’m fully aware that there is the personal lens by which everyone sees the world such that we’re all drawn to seeing all of our own imperfections whenever we see ourselves in a photo. For example, I see a little kid playing with his toys on the floor possibly thinking about how he’s going to get the stuff behind the kiddie-fence, while someone else sees themselves with their back to the camera and they can only see that it’s not very flattering (to them). I guess I could crop the photo so that the unflattering bits are cut out, but the point of such a photo might be the interplay between the little one on the floor and the one not facing the camera.

So, when I see the photo I see the interplay between a little kid on the floor and the adult and it seems like a reasonable image capturing that moment. If I were in the photo with my back toward the camera would I be uncomfortable? Well, that test doesn’t work because I would see the photo as being about the kid AND me (in this version) and not about my posterior. Now if it were a close-up of the Buddha-belly, I might cringe. But if it told a story about that day and those people or about what happened, I’d find a way to get over myself.

All I wanted to do was to capture these moments and share them. No malice, no agenda, just wanting to share the moment. And it takes a lot of time and effort to post the photos, so it’s all the more irritating when I get the pull-down email. As much as I probably should publish a lot fewer photos (i’m up to over 11,500 pix) this isn’t the same as saying that I post everything. There is some cropping and image enhancement and selection that goes into this. So, yeah, I feel like no good deed goes unpunished when someone tells me that they don’t want all those photos posted. I’m mean, why bother taking the pictures in the first place if no one is ever going to see them?

There must be something to wanting to share our photos in that many of us exchanged DVDs and CDs with photos from over the years this past Christmas. “But Joe, why would you want to share your photos on the open Internet, I mean, really!” I’ve chosen to post my photos to Flickr because I’ve learned over the years that any barrier to entry, anything that requires passwords or signing up for this service or that service, is enough to make it too difficult for anyone to find the photos, thus defeating the purpose of sharing. Period. I’ve decided that I’m going to make it as simple as possible for the photos to be found and enjoyed. As for the danger of posting things on the “open Internet,” except for those in the photos or close friends, no one cares. Remember, I’m just capturing little moments that only matter to us. The paranoia that posting photos on the Internet might lead to a life of misery or visit from the agency with the black helicopters is just plain silly. Believe me, I know, it’s part of my job to know about this Internet stuff.

Alas, among most of my relations I know that I’m the odd one who has consistently chosen to live my life on the open Internet. It’s frustrating to know that my siblings have the most amazing collection of photos and except for this one time, last Christmas, almost no one has access to any of it. I have tried to be a cheerleader and in the past gave Pro-accounts to flickr.com to the siblings only to have them expire with only two of the sibs taking advantage of the accounts. Sad. All the hours I put into this… funny thing, a co-worker was looking for work-related photos for a project she was working on and ended up spending probably too much time wandering through the family-related stuff and later complimented me, well, us because she thought we seemed to be a very fun group, based on the photos she saw. She seemed to get the point of all of these photos. Yeah, beware of Joe and his camera, he’s nefariously capturing images of us and stealing our privacy by posting the images on the web. Or maybe he’s just making it possible for us to enjoy our brief moments together long after the moments have past.

Sources:

• All images by joe bustillos, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebustillos/sets/72157625956141627/with/5455875395/

I love this subway commercial. The boy’s “this is too good to be true,” reaction when the beautiful girl asks him if he wants her to be his girlfriend and then the disappointment when he realized it’s just a rouse to steal his lunch is priceless. Ain’t life grand. Reflecting some of that innocent realization, I had a wonderful conversation recently with a high-school girlfriend. The conversation with Peggy drifted back to the first time I asked her out and for all of the years that we’ve known each other I was surprised at how differently she remembered this particular event.

I think I even began by saying that I usually pride myself at having very vivid memories. Well, that was until another conversation we had years ago when she surprised me with a few stories about us that I had absolutely no memory of. That said, you’d still think that I’d remember something like asking her out the first time with a bit more clarity. Ha. So, the story goes that my wonderful girlfriend at the time, not Peggy, decided toward the end of our senior year that “we should see other people.” Perfect. Senior prom, grad night and I’m left to hustle to find a date after being with said girlfriend since our sophomore year. Ack. I did end up going with the old not-girlfriend to prom but was determined to not repeat that underwhelming experience for grad night. Okay, to be fair it was an okay but more than a bit awkward to share with someone who has decided to “see other people.” [fail trombone].

Anyway, I knew Peggy because she was a good friend of a girlfriend of one of my football buddies. I do vividly remember walking up behind her in a crowd as we were all shuffling to get to our afternoon classes, touching her on her shoulder and when she turned around asking her if she’s like to go with me to grad night. There was a bit of an expected blank stare on her part and then she said that she’d have to ask her parents first. She is still embarrassed that she had to ask her parents because she was only 15 and her mom had said that she couldn’t date until she was 16. I remember being happy because she didn’t say “No” outright or laugh. But what I didn’t remember, and what Peggy told me in the recent conversation, was that me asking her out was the very first time that we’d actually ever spoken to each other. I was flabbergasted. I assumed that we’d talked at least a few times because, if this were true, than this had to be the one and only time that I can ever remember (which clearly isn’t as reliable as it used to be) ever walking up to someone that I wasn’t first friends with and asking them out. Wow. After all these years, I was stunned.

Grad Nite 1976 - Two Very Young Kids

What was it that enabled me to break out of what would become a life-long pattern just this once? In that that version of myself is over 30-years in the past, I was kind’a impressed with that version and wondered what happened to that guy. Oh yeah, life and experience intervened. In all fairness, life is different in ones hometown in that I may not have talked to Peggy before that fateful day but I knew who she was, so she was not a completely random stranger. So, to continue the tale, we went to grad night and dated a little that summer and then in the Fall I moved to Los Angeles to attend Loyola Marymount University and we stopped dating. Well, not quite, but that’s a tale for another time (and probably another phone call so that I don’t get the detail too screwed up). Ah, memories of youth. I love the boy’s last line, that no one hears, “ah, I don’t think this is working out…”

P.S., Peggy recently had a monumental birthday and her lovely daughter wanted to get a lot of her friends together. I wasn’t able to make it to the party but I sent the link to the following video to her. It’s good to have friends.

In Bad Faith, Part 6: Is Your God a Tribal Strawman?

Had I been raised in a different community on a different spot on the globe than the language of my experiences, how I would have interpreted my experiences, would have been different. Had I not had my first experiences during the “Jesus People Movement” in Southern California in the mid-1970s then the direction of my life might have been entirely different. Instead of being a Religious Studies major at Loyola Marymount and then getting a BA in Biblical Studies at Biola University, I might have joined a monastery in Europe or Asia or entered into training to become a Mullah or Rabbi in the Middle East. I wonder, if I had taken those other paths, would those traditions have allowed me to examine their early tribal heritage and eventually find fault with systems of interpretation that don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. I guess I’ll never know. But what I do know is that, experiences not withstanding, I cannot faithfully recite any of the creeds I’ve known without massive mental re-editing. So it would seem that once I moved from “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” to interpretation or human understanding something or perhaps everything got lost in translation.

One of the beauties of Faith is that it tends to wrap all of the difficulties of life into one little package and say that all you have to do is “X” and all of these things will go away. When I was a teenager that was a life-saving moment because nothing made sense and everything I wanted to do was inconsistent with the beliefs I’d been raised with. And then, thirty-years later, when my heart was being completely broken, this divine love seemed to break through and offered me meaning and purpose. Those were difficult, life changing days. But as soon as I went from experience to interpretation it was back to nothing but difficulty, complications and failure. It was as if someone had said to me, “The good news is that Jesus loves you and has a plan for your life, the bad news is that you are still you.” Thanks. So I tussle between my thirst for understanding and rationalism and my experiences of oneness and connection.

Some time ago my brother and his late-wife were socializing with their Episcopalian priest when the priest commented to my brother, something about the difficulty of bridging the gap between modern life and Faith. My brother quipped, isn’t that the sign of greater intelligence and faith, to be able to live with the ambiguity of unanswered questions? My brother has lived a somewhat similar circuitous life of faith and rationalism. I love my brother dearly, and I’m sure that he can balance the ambiguity between the faith we were raised with and the modern contradictions we run into daily, but I’ve already spent 15-years going around saying “I don’t know” when it comes to issues of Faith. More to the point, and perhaps in spirit of his response, maybe the problem is that there are no simple answers. Or maybe there’s only a problem if one insists on a vision of God who plays favorites and orders one tribal community to commit genocide against another tribe, a God who would have a father kill his son to prove his faithfulness, a God who would require the murder of an innocent man to fulfill his need for justice. Or, like Bart Erhman‘s professor at Princeton remarked, maybe the biblical writer(s) got it (all) wrong.

When I heard religious scholar, Karen Armstrong, say in her NPR interview, that it’s a shame in our modern era that our theology is stuck in the dark ages, I had to hear more. During the interview she quipped that Dawkins’ attack on “old man in the sky” notions of God was a bit unfair, in that not all religious people hold to that view of God. But she admits that the discussion needs to be taken to a higher level where the central issues of compassion, connectedness and transcendence are not only emphasized but acted upon. If this former-nun can bring together Jews, Muslims and for god’s sake Anglicans, then maybe there’s still hope for this disenfranchised former-Jesus-freak.

NPR Fresh Air interview of Karen Armstrong Builds A “Case for God”

Sources:

flickr image: IMG_4743 by beggs. http://www.flickr.com/photos/beggs/88809549/ retrieved on 2/13/2010

YouTube video: Fallen by Sarah McLachlan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqps9ZdMxs0 retrieved on 2/13/2010

NPR/Fresh Air Interview of Karen Armstrong. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112968197 retrieved on 2/13/2010

The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto. Available at Amazon.com

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong. Available at Amazon.com

In Bad Faith, Part 4: The Evil Media

What both the Left and Right seem to forget is that the Media, especially in the form of the movie industry, is a form of banking, and it will do whatever it thinks will make money for it’s investors. Period. It rarely leads and often plays both sides of the issues because it needs to draw attention to itself, not to change things but to make money. The Media is not a perfect reflection of our culture, remember it’s first responsibility is not to reflect Reality, but to make money. And this “bottom line” mentality is not limited to the movie industry but, sadly, has become a big part of the News Industry too. Journalism has felt the pressure to sell it’s wares. We may think of Journalism as a service, but it’s a business. This is not to say that Journalism has abandoned the principles of Objectivity, but it’s more of an ideal, like how Americans try to live up to our Constitution, Bill of Rights and Pledge of Allegiance. Journalism believes in Objectivity, in part, because it’s business model requires a certain level of trust. No trust, no sales. So, at it’s core the News & Media industries are neither Left or Right. They can’t afford to be. They will follow the interests of their audiences, Left or Right, but the commitment isn’t to the politics but to the business of making money. The Media decision-makers are not pushing any position except the one that keeps them viable and better yet, more than viable.

Add to all of this, one of the dangers of our Internet era is that, just as much as we have the possibility to get our news and information from world-wide and culturally diverse sources, it’s just as likely that we will choose only sources that we agree with, creating a kind of echo chamber of information. This is the unintended result of the combination user-selected news/media feeds with user-created journalism. What does this have to do with God and Faith? Well, today it is possible to completely blanket oneself 24/7 with whatever message one wants to hear and completely blank out anything that one doesn’t agree with. For many there’s no problem with this picture except for the part where one might want or need to interact with someone not from ones own media bubble. For Christians we call that the Great Commission. For the Secularist, there is a curiosity to understand our fellow-person (especially if they don’t agree or understand us). So, how do you do that if the other person is not from your media bubble? Is there even a common media language left that you can use to reach this other person?

So, the Media is neither Left or Right. It’s a business that wants to stay in business so it’s going to be careful not to offend what it perceives to be its audience. You don’t like what’s on the air you now have at least three choices: change the channel/stream, turn the thing off, or make your own news/media organization. By the way, according to the film’s official website the film opened in limited release this past Friday, January 22, 2010. At the bottom of this entry I’ve embedded the film’s trailer and an NPR/Fresh Air interview of the Randal Keynes, the author of the book  the film is based on.

NPR Fresh Air Interview: Randal Keynes: When Darwin Is In Your Family Tree:

Sources:
* Movie poster: Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin. http://www.creationthemovie.com/ retrieved on 1/26/2010

* Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’ by By Anita Singh. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6173399/Charles-Darwin-film-too-controversial-for-religious-America.html retrieved on 1/25/2010

* Image: Freedom of the Press poster by Publish! Magazine (nd).

* YouTube: ‘Creation’ Trailer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BREvUKpZTeU retrieved on 1/26/2010.

* Randal Keynes: When Darwin Is In Your Family Tree. Fresh Air from WHYY. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122778363 retrieved on 1/25/2010

I’ve been watching Leo since the early ZD-TV days. It feels like it was early Internet, but it really wasn’t. Here was a guy and a show that was part of this tech world that I was a part of, that no one else understood. So for their last podcast for 2009, TWiT 228, they got a bit nostalgic (and funny). Good times. This was not the case several weeks ago when Leo and John C. Dvorak made fun of the NASA Tweet-up and totally forgot about what Twitter really means. Basically they took the low road and made jokes about what the hell are you going to say in 140 characters except, “I just peed in my diaper.” Twitter isn’t about the 140 characters or what one has for lunch. It’s about the community and connections that happen over time. So, sometime Leo gets it, and other times he goes for the cheap shot. Surprise, he’s human.

It is a bit strange to feel a connection with an Internet personality (who was a Cable-TV personality from a small network before that) and then discover that there’s a whole community of weirdos like me who work in tech. Following is a short documentary featuring Leo talking about the moment we’re at right now where it’s possible for a small media company can compete with giant corporations and get their message out without all the filters imposed in the past. It’s about the individual and the community and the message. It’s not about 140-characters.

Bonus video: Here’s a video circa 1996 during which Leo Laporte predicts the future. Given next week’s Apple announcement, Leo’s talk about the power of the Newton in 1996 might be all the more interesting:

Sources:
* YouTube video: TWiT 228: The TWiT Of The Decade posted by TWiT. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaq_FoA8jmo retrieved on 1/19/2010
* The Spark Series, Part 3: OPEN by Michael Sean Wright and Marc Ostrick. http://www.eguiders.com/exclusive/the-spark-series-part-3-open retrieved on 1/19/2010
* Of Mouse and Man. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIV8BxlaQs retrieved on 1/19/2010

In Bad Faith, Part 3: Franky Schaeffer, Son of “Slippery Slide” Comes Clean

One of my favorite Fuller Seminary professors, Colin Brown, commented once that he didn’t think that Francis Scheaffer (Sr) read any of Kierkegaard in the original languages. Academic put-down! The Schaeffers represented a huge line in the sand between True Biblical Christianity and the various forces of liberalism, academia and secularism. After reading one of Franky’s books in the 80s I recognized that I wasn’t on the “right” side of the divide. I was too much of a rationalist, situational-ethicist and intellectual. I loved the Bible but I also recognized the cultural-historical place it came from (hint: it wasn’t Heaven). Slippery slope, indeed.

So all these decades later it turns out that all the rhetoric was mostly a sham promoted by the Christian Right, to the point that even Franky eventually couldn’t tolerate and left. What I really loved about the interview was that this was a story about Idealism, human foibles, bending the “Truth.” The forces the Schaeffers represented created a conflict that I’ve spent a lifetime contending with. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one scarred by the experience. I love the comment Franky makes during the interview when he’s asked why he hasn’t gone all the way to Atheist. He says that the patterns of his life are such that the first thing he’d do would be to pray to God to help him be a better Atheist. So human.

Sources:
Pro-Life — And In Favor Of Keeping Abortion Legal by Frank Schaeffer - NPR Fresh Air Interview. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97998654 retrieved 1/9/2010.

In Bad Faith, Part 2: Born this Way? or This is Your Brain on God

I don’t think that I ever shared these thoughts with my fellow-believers. I just assumed that those in the midst of the experience probably didn’t analyze the phenomenon beyond a few Bible passages and whether the practice was accepted or rejected by their church. Then many years later I saw a documentary TV program where scientists were mapping the brain, using scans that looked for elevated brain activity. They found that persons in deep meditation or prayer showed elevated activity in the Temporal lobe. From what I remember, the pattern of activity was similar to those who reported stories of alien abduction. They were able to induce the “Alien” experiences in some test subjects by transmitting the pattern instead of recording it. Then one scientist, an atheist, thought that he might “see” what the religious participants in the experiment had experienced if he also used the recording harness to transmit the “religious” patterns to his brain. The scientist saw and felt nothing. I wasn’t too surprised, but it wasn’t because of any “God” thing. It might have been that his brain was just not wired to understand the “language” of religious experience that had been recorded in the experiment. According to a recent article in Ars Technica, it might indeed be something lost in translation that’s individual to everyone’s brains.

Previous studies were looking to see if there were particular areas in the brain related to religious experiences. According to the Ars article, more recent studies, conducted by Dimitrios Kapogiannis from the National Institute on Aging, didn’t find “God” areas of the brain but did find neural pathways associated to social cognitive processing that were not unique to religion. So what does this mean for the Faithful, or for the Skeptics? According to Ars Technica, it means that religion and religious experience could be experimentally addressed and studied. Thus, one of Dawkin’s demands from his book, The God Delusion, seems closer to realization: that religion can no longer claim to be entirely outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Whatever rational systems of thinking that we apply to weather, biology, physics, etc., can and should now be applied to religious experience.

The Ars article goes on to discuss how some scientists are looking at the possible connection between the emergence of language and the development of religion. Additionally, scientists are looking at the capacity that some have for intimate relationships and how this might be related to how some feel “close to God.” Conversely, they are also looking into how some individuals’ inability to form close relationships may be related to how some have no sense of there being an “Other” out there.

Taken to its logical conclusions, it might be determined that having no sense of the Divine is no different than being red/green blind. Or for the skeptics, having a sense of the divine is just like having Phantom Limb Syndrome. Thus, while science will be able to determine if an individual’s experience is “real,” two things have not been determined. One is causality: do some people have these neural pathways because they are born that way, or were these pathways developed because of their early experiences? The other thing is that brain evidence that one feels close to God neither confirms nor denies that God is, in fact, communing with the one wearing the scanning harness.

Geovanny Verdezoto can't handle his success Heartbroken young man on floor by hyperscholar

So, where does this leave us? We can see that something “real” is happening in the brains of those having religious experiences and that opens the door for Science to investigate Religion. Note that on a purely scientific level there are still a number of limits to what Science can determine if one sticks to the scientific data. There are some parallels here between this course of study and when higher critical theory was applied to Biblical Studies. The “devotional” was striped away and strenuous literary, historical and cultural research was (and still is) conducted. Unfortunately, in the long run the Faithful abandoned higher Biblical criticism to the “liberals” and academics and only the academics cared about advances being made in literary Biblical criticism (except when Erhman publishes a popular culture friendly book pointing out the blazing holes in Biblical Innerancy).

Again, where does this leave us? Well, one can’t “prove” delusion, so the skeptics need to dial it back a bit. Science that’s interested in measurable data can only say when someone is sincere about their experiences, period (I’d love to see a “sincerity readout” on the tel-evangelists, though I’m sure part of their “art” is convincing themselves about their own importance and relationship with the Divine). Second, on the other side, the faithful aren’t interested in anything that doesn’t “prove” already established beliefs, so there’s little room for real dialog here. Finally, ones receptivity toward awareness of the “Other” doesn’t seem to be universal which should change the idea that the gospel is open to everyone. At the same time this receptivity does seem to exist, whether via early experiences or “wiring” for some of us. So….

by Gastev”]

bios [bible

To be continued…

Sources:

Finding the fear and love of God inside the brain by Jeremy Jacquot for Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/finding-the-fear-and-love-of-god-inside-the-brain.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss retrieved 1/9/2010

image: 2008_nidcd-brain. NIH. http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/images/2008photos/2008_nidcd_brain_hi.jpg retrieved 1/9/2010.

image: Geovanny Verdezoto can’t handle his success Heartbroken young man on floor by hyperscholar http://www.flickr.com/photos/hypertypos/3164306380/ retrieved 1/9/2010.

image: bios [bible] by Gastev. http://www.flickr.com/photos/gastev/2174504149/ retrieved on 1/9/2010.

What is it that you most love in life,
and how do you express it in your
day to day routine?

Thinking about the aunts and uncles who’ll be at this year’s Christmas gathering, and realizing that the list is getting shorter. My dear sister-in-law, Connie, passed last Spring. And a life-long friend whom I haven’t had the best communication with, has had incredible health difficulties since taking a fall a few months ago. For my part, I’ve been so busy, with an almost around-the-clock sense of urgency tending to my job. Because of the freedom I’ve been given I feel the need to work all the harder to deliver the best possible learning experience for my students. That’s a blessing, but I still need to pause a moment and consider bringing the bigger vision into the daily routine.

I shouldn’t let a day go by without picking up my guitar. I shouldn’t let a day go by when I don’t write in this blog. I shouldn’t let a day go by when I don’t call up a friend just to say, “hi.” I’ve done these important things too infrequently this past year and that needs to change. After my uncle Joe passed, whenever I found myself relaxing for a moment, especially if the moment included a good IPA, I raised my glass in his honor. I didn’t do this because I thought that he might be haunting me or aware of my gesture, but because I wanted to honor the memory of his work ethic, what he contributed to in the life of his six daughters and dozens of grandchildren and just the man’s man who he was.

So, there needs to be more room for the meditation that I find in my guitar. Thus, last night when I should have been trying to get some sleep because I had an early morning video shoot (I was doing the behind the scene stills), I found myself listening to some Sarah McLachlan and then strumming along, then looking up the lyrics and chords for the song on the Internet, then learning the song and playing until my finger, that have long lost their callouses, forced me to quit. I’ve long felt a strong emotional connection to McLachlan, but when I listened to the lyric last night, something in the careful twist of words really connected it to the journey I’ve been on. I decided that this would be a good place to start getting back to the things/people I love in my life.

“Fallen“
Heaven bend to take my hand
And lead me through the fire
Be the long awaited answer
To a long and painful fight
Truth be told I tried my best
But somewhere long the way
I got caught up in all there was to offer
But the cost was so much more than I could bear

Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

We all begin with good intent
Love was raw and young
We believed that we could change ourselves
The past can be undone
But we carry on our back, the burden
Time always reveals
In the lonely light of morning
In the wound that would not heal
It’s the bitter taste of losing everything
that I’ve held so dear…

I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

Heaven bend to take my hand
I’ve nowhere left to turn
I’m lost to those I thought were friends
To everyone I know
Oh they turn their heads embarrassed
Pretend that they don’t see
But it’s one missed step you’ll slip before you know it
And there doesn’t seem a way to be redeemed

Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

Sources:
* “Fallen” by Sarah McLachlan from her Afterglow CD

* youtube video: Sarah McLachlan Fallen Live – Macworld 2003 Keynote posted by cryotekk. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKqFw9x_IM retrieved 12/11/2009

p.s., I used to catch hell for my affinity and attraction to artist’s like McLachlan. This person would tease me, saying that I needed to quit listening to the “lesbians” because the music was making me too moody. I’m glad that I didn’t stop listening. The music didn’t make me moody, it spoke to the shitty situation and my frustration with it. Making this song a part of my emotional vocabulary is a far better way to move past those trouble times than to pretend that they didn’t happen or wall off whole sections of ones life. There, I said it.

In Bad Faith, Part 1: It’s the Accent, Isn’t It?

My brother warned me against reading this book unless I was serious about examining my faith. I can only imagine how confusing my circuitous route into and out of and then back into and later out of Faith must appear to my sibling(s). I mean, given that I went against my parents’ wishes and switched from Catholic Loyola Marymount University to Fundamentalist Protestant Biola University, and instead of getting something practical like a B.A. in Engineering I got one in Biblical Studies. This was definitely something more important going on here than a passing adolescent fad. But having gone from highly academic Loyola to wanting-to-be-more-academic Biola (in the early 80s) I learned to approach my Faith and the Bible from a more scientific/academic approach than just a devotional approach. Two of my favorite books from this era were Robert Alter’s The Art Of Biblical Narrative and Robert Mapes Anderson’s Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. So there was always some danger that I was susceptible to things a little beyond the safe confines of devotional reading.

Fast forward twenty-eight years, divorced twenty-five years, failed MA in Theology from Fuller Seminary. second BA in communications/journalism, teaching credential, MA in Educational Technology, failed Ed.D in Educational Technology, re-located from Southern California to Central Florida, I decided against jumping back into the church thing. I needed to find some balance between my experiences of faith and the academic/scientific part of my personality. That’s when I decided to listen to Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion. Well, actually I watched the TED video first and came away with the sense that this quiet-spoken Englishman could probably get away with almost anything because of our American stereotype that causes us to assume that anyone with said accent is obviously more intelligent than we are. Damn.

The most memorable part of the beginning of the book is the idea/quote, “we didn’t know we had a choice,” and Dawkins wanting to make the case that not believing in God isn’t something to be endured in silence. What follows is a tour de force with side trips to Einstein’s God and whether Science can say anything about Religion. The big idea of the book is that Religion is a vestigial personal/cultural remnant that’s related to the childhood belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Whereas we gave up on the belief in Santa and the Tooth Fairy when we grew up from childhood, we persist in our adult years in a belief in an “Old Man” in Heaven who knows our every thoughts and has a plan for our lives. This isn’t to equate Religion with belief in Santa, it’s just that they seem to serve the same purpose and come from the same part of the human psyche, according to Dawkins.

Dawkins also wrote about his wonderful relationship with his Anglican pastor/headmaster and how that helped him feel free to explore his belief in Science and not see a lack of faith in God as if he was missing something. I have to note that there is a real cultural divide between this educated Brit’s take on Religion and my experience with American Christianity. This fact was brought home to me in a recent conversation with a coworker who was raised in the UK when the coworker commented about how he felt like the reading of Genesis by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968 was some kind of put on. He couldn’t see how these astronauts/scientists could seriously be reading from the Bible without a sneer on their faces or in their hearts. To which I have to say that one should not underestimate how deep the religious feelings are among Americans and, contrary to one of Dawkin’s claims, this phenomenon is no respecter of intelligence. There’s most definitely a political efficacy to the practice of Religion in the U.S. (note that there are no self-proclaimed Atheists in the U.S. Senate), but scratch under the surface and one is reminded that this continent was settled by religious refugees.

Thus, Dawkins’ solution, that we refrain from indoctrinating our children with Religion, is just plain silly to an American audience who may fully disregard their religious tenets eight-days a week, but will fully and sometimes violently defend their right to pass on their belief system to the next generation. In fact I’ve seen more than my fair share of marginal Christians reclaim their faith with the arrival of children. One might wonder if they’re not doing this because that’s how they were raised, but that’s kind of how humans do most things and is not limited to religious indoctrination.

So, Dawkins’ take is that given how out of step most religious foundations are with modern life, practitioners must be ignoring the obvious contradictions in order to maintain their belief in the wise old man in the sky. In a word, they are deluding themselves. Alas, to the faithful his words, should one bother to read all the way through this tome, won’t hit home. The skeptic/atheist will feel reaffirmed. But what about the fence-sitter, the person trying to balance a religious upbringing with life in our modern world?

I appreciate Dawkins’ experiences and thought processes. I don’t think that he has a real understanding on my particular journey. He might be right that it was my upbringing that influenced me to interpret the narrative of my life to include god. But given the enduring strength of this vestigial delusion, maybe this is more than a cultural hold-over, more than a relic mistake handed off from father to son. Maybe it’s something that we’re born with.

To Be Continued…

Peteca toma seu banho by elbragon

Then Brother Matt mentioned during his recent Florida visit that my current and persistent lack of a girlfriend was causing mom to openly worry whether I’ve changed my gender preferences. Thanks mom. The truth is I’m beginning to wonder: have I become lazy, too cautious or too picky when it comes to dating?

This is hardly a new phenomenon. I went through a pretty long dry spell after breaking up with a live-in girlfriend in the early 90s. One friend spoke up at the time and said that he and my other friends were worried that I’d given up on having someone in my life. I was just beginning my teaching career and pretty much every waking hour and ounce of emotional energy was being poured into surviving those first few years. I thought I was, for the first time, being smart and acting like an adult. Apparently not. Damn.

past girlfriends by joe bustillos

Another friend, who knew that I’d been very fortunate with the level of attractiveness of my former girlfriends and female friends, said that I needed to expand my preferences beyond curvy playboy playmates. Out of frustration she quipped that at our age all the good ones were already taken anyway.That one left a scar. I mean, if all the good ones are taken and I’m not taken then does this mean that I’m not one of the “good ones?” Shit. That didn’t leave me with a particularly hopeful sense of having a future with someone I found attractive.

So at least one part of moving across the continent over a year ago was to get a new start on social things. And as much as I’d been warned to not have high expectations by two very good friends who have lived in the area (I mean, after all I’ve spent a lifetime spoiled by all the pretty people in Southern California), my dateless-state is not for a lack of attractive women where ever one goes. So, again, am I being lazy, overly cautious or just too picky? Sitting here staring at these words reminds me that the fact that I reflect and try to think through all of this is just not normal for guys, so my well-meaning friends say. Ack.

When I was in the process of moving here one friend suggested a couple websites, like meetup.com, where one could easily meet like-minded individuals centered on common interests. I signed up but never got off my butt. Another avenue to meet new people would have been to join a church. I used to inwardly chuckle when someone suggested that I should check in to see the size of the singles group before getting involved. But I couldn’t see making my choice of church based on some babe-meter. I had other issues about churches, so I never really even considered this as a meaningful option. In fact, being as busy as I’ve been over the past year, getting involved with anything for the purpose of meeting women hasn’t been enough. Put another way, there has to be a value to the thing beyond just meeting women. I am the complete inverse of several of my good buddies who’s main reason for doing anything is to meet women. That’s just not me. Don’t get me wrong, I love meeting new people and I generally find the people I encounter fascinating, but given how busy I am there are scant few hours dedicated to meeting these fascinating people.

One of the take-aways of my last relationship was how much better things seemed to come together for me when I’m in a relationship just in terms of energy and a sense of purpose. It’s not that I need someone for these things as much as having the benefit of someone to share the journey with, just in terms of bouncing ideas off of and getting outside of my own head on a regular ongoing basis. At the same time I do have a very full life with my career and writing and just the stuff that fills each day that I’m not entirely convinced that having as much freedom as I have isn’t much better than the complications of letting another voice into my life. Part of the problem is that I am very good at adapting to living all on my own and convincing myself that I really don’t need anyone. Too lazy, overly cautious or just too picky? I think I need to work the “friends” angle and just get out more to be with other people and find the joy there. No pretenses, no props, no re-inventions, nothing that’s not really a part of my life and passions. I’ll dare to go to the park without the borrowed dog and see what happens. jbb

Jessica at Laguna Lake by TravOC

Sources:
Image: Peteca toma seu banho by elbragon, http://www.flickr.com/photos/elbragon/3183246877/ retrieved on 10/15/2009, Creative commons/attribution license.
Image: Past Girlfriends by Joe Bustillos, http://joebustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/mygirls-1.gif retrieved 10/15/2009. Creative Commons/attribution license.
image: Jessica at Laguna Lake by TravOC, http://www.flickr.com/photos/travoc/89394031/ retrieved on 10/15/2009, Creative Commons/attribution license.

What would you do if (name-redacted) sent you a friend request on FB? Would you confirm or ignore . . . I still regularly think about (different name-redacted) – almost daily. I’m worried I can never get past her. And yes, I just got a friend request from her.

image by clipart.com

I’d been letting my “being-too-busy” dictate my social life (or the lack thereof) lately… okay, for the past year. But this dilemma required a response, so I sent the following back to my buddy:

Good question. First I’d be totally shocked because (name-redacted) isn’t an Internet “social networking” person. Second, I would be suspicious of her motives. All that said, I’d probably confirm. It’d be fun for a few days and them I’d remember that it didn’t work face-to-face, there’s even less for me via FB. Then I’d move on, per se, as one can move on from someone who’d previously defined ones life and crushed ones heart.

I have been over a year now without affection and intimacy in my life and that’s because of her. I think about her pretty much every day too, but I think of her as the one who had the chance to have everything I could give and rejected that so completely that I had to move to the opposite end of the continent, away from everything I knew and loved, so that I might start a new life and find someone to love me. I wish her well but in my mind I can’t get past the fact that she chose to not be in my life when I offered it. Now, it does help that I’ve benefited in every way imaginable by this rejection beginning with my job, to my friends here, to the new place I’ll be moving into in about two-weeks. But I think of her as the “oh well” in my life. I know Holly would ask, but if she said that she’s got it all figured out and she wants me back, what would I do?

There’s a danger being overly definitive about previous relationships, but my ability to trust her on any meaningful level has been permanently damaged. There’s no way in hell that I’d leave what I have going for myself in Orlando “to be with her.” If she said she’d come out here I wouldn’t believe it or trust her. The latter would be very destabilizing if it were to really happen (awkward!). Nope, I left everything I had to give. That well is complete dry. I gave up over a tenth of my life to her, almost to my own ruin. She’s not entitled to any more of me. I have to integrate all of that back into my life and be present in the good that is a part of my life now. Like i said, she’s the “oh well” of the past six years of my life.

And you, my friend, have got to do the same with your former flame. As (name-redacted)‘s psychologist once described me (not knowing that we were still seeing each other): “he was a wonderful memory which will give you warm feelings later in life, but nothing in the here and now.” amen, end of chapter. Hope this helps. Much love, jbb

image by neva

Over a year ago I wrote about my friend Neva:

I wasn’t living in Long Beach when Melissa Etheridge made her breakthrough playing locally at a club called Que Sera on 7th Street (funny that her wikipedia article doesn’t mention Que Sera), but every time I come out and watch Neva I think I’m seeing the beginning of the same thing. – neva rocks taco beach! *video* – May 4, 2008

I don’t remember how long I’d been going to my favorite watering hole, Taco Beach, when I happened to be there on a night when Neva was performing. Nothing formal or flashy, just an acoustic guitar and amazing voice playing over the bar PA, taking the passing attention of the audience between their conversations and drinking. Doing a solo acoustic set in that setting was not for the faint of heart. The audience wasn’t overly obnoxious or disruptive, but I’ve seen pretty talented musicians stare down at the floor, reduced to mumbling through their songs because they couldn’t break through the conversational sound-barrier. Sometimes it seemed to take a whole band to grab the audience’s attention, or at least something electric and loud. Neva had a backing-band a couple of times, but most of the time it was just her and her guitar and she was able to get the whole place rockin’ in her direction.

Wanting to be a supportive fan I checked out her MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/nevamusic and was met by the typical unappealing sprawl of a page where she’d post a poster for an upcoming gig that broke the pages frame and left one scrolling in all directions because one couldn’t see the whole poster at once (NOTE: I’ve shrunk the example page so that the viewer can see the whole poster at once. Notice that the list of gig dates along the right column are entirely illegible and the multi-spacing added to the confusion). Of course almost all MySpace pages are noted for their amateur quality. Regardless of the visual quality of her MySpace, between her MySpace and Facebook accounts she’s been able to muster up an online following of more than 800 folks. It’s difficult to figure out how many fans she has who are not online, but I’d guess that the online number is only a third of the folks who come out to see her shows (this guess is entirely based on the wide variety of folks who attend the shows I’ve seen, from college kids to retirees). Anyway, over the years I started taking pictures of her gigs and posted the results on my Flickr account. Then I started to shoot some video. I’ve only managed to edit and post one “performance” video and one “slide show” video (the latter video being mostly about my moving away from So Cal, Taco Beach & neva concerts). We talked on occasion about her website, but nothing came of it. Then she moved from Southern California to Lake Tahoe and I moved to Florida.

Just before I left So Cal I heard that she was working on a studio recording and eagerly bought the six-song set when it came out last February.We talked a couple times and she was doing pretty good with the CD but wanted to sell a lot more and joked that she’d sold a copy to all of her friends and family and still had a lot to sell before she would get to the point of having paid for the studio time and CD manufacturing. One of my first thoughts was that she’s not exactly living in a music mecca, living near Lake Tahoe. But then over the past few years I’d been following the careers of a few successful independent artists and part of the key to their successes was generating Internet buzz and gathering a much bigger following than they ever could with just public performances.

Lessons Learned From Those Who Went Before

The first on the list is a former software writer who decided to celebrate the birth of his first child by quitting his job and going fulltime with his music career. Jonathan Coulton built a strong following with the technorati in part because he spoke their language and found a way to be quirky, funny and touching usually all at the same time. Coulton produced and released two CDs, Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow and Smoking Monkey by 2004. Podcasting was just then taking off and Coulton offered to help his friends who were experimenting with the medium. But what really seemed to help Coulton was that he offered every song from the two CDs as a free download on his website. He understood that the free music would help generate a lot of interest and buzz and that at the same time those who became real fans would willingly buy his CDs (which were just one click away on the CD Baby website). The combination of speaking fluent geek and free-to-buy worked perfectly. But that alone does not a successful career make. Coulton kept interest up by deciding that the following year he would record and release one song a week for the whole year, and following the success of the last releases, he offered the recordings on his website for free, with the understanding that there would be CD collections made following the end of the year. Thus, the incredibly successful “Thing a Week” project was born, which resulted in a four-part Thing-a-Week CD collection. This past month Coulton released a follow-up CD/DVD project, BEST. CONCERT. EVER., recorded from concerts performed over the previous year, which includes fan-video, internet personalities and various interviews.

Looking at Coulton’s website one would not assume that this is the work of a genius, or wunderkind self-promoter. It’s basically an old-school unglitzy blog, low on graphics, big on text, with a tiny header and row of tiny buttons/links along the right column. It’s definitely the kind of thing that a former software writer turned successful musician might produce. But if one digs a bit below the text, one will discover that Coulton does two things right. One: everything a fan might want to know about him and his music, including the lyric, guitar song-sheets and the download-able songs are all just a click away. Two: he welcomes fan music videos, fan concert videos and fan involvement with his wiki and forums. And maybe this is the biggest key to his success, he came from and is still part of the community that now supports him. There’s no cult of personality or detached stardom. There a genuineness that bands and artists from major labels can’t hope to pull off. There’s no promotion machine trying to convince us that we want to listen to him. Just the craziness of his songs and simplicity of his performances are enough to general real interest and fun.

The next role model, Geoff Smith, is a Nashville musician who splits his time performing in a piano bar that partly owns, running a successful musical ringtone business (using a free/plus-premium model), writing jingles and doing live-video-streaming concerts with and for his friends, most notibly Cali Lewis from Geek Brief TV. The first time I saw Smith was one night during the holiday season a couple years ago. He’d turned on his web-cam and was streaming live-video from his living room, sitting at the piano taking requests from the chatroom that was attached to the live stream. He spent the whole evening playing Christmas songs mixed in with a little Beatles and other pop-tunes, bouncing between his piano to acoustic guitar. His talent was obvious and his enthusiasm and playfulness made for a very fun night watching this stranger from across the country while I worked on whatever project I was working on at the time. Not too surprisingly, Smith’s website conveys a lot more personality right away, but it’s also very user-friendly and transparent for the fans. In an email correspondence I asked Smith a bit about the blogging platform he was using, because I recognized the WordPress theme as being related to the one that I’ve been using for the past few years (Revolution, which became StudioPress by Brian Gardener). Smith confessed that he didn’t know too much about the inner workings of the blog because he has a friend doing that part of the business.

Like Coulton before him, Smith connected himself to many of the A-List podcasters, offering his services as a jingle writer and performer. He also offered his fans something a little different from Coulton’s free-to-buy method. Smith recorded a CD, Ones and 0s, and if you bought it directly from his website you’d get a bonus track subscription which entitles you to download new songs/videos that he updates on an ongoing basis. He recently released the 21st upgrade track from the CD. Buzz, community, relationship and using online/new technology to connect with the community/fans.

neva-music.com version one

neva-music.com version 1 by joe bustillos

The website is important, but as we learned from the two examples cited above, it’s completely meaningless without the willingness of the artist to be available to the community and fans in a way that was never realized (or really possible) in the pre-Internet world. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Ustream, Stickam, these are all tools to connect artist with community/audience. Getting past the fad-ish attention these technologies are getting from the general media, these tools can revolutionize relationships for those willing to let them into their lives. Transparency, genuineness, vulnerability, real-ness.

A couple things were paramount in my mind as I was putting the website together: 1) promote the brand, 2) make the  CD easy to get, 3) make the calendar/gig schedule easy to find, 4) make the website very visual. As I noted above, Neva’s MySpace and Facebook pages were none of these things. The best part of the MySpace page was that her music started to play as soon as you landed on the site, there was usually a giant poster about her next gig or schedule of gigs for the month dominating the page and way below everything else fans could make comments. But visually it was chaotic and her name didn’t stand out all that much. It looked like everyone else’s page.

1. So I put her name and image way up front (more in #4).
2. More could be done to promote the CD and make purchasing it more obvious. I found a “discography” widget that was made to list the CD and  the singles with links built in to sell the CD and singles. She just has the link to sell the whole CD, It’s a work in progress. I love how Geoff Smith has icons on the footer of his page connected to all of his products/projects, and these icons are persistent across all of the pages of his blog.
3. I wanted to put some kind of calendar on the front page that was click-able to info about where and when she’d be doing her next gig. I found a widget that did the gig thing in a list form. It’s a lot more clear than the MySpace version, with click-able links to venue information and maps. But having a calendar would have been visually more involving. I created a calendar using Google Calendar that I could embed in her website, but didn’t get it working the way I wanted.
4. Besides being a talented writer and performer Neva is very easy on the eyes and WordPress template(s) I’ve been using have become more and more visual. Color, image, feeling, I prefer this version of a promotional website to what she previously had on MySpace and Facebook.

So, this is still version one. Supporting community/fan communication is essential and this model only allows for comments to individual posts. The other thing is that i don’t know how much or if Neva is going to want to do individual update (e.g., blog entries). Additionally, I’m considering an experiment using the SquareSpace online publishing/blogging platform because it takes the layout/visual webpage/website design up a whole level. It has the design sense of iWeb without the irritating template limitations.

Big Picture: Facilitating Community

As the technology/Internet coach, I see my part of this as the one to find a way for Neva to comfortably interact with her community using the these tools. She knows her audience. She knows the people she wants to work with, on the music end of things. My part is to help her get started using these tools to communicate her beautiful voice to an Internet audience. jbb

Sources:

Image: Neva in an Alley, http://www.myspace.com/nevamusic

Image: screen-grab by Joe Bustillos, Neva’s MySpace, retrieved on 7/27/2009

Image: screen-grab by Joe Bustillos, JonathanCoulton.com, retrieved on 7/27/2009

YouTube Video: When You Go by Jonathan Coulton, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPBsSlYYezc&feature=player_embedded, retrieved on 7/27/2009

Image: screen-grab by Joe Bustillos, theGeoffSmith.com, retrieved on 7/27/2009

YouTube: I’m a Twit by Geoff Smith, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3biEam1_GgY&feature=player_embedded, retrieved on 7/27/2009

Image: screen-grab by Joe Bustillos, neva-music.com, retrieved on 7/28/2009

Image/slideshow: nevamusic @ Taco Beach by Joe Bustillos, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebustillos/sets/72157603250930056/, retrieved on 7/28/2009

image by joe bustillos

In the time that I’ve had my one dating experience most relationships have gone through whole life-cycles from discovery to death. Truth be told, the vast majority of my time with e-harmony I haven’t been actively pursuing anything as much as kept the service in my emotional back-pocket as a “Plan B.” I had a lot of fun the first few months when I was convinced that my former relationship was over and loved the possibility of meeting someone who was specially selected for me. Then that former relationship came back… kind’a. Well, it didn’t quite come back as much as it just took an extended period to expire. In the meantime, some of the air was let out of my e-Harmony expectations to the point where I just kept the subscription so that I could feel like there was a possibility of something for me in the future. Then when that former relationship really expired (for real this time!), it took almost all of my ability to trust myself and relationships with it. At that point I kept the e-Harmony account because I wasn’t ready to kill it too. Lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to change a few things.

Something a match wrote in her profile reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite movies, American Beauty, when the main character, played by Kevin Spacey, is accused of being a bastard, to which he says, “Nope; I’m just an ordinary guy who has nothing left to lose.” In my case, with 1,251 rejections to my name, I’m clearly doing something wrong and I most definitely have nothing to lose. It should also go without saying that I’m counting on my results turning out way better than how things turned out for Lester Burnham, the American Beauty character by Kevin Spacey.

So, I started to think about putting some effort into opening up the social circle using Meet-Up.com to get out and hang out with folks with similar interests. I’ve also been hearing good things about the Plenty of Fish dating site. But none of that is all that different from what I’ve been doing for ages. So, the “got nothing to lose” twist is that I’m thinking that, given how much I post online, I should include a link to my Facebook profile (or this blog) in my e-harmony profile or whatever website I sign up for.

This definitely isn’t a plan that Dr. Warren from e-Harmony would recommend and there is a definite danger of giving away too much information too quickly, which is a bit like insisting on telling one’s whole life story when someone just asks “how ya doin’?” And there’s the risk that being this open makes it more difficult to walk away from an unwanted match if the match is persistent. Of course, once someone that I meet online knows my name all of this information is just a Google-search away anyway. So, what do I gain from this level of exposure? It counteracts the possibility that someone is going to close a match because nothing popped out at them in my initial profile or in my answers to their five questions. If they click the links they’ll get to know the things that are important enough to me for me to write about (assuming that they’d bother with the links… which is a big assumption).

Another thing that I’m thinking about here is that I’ve always seemed to do best in my relationships that were more based on friendship first, where the level of communication is left as open as possible, where there’s no real fear that saying the wrong thing might chase the other person away. This idea does run a risk that has been a running theme of my relationships with females, of always being seen as the buddy and never as the lover. But I’d much rather do the work needed to be the lover with the foundation of a kick-ass friendship than be someone’s lost weekend with nothing to talk about in between (not that I’m having to turn anyone away… [sigh]). I do have to work on a lot of bad habits, beginning with putting almost no effort into meeting or spending time with new people. I love having a lot of control of how I spend my time, but Life is passing me by while I ponder the words of this blog entry. Onward and upward: “I’m just an ordinary guy with nothing to lose.”

Sources:
image: Emotional Cut-Out by Joe Bustillos, © 2009 · Some Rights Reserved ·

video: American Beauty: Trailer, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q3ltyPJJMQ Retrieved 7/10/2009

image: mouseguy, microsoft clip-art

image capture by playerx

Following is a video of Clay Shirkey at TED that my student included in her blog post:

Sources:

EDM613 wk4: Clay Shirkey and Twitter by Alice Keeler, http://www.selfservebaker.com/mathblog/?p=156 Retrieved 7/3/2009

Video: Clay Shirkey at TED, http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/575

image: Twitter Fail Whale is back by playerx, http://www.flickr.com/photos/playerx/3090739418/ Retrieved on 7/9/2009

New to Florida

it’s been an amazing year. A year ago February I decided to accept the challenge of moving across country to step from the safety a public school teaching job to try something new: teaching a masters level course at a new online program in Florida. I looked at my life in Southern California, having no permanent ties, save my siblings and nephews and nieces, and decided that I needed to make this change, to take my gifts and skills to the next level. It was a logical choice. But it also meant that I was permanently closing the door on a relationship that I’d been unsuccessfully pursuing over the past five years. I could either take this job or I could stay in California, woeking as a largely thankless classroom grunt waiting for a relationship that might never become what I wanted it to become. The choice was pretty logical. But I was also walking away from something that I had defined myself by. I’d poured everything I could into this. This was who I was. This was who I wanted to be with. I felt connected in a way that I couldn’t explain, yet it had somehow completely failed when it came to what she needed at the time. So I left and shut the door to that part of myself.

Then as I began to build my life here in Florida I grappled with how I would express my relationship to God, The problem was that this was something that I had re-discovered in my life because of the power of the relationship I’d just left. It was something we shared. It was something that seemed real because of the power of the love I felt for her. But given the ease with which all of that just went away without a single tear shed, I was left to think that that relationship had been largely in my own head, and this led me to question what else might have largely just been in my head.

It’s not so much that because I didn’t get what I wanted, I was just going to stop believing. But given how much I had opened my heart to the possibilities, only to be set aside and rewarded with the sound of silence and a completely affection-less life, I lost my certainty and thus another way that I had defined myself by slipped away. Another door closed in my life.

So this brings me to this past week. i had just returned from a great trip to Washington DC.

Brad, Jenith & I at the Newseum porch overlooking the Capitol

I was just getting to the point where I felt comfortable with my new cadremates, after having been away from the doctorate program for three years. Then when I got back from DC I received the letter from Pepperdine telling me that the Educational Technology Doctoral (EDET) Program committee had met and decided that my time at Pepperdine was done. In a nutshell, I’d requested for an incomplete for a research course so that I could get further along with my research and have something to write for my chapter 2 and chapter 3 of what would become my dissertation. The course professor felt that I didn’t deserve an incomplete and that I should just retake the whole course when it was next being given. Alas, this meant getting an “F” for the course which would mathematically drop me below the required B+ GPA to stay in the doctorate program. The committee agreed with the professor and now I’m no longer connected with Pepperdine. I knew for some time that this was going to happen, but getting the “disenrollment” letter very much left me with an unsure sense of self. More than just another door closing, having suffered the loss of these defining aspects in my life over the past year, I was losing track of who I was.

Dr. Spark & I at the Feinstein Breakfast in the Hart Building

The irony of this was that my last conversation with my good friend Dr. Sparks in DC was about me having greater vision for myself beyond being the guy building PCs, blogs and websites for others and taking my own vision for myself to the next level. Other cadremates in DC were meeting with their senators and representatives and agencies and national policy makers while i was struggling to maintain some sense of self. Dr. Sparks had no way of knowing that the hammer was about to fall on my career at Pepperdine. Also a bit upsetting was that I knew how other doctoral students in my program had spectacularly failed (for example, showing up for the end of program oral comprehensive exams unprepared and rip-roaring drunk… twice), I knew that a different choice could have been made. But my path was apparently meant to take me in a different direction. Things could have been different, but I alone was responsible for things not turning out as hoped for.

As the days have passed I wish that I could confidently agree with my friends and advocates that this change is for the good, that something better is going to come from this. But the sound of so many doors closing tends to undermine any sense of confidence or promise. I just know that it’s a waste for me to remain a candle hidden under a bushel basket. It’s not much to go on, but it’s better than assuming that I am now whatever I was meant to be or that the best days are in the past. I refuse to believe that. jbb

Click here for my flickr set from my trip to DC.