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According to Buddhist teachings, ...

The Magic of GO.

According to Buddhist teachings, man is unhappy because of attachments, called cravings. A better way is to embrace tightly but to let go easily. In other words, you should try to do everything you can to win the game, be it some aspect of the game of life or business or a real game like go. In the end, we may win some and lose some, but when we lose, it is time to let go and put it all in perspective. That way, we may lose but we will not be beaten. In go, we may lose a game, but through analysis and introspection, we can still benefit and use that knowledge and insight for a new game. - Rob Van Zeijst

Long Distance URL

MYBEDROOMVIEW.jpg
Originally uploaded by Space Explorer.

Wow!
Just great stuff for the imagination of us all!
You go girl!

The Women Warriors

Link: Jane, We Hardly Knew Ye Died - New York Times.

"LT. EMILY J. T. PEREZ, 23, a West Point graduate who outran many men, directed a gospel choir and read the Bible every day, was at the head of a weekly convoy as it rolled down roads pocked with bombs and bullets near Najaf. As platoon leader, she insisted on leading her troops from the front.

Two weeks ago, one of those bombs tripped her up, detonating near her Humvee in Kifl, south of Baghdad. She died Sept. 12, the 64th woman from the United States military to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Eight died in Vietnam.

Despite longstanding predictions that America would shudder to see its women coming home in coffins, Lieutenant Perez’s death, and those of the other women, the majority of whom died from hostile fire (the 65th died in a Baghdad car bombing a day later), have stirred no less — and no more — reaction at home than the nearly 2,900 male dead. The same can be said of the hundreds of wounded women." - Lizette Alvarez

Sunday Outlook

Are We Really So Fearful? - washingtonpost.com.

"That is what stays with me -- that he was cold under the balmy afternoon sun of Santiago de Chile, trembling as though he would never be warm again, as though the electric current was still coursing through him. Still possessed, somehow still inhabited by his captors, still imprisoned in that cell in the National Stadium, his hands disobeying the orders from his brain to quell the shuddering, his body unable to forget what had been done to it just as, nearly 33 years later, I, too, cannot banish that devastated life from my memory." - Ariel Dorfman

Daring to question from a position of knowledge; fact, not theory, seen first hand.
A beautifully written look into the eyes of torture and into the heart of our collective, national soul.

Odds and Ends

Great interview yesterday in the N.Y. Times with Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power. Interestingly, the text was very short and when you watch the video you realize that the vid could easily replace the text altogether...a vision of the future?

Speaking of the future, I am still in love with the N.Y. Times Reader. It's a new take on one of the first online paradigms, the downloadable newspaper. This is done much better, however, and with today's bandwidth and access, the concept could stick this time. Check out Slate's take on it here.
Photo by Erich Schlegel for The New York Times

Ya Gotta Believe!

The celebratory bath with what must have seemed like the finest Champagne had eluded them in Pittsburgh, but it arrived in full force after the Mets defeated the Florida Marlins, 4-0, at Shea Stadium to clinch their first division title since 1988. After Cliff Floyd caught Josh Willingham’s liner to end the game, catcher Paul Lo Duca mobbed Billy Wagner at the mound, and the rest of the team sprinted out of the dugout to join the merriment near second base. - Ben Shpigel, The N.Y. Times.

N.Y. Times Reader

N.Y. Times Reader
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

So, I am about 10 minutes into my beta-testing of the new New York Times Reader. It downloads the Times to your computer, giving you full access, in a print-metaphor interface, to the full paper - pictures, ads and all. Its search-able, save-able, markup-able, email-able, and depending on the size of your Windows machine, very, very portable.

Once downloaded, you no longer need an internet connection to read it; when you connect again, it updates. So far, I love the screens; navigation is very intuitive and resolution is great. If you are a competing dead-tree media company, be afraid, be very afraid. More info to come....

Weekend Guilty Pleasure, Tokyo-Ga

Weekend Guilty Pleasure
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

I am in love with the films of Wim Wenders!

While I am quite fond of Paris, Texas, and adore Wings of Desire; it was the film Tokyo-Ga which makes me swoon.

This 1985 doc is an homage to the great Japanese director Ozu Yasujiro, and it follows Wenders on a personal pilgrimage to Tokyo in search of Ozu's trail. It is visually and acoustically very effective at setting the mood for Wender's wanderings, and it foreshadows techniques that we see later in Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club.

I had this film on 8-mm tape for a while and would watch it constantly; then my camera broke. I haven't looked at it in over 10 years as, with most of Wender's films, it has not been available on DVD. Imagine my surprise when I found it package with the Criterion Collection's release of Ozu's Late Spring. What a wonderful treat!

My weekend is now set!

Save Your Pennies!

Leica M8 Hands-on Preview : Digital Photography Review.

...fifty-two years after the M3, and just in time for Photokina, Leica has made another historical introduction, the first digital M series, the M8. This new rangefinder digital camera has the classic design, build and function of the M series but utilizes a completely digital imaging system. The M8 has a specially designed ten megapixel CCD sensor which being slightly smaller than a film negative introduces a 1.33x field of view crop. This ratio conveniently converts several standard M lenses to sort-of equivalent steps (so 21 mm to approx. 28 mm, 28 mm to approx. 35 mm).

River on the Metro.

River on the Metro.
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

Dave Winer is brilliant!
He has a winning way, not because of his stellar personality or because of his movie star good looks, but because, unlike soooo many of his contemporaries in the tech world, he understands the concept of "simple".

He is the father of the "simple" web site (blog); the "simple" push technology (RSS); and now the "simple" mobile information terminal, a cell phone transformed by River of News.

While many of us in the news business keep building more and more complex ways for people to get our content (mobile.nytimes.com), Dave has figured out how to get the people what they want, painlessly.

Brilliant!