Mortality Shines in Soul Colors

My family skirted what could have been a major tragedy this last week. A dear member of our family underwent critical surgery after a close brush with real-life mortality. This is the kind of event that brings family and friends together post haste in support of their loved ones and that is exactly what happened to our circle of family and friends. We love each other and that is why we came together...and there was no question in it. It's one of those things that comes from the very marrow of your bones without so much as a thought entering into the process. A family member needs you: someone you love who means the world to you. You go! There is no question about it. None at all.

I think often I have thought of mortality as a kind of enemy, like aging, because after all that's what it represents....the temporality of physical existence, the ending of 'the known' as we each individually experience it.  We have whole industries that are built around 'putting it off'. We have the 'Fountain of Youth' in our mythologies or the concept of 'immortality', if you will. But really,...aging,....entropy,......time:.....the cycles of life, they have the power to bring us together and unite us, because we all experience them whether we are rich or poor, educated or indigent. They are part of the fabric of being alive, of being a living human being, a Soul Shining through the Fabric of Mortality. 

These times of crisis offer us an opportunity to get just a little closer to our humanity and the true spirit of our soul and even that energy that is of our Genesis: the High, Mysterious Order of Intelligence that guides the Universe and our very Life Force within It. It is one of the four letter words within our language that gets used often, but truly donned or harnessed a bit more infrequently. ...... LOVE...... That is what this is all about...... These times, although they may be scary and fraught with uncertainty, bring us closer and draw out of us the love that is always there, albeit usually under the thick--sometimes Very Thick-- surface hide of our ordinary lives. These times make us vulnerable, pliable, and supple.....and that process scares us....to be so naked and so vulnerable....and yet, it is also one of the times when who we truly are is more accessible,  when we are the closest to Source, Love, and Humanity.

Reach out to those you love in your life and tell them that you love them. Why wait? Honestly, I think that this is precisely what events like this are designed to teach us above all else. Live and Love NOW!! Not tomorrow, for that will be too late.  Living fully + Loving fully = Peace.

I Wish True Peace and True Love Upon All Who Happen to Come Across this little Post of Mine. One thing I know...and that is that we are supposed to Love One Another regardless of what our belief systems may or may not be or in what part of the world we are born or whether we went to college or we didn't,  whether we like the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers or whether we consider ourselves Republicans or Democrats or Buddhists or Agnostic. None of this matters. All of this is just noise and the noise will continue until its not. What  has really been important long before the 'noise' and long after it's over for ourselves is Loving one another. Really, truly, loving each other as the special, sentient, individualized miracles that each of us are. Really, we are just kids on a big, round, living playground that is spinning around on its axis as its traveling an orbital pattern around a central Sun and the only real rules of the school yard are not to throw rocks, to love one another and have fun. Love is not complicated. It's simple. If that were not true, babies wouldn't be the Pros.

God Bless You.

Mirroring Your Hard Drive (on Mac OS X 10.8.2) to Bitcasa "The Way You Want It"

If you're at all like me, you like to have multiple backups of your system. Sure, a local backup--or several actually!--is a basic part of the program, but aside from the most obvious, it's also good to have an offsite back up system firmly in place. For me, Bitcasa seems to offer a great deal ($99/year for Infinite Cloud Storage) to the average joe to solve the catastrophic fears in the back of our little tech-oriented minds. Aside from this, they offer free iOS apps so that you can litterally have access: manipulate ('send' or 'share'), and in some cases 'view' (basic content such as pictures, movies, and documents) right on your portable device...and since the amount of storage is 'Infinite' you can litterally put anything and everything you want up on their cloud--even files that you cannot 'view' on the app, simply because you are still allowed to manipulate them (send/share) with colleagues, friends and family for extended and complete file sharing capabilities. At $99/year, it's a steal.

There's One Caveat at This Stage of Bitcasa's Evolution:  Your Have to Get Your Hands A Little Dirty--

One thing about Bitcasa is that to fully use what they offer--what they call 'mirroring' (of folders)--you have to really get into your file directory and root around to make sure that all aspects of your system that you want to be 'mirrored' (to Bitcasa Servers), ARE. They offer a partially automated system when you set up their Mac app on your system, but it's really just a 'skim coat' when it comes to getting a good 'Mirror' of your system to the cloud: basic files like pictures, videos, and documents are fairly automated...Unless you've got your stuff stored in places on your Mac or Windows Machine that are not the most obvious of locations. That being the case, you will have to 'point' Bitcasa at those files or folders by 'mirroring' them To Bitcasa (an easy choice in the contextual pop up menu that appears) when you (right)tap/click on the particular (or any) folder or file once you have the Bitcasa app up and running on your machine.

Even to the non-tech oriented Bitcasa's app will make the set up and implementation of their service easy and automatic. Since basic files and folders are going to be mirrored once you say 'yes' to the prompt "Mirror this computer to Bitcasa?", most people will find this sufficient for their purposes. For those of us that want more, the lanscape is open and beconing: you can 'Mirror' everything and anything you want except where the OS will not allow you to because of "security issues". That leaves A LOT that you can configure.

Here's a cool thing that I discovered today:

Photo Stream Automatically Uploaded to Bitcasa:

By 'mirroring' this folder 'volume/user/home folder/pictures/iPhoto Library/Masters' you can cause your PhotoStream photos to auto upload to your Bitcasa Infinite Drive. This is nice since it uses your Mac or PC and iCloud and Bitcasa Services to do the heavy lifting. There is a 'connect to camera' feature on the Bitcasa iOS app, but if you have this folder mirrored on your Mac then you can forego this as iCloud is already doing a lot of this through PhotoStream (as long as you have that feature enabled) on your system and devices. Note: If you are using Aperture or some other Mac app to import your photos other than iPhoto, then you will have to amend the file path above accordingly. 

Finding little things like this makes me smile. It's fun. Off I go to find more and when I do, I'll surely share.

Happy Tech-ing. 

Chrome or No Chrome?

On Aug 14, 2012, at 7:49 PM, Sean Casey wrote:

> I was using Google's Chrome Browser earlier today on my Mac and iOS devices and I have to admit that it is, indeed, a cool feature. However, I look forward to Apple's implementation of the feature and UI to be thoroughly integrated in iOS 6. I was excited to try this feature between my Mac and iOS devices, but not enough to stand having to look at the blocky, rough graphics of Google Chrome on my Mac. I tried having Chrome as my default browser for a while today while cavorting around on the web and checking out the cloud-tab features syncing back and forth through Chrome on Mac and iOS. How did it turn out?

> Well, I think that I lasted about an hour before I switched the default browser back to Safari. Sorry Google, couldn't do it--but thanks for the option. I finally hit a hang nail with Chrome when I tried to save a webpage as a .pdf file, which I happen to use quite often in Safari. For me, that did it. 'Click'--Safari as Primary Browser Restored. I felt a little weird afterwards like I needed a shower, like I had been unfaithful or something. It's kind of funny: the emotions and attachment tendencies that can arise out of a relationship with a Mac. To solitary Windows owners this may sound a little odd, but not to those with Macs. Certainly not. For some it's love at first sight. For others it simmers and develops over the years. But either way, genius and passion are a part of it. > …I digress. Apologies.
>> I think Google has done a good job with it all in all through the Chrome Browser experience, yet I cannot shake how chunky and rough-edged the graphics experience actually is on Chrome. It's different than my personal experience of other Google Apps, especially the Google App for the iPad, which has, I think a very smooth and elegant UI. The Chrome App for Mac though is a very different experience that does not seem to jive well with other Google iOS App experiences on the whole. It stands to reason, I suppose, that more attention to design would be lavished on Google Products for iOS than Mac as per numbers alone, but here it's awkwardly obvious that this has been the case. I'll probably leave it on my machine (for now), but I doubt that I will wind up having much of a use for it. It's a nice idea though, albeit a design clash on the Mac.