tziteras

A financing company or quango - needs to allow people and businesses to invest in renewable energy - solar panels, wind turbines, etc but pay it back slowly so as to immediately see any rewards in terms of lower monthly prices etc. Home energy management infrastructure: So that lots of small renewable energy solutions can be used together seamlessly - all plug into "inverse" plugs for example, which feed energy into the house (or back to the grid, but mostly people won't have the money to invest in something that generates that much energy - only the Camerons of the high income world). Lots of renewable tech charges batteries for example - perhaps this aspect should be seamless: on a windy day more energy would come from a turbine, on rainy days from the hydro, from sunny days from the sky... This shouldn't matter to people. The equivalent of the IBM PC or of USB plugs - if one thing doesn't work, plug in another one and use that... Problem is, the government migh...

Just back from the Chocolate Box Architects meeting. This step in the campaign consisted of getting two well known architects active in the area to come and give their opinions and expertise. We met with Keith Hallet (who has set up many local wonderful places like the scrapstore/better food company and redcliffe futures - all with a running theme of community involvement) and George , were joined by Jackson and Paul , as well as a lot of the core Chocolate Box people and of course local residents. The architects seemed very capable and very open to the very same community participation, sustainability, and self build ideas, although offering their own improvements to our ideas by saying that the self build could happen within the framework of the existing buildings (thus offering many many more self build plots), and seemed to warm to the idea of a reduced traffic build that favoured bike access or connections with the railway. I arrived early and got a chance to speak in person to Ke...

So came my epiphany. In the realisation that no-one knows when the end will come, and that we are actually in charge of deciding this. Peak oil is just a tiny part of a much larger point which is our having grown to this size in terms of our consumption of resources for the first time in the history of life. As a Buddhist this is significant because it's a turning point for humankind. If we can survive this issue, we will really be making an incredible cause. There is only one way to do this, and it's to finally realise the connectedness, or even just see the logic in not taking the world to the extremes we've taken it. We have already gone too far and it's not going to be easy to get out of this mess. But there are changes afoot - even Google realise that working with small companies and not seeking to dominate is the business. And one little bit less do we resemble a steaming pile of maggots over a corpse, now lacking the larger millipedes who storm around or the la...

Today the chocolate factory has been the talk of the neighbourhood. Already a yahoo group has been hijacked and is the subject of much discussion at the local volunteer run free wireless non profit , and maybe soon at the cube or even my work. It's an old ramshackle looking chocolate factory owned by Elizabeth Shaw who used to be called Packer & Co and sell their fancy chocs to marks and sparks. So with the sparks not flying so far anymore, they are closing down. The chocolate factory used to have 2500 employees, workhouses, a school and even the cemetery used to be a part of the ecosystem that was Greenbank in the last century. It was vital for all the people in the area. And this was a very industrial area, with the gasworks and the chocolate factory, the hawks gym - what was that? Mivart St... the big train station (I wish there had been a picture of the mural on that station - it's incredible). They all stand like giants in our wake. Now the tide is turning and I ...

Slashdot | IBM to Oracle - You Can't Buy Open Source IBM? Oracle? Pffft! You're standing on the sky scrapers and only see the giant peaks that come out over the clouds. What happens when the mountain falls? So here I am stuck in Peak oil world - that devastating feeling you get after eating too much and realising you just popped your stomach. Oh shit. But it's just a world, and it'll pass, and be replaced soon enough by my peak oil epiphany. I've known for long and have had glimpses in my dreams. "Daddy - the chickens are sick" - and me, "Stay away from them!". The world where every resource had been taken and was being used to the full amount it could, renewably. So the only way to win over the others would be to destroy a large amount of the land through war or something equally hellish and then run in and invade it. "We have to go on our annual pilgrimage to feed the Chinese soldiers. We will not have to donate a child this year. They ca...

Is this the answer to peak oil? I've spent the easter weekend enjoying children and festivity and friends in Bristol, sometimes coming out of my little happy hole to look out and see really upsetting headlines - another oil price hike, unrest and mad violence at oil sites etc, and a very good documentary on more4 last week which pushed me to finally unite my family's dreams of moving on somewhere permanent, with the peak oil idea that the current society really risks very turbulent economic times within the next 5 years or so, and that after that most resources will dwindle in similar ways - such as natural gas and coal, and we'll be left with whatever we can take to the next level. Just like you shouldn't move to San Francisco if you don't like earthquakes, you shouldn't live in oil dependent areas if you fear recession. The next step has to somehow keep some of what we've learnt during this time. Like the Roman times hugely influenced the middle ages, we...

Creative Commons: A safe house for intellectual property Interesting chat on the #cc channel on freenode - some guy who wouldn't disclose the type of software he was making, but looking for a CC rather than GPL/BSD license for it - specifically so it was non-commercial. A bit of a lost cause really because if you don't understand the mentality of openness and are trying to stop other people making money from your ideas then maybe you shouldn't be looking for these licenses. Or maybe you should and there should just be more levels to let everyone release as much as they want of things... This guy kept repeating that he wants to make a living from writing code. Same with me with music/art using the creative commons idea - but with me I don't care if from today to tomorrow I make money from a song, so I'm just glad if someone wants to sample or reuse something. It's the skill argument - paid for what you do not what you've done. Will cc licensed creative materi...

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/26/1829240 http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/24/okay_do_be_evil_goog.html A lot of talk around the internet about the censorship problem. A few thoughts: It just occurred to me that from a buddhist point of view, no-one can rightly say "We are not evil" - like a lot of these new copyleftish companies are doing. No one is intrinsically good and unable to do something bad. We all have all those things. But saying "do no evil" is a bit of a christian or at least western block in morality - as if evil was something you were always conscious of. We are living under a lot of different prejudices at any one time: a colleague of mine who grew up under apartheid in south africa never knew that it was wrong until she visited the UK and found people mixing between races. Our weapon against this is taking responsibility and confronting these prejudices when they become apparent, but crucially making sure they can be apparent. Also, ...

Wireless Application Programming with J2ME and Bluetooth Ok so it's possible to make bluetooth stuff I think with java, that you then load on your phone and can use to go around doing damage to other people's phones - http://bluetooth.weblogsinc.com/2004/02/07/bluetooth-hacking-for-fun-and-profit/2#comments But this is sooo unimaginative. Here is a braindump of ideas - the end idea being of being able to use this stuff for arts: For ages I imagined a way of talking that was like extended quick bluejacking. I thought I'd use it to find things out without talking to anyone - it would be about quickly noting metadata to do with a place or time or day, and sharing only that, automatically. It would be all about the social side of it - how much do you feel comfortable sharing with strangers, and how do you create social contact in spaces where that never happens? The interface should be simple and people should want to do it. Here's a similar thing Another network idea could...

Cebolla 1/4, aji un poquito. comino. 250 gramos de carne arevejas, zanahorias, papas se hace un fritito con todo eso no mucho aceite luego se pone el arroz y el agua hervida un poco mas que lo normal para hacer arroz. Y ahi esta'!

this is not the file I am looking for...I know its around the studio somewhere...but the Last Rose of Summer is a great song.... Jaff! Message from Jaff, from ccMixter - Here are some thoughts as I listen to the files as they come through. This is a collaboration with some singer I've never met, whose brother posted samples of her voice which I used in a track . Planning to do some mixing of "Last Rose" - hoping it's their own composition! I imagine a crazed improv noise madness session playing behind it... I love soprano voices... Sorry to see Derek Bailey go. He was in Barcelona, where I once thought I'd return to start loads of impro stuff. We have to be a new generation with this stuff. Mr Bailey had already improvised with and anything and anyone that took his fancy, we have to take this stuff now and use it in our work, taking it to a whole new level. We can mix his and his contemporaries' theories on chance meetings and unpreparedness, his approach t...

I've not written for ages. I'm really sorry about that - I had prepared an entry but I think I focus too much on quality and these things need to be just written offhand and published. I guess with writing I'm much more preparatory than with music. Anyway the gig was about a month ago. I have another one planned for the 22nd at bar Oppo on Park St Avenue, Bristol - a no smoking venue to appease people like claudio or my friend Fleur for whom pubs are too smokey, and the millions of others like them, as well as yet more who just don't like to play or hear music where people are drunk and throw glasses at you (Which is incidentally what happened at the gig - I don't think she meant it - far too out of her face to even notice what she'd done I think). So we're moving to nicer venues, with Claudio on percussion and perhaps I wonder someone else on Base or something. I just saw the opening concert for Nathan Daniel PSI - where PSI means personal space invaders....

There's the new flyer for the gig, which I posted around a bit. Since then Tim has pulled out, but I've found and confirmed Claudio Furet on percussions.

Here are my preparations for the gig on the 11th . Lots of guests to keep track of, lots of time to play. Very little money. That's life. It's my birthday. It's an investment for more gigs. Wish I could do a whole gig with a story teller who had a great story though... Would be brilliant. Just did a duet at a Buddhist course. I'm a member of SGI-UK . Playing improvised guitar as a live score to a sketch. Felt really good to get to play experimental improvised guitar and have people actually enjoy it - loads of people said afterwards that the guitar playing fit so well with Aletta's movements and was "timed perfectly"! - Aletta did the animal effects for Dr Doolittle and it was loads of fun to play to her story about an evil nun, eating soap and pretending to be a tree... Anyway, on this gig there's the talented writer and songwriter David Green - I really like his email address name more - should be a stage name - Daid. I want to play tabla to two of ...

I am in a huge and expansive arts centre/cinema/cathedral, in ancient Monfalcone. It's Monfalcone so it must be the Valentinis disco, where all my school friends used to go when I was 16. and although we were in the same school it was unreachable, a world apart. But it's more than that. Other unreachable things are all around. We have come as buddhists or students to do a course and are here for a while in accomodation on the centre's grounds. I can't remember if it's with Soka Gakkai or as students of the UWC that we are here, but the accomodation is simple and functional, but I can tell that we are in a cheaper more day to day part of what houses much more valuable people than us. We are all teenagers and young adults. The course has now come to an end. I remember the rooms and the shared bathrooms, all very clean and well kept. I look out the window down the huge stone block walls worthy of an Inca city or Egyptian pyramid, and far down below I see some limousin...

As I write I'm compressing a file from a tabla practice. I am a student of a student of Pandit Shankar Ghosh . My guruji/master's name is Tapanji . I once told him I was a buddhist, and he told me this story in great detail about the way he would walk past a beautiful buddhist temple in his youth. And now you can't even see the temple for all the other buildings that now fill the land. And his mother used to use flowers, like the ones he pointed out to me in his garden - big bright yellow flowers - when he would hurt himself as a child. Homeopathic remedies. And the tabla classes. Always told with such feeling - his tabla master's strict classes where he wouldn't let you leave when your lesson finished, and you had to assist other student's lessons, or where he would say "put on that record" and they would listen to something - I think quite varied stuff, not just indian music. He told me of not being able to write it down, scolding me almost, for taki...

A huge storm chased me down park row, past the violin shops and the hospital, into the Cube Cinema yesterday Wednesday 31st for our first Cube Orchestra rehearsal after the Here Shop Gig. Present were Belinda, Tomoko, Gareth and myself. We took our time in setting up amplifiers, and finding some old drums for Tomoko to play, while we chatted. After some chat about what went wrong on Saturday, Belinda wrote down a list of points which I hope she'll send to the list - quite openly worded and focusing on the percieved problem rather than the percieved solution. I hope we can use all the problems constructively to refine our guidelines for new people and for participating and in preparation for concerts. Then it was time to play. One of the comments from before was "lack of conductor" or "limited ways of communicating during performance". Belinda suggested a great exercise where you appoint an "invisible conductor", disguised as one of the musicians and th...

Ok so trying to think straight so I can write something usefully. But I'm completely entrenched in lack of brain fibre by this orchestra cube rehearsal that captures my will to write or communicate, my need . We've become kind of a jam band, kind of a crazy orchestra with a rebellious spirit. I don't like it when people feel that that spirit of a bunch of people together doing something is based only on their feel as musicians - that's always there, but it's not everything. What about what was happening in your life, that affected your confidence at different moments, and the memories you'll carry with yourself of those times and those days when you happened to record that music. It's because sometimes what's not said is so beautiful that it tears apart all meaning in a meaningless day. But that doesn't mean it's everything. So I feel we should talk, fight it out, bond or whatever the fuck as long as the music we produce is beautiful and breatht...

ta ti ti ta ta dhin dhin dha dha thin thin na tete ti ti ta