The weather is unseasonably mild, for example it was eight (8) dC. yesterday and I therefore decided to go for my haircut at Tony’s in the ‘Grain Exchange’ building from around 1911, the building that is! I also had coffee with John all between ten (10) am about noon. It is neat that John is downtown again, it makes coffee and the occasional lunch more pleasant and interesting. Sub-urban lunches are a drag for setting, I feel.

Today is Elisabeth’s birthday and I can give her a call as early as nine she informed me, but I’ll stay on the safe side! Elisabeth and I have celebrated each other’s birthday on a regular basis now for about half a dozen years. I have received a kettle, a frying pan, a teapot and a drawing over the years. I usually take her out for a lunch or an event. I don’t know what is on the agenda this year, but it maybe a trip.

At the moment I am recording sound files for Herman, which has been in the mill since the end of April. He does not have sound on his computer and consequently cannot listen to the CBC pod casts. I listened to the broadcast and recorded the pod casts for him, but he needs the old fashioned recorded tape in order to hear it! I have to watch the timing on this, because I have to do four before I meet him for lunch. The next tape exchange is at 8:25am; this reminds me of the laundry cycles I do at times and which will be due again next week.

Yesterday morning I right away dove into the problem of reducing image files using my own PHP image scaling software. This worked fine on the previous Vista-OS installation, but had remained untried so far on my renovated computer with the Windows7-OS.

And sure enough, the newly downloaded PHP programme reported that certain files were missing. It turned out that the ‘GD2’ software extensions had not come with the new download. A visit to the required website taught me that no downloads were available until further notice. Since that extension package was still on my old Vista C-drive, I simply copied all the missing folders from there, adding them to my newly downloaded PHP main software, reset the config file to listen for the gd2 extension, restarted the php.exe and still no result. I had to restart the whole computer itself and there was the GD section listed in the PHP-info page.

And, the ultimate test was of course ‘did the image scaling programme work?’ and it did. This also meant that I had the Apache local server working ok. In other words, thing are back to normal for my new computer’s functionality. For this I am very thankful, because this kind of operation is not a daily routine for me and always has some unexpected wrinkles associated with it, making me feel nervous and challenged. I should not complain, because I have met many such conundrums over the years and resolved most.

And, not satisfied with just restoring the old conditions, I went on to add sound clips to three of my Ajax-gallery photos as a trial. This, because I want to make a gallery using photos with such sound clips for the year gone by, i.e. 2012. Two years ago I made a review, but it used text and one image per month. This year a want to use my new Ajax based image gallery technology to incorporate sound and maybe some text. [The recording is still going with ten (10) minutes left.]

So, yesterday was quite a day for technical successes and blessings, which make me feel quite grateful, doing all this at my ripe old age of seventy six (76)!

Not too much to say under the ‘writings’ heading, except for a growing notion about would I can best label as the ‘de-personification’ of notions such as the ‘loving father’, the ‘good shepherd’, ‘god the father’ or even in the secular vein as in the ‘forces of nature’, the ‘process of evolution’ or the ‘struggle for survival’. All such ideas and similar others, are personifications of trends that we humans think are present in existence.

Now, the trends may indeed be discernable, but that does not mean that they are persons. We as humans tend to bestow personality on forces and processes of existence that have become distinguishable to us. We like to think of them as persons, having intent and motivation, but this often leads to the wrong expectations and misleading models of what existence is about.

The Ancient Greeks [the recorder time was up, but … I had speaker to speaker, instead of to mic, on the tape recorder! Wow; such technical talent :-.] held that certain feelings and thoughts they experienced were caused by the presence of the pertaining god being near by; such as Eros or Zeus. The thoughts and feelings were not experienced as their own at that time.

Mary-Louise von Franz in her book ‘Projection and re-collections in Jungian psychology’ 1987, reports (p.9) a case of an Nigerian soldier breaking out of his training barrack, because the tree he was named after, called him. And don’t we have the saying ‘The devil made me do it!’? This reminds me of the case of a well know federal male BC politician (Svendsen?) who stole jewellery to give to a friend, yet the place of theft was a well monitored auction preview venue!

So, we do seem to experience forces as coming from outside of us, yet they are at times dis-associated feelings and emotions on which we bestow personality. It is this kind of phenomenon that leads me to the conclusion that consciousness is acquired through learning from experience over a long period of time and that this process is still with us in modern times, I hope.

It is in this context that I see the need for de-personifying experiences such as love, anger, beauty and order. These are our own discernments by means of which we order the world of our experience and make it liveable so to speak. The intelligence that we perceive is our own, just look at all the disorder and unpredictability of many aspects of our world, such as the weather for this day one year from now!

Most order we find in the heavens is because of our short human life time span on to the celestial time scale of things. This is also evident when we look at the sub-atomic world, where chaos appears to reign in a world that measures existence in fractions of seconds in many cases.

Taken all this together I aim to say that we weave ourselves a world view that is fairly subjective, but functional. A theory does not have to be correct in order to be useful. I learned this when I studied positional astronomy, which is based on the assumption that the stars, the moon and the sun rotate in circles around the earth with the necessary computational corrections.

Why does this assumption work when positioning yourself on earth by means of the stars? Well, compared to the far away distances the stars are at, sun, earth and moon are all three in the same spot!
So we have working hypothesis as that is called, but is may not always describe or model accurately what is out there or in here! And that is the mystery in which we remain, revealing and knowable, but un-comprehendible!
<9:07am~