The import of previous bloggits from the twohandsapproach.org/nucleus blog did not go as well as expected. The database has the records, but the dates are all screwed up.

Also, nucleus is not the friendliest at showing its archives.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

I have about 70 bloggits that I would like to have up on this, the new blog.

Please bear with me.

Without hesitation, I must divulge something of my peripatetic, genetic past. Psstt! Even though I was born, raised, and set free in Canada, my chromosomes come from Scotland.

My paternal grandmother, Marion Cole, was from Edinburgh, but later moved to Vancouver. She was alive until I was about 22 or so and traipsing around Africa and other nodal points of the globe.

Apparently, Watson is part of the Buchanan clan. Here is their tartan (see below):
Let's face it: Dylan has a huge mansion in Scotland, as does Sir Paul McCartney. The Chieftains and other bands keeping Celtic also deserve mention. Acoustic rocker KT Tunstall also hails from the land of the haunted moors. In fact, she praises Scotland's live music scene in this youTube video.

On my maternal side, I have English roots. I do have to explore this in more detail. I must talk to Mom at length on that soon.

I'm staying in Korea for the next few months, but Mom is in Ontario, Canada.

She's 85. She does calligraphy and drawing and painting. Here are some samples:

Well, I am on summer vacation but with a slew of things to do.

As some of you may know, I have occasionally blogged using an installation of nucleus blog software on the twohandsapproach.org website. Unfortunately, this installation does not show the stedawa.com name at the top, and it looks as though the blog is squatting illegally on someone else's land.

Well, the story is that twohandsapproach.org plus stedawa.com are housed on a single server under a single account. Stuff about domain name and how to point to it and how not to see one as a subdirectory of the other etc is stuff that my cranial fibers have to severely strain at times to fathom. Circuits overheat, causing blackouts in my mind's city.

On yet another analogy, we could say that I ride the tech train only so far, and when the topography and terrain gets too labyrinthine or the air too thin, I head back to sea level.

But this morning I was bothered by mosquitos at 3am, so I got up (since going back to sleep is an almost impossible task and not a viable option), and I tried to install the blog under the stedawa.com name.

So, as you can see, it worked. My next task is to try to pry open the database of the older bloggits (entries), and to try to transfer them into the new installation database. Anyone who has any tips on how to do this (mySQL savvy), please tweet me @stedawa and I may pick your brains for tips on the procedure for transfering records.

By the way, the name for the blog is smatterings.

photo preview from flickr. photo by tammylo.

Jai Agnish: Awake When You Dream (free audit/download here)

Jai's music is listenable and approachable, and because of this, it is more than a pleasant surprise. Since I live in Asia and my access to the latest English-language music is limited, I don't have a lot to compare it with. What immediately springs to mind, though, because of its vocal-layering and subdued tone is that it is similar to The Weepies. Words are given an appropriate background, a kind of cushion if you will, so that as they are sprinkled or flung before you, you are relaxed enough and ready enough to catch their impact, their full charge. The charge of the lightness of words brigade that skips the light fandango and leaves trellises for us to enjoy. Words are suitably inaugurated, as they should be in all good songwriting.

It's a meandering, gentle weave of sound and sight, like a bike ride or country roads ride in a car that may break down and need towing, across the landscapes and shifting sandscapes of family and urban and other things that are livable, lovable, laughable. His somewhat soft but clearly audible voice, backed with overlays of and stretches of carefully crafted acoustic guitar and occasional mellotron arrangements and vocals by Peg Carlin, informs the listener without contest or confrontation. He is obviously trying to collate in these confusing times. Lively enough and with words that tell little stories and conjure up places and people, with words that capture the fleetingness of it all, seemingly acknowledging even the fleetingness of the words themselves, the song collection has tinges of transcendentalism, poetic pit falls that pull us and tug at our mind that at times, too, must be childlike, down the Wonderland rabbit hole of the imagination and away from the Blunderland of our blesst social mess.

Phrases are elevated at times with repetition, sometimes unexpectedly, making us notice even prosaic phrases as having something worthy of note. I provide here some not-too-carefully sifted samples from the lyrics; perhaps you may feel compelled to drop by the above website for a listen to the whole album. I also [encase] what might be the theme or drift of the song in each case, although that is personal and someone else could interpret the song quite differently. Perhaps it is poetic confetti, picnic finger food, krill for blue whales — with no Ultimate Meaning intended.
(1) New Parade: Call up the press and stop the traffic -- — and make a New Parade. Everyone's here, and everyone's messed up [celebrating something?]
(2) Farview: Go inside and open up the door. Tell the man in there that you're ready for more. [staying open]
(3) Paradise: Trying to find my way to Paradise, to Paradise. Can't quite figure out this roadmap, there's too many signs. Tie me to the truck, maybe you can tow me there... Does it matter at all? [metaphor of driving in a car for the cosmic journey?]
(4) Walls: Walls above my head. [?] I guess it's best for the rest of us. Tears are in my eyes, but I can't cry. How high is this, anyhow? [consciousness? reality of emotion?]
(5) We Found Love: I found a new friend. We found love. How high does this love go? [love springs eternal]
(6) **Shopping Malls: Whose land is this, anyhow? Give it back to the animals, to the dinosaur age. How long til it all becomes walls, walls, shopping malls? You can buy anything in this shopping mall. [suburban mall sprawl]
(7) Your Dream: Quick, get out of bed. You can tell me all about your dreams later. I'll see you later. [morning routine, singing in the shower, sunshine after rain]
(8) India: Told our tour guide this journey's been sanitized. Crowds of people wander by aimlessly. Does anyone notice them? Does anyone notice me? [night time in Mumbai, heritage identity]
(9) Lightnings Bugs: They hung around almost for a week. They have me drive them down the street to the bagel shop... We sit out on the cliff by the lake just in time for the sunset... I wanted to tell you this story about this thing that I found... Is it the timing or the rhyming? Haven't really figured that out.... His toys are everywhere... [snippets of stories, starts of yarns -- it doesn't take too much to get a story going.]
(10) Parachutes: It's OK if you put on your boots and fly away... Into the sky, you and I... It's easy enough to get lost in all of these worlds. Hey, we forgot our parachutes. Hold on, falling, down. [the convergent and composite nature of reality, the inevitability and atemporality of death]
(11) An American: Just outside the city lines... She says she's an American... Puts in 60 hours a week... Play games with money... They heard the saints making noise... Then the war it begins... They dream of smoke, they dream of fire, they dream a vision... Her face is like the sun... It's sweaty on the trading floor... [American dream? statue of liberty? the inner battle?]

Links:
review at docstoc had this to say about him
Jai Agnish -
album at bandcamp

Having swelteringly sweated and swatted it out with Pivot, having briefly flittered withB2Evo, having had other domain name problems with WordPress, and after having great success with pMachine which is now discontinued but reincarnated as Expression Engine, I now venture into new territory with Nucleus, the blogware for this scriptorium auditorium.

typo3 was also a strong candidate of choice, as was EZ Publish CMS from Norway, and perhaps I should try out an installation of both of those as well and compare notes. I should have studied the comparative list of CMSware here and specifically Typo3 vs TikiWiki here.

Ink is the topic for this bloggit. Our pens and pieces of papers would be nowhere without it. As well, the tattoo business would not flourish, or would the ink-jet refill business do well. The cost of ink to refill an inkjet printer cartridge reputedly costs more per gram than caviar. One might deduce that colored ink is more costly to produce than black and white ink, since whenever I have to print out something with my HP Inkjet printer, the default setting is always color, even if I usually change it to greyscale; it doesn't care about my preference.

Historically, ink goes back a long way. According to wikipedia,

"Approximately 5000 years ago, an ink for blacking the raised surfaces of pictures and texts carved in stone was developed in China. This early ink was a mixture of soot from pine smoke, lamp oil, and gelatin from animal skins and musk. Other early cultures also developed many colors of ink from available berries, plants and minerals.

In ancient Rome, atramentum was used. In an article for the Christian Science Monitor, Sharon J. Huntington describes these other historical inks:

About 1,600 years ago, a popular ink recipe was created. The recipe was used for centuries. Iron salts, such as ferrous sulfate (made by treating iron with sulfuric acid), were mixed with tannin from gallnuts (they grow on trees) and a thickener. When first put to paper, this ink is bluish-black. Over time it fades to a dull brown.

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