Folks, I’m trying to gather a little info about the meditation habits of the folks who read this blog and/or listen to the Enlighten Up Podcast, plus get some ideas about what subjects you guys would like talked about on future episodes of the podcast.  I’ve cooked up a short survey that I’d appreciate you taking a look at.  It only takes about a minute and ask for any identifying information such as name or email.  To help it out, you can click here or on the link in the header.

Thanx!

I finally got the rss feed working right so everyone who is subscribed to the podcast through iTunes should now be getting it.  That’s a huge relief.  I have spent all week trying to get this feed working that I haven’t had a chance to prepare the talk for this week.  I should be able to get it done as long as Ike doesn’ t cause us to lose power.

It took me several days, but the site is FINALLY up and running at 100% again.  There were numerous emails to my old service provider, a couple of emails to my new service provider (who were GREAT, BTW), and who knows how many deletes, re-installs, database imports etc… but it’s finally back where it should be, at least until I do a redesign in the next few weeks.

On this episode of the podcast, we are all over the place. Jimmy from SA wrote a couple of great questions which I attempt to tackle.

The first is dealing with differences in who we are and what we perceive the dharma says we should be. Is humor with questionable themes against the teachings? How about combat sports? Poop?

Then we talk about chanting. What it is, why we do it and how prevelant it is in a modern sangha. We also look at a few situations where spontaneous chanting is useful.

Some of the chants discussed:

• The Heart Sutra (The Sutra of the Heart of Transcendent Knowledge)
• ‘Om Mani Padme Hung‘ (Compassion Mantra)
• Supplication to the Takpo Kagyus

We also discuss the practice of tonglen.

In addition, it’s that time of year again: Podcamp San Antonio Numero Dos. I play the San Antonio City Cynic’s promotional rap song for the event. It’s a hoot! For more information about Podcamp San Antonio II, just click here or here.

For the past couple of days, enlighten-up.org has been pointing to hoboslanding.com.  I finally found the problem, thanks to a little hint from the ISP and a lot of hints from the San Antonio Podcasters Meetup Group.  A little tweaking on the settings in the new WordPress 2.3 and we are going again.

Hi everyone,

I got an email today from someone who said they had a problem viewing the site here at Enlighten Up.  I really appreciate the info, but here is my problem.  I had a friend who had encountered the problem a few weeks back and I worked on it for quite awhile.  It seemed to only show up when the site was viewed using a particular version of Internet Explorer.  I searched the WordPress (the blog software that’s running the site) site and came up empty.  I poured over all the CSS code and the theme html code but still, nothing.  I have a friend with a WordPress site, running a different theme, and  she had a similar problem.  I don’t think she ever found the problem either.

So if anyone out there knows anything about this problem, and especially if you know how to fix it, please drop me a line.

When you go to a great event like Podcamp San Antonio, you pick up a lot of things that take you a while to go through.  I spent the afternoon looking over Michael Verdi's site.  It was an eye-opening experience similar to when I started first delving into podcasting.  I knew there was a lot of video on the net, with sites like YouTube, but I had never really separated the concept of a vlog, or really any forms of visual media for the net, from the concepts given to me by MySpace and YouTube.  But I discovered what I felt was a bit more of a vision.  The ideas for collaboration that I saw in 'A Conversation About Distributed Production' were great.  The idea is not limited to video production, but as a concept for almost anything.  I also looked over the SpinExpress site which seems very cool.  While it's aimed at video, it could easily be used for any number of types collaboration

Then I went through the tutorials from freevlog.  If you wanna set up a vlog and have no clue, this site can show you.  The tutorials are simple enough that my mom could have done it, and the fact that they show you how to do it for free with readily available tools on the internet makes it that much more valuable.  Unfortunately, my only video solution is the video mode on my digital camera, but I may give it a shot anyway.

Our internet backbone seems to go out every time there is a thunderstorm.  So we just got it back on this afternoon, and guess what.  A thunderstorm just started.  It always goes out early in the morning after the storm.  Don't know what that's about, but I BETTER have broadband in the morning.

Grrr!

After ANOTHER day and a half without internet, we are back up again.  Does it irritate me?  Hell yes!  But I am stuck with it.  So many of my friends have told me I should drop them and just not tolerate this.  Unfortunately, it's not that simple.  Let me explain.

Living out here on the ranch, my options for internet access are slim.  There are in fact, three.  First, there is what we are doing now.  Internet America wireless.  I have a radio transmitter/receiver on a 50ft pole (that I paid for) attached to the front of my house.  My performance is awesome.  It hauls mega-ass and is not affected by weather at all.  The down side is what I have been talking about.  The backbone seems to go down for extended periods every couple of weeks.  So I should drop them right?  Well the next best thing is what we had before, which is satellite.  It was relatively reliable unless the weather was bad, but the speed wasn't great and worst of all, if you used it alot, they throttled you.  If I recall correctly, it was at 75M in an hour then all of a sudden you are at dial up speed for an hour.  As a podcaster and new media lover, this isn't acceptable. 

So that leaves the third alternative.  Dialup.  So at this point, dealing with the down time of wireless is the lesser of the three evils. This throws the 'get rid of them and don't put up with this' argument out the window.  I will say that when the wireless has been down for a week or more, they have credited my account so at least they are fair, but part of the reason we got this system was they said we could switch to Vonage.  Now Vonage has been great, but when I have no broadband connection, I have no phone.  Now how do you suggest I call the ISP to tell them I have no connection.  Cell phone, right.  Great idea!   Unfortunately, out here in the boonies, we don't get a cell signal unless we drive 3 miles down the road.  Now when you call the ISP, the first thing they want to do is to walk you through their check list.  It is, after all, first tier tech support.  'Unplug the router…unplug the radio…etc…'  

So at this point I have to explain to them that I have Vonage and without them, I have no phone.  I then have to add the lack of cell coverage info.  So they usually suggest I go back to the house, recycle everything, and then call them back.  Now I am no hardware genius, but I can recycle a router and a radio, so I ALWAYS do that several times before I call them.  

Now this brings us to the point where they send out a tech.  When they do this, I ALWAYS tell them that we have no phone because of Vonage.  I also tell them that I have no cell coverage.  YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO CALL US.  JUST COME.  What happens?  They don't show.  So I drive down the road to call them.  'The technician tried to call but no one was home, so he didn't go.'  ARRRRHHHH.  What did I say!?   

At the moment, internet is up. Hopefully it stays that way. On Monday, we had a 50 foot pole installed to improve the radio reception. Everything was fine on Monday. Tuesday night, we had storms from hell…winds, so reports even talk of a tornado. We lost power once for a short amount of time, and heard the rain, but didn’t really realize that anything major was going on, but the internet went out. At first, we thought that the radio may have somehow shorted out. That wasn’t the case. We even thought the pole may have been blown down. It was fine. We discovered that:

• Our ISP’s towers sustained a lot of damage from the storm…so they were working on getting it fixed
• We had 8 trees blow down on the property
• One of the trees crushed the back fence, so it will have to be repaired
• One crashed right where Woody the wonder akita stays so it was a good thing we brought him in.
• One fell on the main power line to the house. It lowered the line about 10 feet and actually bent the large wooden “telephone pole” it was attached to. Luckily it didn’t break, so we still had power.

The power company finally showed up today to cut the tree off the power line. They told us we have another one that needs to come down or we could have a problem with it. They are right, but I just really like the trees. I wish that mesquite wasn’t so brittle and prone to breaking.

As for the internet, I called them this morning and they said that the backbone was up. Unfortunately, we still weren’t able to get on the net. Chris spent a good amount of time on the phone with their tech support and they had her take the router out and then had her put a static IP and default gateway in the computer. I don’t seem to recall us having a static IP, but it worked. I also didn’t realize when we were talking on the phone that she had put in a static IP. Unfortunately, they told Chris that the router was bad, so I went and bought a new one. It took awhile, but I got it installed and then looked at how it had auto config’d it. This is when I noticed the static IP and now I am thinking that when I reset the router, I probably set it for DHCP, which I thought it was using. So now I think I have two working, wireless routers for two computers. I have a couple of ideas of what to do, but if any geeks out there have any creative uses for an extra WRT54G, drop me a line and let me know.

I have produced two podcasts for Shambhala Meditation Center of San Antonio. I think they have turned out pretty well but you can judge for yourself at sanantonioshambhala.org and click the link on the left side of the page that says “Blog and Podcast” I have a third one that required a little more tweaking but should come out in a couple of days. During all this I still have to come out with the EU podcast

All this has given me a nice little headache that effects my eyesight so as far as spelling goes, this is headed straight to the bottomlSo I will leave you with my storioes and will promptly fall down at the end of this sentence and collappse….**BOOM** See, I told you so….time to uncross the eyes and relax.

Much Love my readers