Fun friday

Yesterdays storms flooded the Merri Creek Path in a few spots and left some muddy stretches and some puddles behind. I manage to keep the unicycle under me while driving through the slippery bike path, I didn't want to bath my new Fivefinger shoes on the first day I was wearing them.

I worked with Matt on the vision dance, a movement sequence I learned at Peter Grunwalds workshop. I do it usually on my way to school on a patch of lawn next to the bike path, it offers me a great opportunity to observe myself in motion. Matt suggested some minor changes for synchronization of the movements, and picked up less directed part of it.

I spend some time with Sharon, talking about the 'zone' and showing her a way to take a student's legs while sitting. When she applied this technique to me (simply putting the leg on the thigh while kneeling in front of the student), something strange happened to my left ankle. I noticed some release on the inside of it, and Sharon remarked it was as if something in my ankle had woken up. The sensation brought up the memory of the injury I had there 24 years ago, running around on crutches, and not using my left leg for weeks as a consequence.

Matt started the group experimenting with ideas about our 'inner talk'. He asked us to write different things, later to use a different voice for this inner dialogue. A nice way to wrap some quite complex stimulus into a fun group activity. When he guided each of us through a chosen activity, he encouraged us to wait until he inhibited everything we noticed. I was quite inspired by the way he ran the lesson today, which makes me wonder whether his teaching style has improved, my perception has changed, or whether a mixture of both happened.

Learning the technique seems to engage most of my fellows students so much that there seems little room left to learn about new technology. My attempts to spread the word about the Twitter Project haven't yielded much success so far, and I haven't advertised too much my interview with Robert Rickover. Hmmm... is this negative self-talk?

Working in front of the computer still activates a lot of old habits, but it's easier for me now to notice strain, have pauses in semi-supine and remember my directions more often. As I'm using really old equipment, I had plenty of chances to study some old habits in detail, yet I enjoyed building the start of the Tweet Factory and the AlexTech Blog feed.

Strong stimuli

During my turn with Margaret I discovered an interesting detail of my faulty sensory appreciation. I was convinced that I moved my shoulders back in certain situations, while I was in fact arching backwards from the thoracic spine. I felt an inner fight starting when I inhibited this movement, and humbled by the discovery of this blind spot in my body map.

I did a bit of chair work with Amanda, looking for more sensitivity in my hands. I get a better idea which parts are moving and which are held, although still fuzzy. It's hard to distinguish who is doing the holding, just being present still happens only for some short moments.

The discussion of this weeks reading with Vivien turned into pure pleasure. Although FM's writings are far from easy, she embodied an amazingly subtle understanding of his words, and guided us through some important aspects of the text.

Vivien then went with the large groups through spirals and hands on the back of the chair, another pleasure to observe.

Back home, another stimulus was waiting for me - preparing the kit for a skype interview. Just after I send Robert Rickover an email to negotiate a time for it, the disk of my laptop stalled (and hasn't been accessible since). I had already tested the bluetooth headset, and even with 64k the sound quality was okay.

A lot of anger about faulty technology surfaced temporarily, yet I inhibited going on a ride with them, and started thinking about alternatives. I can go online with my MiniMac and even with my phone, there must be another way...

I decided to upgrade Skype first, and then connect the head set. But even five tries to connect to skype failed - wrong network settings. I found a symbian version of skype and gave that a go. However, although I have a keyboard on the phone, I couldn't access the underscore character (_), so I had no chance of typing in my user name...

There's luckily the option to sign up for an account in the skype client, so I simply created a new account and, voila, I connected without problem. I checked all the gear with a call to the 'echo' facility, the sound isn't too good unfortunately. Anyway, that's at least one working solution, although probably not really suitable for recording.

I guess it takes some computing power to digitize voice, wrap it into nice packets, send it over the network, all the while receiving data and decoding it. I remembered using the old version of skype, so I downgraded and indeed, I could log on again. I don't remember what I used as microphone, so I went ahead and connected the head set.

Optimistically, I made a test call, and was shocked to hear the external speakers. I checked the settings, and chose the headset for in- and output. I spoke after the beep, but on the replay I just heard the lovely voice explaining the test. Bummer. My MiniMac hasn't got built-in bluetooth... which provides me with another option: getting a new blue-tooth dongle. Although I can see the device and receive data, it simply ignores all input, maybe, after all, my bluetooth keyboard isn't broken.

So instead of spending maybe 15 minutes to get skype up and running in good quality, I spend about three hours fiddling around with suboptimal solutions. Even though I got a fallback solution, I notice how much the stimulus 'fixing a computer problem' reactivates the habits I cultivated as IT specialist. What a prize to pay for the bit of flow when finding solutions provided a pleasurable challenge.

Right now, while I can't even reset the headset to be used with the phone, I can observe a lot of useless mental chatters from similar situations in the past. At least, I added some more time (and money) to remove potential blue tooth errors - and had another nice unicycle trip instead of cursing technology.

On the other hand, I notice how much I got back into the habit of surfing while watching telly. Maybe it's good to separate these time killers again, especially as there's lots of 'habitual' programming with most TV content. Another aspect of not using the laptop is the climate - the study heats up a lot. Back to basics, back to books.