Russell Smithers"Experience is the only teacher we have" – Swami Vivekananda

“She stood up, and I rose with her. Under the street lamp her green eyes were jewels of desire, wet with light. Her lips widened in a half-smile that was mine – a moment that was mine alone – and the beggar, my heart , began to hope and plead.”

Gregory David Roberts from the book Shantaram.

Awen Celtic Spirit is one of the most friendly and happening places you could go too. It’s not just a shop, it’s the dynamic culture around it and the friendly staff that make it more of an event than a shop.

Here are three web based resources for people who use KCML, KFORM and KDB.

1. A group on LinkedIn called The KCML Programming Language
2. Forums for the entire KCML tool set; www.kcmlhelp.co.uk
3. A group on Facebook; http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=83435884572

Hi

I have just started to read a book called Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts). The first paragraph is amazing, I get the feeling that this will be like Star Maker (Olaf Stapldon) not because of the content, but because the first paragraph in both books are awsom, and in Star Maker each page was no decent from the original greatness of the first paragraph. Maybe Shantaram will be like that, according to the reviews it will be. Third time lucky, he wrote this book 3 times in prison, 1000 pages (nearly), the first two copies the guards in his prison trashed. Amazing, I shall read on.

All the best
Russell

Last night I watched “South Pacific” (episode 1) on BB2 which is a “documentary series looking at the remote South Pacific islands” (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jq11g). This  episode looks at the  Anuta (pronounces anootoo) and the story of Easter Island. It has been my opinion for some time that Easter island is a history lesson the world is ignoring at it’s peril. This program demonstrated to me opposite ends of a spectrum of how man can choose to live.

The Easter islanders chose a competitive way of life. Different tribes on the island trying to out do each other by creating larger and larger stone statues. This behaviour used up all their trees which were a vital natural resource for them. Once a enough trees had been cut down for moving huge stone carvings, life on the isolated island became impossible for human peoples to live. The upshot was that the peoples of Easter Island died off, all because they allowed the ego to rule their culture.

The other end of the spectrum shows the Anutans (pronounced anootans) living on an area 1/6 of a sqaure mile in size, and has one of the highest population densities found. The have the largest variety of ways to fish. They succeed because there is no competition, there can’t be, the island is too small and there are too many, they all co-operate and live as one harmonious group of peoples, living in harmony with their environment.

As a global culture which of these two do you think more closely resembles our current global culture? and, which one do you think we should attempt to be more like? I know which way I would choose to live. I think our current global culture is in danger of going the way of Easter Island.

We could call this potential disaster Easter Planet!!!

Copyright © 2009 by Russell Smithers

Well I decided to try twitter, I have known about it for some time, but seeing it on the gadget show convinced me to try it. I like it, it looks like it will be a good supplement to my Facebook, myspace and WordPress blogs.

It’s very versatile, for example there are wordpress plugins that let you update twitter, or be updated from twitter. Also with facebook is you add the right application, you can update twitter, and have twitter update your profile on face book, and so type once and it can update facebook, myspace and wordpress blogs to name a few.

It’s worth playing with for sure, and if you don’t like it you can delete your account.