Eyepoet's Spiritual Technology eZine

Enough with your political analysis. Enough for with the endless dissection of every sneeze, burp, and fart of a presumably important or famous person. Enough with the cult of personality.

Tell me a story. Sing me a song. Chant a psalm.

Awaken within me the archetypal, incorruptible hero.

Enough with the corporeal "heros" with their feet of clay and their twitches and bad habits.

Enough with the phony, legless demand that creation myths be sold to children as reality. Instead, teach them the meaning of the myth--that all of us are creators, that all of use have a responsibility to the earth and to the future.

I was watching Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the local "Yes We Can Party" hosted at the BottomLine Bar in Clinton, MD. The speech was as moving as expected, but the words almost didn't matter. I found myself staring at the big projection screen in complete aw of the reality that an African descendant is in striking distance from the White House. I did not believe that such a thing was possible in my lifetime.

As the camera panned the crowd at the outdoor convention/rally, it come to rest on Michelle Obama and the children, and my mind involuntarily flashed to the famous image of Martin Luther King's widow, Coretta, veiled in black, setting at her husband's funeral, and the similar image of Betty Shabazz. Shocked at my own thought, I vowed that I will do whatever I can to insure that Michelle Obama will not be another Black widow.

Here are the top ten "reasons" I've heard from engineers (and other people) who want to avoid documenting their projects. I'll admit to using one or two myself back in the day when I was a developer. Which ones have you used?

Kathy, a former officemate and fellow science fiction fan, observed that in many scifi and horror movies the lone Black character was, more often than not, the first person to die. In the movies, the hapless African-American "buys-it" at the first sign of trouble: the evil aliens just happen to blast open the airlock he was working on, the deadly bio-weapon is mistakenly unleashed from the military research lab when it spills from a cracked beaker on the top shelf into the Brother's mug of latte, or the Brother is "volunteered" to go check out the radiation leak in the engine room. She called her observation "The First Brother Dies Rule".

I opened up today's mail to find a photocopy of the deed to my house listing my mortgage company and property information with a yellow sticky attached. The yellow sticky contained the rather cryptic note
"Jesse-
Please call me about this document. 410-602-2095
Matt"
Naturally, I'm a little anxious because of all the mortgage scams afoot, but I decided to find out a little more about "Matt" since he apparently knew so much about me.

I few weekends ago my wife and I were awakened by an alarm from our weather radio on the early morning hours of May 8th. The announcement warned that a tornado had been observed near Camp Springs and that it was moving towards Clinton. The broadcast indicated that residents should “take cover.”

Without our Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) capable weather receiver we would have never known about the tornado!

I was preparing for our local Prince George’s County ARES/RACES’
go-kit “Show-n-Tell”, and I needed a lightweight, cheap (~$10), easily disassembled
and stored, antenna support for my newly completed WB6IQN DBJ-1 dual-band j-pole antenna.

To make my cheap and quick antenna stand, you will need the
following parts:

• 5 #8-32 3/4-inch machine bolts and nuts
• 5 #8 washers
• 1 12-inch traffic cone
• 2 10-inch lengths of Galvanized Steel Hanger Strap
• 1 1-inch or ¾-inch PVC pipe cap (see text)

I'm back on yet another job search. So potential employers (I know you're out there somewhere) as you , view my Jobster profile, and check out my pages on Facebook, BisonRoundUp.com (Howard University Alumni pages) and Elance (http://proposalman.elance.com), please understand that you're dealing with a whole person--not a commodity.

Years ago I read a magazine article about food prices that included a black and white photograph of dairy farmers dumping truckloads of milk down storm drains to "support" the price of milk. The article went on to talk about the contradiction of spilling milk and of children suffering from the lack of milk.

This is the image that reappeared in my mind as I read the commentary in Black Agenda Report about a Wall Street Journal article that recommended the bulldozing of foreclosed homes to prop up housing prices. In the WSJ article, the author tells us that we need to change our thinking and "get over it" when in comes to bulldozing "surplus" new homes. These homes are just so much spilled milk to author of the WSJ screed, while homelessness is on the rise for working families in the Land of the Free.

Ever notice how all the new devices and gizmos look just like...um...Television sets? I'm geezing just a bit but bare with me...

My TomTom has a screen and an on/off button on the top--just like my 32" Magnavox flat screen.

My ol', glitchy Palm Tungsten T5 has a color screen too, with 4-5 buttons on its edges and sides--just like a TV.

The only thing my cell phone has that my TV doesn't, from a cursory "I just appeared from Mars" view, is a camera and lots of buttons. (But the TV's remote handily beats my cell phone in the "maximum number of buttons" contest.) Ergonomically its a nightmare (at least one a month I have to rid the phone's memory of pictures it takes of the inside of my holster) but it has the same physical architecture as a TV: a screen with buttons or controls around it.