Voicemapping

I met a great guy at Burningman, and he offered to have me get my voice mapped!
The machine listens to the frequencies in your voice and just as you can tell if someone is depressed, angry, etc, by the tone of their voice, this is exactly what a machine does, but can analyze it very closely (better than the human ear).

Anyway... after the voice analysis does it's thing, as you talk about various family members and significant others.
It then sends back some of the missing frequencies to you via the chair and a small device in front of you, and these "magically" seem to make you feel better! As well as quite positively showing up on the voice frequency analysis.

So by the end of it (a couple of hours) the machine assessed I want to be acknowledged, and the phrase "I deserve to be happy" was chosen for how I feel/what I'm missing. It also decided that the most effect I could have would be a hormone I'd do well taking, specifically "pregnenolone" which is usually released during sex, which the report said (in part):
• Its major effects are upon mood, energy, and memory, and taking it can increase mental clarity and enhance memory.

So... lack of sex (at least strong in me) means worse memory - LOL - I need to tell my ex-wife and my ex-GF who both complained about my memory, yet when in my relationship with each they were the cause of low amounts of sex!

FYI the report I received was PAGES long, the above was just the highlights.
Overall it was an excellent experience!

Head on collision

So I'm driving on a 2 lane road and it's slow due to road construction.

A large 4x4 pickup truck pulls out "crazily" at a T-junction swinging wildly onto almost into oncoming traffic but avoids hitting a semi, and then joins the slow traffic, getting really close behind a semi. Way too close.

When a gap appears in the oncoming traffic he decides to overtake, but with me being a little way back I can see oncoming traffic just past it, which he could not (as he was *SO* close) of course as he does so, with the car coming the other way and it's a slight bend too, so he didn't see until too late, he slams on his brakes and hits (not as much as the picture above), but as I passed I saw both vehicles had damage.
What a bad driver!

PS For those non-USA folks a "semi" is a large truck and trailer that hauls goods across country. eg Juggernaut.

Twice now. What if... 3rd time unlucky?

Send me your email, phone number, home address, whatever you feel you want to do so if tribe falls and cannot get up, we can stay in contact (if you'd want to).

My email is: tribeblog@dongrays.com
Actually it's not, that's just a forwarder, so any spambot that grabs it, I can filter it out easily. So if you send me yours (to there, or via a tribe message), I'll send you mine, so you will be not subject to anti-spam measures I have programmed into my email server.

Why?

OK, so we've had two recent BAD outages with tribe.
The first time, my paranoia got me to save (and I continue to save) my profile photos, photos in my blogs, and photos in my moderated tribes, and yes I thought about how would I contact friends if tribe fell again without being able to get up... or some corporate mandate from Cisco, shut it down for good! So I was going to post something like this last time, but I thought, maybe I'm freaking out? (see blog: people.tribe.net/btd/blog/...19c418e831 )

But with it having been twice now, I feel I have to act, get friends contact info, just in case the 3rd time is fatal!
Even if you think I have your contact info, I might not, so please... send me whatever you feel comfortable about sending.

Thanks.
Feel free to comment here your thoughts and feelings about this most recent tribe "fall"?

Update: I will only use your info if tribe dies for good (ie more than a week).

Gifting

(in response to Girl*Parts - aka Doll*Echo)

For the first three people who respond- and re-post - this challenge, I will send you something. It might be something I've made, or something cool from my hidden stash, a sticker, a rock, a book I think you will enjoy, or something else that is awesome. Whatever it is, I promise that I will get it to you in 30 days or less.

The only thing you need to do in order to participate is to be one of the first three to reply to this, AND post this very same thing - 'cause its fun to give people stuff

Playa Gifts

Every year I take photographs of the best schwag I get gifted on the playa, so this year I did the same, uploaded them into Playa Artifacts at the Burningman site, and on checking back there, it seems they all got approved. Yay!

See all me booty at: pa.burningman.com/index.cgi

PS Getting a 500x500 jpg image to be under 30k is quite a challenge!

SF decompression

I didn't feel like going to the decompression this year, possibly because of the visit to my mum's funeral?
But in the end I arrived about 4pm, what a MASSIVE line (compared to previous years, when I've arrived when it opens). I didn't get a "I'm over 21 wristband" - maybe it's too obvious, and I'm looking my age?

Actually part of my indecisiveness was also (again) I was going alone, nobody who'd fully enjoy the entire time with me, and come home, with me.
Also I feared when I got home I'd be sad about coming home to an empty house, but luckily I was shattered/tired, so fell instantly asleep when I got home!

So I did go, and it was good to see a few friends, but sad I missed a few others who afterwards said they were there.

I TOTALLY enjoyed the Karaoke and sang Alanis Morrissette's "You Oughta Know" - which many passer bys seemed to enjoy (or maybe the sight of a Viking singing that song was interesting/amusing), later I sang Christina Aguillera's "Beautiful" - which a group of teenage girls thoroughly enjoyed singing along to with me.
Because of that, I didn't use the sunlight wisely and my photography was done as it was getting dark :-(

If you're wondering.... The above photo was a sexy (even if she was exceptionally thin) lady who posed and loved the camera. She knew she wanted to be photographed, and I was happy to do it (there are more of her on my photo page: www.dongrays.com/bm-decom-sf2007/ ), I wish I had the photos of her posing with another guy that he asked me to take some of... they were very *hot* photos... phew... I think he got a great set of shots.

I just wished I'd thought to get someone to photograph me. Once again, it's like I wasn't there!
And despite what I think of me looking pretty damn good, I didn't seem to attract many people to photograph me - I think I need a sign that says, if you think I look any good at all, get your frigging camera out!
Hmmm... Maybe I don't look any good?
Maybe I am just a sad case of a guy who no matter how hard I try, I just have to accept I'll look crappy, and I really shouldn't bother.
There were a few taken I know of, of me, if you see any, point me at them, it makes me feel good that people enjoy how I look enough to take a photo.

Also I wish it was a little quieter, so conversations are possible with friends (and people I meet), but I know people don't like to dance until they FEEL the music in their bones, and some people only enjoy music if it's loud (like being loud is somehow better).

I spent too much time walking up and down looking, not sure what or who for, but I never found it/them. I left about 10:30pm.

Photos (at last)

So my Burningman AND my SF Decompression photos are now online:
• Burningman 2007 www.dongrays.com/burningman2007/photos
• SF decom 2007 www.dongrays.com/bm-decom-sf2007/

Enjoy. Come back here and give me feedback - ie which ones are crap - and I should shred!

OK - did I "freak out"?

Thinking about the tribe "Donut freak out" page... and while I don't think I freaked out as much as the guy in the photo, I did spend a lot of last night and today downloading all my photos from my tribe profile, my blog photos, and a tribe I moderate, since it occurred to me that if tribe went away, a number of photos would "go away", photos and images I put a lot of effort into sometimes!

So now I feel happier.

OK, I counted it was about 14Mb of files, and 269 images, ok some are dups, but not that many, and some are from my photo album, but I just didn't want to lose it all!

Did I freak out? Or am I just sensing this is a good thing to do?

What's so amazing about really deep thoughts

Somehow I'd missed the movie called "Zeitgeist".
It's under 2 hours and is online at: www.zeitgeistmovie.com

Being recently accused of rigid thinking, so trying to be open minded, I watched it (even though the intro is a little long, tedious, boring).
I do feel it was worth watching all the way through. I hope you do too.
It gave me some great deep thoughts about various aspects of the world we live in.

I give it my thumbs up (but I'd recommend cutting the intro down).

Nagging (and discriminatory) neighbor

My neighbor just cannot stop finding something to complain about.

I won't list all she's complained about most recently it includes:
• I've put out our shared garbage, when it was full, the collection was in the morning, and she wasn't home (usually she does it).
• I walked down her path to her front door (to access the garbage, which she wants by her door, despite it being shared).
• I am polite (I put my hand up to request I can talk - as her ranting was incessant).
• I am white.
• I am male.

The last two were not so much a complaint, but apparently she feels because of the color of my skin, and because I am male, that I have a belief that I can do things (like put out the garbage) and she should be happy about it? Sure... I would have thought you'd be happy for someone to put out the garbage, no matter what race or gender. Maybe I'm wrong... OK I'm happy to let you put out the garbage when it's full. But if it doesn't get put out, do you want me to complain to you?
Maybe if I were a non-white female (she's from Venezuela) it'd be ok to put out the garbage?
I just don't see the relevance!

I'm sure if I made a comment about her race or gender she'd report me.