Time.com byline this week

To be quoted in Time Magazine on line edition is to enter another frame of reference. A certain patina of worldly presence lurks in this innocent event. The global communications community keeps track of who enters the sacred zone. Google is the announcer of all who enter the ranks.

Having been raised up in a culture that frowned on people who pretended to know things and who wished to gather public attention, any kind of blatant public announcement was certainly an unseemly accident. The saying was "Fools faces and Fools names are often seen in public places." I recall it from the days of early childhood. For us it meant keeping a low profile in a world where property and money called the shots. We had neither.

All the bother is about an article on world religion holy days in which I am quoted and reference is made to www.interfaithcalendar.org This is Holy Week, 2008. Easter is tomorrow.

On Being Programmed by a Computer

In the process of installing a new computer in the household, moving to Microsoft Vista from Microsoft XP, and dealing with a failed DSL line, a person becomes vividly aware of personal mental interface with technology.

This is such an intimate process. The minds of the computer programmers burrow into ones inner mental frame of reference via the learning process when taking on a new operating system like Vista. In order to get the machine to do what one wishes to accomplish there is no alternative to taking on the thought patterns of the writers and the limits of the machines. Even as dogs and cats program us to feed them regularly so the computer programs us to handle information in a disciplined way.

It is a bit daunting to wake in the morning with the solution to a computer problem right there in plain view. Obviously the mind has been working in some back room of the brain during sleep time. Since one has also been dreaming various strange stories at the same time, one comes to speculate on what else is going on in there out of conscious view.

System maintenance, organizing files, cleaning out trash, checking the timing mechanisms, doing routine health reviews, healing broken systems, doing mathematical computations that integrate conscious planning into the ancient systems that govern the future shape of this organism. All this and much more.

I allow the computer to program me until I know enough of what needs to in place to say that now I will program what the mechanical device will enable me to do. Let us hope that this is more than wishful thinking.