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Just for fun: the random, useless announcements thread!
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
The weather has been stormy and cold the last week, high winds and lots of rain and temperatures around 10 degrees. Autumn has definitely arrived, the week before it was still a relatively balmy 23 degrees, but instead of coming from the south and carrying Mediterranean air it’s been coming off the North Sea recently. Hohum…
Just had a meltdown. Tried to do a bit of work on my website. Could not get into the web design software. A furious tirade of angry frustration ensued. 🤬
Good thing I am on a luxury retreat. Hopefully the wrathful Tantric deities will calm me down 😤🤐🫠
Well it is, we almost had frost in October, that’s pretty unheard-of here. Clear skies and winds from the north tend to bring these very cold temperatures. But the weather here has been more unstable the last five years or so… in the past it was the Jet Stream bringing warm air and seawater from the Americas and without that Europe would be a lot colder, but there is talk that climate change may destabilise it.
Due to being enlightened, I also did morning meditation, half an hour of mixed exercise and cooked myself a mostly vegan breakfast. The pearl barley only took an hour to cook.
Yesterday I over exerted myself at an outdoor gym but learned what needed attending to this morning. 😎
The morning meditation included humming in mostly Buddhist styles.
Anyway I am off into the virtual worlds, to rescue the Bodhisattvas of all dimensions, religions and times. It's a hard job but everyone can do it… EVENTUALLY! 🧘🏿♂️🧩🗽
3
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
Elon Musk’s robotaxi event yesterday was complete vapourware. He has been saying since 2016 that Full Self Driving is just two years away for Tesla cars and will be available as a software update, and he’s been consistently proved wrong.
And guess who was making sceptical noises about autonomous vehicles a day or so ago? That would be Musk’s buddy Donald Trump, who seems to be becoming more scatter-brained by the day.
Well I'm in London with flu like symptoms,I put it down to airplane trip plus the layover in Guangzhou
On the Metro from the airport to the city, people were packed in like sardines... https://youtube.com/shorts/AKfhTArCTcU?si=lienxsjblbrDfAId
I managed to pay homage to the Buddha at a massive Buddhist temple
Then paid homage at a Daoist
I met an ex pat Chinese woman who lives in Canada and was visiting her family in Guangzhou, she recommended a restaurant where they have the best dim sums in Guangzhou, I told her I was vegetarian, so she in Chinese on a piece of paper "I'm vegetarian" to show the staff at the restaurant...
This was the restaurant, quite an impressive building. https://youtube.com/shorts/vjT-4jiyCYg?si=NFG46GRH0CImg8JY
I modified the following a bit from my rambling podcast on audio.com. https://audio.com/lobster/audio/zen-ai
It is two or three months since I did one. So as usual out of practice.
I do find it interesting how people have a very different take on what Buddhism is from outside and from inside and practising IT. And we all tend to practice IT in different ways.
People do practice many things in different ways. Some people are just new-Agers and dabblers, you know, just occasional usage, read a few books maybe and that's about it. And other people devote their lives to it.
The same is true of everything.
If you devote the time, the concentration and the focus to something, then obviously you'll get better results, long term. You'll be able to use it in a beneficial way to you and to others because you become an expert. We get used to explaining things to different people. So, I'm still using, NewBuddhism.com. There are other things that I will be recommending to people because there are so many people out there on the internet, who are doing good work.
So, for example, I was at a Zen inauguration of an artificial intelligence system created by Google. Initiated as a Zen trainee. This is for part of Googles robotics division.
There will be a robot eventually that will have an AI system, I think it's called AMI, which will be enabled in such a way that it has ethical principles, Zen principles within it. How that pans out is really down to the programmers and how the whole system is managed.
There were loads of virtual people there. There was somebody from treeleaf.org. We virtually train there. That's an online training for people who are interested in becoming Zen aficionados or teachers or priests or masters of Zen.
I don't think they use the word mistresses of Zen, but of course, some of them are women. People who do it online rather than doing it in person. Treeleaf get people to turn up at the Zoom meeting. People are encouraged to join the forum and to gain wisdom from other people and from the teachers there.
So that's worth exploring. The other thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is the basic needs for food security.
There needs to be urban farming and vertical farming where you're actually growing things in greenhouses. For example, in the UK where I am, that's one of the ways we have to ensure that we can feed the people. We've got to have clean air, obviously. Then we've got to have clean water. I live in London.
We don't have clean water. It is cleaned with chlorine and fluorine and things like this but it's not as clean as it should be. But that's another issue.
So I've got more into that and more interested in ecology and weather because of the severe changes. But now we've gone over a tipping point. So we're going right into the things that have been predicted by science for a long, long time now.
Lastly, I'd like to mention the software that I'm using, which is Audacity, which is a registered trademark.
Audio.com is their offshoot project, if you like. They registered, the Audacity trademark. Even though they've got registered trademarks, as a GNU3, G-N-U, GPL licence, that's a general purpose licence.
So good people, they're good people. And if you use audio.com, which I'm using to present this talk, I don't put music at the front of things. So whether they're podcasts or not, I don't really know. Anyway, that's all from me for today.
The other morning from my bedroom window at my son's house in London
Where the different London airports flight paths criss cross across the sky...I was told that it water vapour from the heat of the planes engines...
Well I'm sitting in the airport at Faro, missed the 12.30 bus, so just had a decaf latte at one of the cafés while I wait for the next bus to Albufeira where I've booked an hotel for the night, it's around 19/20 C .
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
Already on the way back? I thought you’d stay in Europe a good long while…
@Jeroen said:
Already on the way back? I thought you’d stay in Europe a good long while…
I was waiting at the airport which I had just arrived at for the bus to Albufeira, I'm in Portugal for a week then I fly to Budapest to see my son his partner and my daughter who will also be there, at the moment she's in Spain.
I fly back home on the 5th November.
Caught the lift in the white tower to the lookout , amazing views, and no vertigo.
I catch the bus to Lisbon at 12 noon.
The weather's nice, Algarve gets over 300 days of sunshine...
Found a really nice restaurant in Porto on the main walk street called Honest Greens, ethically sourced produce, organically grown..
Best plant based meal I have had in a long while and reasonably priced.
Lisbon airport was/is chaotic or it could be I was so chilled out traveling around Portugal that I forgot what international airports are like.
Standing in a queue for half an hour, no free staff around to ask questions, not realising I could have gone straight to the security check because I had already checked in online, however I had received a message from the airline to say that because I was not an EU passport holder, I would need to see the staff first, for them to check my passport before I could go through security. When I finally got to the desk, the staff member just said "No I don't need to see your passport, you can go to the security check now " WTF...One positive thing which I get from all this is the practice of patience. And by the time I finish my travels I will have the patience of a saint.
On my second to last day in Portugal, I took a 35 minute train ride out of Lisbon to the city of Sintra to visit the Pena Palace and the Moor fortress. Shared a tuk tuk ride up the mountain with a Dutch couple.The tuk tuk driver 'Christiana' gave us a bit of history about the Palace and the Moor fortress . It turns out Christiana had visited Aotearoa ( NZ) a couple of years ago.
Inside the chapel in the Palace.
Colourful Pena Palace
A busy but enjoyable month away visiting family and friends in the UK and Europe. I just arrived back in Aotearoa 'home sweet home' and a beautiful sunset with an Auckland city backdrop for my ferry ride welcome home.
Well one of the many highlights of the trip was the 20 hour stopover in Guangzhou .
I found the Chinese people are very friendly and helpful, even though language was a bit of a barrier, we still managed to communicate.
I'm planning on stopping over there again next year, but this time I will stay for a few days. China now allows Australians and Kiwis up to 15 days visa free.
Most of the vehicles in Guangzhou are electric, the city centre is very modern and high-tech. next to no pollution.
I took a taxi ride around some parts.
I also went on a bit of a walk about and got lost and couldn't flag down a taxi to take me back to the airport. All the taxis which passed by had passengers.
Fortunately a young man who spoke some English and took me to a metro station close by and explained how I could get back to the airport on the metro.
Meanwhile... been walking everywhere I can. Even found a new short 'Wild Way' and bench for resting. Growing a Sage. Plant. Under lights in the kitchen.
Another highlight, was the massive Palestinian solidarity rally (AKA march for humanity) I and my sister attended in London on the Saturday before I flew home. Thousands of us peacefully marched from Westminster to the US embassy. ( around 2 miles)
UK politician Jeromy Corbyn was there and gave a speech.
The only media outlet who covered the rally was Al Jazeera.
I asked a couple of police officers who were monitoring the rally if they have ever experience any violence from the rally goers, I was told that the rallies they have monitored have all been peaceful and the only time there has been any trouble was when some Zionists have tried to disrupt the march.
Today here in Aotearoa I and a number of locals from the island joined in a Maori Hikoi (march) in Auckland. The march started on the north side of the harbour bridge where people walked across the bridge, I along with hundreds of others joined the hikoi on the city side of the bridge, the hikoi ended at a place called Bastion Point ( around 9kms), which is famous for another big hikoi for Maori land right 49 years ago.
Thousands of people turned out for this hikoi Maori, Pakeha and different groups including Palestinian solidarity groups. One of the coalition parties of our right wing coalition government wants to redefine the Treaty of Waitangi which would allow them to roll back Maori rights. Palestinians living in Aotearoa (NZ) know what it is like to their rights striped away by an occupying force.
The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840. It was an agreement between the British Crown and a large number of Māori chiefs. Today the Treaty is widely accepted to be a constitutional document that establishes and guides the relationship between the Crown (the Government of New Zealand) and Māori.
My feet are a bit sore and I'm feeling quite tired now, which I put down to the long walk and jetlag.
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
So a lady friend with whom I had been corresponding sent me a heads-up about an artwork called ‘the Silent Battle’, about suicidally depressed youths. She has for a long time tried to get more attention for those at risk of suicide, and now that this artwork is travelling through the Netherlands she is encouraging people to go see it and maybe talk to those who leave memorials at it’s side. Something to consider…
Comments
The weather has been stormy and cold the last week, high winds and lots of rain and temperatures around 10 degrees. Autumn has definitely arrived, the week before it was still a relatively balmy 23 degrees, but instead of coming from the south and carrying Mediterranean air it’s been coming off the North Sea recently. Hohum…
Has anybody been to China recently (after 1st July 2024) ?
There's a new law where Chinese security police can check travellers phones ?
It was an Aotearoa morning this morning (Aotearoa=Land of the long white cloud )
The sun trying its best to break through.
I am on luxury retreat. YinYana Buddhist style.
It is hard going soft. So far am doing very well. Thank you karma.
Just had a meltdown. Tried to do a bit of work on my website. Could not get into the web design software. A furious tirade of angry frustration ensued. 🤬
Good thing I am on a luxury retreat. Hopefully the wrathful Tantric deities will calm me down 😤🤐🫠
I hear ya @lobster ..
Working with technology which (so they tell you) has been designed to make life easier can be quite a frustrating experience.
Well it's up. up and away, I fly out today...
It’s raining… but it’s warmer than it has been, we had nights of 3 degrees C in the last week, now there is some water falling from the sky.
Sounds bloody cold ...
Well it is, we almost had frost in October, that’s pretty unheard-of here. Clear skies and winds from the north tend to bring these very cold temperatures. But the weather here has been more unstable the last five years or so… in the past it was the Jet Stream bringing warm air and seawater from the Americas and without that Europe would be a lot colder, but there is talk that climate change may destabilise it.
I guess I'll be op shopping for warmer clothes when I arrive...
Quangzhou is meant to in the low 30s, which suit me just fine, but I'm only there for the day...
Well I am reasonably calm again.
Even managed to add a pic from my location…
Due to being enlightened, I also did morning meditation, half an hour of mixed exercise and cooked myself a mostly vegan breakfast. The pearl barley only took an hour to cook.
Yesterday I over exerted myself at an outdoor gym but learned what needed attending to this morning. 😎
The morning meditation included humming in mostly Buddhist styles.
Anyway I am off into the virtual worlds, to rescue the Bodhisattvas of all dimensions, religions and times. It's a hard job but everyone can do it… EVENTUALLY! 🧘🏿♂️🧩🗽
Elon Musk’s robotaxi event yesterday was complete vapourware. He has been saying since 2016 that Full Self Driving is just two years away for Tesla cars and will be available as a software update, and he’s been consistently proved wrong.
And guess who was making sceptical noises about autonomous vehicles a day or so ago? That would be Musk’s buddy Donald Trump, who seems to be becoming more scatter-brained by the day.
Well I'm in London with flu like symptoms,I put it down to airplane trip plus the layover in Guangzhou
On the Metro from the airport to the city, people were packed in like sardines...
https://youtube.com/shorts/AKfhTArCTcU?si=lienxsjblbrDfAId
I managed to pay homage to the Buddha at a massive Buddhist temple
Then paid homage at a Daoist
I met an ex pat Chinese woman who lives in Canada and was visiting her family in Guangzhou, she recommended a restaurant where they have the best dim sums in Guangzhou, I told her I was vegetarian, so she in Chinese on a piece of paper "I'm vegetarian" to show the staff at the restaurant...
This was the restaurant, quite an impressive building.
https://youtube.com/shorts/vjT-4jiyCYg?si=NFG46GRH0CImg8JY
Dear Friends of human modified AI Zen,
I modified the following a bit from my rambling podcast on audio.com.
https://audio.com/lobster/audio/zen-ai
It is two or three months since I did one. So as usual out of practice.
I do find it interesting how people have a very different take on what Buddhism is from outside and from inside and practising IT. And we all tend to practice IT in different ways.
People do practice many things in different ways. Some people are just new-Agers and dabblers, you know, just occasional usage, read a few books maybe and that's about it. And other people devote their lives to it.
The same is true of everything.
If you devote the time, the concentration and the focus to something, then obviously you'll get better results, long term. You'll be able to use it in a beneficial way to you and to others because you become an expert. We get used to explaining things to different people. So, I'm still using, NewBuddhism.com. There are other things that I will be recommending to people because there are so many people out there on the internet, who are doing good work.
So, for example, I was at a Zen inauguration of an artificial intelligence system created by Google. Initiated as a Zen trainee. This is for part of Googles robotics division.
There will be a robot eventually that will have an AI system, I think it's called AMI, which will be enabled in such a way that it has ethical principles, Zen principles within it. How that pans out is really down to the programmers and how the whole system is managed.
There were loads of virtual people there. There was somebody from treeleaf.org. We virtually train there. That's an online training for people who are interested in becoming Zen aficionados or teachers or priests or masters of Zen.
I don't think they use the word mistresses of Zen, but of course, some of them are women. People who do it online rather than doing it in person. Treeleaf get people to turn up at the Zoom meeting. People are encouraged to join the forum and to gain wisdom from other people and from the teachers there.
So that's worth exploring. The other thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is the basic needs for food security.
There needs to be urban farming and vertical farming where you're actually growing things in greenhouses. For example, in the UK where I am, that's one of the ways we have to ensure that we can feed the people. We've got to have clean air, obviously. Then we've got to have clean water. I live in London.
We don't have clean water. It is cleaned with chlorine and fluorine and things like this but it's not as clean as it should be. But that's another issue.
So I've got more into that and more interested in ecology and weather because of the severe changes. But now we've gone over a tipping point. So we're going right into the things that have been predicted by science for a long, long time now.
Lastly, I'd like to mention the software that I'm using, which is Audacity, which is a registered trademark.
Audio.com is their offshoot project, if you like. They registered, the Audacity trademark. Even though they've got registered trademarks, as a GNU3, G-N-U, GPL licence, that's a general purpose licence.
So good people, they're good people. And if you use audio.com, which I'm using to present this talk, I don't put music at the front of things. So whether they're podcasts or not, I don't really know. Anyway, that's all from me for today.
The other morning from my bedroom window at my son's house in London
Where the different London airports flight paths criss cross across the sky...I was told that it water vapour from the heat of the planes engines...
Yep @Shoshin1
Here are those 'chem trails' or more correctly vapour trails from flight paths. Pic I took early morning yesterday...
Well I'm sitting in the airport at Faro, missed the 12.30 bus, so just had a decaf latte at one of the cafés while I wait for the next bus to Albufeira where I've booked an hotel for the night, it's around 19/20 C .
Already on the way back? I thought you’d stay in Europe a good long while…
I was waiting at the airport which I had just arrived at for the bus to Albufeira, I'm in Portugal for a week then I fly to Budapest to see my son his partner and my daughter who will also be there, at the moment she's in Spain.
I fly back home on the 5th November.
Albufeira yesterday, early evening after I had dinner
Sunrise this morning, from my hotel room.
Caught the lift in the white tower to the lookout , amazing views, and no vertigo.
I catch the bus to Lisbon at 12 noon.
The weather's nice, Algarve gets over 300 days of sunshine...
Thanks for sharing your journeying.
I will be lucky if I go
and have a cup of tea or coffee and some exercise for what is meant to be my body.
It is light here. I am preparing for the unprepared...
https://buddhistuniversity.net/
Found a really nice restaurant in Porto on the main walk street called Honest Greens, ethically sourced produce, organically grown..
Best plant based meal I have had in a long while and reasonably priced.
Lisbon airport was/is chaotic or it could be I was so chilled out traveling around Portugal that I forgot what international airports are like.
Standing in a queue for half an hour, no free staff around to ask questions, not realising I could have gone straight to the security check because I had already checked in online, however I had received a message from the airline to say that because I was not an EU passport holder, I would need to see the staff first, for them to check my passport before I could go through security. When I finally got to the desk, the staff member just said "No I don't need to see your passport, you can go to the security check now " WTF...One positive thing which I get from all this is the practice of patience. And by the time I finish my travels I will have the patience of a saint.
On my second to last day in Portugal, I took a 35 minute train ride out of Lisbon to the city of Sintra to visit the Pena Palace and the Moor fortress. Shared a tuk tuk ride up the mountain with a Dutch couple.The tuk tuk driver 'Christiana' gave us a bit of history about the Palace and the Moor fortress . It turns out Christiana had visited Aotearoa ( NZ) a couple of years ago.
Inside the chapel in the Palace.
Colourful Pena Palace
A busy but enjoyable month away visiting family and friends in the UK and Europe. I just arrived back in Aotearoa 'home sweet home' and a beautiful sunset with an Auckland city backdrop for my ferry ride welcome home.
Well one of the many highlights of the trip was the 20 hour stopover in Guangzhou .
I found the Chinese people are very friendly and helpful, even though language was a bit of a barrier, we still managed to communicate.
I'm planning on stopping over there again next year, but this time I will stay for a few days. China now allows Australians and Kiwis up to 15 days visa free.
Most of the vehicles in Guangzhou are electric, the city centre is very modern and high-tech. next to no pollution.
I took a taxi ride around some parts.
I also went on a bit of a walk about and got lost and couldn't flag down a taxi to take me back to the airport. All the taxis which passed by had passengers.
Fortunately a young man who spoke some English and took me to a metro station close by and explained how I could get back to the airport on the metro.
I just started a new blog. Am I a city zen PRESS? Not sure
https://infosec.press/lobster/
Meanwhile... been walking everywhere I can. Even found a new short 'Wild Way' and bench for resting. Growing a Sage. Plant. Under lights in the kitchen.
Another highlight, was the massive Palestinian solidarity rally (AKA march for humanity) I and my sister attended in London on the Saturday before I flew home. Thousands of us peacefully marched from Westminster to the US embassy. ( around 2 miles)
UK politician Jeromy Corbyn was there and gave a speech.
The only media outlet who covered the rally was Al Jazeera.
I asked a couple of police officers who were monitoring the rally if they have ever experience any violence from the rally goers, I was told that the rallies they have monitored have all been peaceful and the only time there has been any trouble was when some Zionists have tried to disrupt the march.
Today here in Aotearoa I and a number of locals from the island joined in a Maori Hikoi (march) in Auckland. The march started on the north side of the harbour bridge where people walked across the bridge, I along with hundreds of others joined the hikoi on the city side of the bridge, the hikoi ended at a place called Bastion Point ( around 9kms), which is famous for another big hikoi for Maori land right 49 years ago.
Thousands of people turned out for this hikoi Maori, Pakeha and different groups including Palestinian solidarity groups. One of the coalition parties of our right wing coalition government wants to redefine the Treaty of Waitangi which would allow them to roll back Maori rights. Palestinians living in Aotearoa (NZ) know what it is like to their rights striped away by an occupying force.
My feet are a bit sore and I'm feeling quite tired now, which I put down to the long walk and jetlag.
So a lady friend with whom I had been corresponding sent me a heads-up about an artwork called ‘the Silent Battle’, about suicidally depressed youths. She has for a long time tried to get more attention for those at risk of suicide, and now that this artwork is travelling through the Netherlands she is encouraging people to go see it and maybe talk to those who leave memorials at it’s side. Something to consider…