This is the last post on this blog URI. The new URL is http://www.kraigbrockschmidt.com/blog. See you there.

You can probably tell that I haven't worked with my site's design for a while, but I'm hoping to give it a refresher here in the next week or two, especially as I plan to be blogging more about extra topics related to Programming Windows 8 Apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Thanks for your patience...

Just recently my family and I moved from Portland, OR to Ananda Village in Nevada City, CA. In the process of moving, it struck me that we were directly experiencing what data goes through when trasnmitted over the Internet.

First, we set up the protocols of the transfer: closing up connections where we were, opening connections where we were going, and arranging the transfer pipeline (aka UHaul).

Second, we did a serious job of compressing the material totality of our three lives into a 20' truck (and the minivan). The compression algorithm had several stages: the small scale (local) compression of packing boxes, then the large-scale compression of stuffing those boxes into the truck. I've always had a pretty good spatial ability (e.g. 3D Tetris), and got the truck completely stuffed floor to ceiling and front to back. If we'd had one more box we might not have done it!

It was quite amazing, in fact, to see that everything we owned could be fit into a 16.75' x 7.75' x 7' volume (OK, so the wheelbarrow was strapped on top of the minivan...). But it really shows what happens during compression--when you remove the extra space that normally surrounds our stuff.

Third, we did the transfer of all this "data" by driving the truck and van the ~590 miles down I-5 from Portland to Red Bluff (spending nights in Eugene and Mt Shasta), Hwy 99 (through Chico and Oroville), then Hwy 20 (Grass Valley and Nevada City), Hwy 49, then Tyler Foote Road. It was a long haul, but certainly made much easier with compressed data!

Fourth, when we arrive at Ananda Village on August 13th, we then started the process of decompressing the data--expanding from the truck into the house, again through a multi-stage process of unloading the truck, then unloading the boxes. Transfer complete!

As a fifth point, it was certainly clear that the compression algorithm (packing) took considerably longer than decompression. That is, it takes more analysis to understand how to pack things efficiently, whereas unpacking is relatively mindless (except figuring out just where everything is going to go in the new place!).

I can also say that while I won't be desirous of making a long-distance move again anytime soon, our data fortunatly has no emotional involvement in such processes and is very happy to be squished and exploded over and over again. For myself, I've been thankful for the good nights' sleep I've been getting for the last week. Phew!

I'm happy to see that Steven Sinofsky has started up the Building Windows 8 blog, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/, that will be exploring many aspects of the product I've been working on since Oct 2010 but haven't been able to say anything about! Hopefully I'll be able to start blogging on developer-related subjects here soon. In the meantime, I'll be seeing you at the //Build conference in Anaheim in a couple of weeks.

A short time ago, my young son and I noticed a sign on Portland's Sesame Donuts shop (very near our home) that June 3rd was "National Donut Day." That piece of news wasn't so inspiring as the fact that the store would be selling 25-cent donuts that day. So of course we make the short trip on that morning to participate in this celebration, and I checked in my location to Facebook with an appropriate comment about the event.

Not long after, a friend of mine in Europe commented on my post. "Do you really have a national donut day? I love America :-)". I had to reply honestly, and say that it was probably just a marketing scheme, albeit a tasty one!

It is true that many such special days on the American calendar are just marketing schemes cooked up one some retailing association or another to bump up sales. Retailers have invented days for giving gifts to just about anyone you might know--family, of course, but also secretaries, nannies, bosses/managers, your neighbor's pet Chihuahua, you name it. And most of the time we just roll our eyes at such things, which I would've naturally done with the donut thing except for the fact that the deal was too good to pass up.

At the same time, I started to reflect more on something more true about these fabricated events. Success in any endeavor always depends not just on skills and know-how, but on the ability to overcome inertia and move energy. Once a flow of energy has started, in other words, it's a dynamic force you can work with, shape, and direct, whereas energy that's frozen into a solid and unmoving form is there, certainly, but very static. We recognize this by celebrating when people who we'd normally expect to knuckle under or cave into their circumstances stand up and put out the energy to overcome their challenges. We admire people who rise out of poverty through will and perseverance more than those who became wealthy through inheritance or other "strokes of fortune." In fact, how often do we see people become rich through no real effort of their own, only to squander that wealth entirely!

This, then, is exactly what fabricated holidays accomplish: they serve to awaken and move energy in a particular direction. This can, and often does, stimulate a greater ongoing flow of energy in that same direction. I had to admit, that is, that without a National Donut Day, I would hardly have thought to visit Sesame Donuts on a Friday morning with my family. We'd actually only been there maybe twice in the last five years, but now what we (and especially my son) has had the experience, there's a good chance we'll visit more often. Fait accompli.

In this way, I have a new understanding and appreciation for these events. Though they perhaps soar to the heights of corniness, they yet embody that important relationship between success and energy. So though many such days are probably not created with much noble purpose in mind, they yet serve this noble purpose of generating and moving energy across the culture. They serve as a subtle reminder of this important principle to us all, and in the end, I think we're actually better off for it.

Now if only National Donut Day was a monthly event!

I searched the Washington Country Library system (in Oregon) with the words "back care basics," looking for a book with that title. I didn't just do a title search, however, and rather searched on "any field." It was funny to see the variety of books that were actually returned, in the following order:

1. The 20-Minute Gardener: The Garden of Your Dreams Without Giving Up our Life, Your Job, or Your Sanity
2. Accounting for Dummies
3. Back Care Basics: A Doctor's Gentle Yoga Program for Back and Neck Pain Relief (the one I was looking for)
4. C++ for Dummies
5. The Chemotherapy Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Get Through Treatment
6. Complete Digital Photography
7. The Complete Guide to Growing Tomatoes: Everything You Need to Know Explained Simply
8. Country: Piano, Vocal, Guitar
9. The "I Have a Life" Guide to Baby's First Year: Get Through Your Baby's First 12 Months, Without Losing Your Life, or Your Mind
10. Jerry Baker's Gardening Wisdom

Go figure. Must be a curious database arrangement!

At my recent visit to the Ananda College of Living Wisdom, I heard a few stories of interested parents who came to visit with their sons or daughters. When they arrived at the Ananda Meditation Retreat, where the College is located, they had to ask "Where's the College?" It's a legitimate question, because if you look at either of these websites, you'll see pictures of people and nature, and very few of buildings, especially the kind of buildings that one normally associates with an institution of higher education. And what you do see is an assortment of new and old structures that have been built at various times since 1968, including geodesic domes, yurts, and yes, even a modular office trailer. In short, not exactly what the word "college" generally brings to mind.

This got me thinking, though--what exactly is a college? To think about this clearly, the real question--and the question that prospective students and parents should ask of any such institution--is this: what do you expect from a college?

That's not too hard to answer, really. A student enters this magic box we call "college" and in a few years supposedly comes out as a more educated, more employable, and hopefully better or more actualized human being.

The big question, then, is what's that thing in the middle. And really, what we're after here is this: what is the essence of that "college" thing? Is it, in fact, just a matter of the buildings in which this college thing happens? No--of course not. It's the transmission of understanding from instructors to students. That's what matters in the end: a human-to-human connection for the transmission of consciousness.

With that in mind, we can then ask: "So what do you need to make this transmission of consciousness happen most effectively?" Is it just a matter of erecting a typical academic edifice, or is it about creating a whole environment that's conducive to this transmission? It has to be the latter, if college is to be the most effective.

If we're looking for such an environment, we can easily see that the big institutional structures that people come to expect from "college" are actually detrimental to the true goal. If a structure creates barriers between students and instructors, then the transmission of understanding is impeded. By removing these structures, on the other hand, and allowing closeness, (impersonal) intimacy, and relationships, the transmission can be supported and even amplified.

I remember, as an example, a history class I took my freshman year in college at the University of Washington. I was one of 800 students in that class--it was so large that while I knew the person way down there on the stage was the brilliant professor Jon Bridgman, there wasn't the kind of deeper connection that one needs in order to be inwardly magnetized and inspired by that brilliance. I was fortunate that, being enrolled in the "honors section" of the source, that my section (a smaller group breakout) was led by Professor Bridgman himself. This managed to bring the group size down to 30--better, of course, but there was still a pretty wide chasm between myself and the one from whom I was supposedly drawing higher education. In the end, it simply meant that expectations were higher!

Imagine, then, what it would be like to have that chasm removed altogether, where a student' access to their instructors is, compared to the typical experience, something like the best broadband Internet compared with 1200-baud dial-up service. In such an environment, a student has the opportunity to be deeply inspired and magnetized by not just one instructor or professor, but all of them. And in such an environment, I'll willing to bet that much more "college" actually happen than it does in most other institutions. It's a difference well worth considering!

Just recently I had a very busy two days at the Ananda College of Living Wisdom, with which I am a member of the Board of Directors. It's a small college, only now in its 7th year, having started from nothing more than an idea in early 2003 (a meeting I was in as well). Considering that, it's quite amazing to see how far it has come in a very short time for this kind of project. The faculty and student body are expanding, the finances are in the black, and the college will likely be granting its first bachelor's degree next year.

It's fitting, too that the young woman who is poised to be this pioneer, Chitra Sudhakaran, already has another great honor to her credit, the National Balashree Award of India, one of that country's highest arts awards given directly by the President. To me, it signals the caliber of student that the College has already been able to attract even in its formative years.

To me it also reflects on the college's primary specialty, which is itself rooted in the ancient wisdom of India and the West together and indicated by the "Living Wisdom" part of the name. That specialty is approaching every subject from the standpoint of higher consciousness, taking as an axiom that consciousness is the fundamental reality of the universe, not matter. This is really a new approach to higher education, on in which there is great potential to be explored. This potential, indeed, underlies my own interest in the college, and I'm engaged in developing an area of the curriculum that's related to my own professional expertise: technology and engineering. The question here, really, is not just how to go about teaching these subjects, but to ask how technology and engineering can be tools for transformation when picked up from the thread of consciousness. (My book, Mystic Microsoft, suggests some of those directions.) Developing this area will help the college expand beyond the core liberal arts subjects like the arts, psychology, world cultures, and so forth.

In this regard, the first expansion of the curriculum into the sciences has been the Physics and Consciousness course, led by David (Byasa) Steinmetz, a trained astronomer but also a deep spiritual seeker for many decades. What has been very special here a the end of the 2009-2010 school year is a new relationship that we've formed with the author of the most widely-used textbook on Quantum Mechanics, Dr. Amit Goswami.

Dr. Goswami's own primary interest today is in the same realm as Physics and Consciousness, especially the implications inherent in quantum mechanics to questions of consciousness and existence. Calling himself a Quantum Activist, it was fascinating to discuss with him how this approach can actually provide a scientific proof for God, which is to say, a "non-local" consciousness that is greater than what we experience individually (which is to say, "locally").

For details, I'll refer to Dr. Goswami's written works, information about which can be found on his own website as well as the documentary about his called The Quantum Activist (he also appeared in What the Bleep Do We Know?), a film we were honored to watch and discuss with him and the filmmakers when he recently visited the Ananda College of Living Wisdom.

Dr. Goswami was very generous with his time, giving several classes as well as giving the address at the college's closing ceremony on May 27th, 2010. in closing this post, then, I offer a selection of quotes from these talks that are relevant to the College and its mission (recorded by faculty member Carol Gray):

More [students / teachers/people] will come to this kind of place [the College] because it’s wonderful to work in a new paradigm. You can be creative in a new paradigm.

Highly intuitive students will come to schools like this – not Harvard or Princeton.

This is the right way [of education]...this wonderful university…liberal arts is to liberate you through the study of arts, humanities, social sciences…this school will attract highly intuitive students.

My young friends, you will figure out for yourself how to make a living. Education is to liberate you from tyrannical jobs so you can have meaning while making a living. The idea of separating jobs from meaning is a very poor idea. The workplace must be meaningful.

And since I am a member of the Board, I have no shame in saying that the college is constantly looking for students who are ready for this level of adventure: higher education for higher consciousness. See http://www.anandauniversity.org for more information, and make sure to check out the YouTube video! We are also looking for new members for both our Board of Directors and our Advisory Board. See this post for details.