Catching Up Oct-07

Well it's been awhile. I thought I would do a miscellany update here and say hi to friends who read this.

First, a review of trivia/references for those into that sort of thing:

* Posted something at the firedocs blog again finally.

* The McMoneagles posted again on their blog finally too. Joe helped find another person in Japan missing for many years!

(I know this only is on Japan TV but still, wouldn't you think that the various RV lists would be filled with people raving about the wonder of it, given the scarcity of modern brag-opportunities for viewing?)

Pic from their blog:



* TKR has had a few threads I found interesting lately, like on Feedback Format and of course the Featured Sessions thread, and for anyone who ever got thinking about how some RV feels like forced-choice like when you're trying to describe a person, this thread was my rambling about that.



As always, TKR at the Dojo Psi is hopping with daily sessions, viewers working their asses off and having fun and doing good work, sometimes mindblowing work, in full doubleblind protocol.

Some of my faves of the moment (recent sessions):

Rev'sDrag id=120350

Lillypad id=120259

7Sees id=120075

JS25 id=119626

(I could list like 10 for RD. She's amazing.)

There's lots of good and great sessions there, and by others -- worth a look. If you don't have much time, go to 'recent comments' or the 'G15' list.

Many people say that 'automated tasking' especially from a pool, with simple photo feedback, and a simple directive to base task focus on the focus/moment of the photo, makes it "more difficult" to view well. I would agree that it is not the ideal condition for viewing, but ya know, people in the RV Galleries do it every day and totally kick ass. Maybe they'd do even better, or do better more often, if it was all different, but I don't see that happening elsewhere or under other conditions so I'm not complaining.

I have a huge admiration for people with the courage to put themselves out there publicly in the dojo.

Meanwhile, back at the Secret Lab...



The new version of TASKERBOT is now online in beta. It's much cleaner. It's still sitting inside TKR until it's fully tested out... then I'm going to make it a separate site altogether, one people can go seamlessly to/from, but still, separate from TKR. This is because tBot is being coded to handle "management" of tasks for a variety of dojo projects, so people can copy/task from one to another, etc. Yes, project-S with an S; there are a couple others coming that have nothing to do with TKR but are pretty cool. Back to the new tBot:

1. Offsite tasking now allows you to use your own task#, so it can be used simply for feedback or already created tasks.

2. TKR folks can donate practice targets--with their own taskings!--to that pool through there.

3. The basic grab-bag options are now easier in several ways, like you can task to more than one friend/self at once, you can task multiple taskings on the same target at once, you can 'retract' something tasked to someone, things like that.

4. There's now quite a variety of listings for tracking/management, and quick-view options, with text, taskings, photos, hidden in the listing so just click and you see detail.

5. A new application called GEO is now part of it. Custom map 'areas' of your locale using Google Earth for GPS coordinates, then tBot-GEO will randomly task you on a location.

6. The TANDEM feature is upgraded and easier. Now you can do it privately, plus (this was the big request) you can do it from the grab-bag of the host instead of the TKR viewer practice studios -- so if the host has a cool collection of tasks including esoteric whatever, that can be tandem work too. Tandem is fun. I keep thinking I need to set up some weekly official tandem where lots of people can come and do a live session with lots of others on the same task just for the fun of it.



7. Not yet online but coming soon are some neat stuff like LIVE MONITOR -- I made a little app where a 'monitor' can sit in a chat area with a viewer, there are all kinds of preset 'feedback options' for how accurate the viewer might be, plus a custom text area for directives. The viewer can type in data to the screen, or just aim a webcam at their paper instead. I'm making some options like putting images and links into the chat itself, and making the room a unique instance for those users (totally private and room never used before/after that) before making it live. Seriously I always thought the in-session feedback idea was brilliant, but research indicates it's a cold-reading-the-monitor (not psi) training method and I've never understood why nobody made the effort to upgrade the approach to it, so that idea could still be used, but without the in-body blowing-protocol part. This does that.

For now Taskerbot is in TKR still, so visit TKR at the Dojo Psi http://www.dojopsi.com/tkr/and click on Taskerbot when you get there to check it out.

Let's see, what else...

Oh yeah - Sketching!!

LD's artsy sketches that he posts at his blog sometimes have inspired me to finally get my act together and learn how to sketch. So I dug out my copy of Betty Edwards's "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", made a list of about 40 items in there I wanted to try, ranked them in assumed order of difficulty, and every night I sit and work on one of them. Observation #1: I suck at sketching. Observation #2: Apparently even someone like me can learn though, because I'm improving slightly already.

I can't tell you how many times I've not been able to sketch in a session or done more harm than help to the session process, data, even given myself AOL in the process of screwing something up... I've just got to learn to sketch "perspective" well, that's all there is to it. My kid likes to draw so we do it together at night before bed. She's working on teaching herself to draw Anime. I put on either classical or jazz (it's her Music Education Hour, haha) and a little incense, it's a great mood moment.

Beats watching TV. Whatever that is. If I didn't get TV shows on DVD from friends or via the internet, I'd never see it at all.

Speaking of LD he recently visited here. Cool guy. While here he assembled for me a desk I bought over a year ago (I only recently made room in my house to use it), a slant-table that makes my secret Architect dreams come shining through. Now I have an 'official' place not only for sketching but, when it's flat, for dowsing. I'm going to put together some kind of official dowsing experiment to celebrate, I just haven't decided on a new one yet. I still have like 500 targets in my physical pool that I need to get through so I can make another one so it'll probably be something that involves a lot of RV targets. ;-)

I sent a couple dojo friends signed copies of McMoneagle's "Mind Trek," that he gave me after I thought to ask for one for a friend. I have a few left, so if someone reading would really like one, send me an email with a name and mailing address.

No, I will not be sending that to my Big Uber-Secret Cache Of Government Spies that people seem to assume I have for some reason, just because thanks to RV I know a few people who used to be in intell. However, if you send me chocolate or gourmet fruit flavor jelly beans in return (or gourmet garlic. I love real garlic!), I'll do prayers for you in front of my 99 cent Mexican candles with Archangel Michael on them. Between the candles and the Frankincense and Myrrh you'd think I was religious or something. Hmmmn...

Moving on.



It's a good thing I lost a lot of weight in '06 because I haven't lost any in '07. Of course this would mean I might actually have to make an effort, which I haven't been. I'm inspired to weight lifting again though. And a friend bought me this lovely old photo of Marilyn Monroe lifting weights that is awesome for my workout room. Now I just need some decent mirrors in there, so I can remind myself constantly WHY I am working out, hahaha.

Weight lifting is actually a pretty cool sport, as these things go. Anything that is really hard, almost hurts and makes you smell bad must be cool. So far I still have a butt the size of jupiter, but I feel a lot healthier than I did a year ago, so I guess I'm getting somewhere.

I'm restarting an RV 'exercise' period where I do very brief, very fast sessions from my envelope pool. It's partly punishment for not viewing enough for quite some time.

The time for viewing is evening. By the time the kid's in bed I'm sleepy, and then I have like an hour, two at the most, to allot between RV, dowsing, guitar, sketching, house cleaning, reading, my boyfriend, programming for RV stuff online, and a dozen other possible things. It's so easy for viewing to get run over in the competition. I sorta resent that I gotta work for a living frankly and have so little time for the many things so important to me -- kids are the main time-suckers. Sometimes I feel like from the time I gave birth I should have known just to 'write off' the next dozen years of 'having a life' of my own at all. She's awesome but I'm long overdue for having my own life again frankly.

Anyway, I gotta get back into constant viewing again. I would like to set up some things that let other people task me (and anyone who wants to join me) in a regular daily viewing challenge, sort of a exercise for people to hold the line of constant viewing in a busy world. But it won't be fun if I'm programming for it but not viewing for it, that drives me crazy!

Speaking of which. I gotta go task this week's mission at TKR! Sessions due by Monday 10/22 7pm Eastern.

Next post will be a real blogging of some kind I expect. This one is just catch up on too long out of touch.