Grab your helmet, check the air in your tires, and hop on your bike because in many U.S. cities, May 12 - 16 is Bike to Work Week! Six Apart has a lot of biking enthusiasts, so we're very excited to support this event by encouraging all of our employees to bike to work this week. San Francisco's Bike to Work Day is tomorrow, Thursday, May 15th, and New York's is Friday, May 16th.
Six Apart is helping out its employees by providing maps (shaded according to steepness - a must in SF!) to help everyone plan out his/her route, as well as finding first-time riders buddies to commute with. We're also supporting ALL SF riders who pass the front of our office by handing out coffee, juice and snacks from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. If you're in our neighborhood, look for the sign that says "Six Apart Supports Bike to Work Day" and stop by to say hi and get energized!
Improve your health, financial status, productivity, and happiness by joining thousands - maybe even millions - of commuters around the country who are hopping on their bikes to get to work. Visit the Bike to Work Week website to find out more about events in your area.
Support the two-wheeled way of life with the "Passing Left" theme found in "Photo-Based" in the Design Area. Planning on cycling to work this week? Let us know in the comments!
As we mentioned last week, we had to postpone the maintenance that was due to occur on Thursday, May 8th.
We have rescheduled the maintenance for tonight, Tuesday, May 13th, starting at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time (that's 1:00 A.M. UTC/GMT). We'll be taking Vox offline for a bit in order to move the service to a brand new home in some bright, shiny new server racks. We don't expect to be offline for more than an hour or two, but we apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.
Again, thank you for your patience as we continue to invest in Vox's infrastructure!
Poor, Poor Marche Taylor. Today she is a victim. She was wrongfully denied entrance to her prom because of an innocent little dress that the big bad evil school wouldn't let her wear. She knew that there was a dress code for prom but she's a princess and the rules NEVER apply to her! How dare they interfere with her dreams of looking like a hooker at prom!!!
I am sorry folks but freedom of expression is null and vid at a school function - especially when a child shows up wearing two strips of cloth covering her nipples.
I support the schools action 100%!!!
1. They were right to deny her entry to the prom. Its a teenaged celebration of the completion of high school. It is not a music video or a brothel.
2. They were right to keep the money for the tickets. The school did not breach the contract - Miss Taylor breached the contract. She knew that there was a dress code and she CHOSE to ignore it! They owe her NOTHING.
3. She was arrested because she was causing a scene and refused to leave the premises. What should the school do? Allow a rude screaming brat to remain on the premises so she can ruin the prom for the other people in attendance (they seem to have figured out te dress code). They aren't allowed to touch her in any way - so they did what they had to do. They called the cops. Miss Marche could have left peacefully and she CHOSE not to do so.
http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/khou080509_tj_promdress.e4ef3d2b.html
Tonight, starting at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time (that's 1:00 A.M. UTC/GMT), we'll be taking Vox offline for a bit in order to move the service to a brand new home in some bright, shiny new server racks. We don't expect to be offline for more than an hour or two, but we apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.
Thank you for your patience as we continue to invest in Vox's infrastructure!
Update: we've postponed tonight's maintenance, and will let you know when we reschedule. Thanks for your patience!
Last week, we announced the winners of the HP "What Do You Have to Say? Theme Design Contest and promised you we'd make the winning themes available on Vox in the coming weeks. After a little more thought, we decided you shouldn't have to wait a second longer to use these creative and inspiring designs on your blogs, so we made them available for you today. Who says good things only come to those who wait?
Straight to Video
Now you can share your Flickr videos on your Vox blog!
A few weeks ago, Flickr announced that pro members are now able to share videos of up to 90 seconds in their photostream. Many of you already post photos to your Vox blog directly from your Flickr account, and now we’ve made it so you can do the same with your Flickr videos.
To post a Flickr video to your Vox blog, just follow the same steps you would if you were posting a Flickr photo. (Yes, that means you’ll find your Flickr videos in “Photos,” not “Videos.”)
Not using Flickr to add photos to Vox? Find out how to connect your Flickr account to your Vox account. Plus, using Flickr means you’ll never have to upload a photo twice, or waste valuable storage space!
Around the World with Vox and CupCate
A little over a year ago, we announced that CupCate was one of the Grand Prize winners of the Vox World Tour. A month ago, Cate and her husband, Iain, packed their bags and flew to San Francisco, the first stop of a three-cities-in-fourteen-days vacation.
While they were in SF, Team Vox was lucky enough to have a yummy lunch with Cate and Iain and some of us even made it out for a late night karaoke session at The Mint.
We were also happy to hear, however, that she took some time to enjoy a glass of wine, a roaring fire, and the luxury of utter relaxation.
Then it was off to Tokyo where she saw gorgeous cherry blossoms, the Tokyo Tower and the Sensoji Temple, and even got a special tour around Tokyo with Ayako from Six Apart’s Japan office!
And it wouldn't be a Vox World Tour without Paris in the spring time, decadent French meals, and, of course, the Eiffel Tower.
It sounds like an amazing adventure. Congratulations again to CupCate. We had so much fun with you while you were in SF and we can't wait until your next visit!
{Please excuse possible incoherency or difficulty reading as my mind was a bit jumbled trying to get these absurd events on paper....}
It was entirely too great of a day to sit inside and learn the popular Belgian "Jumpen" dance via youtube video's so we decided to go to the bookstore and read a book I had been wanting to read called "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass. As we walked in I knew this was a great day and a lovely time to begin the early phases of my serious adjustment from pre psychedelic life to the skewed idea of reality I proudly hold today. We found the book and I sat down to read it. As I read it I began to realize that I hadn't the slightest fucking clue about what Mr. "Dass" or whatever was talking about. Something about needing to die before being reborn. So I had been trying to gather up the nerve for about a couple of months to score some psilocybin mushrooms after watching some friends trip and reading multiple reports on erwoid.org. I had previously only tried cannabis and MDMA and was looking to fuck with my skin encapsulated ego a bit. So I called my friend who I knew would have them, as he has mentioned getting them before. I figured, like with most psychedelics or mind altering experiences (namely MDMA) I would put the shroomies away for a long time and keep researching the subject and trying small bits of it to get used to baseline effects.
So I went and picked them up and proceeded to take them over to a very close friend of mines apartment to examine them. There were 5 of us over there, three of my good friends and one of their girlfriends. I decided upon taking a bit to try them out as I was entirely too excited to simply put them aside. I filled the small of my palm with some shake and a whole mushroom (about 1/2 eight) upon temporarily conquering my anxiety I ingested them and waited even more anxiously for the effects to kick in. I was sitting on the couch and we were all hanging out and listening to music like usual. Suddenly I feel /hear a vortex pulling me down ward. I had been told before that this vortex marked the beginning of the trip for many people... and so it was true.
I immediately got nervous and jumped up out of my seat to go talk to my more experienced friend about what was going on and to gain reassurance that I was in no physical danger. I then went out onto the balcony and examined the world around me as the visual effects began to kick in. The trees had beautiful bright colored blossoms and were dripping with beautiful crystal clear water droplets. I suddenly realized that the four walls around me were not enough. I asked my friend who I trusted most and who owned the apartment to go outside with me so as to not do anything stupid in public. During deliberation of whether to walk outside or stare out of the door, I began to lose touch with my bodies natural temperature gauge and became super comfortable with the idea of going outside despite the chilly night's air. My friend gave me a tour of the grounds which I had not previously seen, or so it seemed. The world around me became so vivid and clear that it was almost cartoony and the tints and colors and contrasts were blowing my mind. As I traveled deeper than the rabbit hole I found my self in wonderland.
I suddenly got cold and told my friend I was ready to go back. I walked back in and was immediately drawn to the Salvador Dahli picture of Abe Lincoln on the wall which was shifting into absolutely absurd shapes and that is when things became a bit overwhelming. The walls began to take on a life of their own and as I would concentrate on each wall individually it would breathe and flex. This was my first experience with distorted reality and I knew not what to do or how to handle it, so I got a bit more nervous and exclaimed loudly "WOOOOOOOW" as nervous laughter began pouring out of my over stimulated cranium and vibrating off the tip of my tongue. "Are you guys seeing this?" I asked. I turned around and one of my friends began to seriously fuck with my mind. He began making all of these evil faces and shaking his head from side to side. I asked if he was really doing it or if I was just hallucinating. All I got back in response is more of the faces and a lot of laughing from everyone around me and this is the point where I do not know what part of my story was real and what part was in mind.
As my friend continued to make faces he grew horns and, his naturally red hair and face got even more vividly red. I began to talk to tell him to stop it and I realized that I was speaking gibberish and getting the same in response. At this point I knew I was fucked and had no way to relate to the human beings around me. I was leaving this world and traveling even further down the rabbit hole. I stood up and left the room at that time to walk around and examine the multitude of trippy posters around the apartment which also continued to look less and less believable. I suddenly felt the urge to go to the restroom as my entire body felt wet and warm but cold and dry at the same time. I felt I was in a cold wet suit but immersed in a dry pool of warm water. I went to the bathroom and sat down on the John with pants down as I figured out that I would not realize if began to urinate or otherwise. I got lost in the multitude of sound and vortexes around me and stared intently at an odd picture of a paper pig on the bathroom wall. Next thing I know the bathroom feels like a ship that is preparing for lift off and I am literally being caught with my pants down as I am "fueling up". This feeling comes and goes as I relive the moment over and over like a tape recorder on constant rewind and intermixed within the tape somewhere is me walking in and out of the bathroom and various other rooms of the house. When the rewind button let go I found my self walking through the small hallway leading from the bathroom to the bedroom, as I waved goodbye to my friend who had been fucking with me earlier. He was walking out the door with his girlfriend and that made two less humans in the house to deal with, and one less "demon" as my friend had earlier made himself out to be.
I went across the hall and into the bedroom where I saw more posters!! (Posters were not fun anymore and they were fucking everywhere) These posters were of Coors light girls and they were playing all sorts of tricks on me. The girls had many different shades of skin put together in a mosaic on their body and were moving in weird laggy patterns as they began to make faces and grow horns as they shook their heads in the same way my "demon" friend had been doing earlier. It seemed as though he had set the tone for my trip and it was not set in a quality direction. So after I realized I still had a body with feet and legs that could move me I went over and sat on the bed and decided to lie down and close my eyes, hoping it would be normal again. As I closed my eyes I saw that I could no longer tell the difference between the world around me and the world behind my eye lids.
I opened my eyes(I think) again to notice the digital clock making weird patterns that made no sense at all. I had no perception of time and no perception of space. I kept forgetting I had ingested a mind altering substance and when I remembered long enough to calculate according to the clock how long it had been since I took them, the time made no logical sense to me whatsoever. I got lost again jumping through realities while lying on the bed with my eyes closed, only to be opened when I felt I was running out of breath. Every so often (I can’t recall the time intervals...anywhere from milliseconds to an hour) I would "wake up" from a "dream" and take a series of deep breaths as if waking up from a nightmare. Then the pattern once again began playing over and over again like a tape recorder and I kept dying and being reborn as the same person in the same time and space. I was still myself, but I was a big head floating in space with the cosmos, including our solar system, orbiting around me.
Then my friend came in and offered me moral support to which I had no words to say as I could not conceive the concept of words but he almost brought me back to reality. He then brought me apple sauce which was something completely foreign to me with little rubber balls that I perceived as planets I was chewing on and I suddenly lost grip of "reality" again. I once again "woke up from the dream" and found that I was drooling apple sauce on the bed and never actually swallowed or chewed it. I closed my eyes again and saw only mild level closed eye visuals of odd bondage scenes containing myself and people I knew well but not at all in a sexual way as I began to slip in to this scenario and found myself inside of this room for a couple moments before returning back to baseline upon (I think) reopening my eyes.
I lied for a while on the bed looking up thinking "WHUUUUUUT THAAAA FUUUUUUCK WAS THAT!!??!!?" Eventually I got up and rejoined my two remaining friends in the living room and began spouting off about how I plan to entitle my trip "the exhibit of life" and explaining my knew found ideas on god and life and other deep deep deep materials which I was seeing in an entirely new light. We spent the rest of the night flipping through radio channels and listening to music I never liked before (such as country) and laughing hysterically at the absurd Irony of the music and the lack of complexity in the lyrics which I found to be very satisfying. I fell asleep that night on my friends couch with my head phones on, playing a track I had created with a computer music studio, which was influenced by the conflict in Israel and listened intently with great compassion and understanding until it became too much for me, and I fell asleep.
I can honestly say that trip has made me a better person and a deeper thinker as well as somebody who is very thankful for their existence and reality and especially thankful for a chance at having such an amazing psychedelic journey. I now understand full well what the wonderful Ram Dass speaks of in his book and I own the book and read it quite often and would highly recommend the book to everyone.
War is delightful to those who have no experience of it.
--Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69-1536), Humanist, Theologian
If the mind pays no attention to that which plagues it, the body will still suffer the consequences unbeknownst to the victim. The same goes for a nation that blindly leads its citizens into war and chooses to ignore it. When colonies of people start dropping like flies, citizens become more scrupulous in their observations of current events. No matter how many leaders plead ignorance or say they are winning, the suspecting people grow no more foolish than they were before. There is a large population which still believes that war cannot be won. The only way to win in conflict is by choosing a peaceful initiative. As one humorous bumper sticker reads, “Killing for peace is like screwing for virginity”.
The inevitability of losing one’s life is enough to turn many an individual away from violence, but that single snowflake is easily drowned out in an avalanche of survival driven aggressors. The prospect of financial gain is as important a catalyst as is the need for limited resources. But patriotism is a whole other set of ideals entirely. Classic patriotism has always meant standing up for what is best for one’s nation, whether it is for or against the governing body; whether you stand alone or in a crowd. It is the opposition to unreasonable government policies that has historically marked the true patriot. Unfortunately, Patriotism has lost its meaning in the modern context of collectivist nations. Fighting and dying for one’s country is as absurd an idea to some, as it is simple truth to others. Albert Einstein plainly stated his opinion on the matter when he exclaimed, “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism… How passionately I hate them!” Regardless, everything is open to interpretation but relativity is grounded in theory. If there were no borders or countries, as many idealists would have it, would patriotism exist in the context of kinship? Kinship is the rule rather than the exception for human beings in every part of the world, therefore it is quite logical that a brotherhood of man would develop in a form somewhat reminiscent of patriotic fellowship, but modern patriotism is some different. Patriotism today has strong nationalist undertones and causes some very angry reactions from the excluded party.
It is equally important in wartime context to consider the strong possibility of blow-back, which comes most commonly in the form of terrorist attacks and guerrilla forces. Blow back is very real and very dangerous. Somewhere in the chaos of war-time orders being handed down through the ranks, a sense of responsibility and even common sense is lost, this is where the rules of engagement come in, and just as quickly come right back out. Desensitization is another form of blowback. Violence is a drug and an aphrodisiac to people who are bored and restless. The people of the world get fed up with happy endings and they crave bloodshed, turmoil, and conflict as much as they crave their most addictive pharmaceutical.
The jumbled confusion of ulterior motives, testosterone fueled aggression, and self-righteous ideology is what we have come to know as violence. In its more extreme context it is full-blown war, which isn’t as pleasant as it may seem when seen in plain vision.
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
--Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Theologian, Mathematician
Ideology, in every respect, is based on perspective; one that can be seen as wrong, right, or just plain ridiculous. How does a person determine what is right without knowing what is wrong? We must go to each far reaching extreme of every situation to know its middle ground; for without having done so our ideas are but a transparent speck on an unmarked abyss; a blind pair of eyes in a poorly lit room. Naturally, people have the right to deny the fact that they are not sure about something and jump head first into a situation based on some imaginary form of reassurance. It is their inalienable right, in fact. Ideologies frequently crash at full force, giving birth to a grey area very different from what is the accepted definition of compromise (as always words fall short). On the contrary, it is more of an anti-compromise. But this grey area is found in everything we come across. We may derive this from the theory of relativity, that one sees everything only from their own physical point of existence. Man knows nothing because man knows something, thus if a man knows something they must know nothing, for without the knowledge and the lack there of, they have no point of relativity. So the point is we know nothing and we know everything. That being said why must we violently clash ideologies if they are as unstable as radioactive atoms? It is the irrationality of human ideologies that brings about statements of complete non sense backed by a full throttle certainty. In no more obvious of a situation does this manifest itself than in the form of religion. We know nothing about the future in this life, and certainly less, if it’s possible, about the after life. Why then, is it so typical to gather arms and kill for this definite uncertainty? Was Winston Churchill so wrong in asserting the statement, “Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense”. Now, the idea of a God has of course always been an honorable conviction. This may even be in good sense, the true question is where, how, and among whom you read what you preach? Muslims, Jews, Christians, and other forms of widely accepted religions are all convinced that they have the story right. It is blind faith, and it can be as ugly is it can be beautiful; as dangerous as it can be safe; as reassuring as it can be hopeless; and as deceptive as it can be guiding. Where is the grey area? Must ideologies clash in order to achieve said commonality? Absolutely! And I am convinced (pun intended) that there is no other way. What I am not convinced about, however, is that ideologies must clash rather than meet and find a common ground. It’s not an all together absurd conviction that human beings with “extremist” or “radical” beliefs can find a happy center. They know one extreme so they must know the other. For how can one know what it is to be extreme if they do not know what it is to be moderate? An easy answer to an easy question… They don’t know it! They don’t know because someone else developed categories of all sorts of -isms and dispersed people about them to fit the description. This is all a big misunderstanding between misguided, misinformed, but convinced individuals/groups. So convinced; so misguided, in fact, that they would give up their life for their beliefs. Righteous? Noble? We may never know. But is it daring and ballsy? Absolutely! I am convinced of it!
Life is not humanistic choices inside of the boundaries of determinism, but rather determinism within the boundaries of humanistic choice. Determinism is a man made defense mechanism created in response to the fear of the unknown, known as the humanistic choice (the universe and all it entails)
influenced by: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyKNtocdZE
Links from my Neighborhood
100 Reasons to Support Hill...
I saw this over at taylormarsh.com and it's a great list....
Check out the RockMe. Schedule. I'm not sure if this is a...
All of us as Six Apart
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