Zhenren: Why do we exist?
Selene: The process of evolution has evolved for you, to the point, that you realize your own existence and future death. You can accept this brief wonderful travel with no care or you can try to find some purpose. There is no purpose except what you determine. It is a wise person who fits their purpose into the truth of life direction.
Zhenren: Is there a god?
Selene: There is if you think there is.
Zhenren: If you see that our world will be destroyed, you will not interfere?
Selene: You mistake your own existence as some special event. You conjure up your own construct to give you comfort, my existence. You expect me to come and give you rescue? Look toward your abilities, your sciences and technologies, to stay alive.
One of the major pains for me is to find an external storage solution for my Mac Power PC G4. This model limits its USB port power to the 500ma specified in the standards for this type of port. Problem is that hard drives will draw a lot more than 500ma, especially for start up. You will find that most all manufacturers that sell portable hard drives fail to include the USB Y cable to draw power from two USB ports for guys like me that have the older computer. New Mac laptops provide the necessary power to properly run these pocket size portable hard drives. I was at L.A. Computer Company looking over their hard drives. A salesman came over to offer help. I told him of my problem and he told me to go with Firewire. I did not realize that that port properly powered the external hard drive. My son was with me and with the help of the salesman they both chose the LaCie All-Terraine Hard Disk. On the bar code tag it is called the LaCie Rugged HD. In short, it worked! No drivers to install. This drive offers Firewire 800, Firewire 400, and USB 2. Now here is the clever part of this. For USB you get TWO cables. One is a USB at one end and at the other end is a power connection! Not only that, that USB that gives only power out is long enough to run to the other side of the laptop. Now we know that that power connection will NOT properly power the drive. Then we plug in the second USB cable to the second laptop port and to the drive itself. The unit properly powers up and mounts. The problem with the USB port choice is having to use 2 cables. I much prefer to use the Firewire interface – only one cable.
Note that this manufacturer seems to understand that some laptops have only two USB ports and those ports are on either side of the machine. To properly use the USB interface and forced to use both one USB wire must be a lot longer. I can not figure out if it is stupid engineers or stupid managers that can not figure out this problem. LaCie seems to know what it is doing!
I tried out LaCie’s “1 Click” backup software and it is terrific. The interface is direct, meaning fast. The default backup copies everything within your user’s home folder. Now all of my documents, web site backups, pictures, music, etc. are there on this backup drive in a format that is the same as on my hard drive. There is no compression making the contents useless for my immediate use.
My biggest problem is pictures. I take alot of them and they take up a LOT of room because I love to shoot RAW format (8 to 9.5 MB per image) and typically I might shoot over 100 images. I can easily reach one gig file size each time I download my camera images.
Here are some more points about this drive:
Zenren: Why do you have this discourse with me if you do not intend to interfere in my life?
Selene: You exist momentarily in a world of natural perfection. You have personal freedom in that world but do not know it yet or chose not to know. Natural forces will impose upon you because the natural needs to evolve. To evolve is part of perfection. In your life among other men and women, you construct environments that are not yet perfect and thus are hurt by your own kind. There is no point in interfering, you are the master of your own small destiny. I can not interfere in any case.
April 17, 2008 one of our local high schools decided to put on a simulation called Every 15 Minutes. I was asked to volunteer to take photographs for the Placentia Neighborhood Watch. It was quite an elaborate production. Here is just a partial list of participants:
The purpose of the simulation was to drive home the fact that many of the students that viewed the simulation had a chance of dying because of drinking alcohol and driving a vehicle.
A faculty member was made up to be the Grim Reaper and was sent to classrooms to collect students that were picked to simulate a student dying every 15 minutes. A gong sound was played over the public address system for the whole campus to hear. When I accompanied the Grim Reaper to my first classroom, to take pictures, a whole number of students were crying, quite emotional. A faculty member accompanies the Grim Reaper and while in the classroom reads a biography of the student picked to become dead. The student walks out with the Grim Reaper and sent to the faculty lounge where white face paint is applied. They go back to class but are instructed to not talk to anyone, walking dead.
Two automobiles that were previously in a crash were towed to the front of the campus, in the middle of the street. Students that were made up to have suffered injuries and death were put into the cars. Junior and senior students were sent out of the campus grounds to view the “crash”. A smoke bomb was set off on the far side of the vehicles. Fire and police rolled up with sirens. A public address system provided to the crowd what the student actor who survived the crash said and bystanders responding.
The fire fighters had to cut off the top of the car to extricate a “dead” body, actually a student actor.
That body was placed on a gurney and then placed in a hearse and driven away. In the image below we see firefighters kneeling beside the dead body.
In a few minutes a plastic tarp goes over the body and then placed in a hearse and driven away.
I was mightily impressed with the crash site simulation. As I scanned the crowd of student faces, I could see that they were mesmerized with this effort.
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When one covers an event like this, the likelihood that you will come up with an image that impresses you is directly related to the number of images you take. Out of 214 images, I only thought a handful were exceptional.