About new beginnings.

Feb 27

 It has been a few weeks since I posted , and lets just start of with saying thank you to everyone who has been nagging and pushing me to get some more stuff done on the site. I appreciate it πŸ™‚ I wish I could whisk away the delay in posting with a “busy busy” excuse, but its a little bit more then that. Sure I have had stuff to do. But more importantly I have taken some time “off” , some time “out of the net”, “Off the grid”.  Strange as it may seem i have had a strange couple of weeks. Days where I have traded blog-posting for sitting down with a cup of tea and think things over, Where the endless routine of listening to podcasts has been interrupted by listening to a beautiful cd with classical music (over and over again). Where hours of chatting and surfing where replaced by some (god forbid) couch lounging and watching DVD's.  A mental spindown of my internal harddrive.. A recompiling of my own network-attached stack if you please.

All in all , a catharsis to stand back and smell the first impressions of spring tingle in the air. A time for teaching myself what relaxing and regaining focus is all about. Where mental peace was found in meticulously doing the most simple things : Slowly making tea , watching the water boil.. adding sugar, listening to the sound of the hissing water, smelling the aroma .. feeling the heat of the cup. This “zero-ing-in” on the most simplest of things has been a very relaxing experience and has given me some time to “recharge”.To recharge and think about what I want in life, both in real and cyberspace. Contemplating stuff that is going in my life, my work, my website, my podcast and much more. Its healthy to take some time of, if only to make final decisions on things you have been putting of for a while. To stop and smell the sindered air of your own over clocked internal processor and for once give it a chance to cool down.

So I've come to the point where I made some things clear for myself. For one : I want to enjoy the real world a little more. Its been ages since I last went for a bike ride, much too long since i've paddled through the empty fields of my hometown. And these are the moments were I can dig up some inspiration. Secondly I want to take a look at my future : Doing a website, 2 podcasts, keeping the finger on the pulse of whats happening on line, writing articles, keepin in touch with people on-line and maintaining my own system + those of friends and family (together with a full time job) make it pretty hard to find some time to study. And “learning” new things is paramount in my line of work. Not only do I crave knowledge, I urgently need to get my degree in telecommunications. And I need to get my head in the game when I'm gonna start again taking that course in September. Third : I have a wonderful wife and a house that still needs some work. So doing stuff around the house, renovating and most importantly “being home” and spending quality time with my beloved are pretty important too. Cyber-junkies out there know : Once you get behind the computer , its easy to loose track of time. Living on the edge of real and cyberspace is treacherous. Before you know it one falls into “cyber-overdrive” squeezing more digital information into ones life, spending more time behind the computer, being online all the time. Communicating and interacting faster and faster .. Speeding up the digital drip until, at the end of the day, your brain is too exhausted to carry on, yet to hyped up to sleep. And there has to be a balance.

SO….I had to choose. Work, Life, Study, Podcast, Website and so forth. And unfortunately (with much pain in my heart) I've decided to let the Knightcast podcast go. With the Globalgeek podcast doing extremely well several hours of the week are all ready absorbed by this project. And seeing the enormous work Dave puts into it .. I want to pull my weight as well. Secondly : The site. I want to take the time to write decent articles. About the things the Knightwise.com website is really about. Life on the edge of real and cyberspace (and not another Google-loved tech blog looking for yet another hit). So next week i'll probably redirect the Knightcast feed and refresh the podcast column on the right to reflect my current podcasting project : The Global Geek podcast. Please understand, its not a calli make lightly (especially when I get such nice feedback from listeners) but I cant do two (or three) half ass jobs (blog + 2 podcasts) Its time to cut something loose .. and to the rest of it .. right.. So .. New beginnings my friends.

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Reflections.

Feb 07

 The light is amber across the wooden table I sit on. A shallow dance of flickering shadows that glide across the veins of a tree long gone. I am immersed in the silence of my own world, protruding sounds of reality kept at bay by my headphones. A binary string of ones and zero's wriggles its way from the silver disk into my ears where it morphs into the soothing sounds of an ambient album I bought a long time ago.

 The absence of voices and the marching gospel of progress is replaced by mellow moods of music that tingle my imagination. I sit and stare into the flickering flame for just a second and savour the moment. Too few and far in between are my outings to the mare of my own traquilatis. Too seldom to I stroll into this orchard of whispers… where both thought and movement slow down and dance Tenafly to the beat of time. Away from the binary maelstrom of progress. Of information and communication. Severed from the great link that connects me to the virtual world with its constant streams of information and communication.

On the narrow walkway of my own reverie I walk high above the virtual abyss and the skies of my real life. At bay are kept all other human interactions. My reality shrinking down to the scent of my mint tea, the flicker of the candles light and the sounds of mellow moods. As a sentinel I stand and watch over another infinite dimension. One that only exists beyond and without, yet throughout real-and cyberspace. The dimension of my own soul. My deepest thoughts feelings and ponderings. The unlinked workstation of my identity. In an infinite loop my memories, impressions and thoughts compile and recompile each other to form the kernel of who a really am. So seldom I can log out of real-and cyberspace, just to wander through the stone clad walls of my own singularity. In the pool of infinity I converse with my own soul and reflect the light of mind on the crystal clear premonitions’ that are floating through it.  

Soon the Knight that surfs the crest of things to come beaches onto these shores, the servant that walks the world of men rises from his knees and the poets voice takes on its softened tone. I evaporate into my own core and… In this infinite continuum have time to truly be myself. Too few are these times where I remind myself of me. Of the armoury of words, thoughts, feelings and creativity that resides deep inside. I echo the sides of my own polygon that do not often see the light of neither real nor virtual day.  And yet, from time to time it feels so right. To mellow down. Slide down into singularity and run in ones own single-user run level.

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Why do we love 8-bit graphics so much ?

Feb 01

8bitIf the Nintendo Wii has proved one point, it must surely be that the quality of graphics in a game is not as important as the fun you have with it. I get hassled by Nvidea and Xbox fanboys on a regular basis telling me how good the graphics are on those baby's. They talk about resolutions , framerates and what have you. The brag about pixel perfect photo reality and crystal clear explosions, openGL fire and more of that stuff. And come to think of it . I don't give a flying fart. When I see them read through a 20 page manual and have a cheat-sheet with keyboard or joystick shortcuts on their lap I can only frown. Not to mention get seasick with the unnerving  camera-angle sweeps their second-person shooter does. I tap them on the shoulder and ask : What if a game reaches crystal clear graphic realism… then what is next.

Cause i'm an old school dude. For me the first gameconsole was the atari 2600. 8 bit magic galore. In those times where different. 3d modeling was done on a catwalk and a vector graphic was most often only a sprite. But I loved it. Cause the Atari 2600 (and all low-resolution graphic consoles that came after it)  had a very powerful EXTERNAL graphic extension : YOUR IMAGINATION. 

KnightwiseThink back on old games like Pitfall (infinately better then tombraider), Hero, or even ET for that matter. All poor in graphics but cool to play. Why ?  Because you got your imagination into the game. Those square pixels where merged into infinite resolution by your own mind. You played, got into the game, invisioned your own version of it and enjoyed it. Back then you didn't nag about not having 99 frames per second, or that the game would 'stutter' when you threw it into HD-resolution. We just played.

Lately i'm in a bit of an 8 bit revival, after seeing THIS Girls bathroom I was once again mesmorised by classic 8 bit. Mentioning to my wife that IF EVER she would make me tile the bathroom, I would do it like this. Expecting a snort and dismissal she looked at the picture and mentioned it would be a challenge to find the colors .. but she liked it  πŸ™‚ So who knows.  But it was all topped of by Sharky (who is becoming the main content provider for the week) when he MADE me this 8 bit animated Gif. The guy is a youngster (i mean , this kid was born AFTER we had EDO ram) but knows how to draw and has a taste for the classics. So thanx dude πŸ™‚ Now I can hack my version of Larry in the land of the lounge lizards and insert my very own character πŸ™‚  

 

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