Barbara Ann Brennan and Higher Sense Perception

Barbara Ann Brennan in her book Hands of Light talks about how, when she was very young, she would go into the forest and sit quietly for hours, waiting for small animals to come to her. In those times, she would sit very still and try to blend into her surroundings.

It was not till much later that she came to realize the significance of those times - which essentially is what almost all meditation and the practice of stillness and silence is about - that in those moments, she entered into an expanded state of consciousness where she was able to perceive the energy field around objects. This later became what she called HSP and what she used in her healing practice. She does state that to develop HSP, one has to enter into an expanded state of consciousness.

This practice of silence also ties into Eckhart Tolle's practice of 'becoming conscious and aware of the Now" and Wayne Dwyer's meditation of "going into the gap". Dwyer uses the term "gap" where Tolle prefers the term "space". In either case, they refer to the same thing. Which is all very interesting as once again, it demonstrates the inter-connectedness of so many things.

Feeling Sleepy at work? Watch Cute Things Falling Asleep

Here's a tip for any of you who are right now fighting the pull of sleep and you are at work. You know you have to stay awake because no one would classify that kind of behaviour as "Cute Things Falling Asleep".

This little entertainment will help you stay awake.

And if you need more anti-sleepy therapy, this Cute Things Falling Asleep is a whole website devoted to just showing you all manner of Cute Things Falling Asleep .. which is sure to keep YOU awake!

Last Tip of the Day:
Be sure not to let the boss catch you ... unless he/she too is falling asleep!

Has the Internet gone SEO mad?

I thought the ideal for the Internet was so that we would have a huge library of information, accessible all over the world - like a world unity library. But I have just spent days, no weeks, reading and re-reading up more and more facts about SEO and what you should do and not do.

And as one looks at all the other sites ahead of one's own site in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), (see! I can't even speak without techno-jabber anymore) not only is one kind of depressed (because those top pages are not always the best pages of information one is searching for) but one has to wonder if all the hard, genuine work one has put into one's own site is ever going to be "up there" .. and equally depressing is the realization that one has to play this SEO-game.

In the real world, the "rich get richer". On the Internet, it has become the SEO-savvy gets higher. And the price of all that? Not only do we have a lot of junk and rubbish on the internet (which is not the fault of the SEO practitioners) but now, one is tweaking and re-tweaking one's own pages so that it has enough keyword density, that the keywords should be the first letter in the title of the article, that we should name our files like our keywords, that we should beg others to link to us for PR (Page Rank) reasons, that we cannot just write naturally anymore if we ever want to be read by anyone! Geez, has the world gone mad?

Those of us who want to get top rankings in the SERPs (and we are in the millions if not billions), we spend our time tweaking our on-page factors, researching the most popular keywords (that hopefully but usually fruitlessly also have low supply) and that have respectable to high KEIs, submitting to search engines and directories, installing gadgets, contributions, add-ons, and tools to improve, measure our link popularity, our competitor's rankings, their linking partners. And this is just the tip of the techno-mad ice berg.

Once I thought it would be wonderful to be able to access relevant information, to contribute well researched data and articles, to provide cogent alternative viewpoints. Now I am wondering, who has time for all this when we need to spend so much time tweaking not our information or the relevance and coherence of what we have to say, but answering the increasingly hard question of "will the search engines (SEs) like my page/site?" So how much of the "useful" information on the net is going to be good anymore. What about all those articles and resources that could have been not just good, but great? Now they are spending so much time and effort to climb the slippery slope of SERPs positioning ladder that surely they can only spend a fraction of their research and writing time on producing illuminating information.

Imagine if Shakespeare or Thoreau had to worry, while they are writing about if they had enough keywords in their pages. And maybe they should not mark their pages as 1,2,3s... but by some keywords that can be found. And do they have enough other authors linking to them so that their books can be found? Just like the advice these days is if you are getting a domain, it is preferable if you could get a domain that has relevant keyword(s) in the domain name. Maybe Shakespeare would have had to spend his time, not writing his brilliant plays but changing his name to some highly sought keyword so that he could be searched and found.

I am not blaming the SEs like the mammoth Google. Of course not. They may be the progenitors of our current SEO madness but their intentions were "pure" - they wanted to produce more relevant results for users like you and me. But as they say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". We have millions of webmasters, editors, SEO experts, and over-worked stall owners now trying to guess how Google judges sites and their content and then trying to manipulate their sites according to best guess. But of course, the ever helpful caveat also adds spice to the madness: Google changes its rules from time to time!

Fortunately or unfortunately, we have to play by the rules that the big boys lay down coz that is the only game in town. (Not that those rules are all that clear.) It would be wonderful, as a Google-Yahoo-Search Engine user if we could have the ability to just "delete" sites we don't want from our search results. That would be a way of filtering out all those useless gateway, cloaking and spam sites that causes our big gun search engines to work so hard at their algorithms. If we as users could ourselves just click a tickbox or button next to each site we don't ever want to see in our search results, then over time, the results we would get would become more and more relevant for us. Instead of a gazillion useless pages, we could cull some of them for ourselves. It would save the SEs some work and over time, the worldwide democratic process would actually determine which sites are generally considered useless and those would drop down to the bottom SERP pages or hopefully just disappear.

How Little Information There Is

How Little Information There Really Is

It is a strange phenomenon I have encountered over and over. Not always but often enough.

I have a number of web pages that I bookmark for further reading coz when I first come across them, they were either not my primary topic of research or they looked as if they have too much information for me to assimilate at the time.

Eventually when I do find the time to come back and read through the pages carefully, I often find that they don't really contain as much information as they first appeared. Like Etsy pages ... when I was bookmarking some of their pages, it appeared like a gold mine. Now that I have had some time to go through them, the information is really quite scant and not always very useful.

This sad phenomenon is also often true of many blogsite as well. I guess the majority of their readers read not for information but just to pass their time of day?

I don't care about SEO here!

I am glad to have this site. This is my blow-off steam site. My gibberish site. My thoughts-i-need-to-express site. Here on this site, I take a rest. I don't care if no one ever gets to read this. Not that I would not love visitors. But I am not going to worry about it. So here, I don't worry about keywords, meta tags, sitemaps, Alexa ranking, Google PR and blah blah blah. See, I don't even worry about words that are just nonsensical, non-keyword effective. It is just so good to have a sane place for oneself on the net! Everyone should have one :)

Kevin Rudd vs Tony Abbott

Kevin Rudd the clear winner

Today at 12 pm, we had the first debate between Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Liberal Opposition leader, Tony Abbott. And I am happy to report that most of the analysts seem to concur with what I strongly believe - that Kevin Rudd was the winner in this debate. The debate topic was re. Health and Hospital policies for Australia.

I admit that I might be biased as I do support Kevin Rudd in most things and I certainly do not support Tony Abbott in most things. To me, Abbott is like some junior regurgitation of our last, and thankfully gone PM - John Howard. And I do admit that I only managed to catch the tail end of the debate. But later listening to the analysis of the debate and hearing the re screen portions of the debate, I gather I really did not miss much that was of relevance.

Tony was just overly aggressive and definitely negative with no real substance to offer as a viable solutions. In fact, if you took away all the negative things he had to say - he would have very little to say indeed. And even less to offer. Plus it was very annoying and immature to rudely and loudly butt in while Kevin was speaking. Kevin did not do the same to him but rather offered him the courtesy of uninterrupted speech.

And equally annoying and childish was Tony's loud and insincere laughter while Kevin was making a point. Tony so reminded me of aggressive bully behaviour in the school yard. And Tony was forever tying to catch Kevin's eye when he (Tony) was speaking - but not in a deep eye-to-eye contact kind of way. Rather his desperation to catch Kevin's eyes was more in the mode of an aggressor looking for a fight.

But apart from Tony unimpressive and honestly, quite repulsive performance, ... he really had NO SUBSTANCE. Nothing to offer the Australian public apart from "elect me. I can do better than him." Pathetic really.

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Multiple Blogs

So if you have a number of places/sites where you blog - should you blog at all of them? And do you blog the same stuff? Silly question I know but silliness does have to be attended to in life.

People with Poor Hearing

As age catches up with me, I am surrounded by more and more people who have bad hearing. Some have even accused me of having poor hearing. However I maintain that those people mumble.

Nonetheless it seems a common characteristic that people with poor hearing expect others to have patience and display consideration when they cannot catch what has been said. The poor hearers, justifiably, want others to understand that they don't choose to have poor hearing and for the rest of us to repeat things clearly and most of all, with patience.

Which is more than fair. However what I have also noticed is that they do not practise the reverse. If they are required to repeat a statement, the poor hearers almost invariably display anger and impatience. How ironical that is. And if one should point out how that is double standards, they get even angrier!!!

Steel Engineering in Malaysia

Hi, my name is Christopher Lim. I noticed that there are hardly any web sites on Steel Engineering in Malaysia. Although steel engineering may not be a cool topic, I do hope this may be of interest to some of you out there.

A little bit about myself. I am an engineer and I have worked 20 years in the engineering line, first 5 years overseas and the last 15 years locally. Although far from being an expert in this line, I do think I am a bit familiar with steel structures.

I run a small company named SteelTech Design and we provide structural steel design and drafting services. We have among our clients architects, C & S engineers and steel contractors. We have designed portal frames, roof trusses (conventional and light-gauge), platforms, pedestrian bridges etc.

As for drafting, we have done construction, shop, detail and connection drawings. We have over the years provided other related engineering services like Method Statements, Quality Control & Material Check List etc. Some of the projects that we were involved in are: • Car Display Showroom, K.L. • Walkway Canopy at Jalan Masjid India • Bungalow, Tropicana • Bungalow, Mutiara Damansara • Hostel Complex / Lecture Hall Sri Lanka

You can read more of my other blogs and about steel engineering, steel structures, and other related engineering discussions at Steel Engineering

Toddlers and Tiara Competitions

Toddlers and Tiaras competition

Er Yucks

I am just watching this show called"Toddlers and Tiaras" on TV. It is definitely a mixed reaction phenomena. The kiddies (invariably girls) in the competition are definitely cute, even beautiful. Yet at the same time there is a definite revulsion in seeing them. Not just coz the parents (almost always moms) are themselves suspect (how far do they push them? are the comps for the mom's or are the kids really into this).

But more than that, the revulsion is also the falseness of all of them despite or in spite of the cute factor. All the kids are like dolls. Some of the older kids .. sorry, but they look like the early stages of being a slut. There is a girl who might only be 8 or 9 and already she looks like17 or 18 after the inevitable makeup and hairdo. And then this particular girl .. her mamma is there and she is carrying her younger child on her hip. The child looks like 3 or 4 and already has makeup on . So yuck IMHO.

Really I have heard all those documentaries where these moms and occasional dads swear that they do these for their kids coz their kids want it. But something is definitely wrong here. The kids have hard eyes and they pout when they lose. Not baby cute natural pout. But adult bitchy I-am-not-happy pout and you-better-watch-out. Awful.

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Wishing Speedy Recovery to Stephen Hawking

Wishing a speedy recovery to a great man, Stephen Hawking.

On Monday, 20^th April, 2009, Professor Hawking was rushed to Addenbrook's Hospital, Cambridge, England. He was reported to be very ill.

Professor Stephen Hawking, aged 67, is one of our most brilliant minds. A world-renown mathematician and physicist, he is also known to the general populace for his best selling book, "A Brief History of Time", released in 1988. In that best seller, he discussed complex scientific ideas and theories (like black holes and string theory) and was able to achieve the remarkable feat of conveying those weighty matters in understandable layman's terms. A very enjoyable book and remarkable that he covered so much, so easily, in such a small book.

Stephen Hawking is the current Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and was set to retire at the end of this academic year.

A Short History

Professor Hawking is remarkable not just for his undisputed brilliance of mind and prodigious intellect, not just for his ability to translate and explain incredibly complex matters into understandable form, but also for the miracle of his long victory over his incurable disease. He suffers from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also commonly known as "Lou Gehrig's disease".

ALS is a more common form of motor neuron disease - a progressive, degenerative and incurable weakening of body muscles. Seventy percent of people diagnosed with it die within 5 years of diagnosis. Professor Hawking has survived this disease for over 40 years.

Professor Hawking was first admitted to hospital with this disease when he was just 21 years old. Even though at that time, he did not know what it was, he knew it was incurable.

Despite this debilitating disease, Professor Hawking has lived a full and inspirational life. His accomplishments are awesome for their sheer brilliance alone but taken on top of his life-long ill-health, they amount to nothing less than miraculous.

His first marriage was to Jane Wilde, with whom he has three children.

In 1985, Stephen Hawking contracted pneumonia which required him to have tracheotomy. A hole was made into his windpipe to enable him to breathe. Even though his speech prior to surgery was already difficult, after the operation, he was unable to speak. He had to communicate via raising his eyebrows to choose letters on cards that were held up to him.

It was an American computer expect that developed the Equalizer programme which enabled Prof. Hawking to choose words from a menu, map out what he wanted to say, and which was then sent to an electronic voice synthesizer. This is how he has been "speaking" for years.

Stephen Hawking, apart from his scholarly output, has also penned a number of children books as well as having many speaking engagements. His long-term scientific work has been, in conjunction with other scientists, in search of a "single unified theory" that was hoped to resolve the conflicts between the General Theory of Relativity and Theory of Quantum Mechanics.

Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity deals with the laws of motion governing large objects, like planets. Quantum Mechanics deals in the world of subatomic particles.

I wish Professor Stephen Hawking a full and speedy recovery.