Gene's Blog

Dreams

This will probably not be what you are expecting. Then again, maybe so. I have had this “dream” in my head for a very long time. I’m not sure I wrote about it on my main site even, though I may have, it is how my site got its name really, though it isn’t the name I wanted, lol. I’m not going to bother putting these two sketches I made many years ago into this document, nor am I going to put them on the main site. Why? My actual drawing skills, well, the average five year old is a better artist, my skills do not lie in that sort of talent. There is a reason for that, of course, a reason why my skills, though considerable in many areas, are not at a level that would give me cause to pursue THEM rather than the dream that is within me. If I were a great artist, and I would love to be, I’d do THAT and little other than that. I am not sure I’ve written of this part either, I know I’ve told some of you this, and I sometimes, like now, get a bit of a smudge between what I’ve said to one and what I’ve said to all. I still mean to get back to the main site and edit each page, I’ve done about a third – in the last 8 months, giggle.

See the thing is, when something grips me, an idea, when I was younger a video game, or a programming problem in dbase say, or a way to create a .bat file to make all 200 computers I was responsible for maintaining and keeping in sync, do something in particular, it would consume me. It could be a book I’d discover, an author I’d come across, somewhere in the middle of his, or her, work, love and then go make a list of everything he or she ever wrote, buy them and work my way through all of them systematically and thoroughly. Some things are like that but not to that degree. Many programming issues consumed me until I knew I was at a point where I “got” it and would then lose interest and move on to the next thing. That is how I created my main website last summer, and this blog, which, for the first time in print, I will say is mirrored elsewhere, not only as a backup but as a way to reach an entirely different audience. I read everything I could find on html, I read websites for dummies – which I found dumb, sorry, I found THE source of the internet, the W3 consortium, giggle, which sets the standards for how the internet works and the languages it uses AND which has hands on, 1-2-3 methods of learning programming languages necessary to creating and maintaining websites. Okay, now it wouldn’t be nice, if I did not give them their due. So I am going to put their url in here, but recognize that to JOIN this organization costs many thousands of dollars and many very prestigious institutions are part of it. You can find all that yourself if you’re interested. But if you are just interested in basic things, like how to create a web page, or how to make text do this, talk boldly in italics, then this is THE place to begin. Oh, and I was. But I didn’t get here first. I’ll tell you about that as we move along tonight. :^) W3 Schools

That is just the most marvelous site and if any of you ARE interested in building a website, I recommend you start there. I didn’t. And I wish I had. I took a more circuitous route which delayed my entrance to the WWW by a couple months at least, because I already KNEW what my main site had to look like and I needed a way to create THAT. When I say I knew. I mean I had a vision within of how it should look. I had that same vision when I found “pinkie” to create the graphics that are on my main page. I told her, a young Indian programmer doing freelance work for another company I am going to plug here for two reasons, one, they did exactly what I needed done, and two, they are headquartered in my ancestral homeland, Sweden, another NOT coincidence, they are
Get a Free Lancer.

I scrambled my brain trying to find someone to create the graphics that would show what I was trying to describe, to demonstrate what I had seen. I googled everything you can think of and looked through tons of useless sites, until jen gave me the idea and I googled free lance. The rest is history as they say, giggle. I found them, submitted a bid describing what I wanted, got a bunch of proposals, and chose the first responder, Pinkie, because she had already done like 2000 jobs for them and had a four or five star, forget which was the highest rating, from her customers. I read some reviews. They all loved her work and said they’d hire her again. So will I. Darn. I tried like heck to type would there and I got like finger lock, jen insisted on will, not would. I have no idea. Oh, wait, maybe I do, maybe the dream. Hmm. She never stops surprising me.

Okay, enough about html, xhtml, xml, php and all the sundry things that can go into building a website, or working for one. I’m cheap. Okay not cheap, but why pay for something you can get free. Is my current philosophy. I used to be a little more liberal than that with that notion, but have mended my ways. Why? Because a truly civilized place is one in which no one will have something that came at a cost to another. I didn’t use to think like that. I do now.

So, one off-shoot of this philosophy is that I support things that come at no cost to anyone, in computer terms that means open source programs. Open Office is a far better, more adaptable and more useful Office Suite that MS Office, which I also own but rarely use, Open Office is free. Built by a community of collaborating programmers for the public good. I use, virtually exclusively, Firefox as my browser. Why? Internet Explorer IS free and comes with every computer. Well, Firefox is also free but is built by a community of collaborating programmers (note: you do not have to be a programmer to contribute, you can test and report bugs, which programmers fix, and contribute in other ways) and is 90% less susceptible to attacks that cripple, or worse, Microsoft programs. Plus IE has like three add ons none of which are useful in any real way, whereas Firefox has zillions of ’em, all of them useful, some VERY useful, like one which allows you to look inside ANY message or website link, before you ever go there, and see firsthand, right away, if it is useful, harmful or what you are looking for. So Open Source is good. It IS one people one world in action. So, I did a google on open source web building programs and immediately found NVU, which I will also plug here since it has been so good to me, NVU.

It is a What You See Is What You Get, wysiwyg, web site builder, wysiwyg, means exactly that. What you type on the screen is what will appear in your presentation, page, whatever. The term comes from, well, okay, probably no one cares, but I do, :^), Lotus 123 the original spreadsheet program. One used to have to enter esoteric commands and then run a program and see what turned up, if it wasn’t what you wanted, you went back to the code, made changes, and tried again. Tedious work. Wysiwyg changed all that. What you saw on screen as you typed or programmed is what you saw in the end product. NVU is that and a lot more. Point is, jen led me to the perfect program and it, too, is open source. But I couldn’t figure out how to make MY vision show on the page, I had trouble with frames, and I needed three. I SAW what I wanted on the screen long before I could make it appear onscreen. So I did another google search, this one I’m not sure what I typed, my memory is unusually blank, but the very first link Google produced, “looked” exactly as what I saw in my mind. A completely different thing, of course, but the framework was identical. No coincidences. And, the author of the page, had a comment that said something to the effect that he was willing to help people with building web pages. I contacted him, and he, though he would NOT tell me HOW to do something, would give me clues, maddening clues, about how to do what I was trying to do. I apologized many times for taking so much of his time and he, once, wrote back, to stop apologizing, he was learning to communicate, so we were trading talents. Finally, after several weeks, I was JUST about there, and I simply could NOT get the last little bit of code to work. So I did what I have often done, and what jen told me to do then, walk away, leave it alone, do something else entirely. And I did, I decided I was an abject failure and that I would never get it, and turned to something else. And after a few days, suddenly, the solution to my problem just burst open in my mind, full and complete, every detail. And at work. I could NOT wait to get home to try it and it worked perfectly. And still does. That is my main site, giggle. Okay, you have to know, it had to do with clicking on a story and being able to get back to the reading window. Tricky, but not impossible.

Which is like a lot of things actually. So lets come back to my dream. The name I first searched on, and this is detailed elsewhere, was One World. But that was already taken. I was taken too, aback. Because, many years ago, I sketched out a drawing of a place called One World. I have two sketches actually which have been shown to exactly one person. This part is a little complicated, and ridiculous too, but there was a point at which I was told I would one day be working in a circular building. I giggled at that then because I couldn’t imagine working beyond where I have, but almost instantly, I SAW that building. These two sketches are of it. One is a home site, sort of. The other is a place of study. I sketched them while wide awake and greatly bored. Yes, a meeting. But they are alive to me. I still have the originals, giggle. And, as I said, I have never shown them to anyone but one person and that turned out to be a mistake. But, the dream.

This morning as I woke, I had one of those waking dreams (i don’t remember dreams, i used to but i stopped, don’t remember if i said that before either here, but still true, because i didn’t LIKE them, but in the last two years have changed my mind about that and decided to let them come to me again) and in THIS dream, those two sketches came to LIFE. So odd. Because as I was moving through the dream, my alarm went off and I remember thinking NO, I’m not done yet, so I hit the 15 minute snooze, knowing you cannot go back into a dream you’ve wakened from, and went back in anyway. I SAW it all. How those buildings come to be, what we do there, what the curriculum is, how it comes to be that way – yes, the three r’s are included, but it is SO much more, it is the Waldorf method taken to the nth degree. Because nothing I teach, or that is taught in my name, can be taught without a spiritual component. So these are charter schools of a kind. But not conservative Republican, lol. The spiritual component is that we are all one. That what is done to one of us, is done to all of us. We ARE one people-one world. More than we know. More than I knew, I was searching for the wrong name, jenna brought me to the right name. The thing about THIS dream though that was SO different, is that I’ve had the pictures of it in my head for SO long, but I COULD feel this, I could SMELL it, the building was alive. Children learned in arboretums, they didn’t just HEAR about what they were being taught, they SAW it, FELT it, SMELLED it, could touch it. I am doing such a poor job of explaining this, but the dream I’ve had in my head as those silly sketches for so long, came ALIVE in this “waking” dream. And I suddenly know how it can all happen. How, if I have the opportunity, I can “create” that waking dream for many. There is nothing I want more. There is nothing I will ever want more.

much love, :^) gene

If today brings even one choice your way
choose to be a bringer of the light :^) gene