 Time
Things
Oh God, it's after 5:30 am VRT (that's 2:30 am
Eastern) and I am still up, falling asleep in place, but compelled to write.
Is it like this sometimes for every journaler? Even when the subject
isn't all that important?
Oh VRT, it stands for Virtual Reality Time.
It's a nice little standard that some members of the Active
Worlds community are promoting to make interaction between people in
differing places in the world a whole lot easier. In order not to
show favoritism to any one region or county, VRT was set for the one time
zone in the world with no significant human population, the middle of the
Atlantic, GMT -2.
The reason for this is not just the timezones, but
also some lack of standardization concerning Daylight Savings Time.
I once missed a netmeeting conference with a friend in Sweden not because
of the zone, but because we here had switched to DST and in his country,
it wasn't to occur until the following week. Anyway, here
is a nice little Java page with a VRT clock on it, including a pop-up window,
and here is
one without the Java. Please excuse the odd layout of the pages,
they were designed to be used within a tiny web window in the Active Worlds
browser.
Dave Siegel
sometimes writes about time, and the idea of living in the present.
This is a theme that comes up pretty often in Zach's
writings, too. Both men seem to think that living in the present
is a good thing, hell Zach sometimes elevates it to a religous kinda thing.
The grass is always greener...
I live in the present, and lemme tell ya, it's got
its drawbacks, too. Present-dwellers make lousy entrepeneurs, because
the now overshadows the future. Distractions abound. How often
I go to do something and discover something else that needs doing and start
on that, only to run into something else. Yes, I can prioritize,
but once I start doing what's on my list, sometimes stuff comes up that
seems more pressing.
Then there is the beauty distraction, though I don't
know if that's just me or anyone in the present. I do not usualy
get so lost in my thoughts that I cannot see the ray of sunlight bursting
through a cloud, and it can drive all rationality from my head. The
way milk pools in a spoon at the bottom of a bowl that had cereal in it.
The ugly distracts, too, but I don't sit around and admire it.
And there is the emotional side. Highs can
be really, really high, but lows can be devestatingly low, too. When
the now is in your face, it's pretty hard to escape it.
Now, this is not all to say I can't think about
the future, and plan, and anticipate. It's just that that is there
and I am here. And it's not to say I can't remember the past or learn
from it, though I do have less capacity for that kind of thing than a lot
of folks do. My mom will say, "Anita Sugarloaf says hi. She
remembers summer camp," and I have no frickin clue who or what she is talking
about. Well, mostly the problem is names. Event are easier.
And that's not to say I can't see The Big Picture,
because I can, sometimes much better than my friends. But I have
problems predicting a trend.
Today was a terriffic scavenging day, and I hadn't
even meant to scavenge. I was on the way to the grocery store when
distracted by the sight of a loveseat by the street. It passed my
inspection, so into the van it went. On the way back from the self-storage,
I saw a recliner in the same spot, which also passed inspection.
I took a roundabout route back to the self-storage, which gleaned me a
nearly new utility table, a broom, a snow shovel, a sled, a desk chair,
some carpeting, plastic lawn furniture, plastic gardening toys, and
a television, all with minor flaws but nothing that would prevent functionality.
The table has a coffee ring; it did have a loose leg, but all it needed
was some nut-tightening. The desk chair is missing a caster, the
sled has a crack in it, and the tv is missing a zero button (I usually
watch channel 22 so this is a non-problem). I added these finds to
the desk, two dining chairs, dishes, and Star Wars Electronic Battleship
I have stashed away for the move.
|
