Not afraid of needles

I had my first acupuncture appointment last Tuesday, and have my second coming up this Saturday. Nothing is particularly wrong with me (just some minor stress symptoms like mild headaches and tense shoulder muscles), but I wanted to try it out regardless. My friend Dee brought her acupuncturist into the Cafe a few weeks ago, and I was a little intimidated at first, trying to have an informed discussion with an alternative health care professional, but I was able to really ask some intelligent questions. The spirit of San Francisco stands for everything I believe in, but sometimes when something valuable presents itself to me, I shy away because I think I'm "not ready" or that I "know it all" already. Not this time. We had a really great discussion on the topics of nutrition, professional ethics, whether acupuncture is just covering over other symptoms (like an energy pain reliever if you will). 

 

Fast forward to last Tuesday, when I arrived at her house for my introductory appointment, I was pretty nervous. Would it hurt, would I bleed, how deep do the needles go? I wasn't really thinking about the needles per se until we were getting ready to go into "the room". I was more interested in the evaluation: the tongue checking, the pulse checking. Maybe there was something wrong with me I wasn't aware of? Anyway, to make a long story short, I laid on the comfortable massage table in my boxers, the room was pretty warm, she would press on certain parts of my body and if they were tender, would have me take a breath, then she would tap in the needle on the out-breath. None if the needles really hurt, although the one on my left foot turned a little numb in about an inch circle around the puncture. While all the (10?) needles were in, she did "moxy" on me- lighting tiny piles of a special incense on certain parts of my body to bring more energy and flow to them.

 

All in all, it was really neat, and I was amazingly relaxed/out of it after the experience. I don't know whether it was my body recovering from the adrenaline rush of being so nervous or what, but I definitely felt something subtle from it.

Google-zon?

Where is the current explosion of personalized media (blogs included) leading us? If trends were to continue, and they show no signs of stopping, who will be the major players? I got chills from this (BTW Google has not bought TiVo...yet):

I finally stopped laughing

This is the best site ever. Guy tests the limits of signature checking on credit cards. Hilarious.

New Bush-protesting technology! I didn't plan this but..

...this post is also about cellphones. Just discovered the best site, mentioned on Adam Curry's podcast, http://bushprotest.blogspot.com. Looks like it went online yesterday, and is built around the concept of 'mobcasting', defined as when people have an easy avenue to add to the public discussion, and a central repository to hear that discussion. "The Anonymous Protestor" has built a system where someone can call a number, enter a PIN, and give a mini-report. The system takes that message, converts it to mp3 and posts to the site. Excellent idea, and allows a full description of an event from many eyes, not just one corporate-sponsored one.

Does technology have to be rude?

I've been seeing more and more mention of technological overload lately, where technology is leading us and how it is changing our accustomed culture. Just finished a long article about the ethics and consequences of public cell phone use. One of the most interesting conclusions it tries to draw is that cell phone use disconnects us from the public sphere in favor of connecting us more tightly to our own personal sphere i.e. we can surround ourselves with the "virtual presences" of people we know much more easily, "protecting" us from interactions with people we don't know, those that are very important in making up our social awareness as citizens of the public.
Some time before the election, one of the big topics of conversation, at least on the blogs I read regularly, was whether the rise of blogs would just allow us to be exposed to only what we want to hear, and nothing more. I'm not sure yet about this conclusion, but it rings a bell with this cell phone use conclusion. But humans are inherently tribal, and we gravitate to the familiar and comfortable, so why shouldn't this be the case when technology liberates communication from needing a strict spatial presence?
Maybe we just need to grow some tact. Maybe these are the days where excitement with the New reigns supreme, but society seems to regularly impose rules on things that don't benefit everybody. Stop lights, speeding tickets, smoking laws:
excerpt

One possible solution would be to treat cell phone use the way we now treat tobacco use. Public spaces in America were once littered with spittoons and the residue of the chewing tobacco that filled them, despite the disgust the practice fostered. Social norms eventually rendered public spitting déclassé. Similarly, it was not so long ago that cigarette smoking was something people did everywhere—in movie theaters, restaurants, trains, and airplanes. Non-smokers often had a hard time finding refuge from the clouds of nicotine. Today, we ban smoking in all but designated areas. Currently, cell phone users enjoy the same privileges smokers once enjoyed, but there is no reason we cannot reverse the trend. Yale University bans cell phones in some of its libraries, and Amtrak’s introduction of “quiet cars” on some of its routes has been eagerly embraced by commuters. Perhaps one day we will exchange quiet cars for wireless cars, and the majority of public space will revert to the quietly disconnected. In doing so, we might partially reclaim something higher even than healthy lungs: civility.

The Greatest .Net Starter Site

From: David Cheung

All,

This is the site I've mentioned to you guys: http://samples.gotdotnet.com/quickstart/aspplus/doc/default.aspx

In my opinion this is one of the best ASP.net resources on the Web. It has short concise examples and always given in 3 languages of C#, VB, & Jscript (J#). This site belongs to Microsoft but is like a subset of msdn for ASP.net only. It's parent site is http://www.gotdotnet.com which is for the .net developer community.

The counter-part to this is http://www.windowsforms.net which is completely devoted to Winforms. Check out the .NET Terrarium Farm http://www.windowsforms.net/Applications/application.aspx?PageID=30&tabindex=8

David

Switcher

I got a Mac! iBook G4, best little thing ever. I can't even leave the house without it now.