I need no further details of the event, no more heart-rending media affectation tugging at my strings. I know enough now to break my heart a thousand times over. It’s already surreal and vivid enough … an indelible engram. My moments are spent now in quiet thought and prayer for those who suffer, and for all of us trying to understand and make sense. And, I suppose, in thinking how best to reassure my own daughters that we are safe, that all is well, even while I’m choking back and not entirely convinced myself. Even now, as they argue in the next room, I’m grateful for the mayhem, grateful that it’s still there. And I well up again.

Energy, in particular good energy (like compassion and love and kindness), is a remarkable healer. I believe that the immeasurable suffering right now is so powerful that it is felt, sometimes even physically, like a shockwave by us all, everywhere. In the same way, we can muster and channel all of our healing and compassionate energy and send it powerfully, wave-like back to them. And I believe they will feel it, and that it will help them. And the more of us who do it, and the more focused we are, the more they will benefit. As in other times of great suffering, people demonstrate remarkable capacity for love and caring. I know that in the coming days and weeks, we’ll bear witness to some truly beautiful humanity. My hope for us all is that we take this with us as we push ahead, that we do not forget it and return to our hurried and absent ways.

May the deep sadness we share give way to a lasting recognition of the true unity that connects us all. May we keep kindness, compassion, and empathy as the motivation for all our actions and words. May we choose togetherness and mindfulness, peace and calm, over acquisition and constant distraction. May we take time to look deeply and truthfully at ourselves and our world and recognize that things are not as they ought to be. May we be brave and push ourselves to change, for the benefit of us all. May we simply be softer and more gentle, and love more fully and more often.

Well, those days are gone. Another of my monitors is now failing. I called support and was told that their policies have changed. I now have to ship my monitor back to them and wait up to two weeks for repair and return (they’ll replace only if it cannot be repaired). Which means I am without the monitor for two weeks. Which means I need to buy a new monitor. This time it will not be a Samsung. And that’s a shame. I love their products and have been buying them exclusively for years. Maybe this is normal policy for the industry, but their old policy had me publicly singing their praises, while the new policy has me publicly deriding them. Wonder how that will play out for them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve been playing with this on my iPhone a lot lately, and also have discovered some tools to make image calibration right on the phone easier. The photos below were taken on my phone and then worked with Photoshop.com which provides a very friendly interface for filters, cropping, and even uploading. In some these photos I’m also experimenting with some tilt-shift effects (to varying degrees of success).

Here are some cool links:

http://iphonephoto.us/
http://www.ippawards.com/
http://www.philcoffman.com/blog/photography/iphone-photography/

And some cool tools:

Camera Bag
Best Camera
TiltShift Generator

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is an outstanding cartoon (by Chris Ware) depicting a This American Life story about kids who started a fake TV camera craze at their elementary school. As Graham says, “It’s so amazing. Why can’t there be more of this? I could watch HOURS of this.”