Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft will have his good-bye at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2008 in Las Vegas, where he will give the keynote speech on 6th of January 08. He is going to leave his leading role at Microsoft in the next months only to devote his time entirely to the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. The foundation’s goal is to “ to help reduce inequities in the United States and around the world.” It is devoted to global development programs, especially health programs.

Gates said that his keynote at the CES will be his last one: “They can invite me in the future, but I’m not sure if they really want it, for I would talk about contagious diseases and not more about excellent software.” (translated from a German quote in the Heise-Newsticker) – a really great change towards good will work.

Computers are a very good tool for goodwill work.

Christmas is the time of presents – this is also the case in the business world. A number of Christmas presents popped in at my office. It seemed that the agencies and partners want to outdo the others in originality – and not necessarily in beauty and style. In some case there is a subtle material “aggression” behind – a kind of an endeavour to gain favours to get another order or contract. I don’t assume bribery ambitions, but there is some kind of this tendency.

Last week however, I got a very original small gift from an agency which has developed a media management system we use for administering our photos. It is a very good system, and I appreciate the executive director very much – he has an enormous commitment, not only for his enterprise, but also in social activities. Over the last decades he has built up in Andhra Pradesh, India, a mango cultivation and distribution system, which helps hundreds of farmers to have a good job. And then he built up several clinics, and also opened an office of his agency in Hyderabad where they do development and distribution of their media managing system.

The last years he sent always very creative little presents: Once a little granite stone with moss from a pass in the Alps, with a little booklet on how mosses survive in most difficult surroundings, showing parallels to our lives. Last year a stone with petrified little fish from South America, and a small booklet about the evolution and power of life. This year he sent an old Intel Pentium (c) chip, which people from a prisoners rehabilitation centre had opened and prepared, together with a booklet on silicon – how silicon, a material second-most spread on the surface of the earth has become the pivotal point of or technical development. By using the qualities of this semiconductor we are now able to reach technical heights unthinkable of only a few decades ago. The booklet mentioned that for the first flight to the moon the Nasa computers had less capacities than nowadays every cellphone has: We have entered into a silicon age. Now silicon starts even to emit light, through its use in LED light emitting diodes. A real step into the sublimation of matter.

The chip – a little work of art, with a beautifully reflecting centre

Yesterday we had staff trainings on IT security. An instructor showed us different ways intruders try to break into a system and how they manage to change or steal information. Some new security measures were presented, and the head of our ITC services encouraged us to keep an eye on our systems at home, too: “Do at least a monthly scan of the hard disk…”

Well, I thought, I have some active measures, firewall, anti-virus, … I’m on the safe side.

Nevertheless I started a hard disc scan in the evening. Two times it got stuck half-way through and the system was blocked. The third time the scan went on, for a long time, through all the programs and folders. And indeed, somewhere in the system trays different malwares had crept in since the last scan. I don’t know what they’d been doing, but now these little cyber-animals had to give up their pernicious activities…

It reminded me of the subtle noxious thoughts creeping in when you aren’t on your guard. Vigilance and discrimination are very much needed to keep these virus-infections away from your inside.

Today is Scorpio full moon, and secret activities going on hidden under the surface are qualities of this sign. It rules over venomous creatures that try to hide in holes and do their stinging and attacking from there. The worms and bugs stealthily infiltrating the PC and the ones operating with them, aren’t they real Scorpions? You might like to read about the qualities of Scorpio in the “Letters on Spiritual Astrology” or in the book “Spiritual Astrology” by Dr. E. Krishnamacharya.

Keeping creeping creatures out of the system – spider and ladybug on an artichoke.

Last week the management body of my office decided to introduce MS-Sharepoint for our intranet and document management, and I’ll be in charge of the project management. It had been quite a way until this decision came about, and I breathed a sigh of relief, for our old system is a bit run-down… As soon as the contract documents with the agency who will do the implementation is signed, the project can start, and it will keep me busy for the next months.

The contract documents… There was a draft of the agency, but our internal lawyer didn’t agree with it: He just wrote another draft, with some specifications I added: “He who pays the piper calls the tune” he said, “I’m sure they’ll agree if they want to have the job.” Now it’s their turn. A power play shaping the conditions of the relation.

In business it is quite normal that when you want something you start exerting power in a direct or indirect way. Often you don’t recognize it, and it’s very common. In spirituality you learn not to exert personal power, but let things evolve, recognizing the trend of the plan or time and acting along that line. Personal power normally creates polarities, integration or synthesis requires inclusion of opposite viewpoints. Whether an act is to be a confrontation or a clearance depends on the underlying motives. You might like to read a bit more about the Power of Motives.

E-waste, the flip-side of our progress

The last weeks the clock in my computer went slower and slower – and sometimes stopped. The e-mails and files got the wrong dates, I kept on arranging the clock, but I had to realise: Already after one year the life cycle of the inbuilt battery seemed to have ceased.

Ten days ago I rung up the support of the computer company, the world’s biggest. After a long automatic intro on the phone I finally got a person from the support team. No problem, he said, we’ll send you a battery. And he explaned how to change it.

Two days later an express parcel brought a battery from England. When I tried to put it into the PC, I realised it was the wrong type. Again a call to the support team. Another supporter: No problem, we’ll send you a battery, it’s easy to change.

Last Tuesday I received a big parcel again from England – 20 batteries, but of the right type. Enough until the end of my or my computer’s life cycle, I thought.
I put in the battery (I had to take away the little board of the WLAN) and tried to restart the PC: Window started and crashed, started again and back to black.

With the help of the support team (in the meanwhile I found out how to short-cup the long automatic sermon on the phone, with pop-music in between), we saw from the bios check that the harddisk was still o.k.: You can try to do a soft recovery, this will keep your software on the PC intact.
I tried to to the soft recovery with the recovery DVD, but there was no choice, only: “This will delete all data on your PC”. Ooops.

Again a call to the support team: There seems to be no other way. Luckily I had done regular harddisk backups with a famous backup software, I thought, so I can restore everything.

The backup-restore software showed that the backup was fine, but the system didn’t activate the drive, though it showed up. I tried, tried, tried. No result. The famous software didn’t help in the case of emergency.(I later found out that the secure zone of the software might not start from an external drive, as it said on the web.)

Luckily I have done at least other regular backups of my own files plus the essential software on another harddisk, I thought. So I started the destructive recovery. It took some 4 hours. At the end, windows started. And I was happy. Too early. The software installation procedure went on and on and on. I let it go throughout the night. When I woke up at 3 am, I saw a message: There has been a problem with the installation, it could not be completed… I sighed, stopped the PC, and wanted to ring up the support as early as possible. When in the morning, after some restless sleep and a turbulent meditation, I started the computer, it came up well…

Now the work of reinstalling all the softwares was ahead. The graphic driver gave some problems, so again a call to the support team, and finally, with some new drivers, the screen was fine. Then the MS-office installation gave error messages. A long call to the Microsoft support, searching through the registries. It ended up in reinstalling the software again, and finally it worked. Many other softwares and data had to be restored, my head reeled in the end: The backup of the addresses of the mailing lists of my mewsletter hadn’t worked, I only found an old functioning backup.

So there is still a way ahead to control the many addresses and add all the missing ones from the last year, in order that the next Lunar Messenger newsletter can go out. I hope, without too much delay….

A lesson learned, I thought: A lesson in keeping my head and my nerves calm.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (New Zurich Newspaper, NZZ) reported today about a fascinating project of two Swiss artist who developed a method of overcoming the Chinese censorship in the internet. The site “picidae.net” was officially launched last Tuesday and is in English, German, Chinese and Arab. The name “picidae” comes from Latin and means “woodpecker”. The first holes in the Berlin wall were hit by so called “Mauerspechte” (woodpeckers) and gave the project its name: picidae (woodpecker).

They call picidae “an art project, that deals with one’s own horizons of imagination, the image of the world, communication and its hurdles and barriers.” picidae negotiates the firewall (Internet censorship) eg. in China or in the Arabian states. picidae delivers a complete, readable and even clickable image of the censored web sites.

The picidae site is not made up of text and HTML elements (tables, images etc.). picidae delivers a screenshot. The page is visible but not machine-readable. This means the text cannot be searched, marked or saved as a text file. That’s why internet censorship, which reacts on keywords (similar to search engines and correction programs), is not able to detect or suppress picidae pages. picidae is not a centrally organised system and is not be reachable via a centralised database. Every access point and every server runs independently and without description and naming – to prevent censorship and deactivation.

Their definition of picidae as an art project is very close to spiritual concepts of visualisation and going beyond the form, realising oneself as the observer, the I AM, which is not defined by the object he sees: “Art searches for new ways (repetition is in terms of Fine Arts just copying). The new images picidae provides are images of ones own horizon of imagination: images of a global communication and images concerning limitation and overcoming of ones own view. The images are generated in the head of the observer, exactly like in an image gallery. The point is not exactly what is displayed in an artwork but what is inspiring in the sense of Art history and reflection.”

I tested the picidae-server with our good-will website, and it is astonishing how the site is perfectly rendered, as an image. (I tried to put a link to the site, but the url changes, so you cannot link to the picidae-transformed view.)

Hopefully this approach is being used for expanding the freedom of expression and information, to further human relations and not to spread perverse and destructive ideas beyond any sense of discrimination.

By the way, the two artists have earlier launched a site called Zone*Interdite, “a test arrangement that serves as a starting point for individual exploratory tours” into the world of military restricted areas, which they are showing on an interactive map. “Individual imagination and the joy of discovering occurs, i.e. spotting, replacing the patriotic and pacifistic duty of a knee-jerk avowal, and undermining censorship, as well as the restriction of perception.”

Pecking through the great firewall of China and other totalitarian systems

Yesterday we had a final spurt time at home: Our youngest son (14) had been finalizing the website he had created together with some classmates for the Junior Web Award, a Swiss national class competition for realising websites which closed this night at midnight. The contest was organised by Switch, the Swiss Education and Research Network, which is responsible for all Swiss domain registrations.

With the project they wanted to offer “teaching staff the possibility of integrating the topics of internet, domain names and websites in their school lessons. By having students gain insight into the structure of a website and letting them learn something about usability, for instance, they have been able to improve on their own personal information capability and enhance their media competence. At the same time, the competition has also allowed them to acquire other competences of central importance in the present-day world of work, such as teamwork and project management. It is precisely these aspects that have made the competition so valuable for vocational school classes too: planning and implementing a project (e.g. a website) jointly in a team and within a limited timeframe is a skill that is absolutely essential for professional life today.” More than 100 classes – or more than 2000 students – have created in excess of 100 websites in the categories of Design/Fun and Topic/Contents.

Our youngster however, didn’t have much of his web-knowledge and experience from school, but from his enthusiasm about creating websites. Since he was 12 he had started doing sites and studying web programming (he switched from reading Mickey Mouse to reading books on html- and php-programming…) and has done already some projects.

The site for the competition he called Freizeit und Sport (Leasure Time and Sport, for the contest section Design/Fun), of course housted on his own domain… He got some friends together to portray scenes from sport and hobbies, and one of his friends does really good photos. Another friend dropped off from the project 2 days ago, so that they had to realise with another one the missing section, and it worked out well.

Besides a school soccer cup of our community, where his class yesterday made the first rang, and a school band concert from his ex-school there was quite some stress around till the site was finalized, but it really turned out well, also in comparison with many other sites of the competition.
So in case you want to vote for this site in the contest, you can do it here (write Freizeit und Sport into the box) from June 18 – July 15.

The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres has done an exhibition of satellite pictures of the earth with the title: KUNSTWERK ERDE (The Earth as a Work of Art). The original exposition in Brussels is over, but you find a series of beautiful photographs combining art and science in an interactive world map. And there are PDFs with more information in several languages.

About the exposition: “Countless observation satellites circle the blue planet, supplying floods of data, which are processed into satellite pictures. These images of deserts, glaciers, volcanoes and big conurbations show one thing above all else: the stunning beauty of our earth.
The pictures chosen for the exhibition combine scientific import with the extraordinary aesthetic thrill afforded by long-distance views of our familiar planet, a dual approach that also appeals to less scientifically-minded members of the public, providing them with an insight into highly complex subjects.”

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A friend wrote me that she just experienced a shock, because a close family member had tried to commit suicide. Normally a suicide or an attempt is a cry deep from the soul, which is not finding the right way through life, not knowing how to find a good solution to face the tasks it has been committed to solve in this life.

From a spiritual point of view, there is the knowledge, and sometimes also the experience, that we as inner beings are immortal, and death does not exist, only for the body. So there is no end to our work, even if we commit suicide. It is important to understand that when someone commits suicide, he doesn’t solve the problem, but will be confronted with more problems in the future – the present ones and the problem of having gone away too early.

Inner research says that those who commit suicide land for a while in a state of a clouded consciousness, which is very incomfortable. Later on they have to face all the consequences of their doing. For life does not belong to us, we belong to Life. It is not our decision to enter into life, nor is it up to us to decide when the time for passing comes. Transgressing the rules of the “play” has its consequences.

You might like to read the text from Good Will in Action on Dying and Deathlessness.

A painting from a Swedish friend

There are many theories how the Great Pyramid of Giza (Cheops) has been constructed, but it is still a mystery. The French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin has now presented a totally new theory with the help of a 3D computer simulation, that a ramp had been built mainly inside the pyramid. He asked Dassault Systèmes to help him realise a demo of the reconstruction. They now have online a fascinating journey through time and space in real-time 3D. You need however install a plugin for you browser. Spiegel.de online has some photos of the presentation. You can also download a pdf about Jean-Pierre Houdins project.

Dassault Systems

The pyramidal structure contains many spiritual principles which help reorganising our energy patterns.