A net working meditation

Last week was one of the most intensely intellectual and emotional weeks I've had so far this year. It was a great week for exchanging great ideas with some of the most interesting net evangelists doing advocacy work in the United States.

Whether it was talking about impeachment in Philadelphia, describing the state of the feminist blogosphere in Barnard University, inspiring ethnic media publishers and policy advocated to turn to the blogosphere or brainstorming with the political technorati at Rootscamp; it all has been incredibly good and intellectually stimulating.

Yet this week was also marked by the emotional jolt of Lorraine's loss. The death of her boyfriend has been so overwhelming to me that I haven't been able to read her posts about it.

It's the first week though that, due to all the traveling I had to do, I really reckoned with the reality that my kids are better off now in school than with me homeschooling. I have been in denial since September about them being in school and I am just starting to grieve our separation.

So, why am I writing this? Well, I almost never get to write anything personal these days. At least that's how I feel. But also, I wanted to talk about what I do when I'm overwhelmed and grieving : I use cooking and web design to do what some people describe as work meditation, when others talk about active meditation.

Through out my years of studying yoga, I've come in contact with the idea of active meditation while working as opposed to concentration. The aim of active meditation is to be aware of the process unfolding without being attached to the outcome --even though you are working towards a predetermined goal.

So last night I spent the whole evening working on a four column layout I've been working on for months. The layout is meant to be the foundation for all my blogs' design. I had been working on it for months and stopped because it kept breaking in the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser.

Now, for any of you who are not web designers of know very little of internet technology, I can't even begin to express the amount of hatred and bad will Microsoft ellicits from people like me. Every time I hear of one my readers having a problem with MSIE, I wish upon Bill Gates a long, painful and revolting death.

Which is why I have to do so much karma work.

Working medidations are about unattached midfulness. Being in the moment of the task without being attached to a means yet keeping in mind an endgoal. Yet the important term here is unattached.

Technological innovations begat by capitalism are brought to the market in order to hook people to the innovation and keep them caged within the products profit cycle. The browser wars of the 1990s took the idea one step further : Microsoft created Internet Explorer with the sole purpose of taking over the web. They gave it away for free in each computer and deliberately screwed up with the standards set by w3.org (the web's United Nations), in order to control life on the internet.

Bill Gates knew this was a brutal "anihilate and conquer" move by Microsoft, but for a man who had said once that the web was not going to change Microsoft's desktop-dependent business model, his company went on a rampage to create as much strife, pain and suffering as possible to those who chose not to use their operating system and their web browser. One of their sales tactics was the infamous FUD. Microsoft used Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt as a strategy against open standards for web development and a way to use "security" against hacker or "internet terrorists" as a means to sell themselves as the platform for freedom and democracy on the web.

Does it sound familiar?

As a designer then, I have to be mindful of the pain and suffering present in every web design I create. Every decision I make not to support a browser is a political decision and in a way, an act of violence. Why? Because 90% of internet users depend on Internet Explorer --because many don't know any better. Every hour I spend working around fixes for that 90% is 1 hour less I have to work for users of smaller browsers.

Which is why now I understand very much the need to call a site a BETA. The kind of work that needs to be done in order to be open and democratic through your site or blog's design never ends, no thanks to that hateful browser war.

So walking away from a static how and a forced when is crucial to understanding the nature of life on the web. Life on the net is ongoing, ever changing, in flux. How we go with the flow will be a testament to our vision of what is possible in this electronic part of reality.

So last night, after much poxing on Bill Gates, I finally quieted down my mind and was able to debug the four column layout I hope to use as the template on all my blogs. I am still cleaning it up a bit but if you want to check it out, go to your account page and pick template culturekitchen_red.4columns. Remember to save the new configuration.

If I were a true yogini, I'd have found a lesson of love that would make me feel closer to Bill Gates and the people who make possible the nightmare that is Microsoft.

Well, I am not.

Yet, part of yoga is to be present to ones shortcomings, acknowledge them, and then move on. Not to perpetuate the error of my ways but to know they're there and well, there'll be a time to grow out of them. The important thing is to keep working, keep moving, keep growing, midfully.

Until then, I get to say, Soapbox A pox on Bill Gates!