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LifeloggingI am Apollo Lemmon and this is my lifestream. I invite you to join me in my exploration of an integral life. I am focused on discovering what it means to live a life rooted in integral consciousness and I explore spirituality, art, community, technology, fitness and other aspects of a fully engaged life. I am now living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
I can always be reached at apollo@apollolemmon.com
Podcasts are meaningful media for me; they’re the closest thing to radio I can have any passion about. Here is a selection of sexy, speculative and informative ‘casts that I have recently added to the ‘casts I enjoy enough to listen to weekly.
These ‘casts often include mature, sexual or violent content, so if you’re timid you may not want to explore the material I am about to present. If you are interested in being challenged in thinking about relationships, wish to be tantalized with otherworldly fiction and … wish to be tantalized with otherworldly fiction, read on.
At Daytum.com/apollolemmon I track four aspects of my life. During the past week I averaged 7.19 hours of sleep, 1.19 hours of exercise and 0.13 hours of meditation each day. The ten foods and drinks I consumed most were coleslaw, Mediterranean pasta salad, brown rice, vegetable sub, clementine oranges, vindaloo vegetables with Soyeat, cheese and TVP Pasta, chipotle red pepper wrap, French vanilla cappuccino and cheese pizza.
This is a quick digest and analysis of my lifelogging data for the past week, from 4:29pm Wednesday January 20, 2010 to 4:30pm Wednesday January 27, 2010.
3D scanning and printing are quickly becoming near future certainties. The advent of cheap 3D scanning and printing, along with cheap data transfer means that we will soon be able to share physical objects digitally as easily as we do music, movies and books. This is going to change more than we can imagine.
The easy analogy for understanding 3D printing and scanning is the obvious one; 2d –or conventional– printers and scanners are the predecessors of a far more exciting set of technology that is coming to consumer space very soon. Instead of scanning flat paper, we will be able to scan objects in 3 dimensions. Instead of printing an image, we will be able to replicate an object as an object. In between we will be able to manipulate objects just as we edit documents and alter photographs.
3D scanning can already be done with consumer webcams.
In a recent article from British Columbia’s The Tyee, “The Replicator, No Longer a Star Trek Dream“, great care was taken to outline the ways 3D printing is already widely in use and where it may take us.
At Daytum.com/apollolemmon I track four aspects of my life. During the past week I averaged 6.56 hours of sleep, 1.69 hours of exercise and 0 hours of meditation each day. The ten foods and drinks I consumed most were vindaloo vegetables, orange juice, steamed mushroom and vegetable buns, egg noodles, egg noodles with creamy leek sauce, clementine oranges, tortilla chips, cheddar cheese, gnocchi, and poached eggs.
I am adjusting to a new work schedule and have been getting less sleep than I would like. My exercise was down because I allowed a cold to derail my efforts for a few days. My food consumption is still not where I would like it to be and I have been putting more vegetables into my diet. Meditation is an area I have been neglecting for a long time and will be increasing this coming week.
This is a quick digest and analysis of my lifelogging data for the past week, from 4:30pm Wednesday January 13, 2010 to 4:29pm Wednesday January 20, 2010.
Our future promises technologies that will radically extend our lives, but right now there are tested methods for living long, exciting and healthy lives, even beyond 100 years. Dan Buettner has studied the world’s best aged people and found the lifestyle features that they have in common, creating a set of guidelines for living better and longer.
In a recently released TED Talk, “How to live to be 100+“, Dan outlined how he conducted his study by visiting regions of the world with higher rates of centenarians and noting what these communities have in common. He dispelled some longevity myths at the start and then laid out some of the key features shared by each long-lived community.
National Geographic writer and explorer Dan Buettner studies the world’s longest-lived peoples, distilling their secrets into a single plan for health and long life.
~ TED: “How to live to be 100+”
My head has been filled with “Empty Spaces” this afternoon. Earlier this week DJ Rekluse (a.k.a. Cory W. deVos) released his “80-minute musical meditation on silence”. It’s a magnificent mix of brilliant sounds from folks such as Pink Floyd, Massive Attack, Esthero, DJ Krush, Saul Williams, TV on the Radio, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Portishead and wisdom from luminaries Sally Kempton, Alan Watts, Alex Grey, and Ken Wilber.
Well, my post-ISE high has spilled over into a bit of a creative obsession for the past week, the fruits of which i am so happy to share with you all!
Empty Spaces: an 80-minute musical meditation on silence, featuring Sally Kempton, Alan Watts, Alex Grey, and Ken Wilber.
This is what my Dark Night of the Soul sounds like. I hope you enjoy.
You can find more of Corey’s music and his insightful blog posts at CoreyWdeVos.com.
I have been tracking aspects of my life for weeks now, as part of building an ememory, and one of the most important tools for this has been Daytum. Daytum is a website that helps users “collect, categorize and communicate [their] everyday data.” Daytum does this though a simple, elegant and extremely useful interface.
I have chosen to track the hours I spend exercising, the foods I eat, the amount time I spend sleeping and the hours I spend meditating. I’ll be adding more quantifiable bits of my life as I identify a need or desire to track them. The opportunities are endless for ways in which our lives can be tracked.
Daytum was conceived by Ryan Case and Nicholas Felton as an elegant and intuitive tool for counting and communicating personal statistics.
Nicholas Felton has produced yearly tabulations of his life he calls “Annual Reports” since 2005. These collections of graphs and charts concentrate the year into statistical chunks that illuminate his life in a wry but rigorous manner that has become popular with readers around the world. Ryan Case provided the inspiration, insight and abilities to evolve the methodology of the Annual Reports into this new self-expression platform.
Of course, Daytum becomes most valuable when used to measure progress toward goals. In my own case I am committed to making strength training a regular part of my life. Daytum allows me to record the time I spend doing each activity and ensure my fitness is being supported by my diet and sleep habits. Over time I will be able to identify habits that provide the best lifestyle and make sure they are lasting.
If you are taking on any life changing goal, or are just curious about your present life, I highly recommend diving into Daytum.
I’ve selected quantified, simplified and intimate as three words to be the framework of my 2010. These words will serve as guides for my projects throughout the coming year; if an endeavor does not serve to deepen any of these words I will consider not doing it. I came upon the idea in Chris Brogan’s own 3 Words for 2010.
Quantified
At the end of 2009 I began working more actively with the ideas of Total Recall and Quantified Self to track details about my life. By the end of the year I was keeping track of my diet, exercise, sleep and meditation daily and gaining some insights into my behaviours. The word quantified is to help me remember to add new ways of measuring my progress in building a better life. A concrete example of how this allows for goal setting is my plan to add one new area of subjective or objective tracking to my lifelogging each month; for January I had added mood tracking through the website Moodlog.
Simplified
At heart I’m a minimalist, even though I’ve had a lot of clutter and stuff in my life. This year my life will become further simplified through embracing ememory to reduce my possessions to little other than what I can work with digitally. My unnecessary and clunky furniture like desks and shelves will be purged soon as well. I plan to take on commitments only if they enrich my life in an important way. I’ll be adding in more simplification projects as the year flows along and I prepare for another move.
Intimate
In the past couple years many of my relationships have not been as strong and as warm as I aspire for them to be. There are many things that contributed to this, whether it was overextending myself in other activities, purely not communicating well and often, or not cultivating new friendships. I’ve been in a new province since September and have made no friends outside of work and I definitely want to change this trend. Throughout 2010 I’ll be developing a warmer presence, deeper and stronger ties with friends and just maybe finding a new romantic partner or two.
I’m a comics and science fiction geek, I’ll admit it. A love for the fantastic has been there since birth; I was named for a character from Battlestar Galactica and the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. My parents were science fiction fans and I grew up in a home steeped in the joys of Star Trek, The Prisoner, Tolkien, science fiction novels, comic books (one fond memory I have from childhood is discovering Bizarre Adventures #30, coloured in by my father) and countless other science fiction and fantasy media.
I promised one more Podcast Selections entry, and here it is, flying past at warp 3.14. This will be a very brief entry, as I’m itching to get these very cool ‘casts to you. Today’s picks are podcasts that discuss a wide range of science fiction and comics topics.
My favourite podcast discovery of the past month is Galactic Watercooler, a sci fi talk show that touches on a large swath of science fiction, as well as comics and fantasy. Hosts Audra, Chuck and Sean inject humour and playfulness into discussions about material such as Dollhouse, Avatar, Batman and Star Trek and explore luminaries like Carl Sagan and J.R.R. Tolkien.
I grew up with Star Trek, so I first knew Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher on The Next Generation. Now I’m thrilled to listen every week to his podcasts. Memories of the Futurecast is Wil’s geeky and hilarious return to the first season of The Next Generation that is “equal amounts of nostalgia and facepalm”. Thus far, he has covered the first half of the first season, sharing pieces from his book Memories of the Future for one episode in each ‘cast.
Comic Book Club is hosts Alex, Justin and Pete’s insightful and funny take on the world of comics. The reviews and interviews featured on the show are great resources for someone like me who just isn’t able to keep up with the countless issues that come out each week but still has a love for great characters and great storytelling.
Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan‘s A Comicbook Orange is another cheeky comic book ‘cast with great production values. Casey and Rudy bring all the fireworks of their previous podcasts —the sexy Kitcast and sci fi parody show Galacticast— to this series, making it one of the finest ‘casts on the net.