msb-0109 Zones

msb-0109 Zones

"Feedback" comes first, so...

I must say, there haven't been a lot of comments on my new background and theme song.

Perhaps that's exactly as it should be. (Nobody's complaining. :-)

Apart from that, its been quiet. Real quiet.

If I didn't monitor my stats, I might think my audience was baling out on me.

But you're still there, in about about the same numbers as before and the ratio of web downloads to podcatchers has quieted from the spike I got after the interview with Allison Reynolds. (I'll be touching base with her in three months to find out how she's doing and how the "netXperiment" [ http://www.netxperiment.com/ ] is going.)

----

I decided, on a lark, to finally download my Apache log for February 1st,2007.

It held a few surprises for me.

After sorting the addresses and doing a Xwhois on some of the different IP addresses, to find out how geographically distributed my hits were, I discovered that some person or organization among my listenership is dealing with an ISP from Odessa in the Ukraine, so to him/her or them, I say: "Pryvit"; though given the history in the region, I might say: "Zdraustvuite".

Drop me an email at: charles (at) MSBPodcast.com.

Who's out there, dealing with an ISP from St. Louis, Missouri?

Who's out there, dealing with an ISP from Grand Rapids, Michigan?

Who is the person downloading my shows from inside China? (I kid you not!)

Drop me an email at: charles (at) MSBPodcast.com.

Man this is fun!

Who the heck are all of you nice people?

I can't help it, I just want to meet you all and shake everybody's hand.

---- "Comfort Zone" by: "MoShang" http://moshang.net/

"Feed Forward" comes next, so...

I can tell all of you that Tai Chi is a great exercise regimen and really clears the mind.

I went in on Friday feeling my usual "schlubby", inept self, sat down in my chair, meditated a bit and I had an "epiphany".

During the session, I thought about my brain and the lesions it contains.

I had seen the MRIs but I had not really related to them before.

They seemed alien and distant to me.

Its a picture of the inside of my head but I just hadn't made any sort of accommodation to what they really meant.

Friday, it was like a "idea dam" was finally dissolving.

I started to actively visualize the lesions in my head, in 3D, as a white "mass" inside of my brain. (On the right side of my brain, since the left side of my body gives me more grief.)

I started to really picture them in my mind's eye and I started to see that any signals I was trying to send out to left side of my body was hitting the white mass and very little getting getting out the other side and down to my legs.

That led me to try to think "around" the barrier and, lo and behold, I found that I "could", not perfectly and not consistently, but I "could".

My spasticity almost disappeared and I was walking out of the Tai Chi class without leaning on my cane for the first time in months, and I was feeling better than I had felt in months.

Man, I felt I was "in the zone".

I was so delighted that I did something I rarely do anymore, I bought a piece of art and whimsy.

Its a small rhinoceros head pottery piece that I purchased at a restaurant "cum" art gallery which is on the way home.

I'm calling it "Rhino Féroce" (French for "Ferocious Rhino" and a pun on the proper French pronunciation of its name: "rhinocéros". [My first wife and I brought home from a trip to England a glass hippopotamus with a slightly bent nose which got christened "Snuffleupagus". {What can I say? I'm weird that way. :-}])

It's now hanging on my SOHO wall.

----

On another topic, I was going around to various blog sites and on one, Alaskan Michelle's blog "Surviving Multiple Sclerosis in Alaska" ( http://icensnow.blogspot.com/) I checked out her new bike, really cool, and I discovered NeoWorks ( http://www.neoworx.net/ ).

Pretty much that all the work I'd done to reveal where my visitors were from, all that sorting IP addresses, culling duplicates, looking up where the ISP was located and so on, was actually done for me by these simple widgets, so... my own blog now proudly display a list and a map. I'll have to wait and see how this does but I think its cool.

---- "From Another Zone" by: "True Margrit" http://truemargrit.com/

"Feed Me!" comes after that. so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

(Though I think that, given the geographic distribution of MSers around the world, and our difficulties in getting around in our world, maybe I should get in touch with DHL, FedEx and UPS about giving me some sponsorship, or at least taking out "reminder" or "per download" ads, touting their pick-up and delivery services for people with disabilities. :-)

---- "In My Comfort Zone" by: "Stereo Box" http://www.myspace.com/alexanderdeathwish

Main Topic: "Zones"

You know, going through my logs gave me an insight.

On the planet, people are divided, roughly three zones; divided into the "Developed Nations", the "Developing Nations", and the "Third World".

But there is another category, another zone, a "Fourth World", if you want to call if that, of people who are "disabled".

Its a rather large world, being now made up of over 600,000,000, "six hundred million" people. (We MSers only make up .833% of that number, or slightly less than 5,000,000 "five million" people. [Just so you don't think that I'm simply pulling the numbers out of my ass, I'm quoting the World Health Organization's and the National MS Society's "conservative" estimates. The real numbers may actually be higher.])

We "gimps" know no economic strata; though, by dint of not being recognized as having any value in a world where "a strong back in a terrible thing to waste", we tend to be poorer than not.

We know no geographic limitation, as my download logs are clearly showing.

We know no educational or intellectual limitations (though "statistically", our average IQ is 100, [but it would be 100 in a room filled with "Einsteins", or "Hawkings" {or in a room full of "Raymond Babbitts", (the "Rainman" of movie fame.)}])

We have been shunted apart because we didn't fit in anywhere. (In several cultures, the disabled were killed at birth. Thank heavens MS doesn't usually show up until after we reach the age of majority. [In Quebec you almost never saw anyone in a wheel-chair until after "La Revolution Tranquille" because we were society's and a family's "private shame"; not to be discussed in "polite company".])

But the internet does away with all that demographic characterization cruft.

Anyone can access it.

Disabilities become a matter of limitation of our speed of response, not a prevention from access.

---- "Neutral Zone" by: "Shadoz Edge" http://www.shadozedge.com/

Main Topic Part "Deux": "Zones, revisited"

There are all kinds of zones.

Some zones are places, like the much abused "disabled parking" zones.

Some zones are places of a different type, like self-injection sites.

Some zones are emotional, like our private "comfort zones".

Some zones are economic, like capitalist or socialist or some form of mixed model.

Some zones are political, like the "Republican" versus "Democrat" debates in the 'States, (both of which are arguing on the same side of a coin, over how much of it to hoard, as far as I can see, and, because of the focus, or really the lack thereof, of the electorate, leave us both mute and invisible. [Until the slam of the blade into the frame of the guillotine, the only sound a politico hears is "flattery" and the only color a politico sees is "green". {Democracy gives the illusion that we don't have to take things that far. We change politicos, but to the cynic in me, its merely that we don't get splashed anymore by blood as their heads roll into the basket. (If the new boss is the same boss as the old boss, did we just get fooled again?)}])

All of these zones have something in common: Apart from the most tyrannical, they all respond to "vox populi vox dei" ("the voice of the people is the voice of God".)

The internet gives a voice six hundred million strong, five million of which are MSers, to people who, up 'till now, have always been marginalized and disenfranchised.

Take heed: while "sic transit, gloria mundi" ("so passes away the gory of the world") of any individual politician, we are, we remain, we endure and we will always be with you.

Treat us with the respect we deserve and we will serve you to the best of our abilities; ignore us and we will do nothing for you, but let you come to your own grief.

---- "Tobys Warp Zone 2.0" by: "Phoenix Orion & ParanormL" http://www.nonfikshen.com/

Outro