I have been a fan of John Schofield ever since Uberjam – that album was some major funk train. He had such a party playing that album – so bent and high energy I can understand why he felt compelled to declare that he had been drug free for a few years to date in the liner notes. Many of his albums have not clicked with me much bar this one due to the straightness of them. I don’t like his clean sound much, I can respect it, like I respect Jim Hall, but I like my music fluid and dynamic and filled with life.

With this in mind, you might appreciate that I am hesitant about trying a modern big band album out. Big bands are usually quite straight – they kind of have to be so that coherence can be maintained. Its hard to imagine a big band both maintaining coherence and being dynamic with individuality coming through. Previously, I have only trusted Dave Holland in putting together a modern Jazz big band ensemble. Now, Vince Mendoza and John Schofield have created something very special. This album is modern big band at its best. Coherent, strong, filled with life and dynamic – this music carries so many emotions straight through me, its fantastic musical sustenance for this year and more to come I’m sure.

54, as its called, is exactly what I’m looking for in John, the energy of Uberjam with a more diverse palette to work with, some of the music almost borders on too much syrup, but no, the credibility given to this work through worthy intricate rhythms, natural emotional playing, shining mutual respect in passing solos, great arrangements and wonderful sound have made the syrup sweet but delicate and subtle rather than corn.

I’m very impressed, John now has my respect alongside Pat Metheny and John McLaughlin as men that created and never stopped creating new ways to weave their increasingly complex lives into their expression.

Listen to Uberjam and 54, it will surely grow on you.

A friend put me onto AWS – Amazon Web Services. I had known about it for some time, but had not dabbled in it because I thought it would be too expensive. As of November last year though, Amazon, obviously aware that many people see their web services this way, decided to make a free use tier for basic testing and small production use.

So, I setup OpenVPN on an Ubuntu server micro-instance in the Asia Pacific region of Amazon AWS. I followed the instructions located here to setup the keys and certificates for the server and some local clients. At this stage I am only using the basic tunneling interface, I do plan to try the alternative TAP interface though, which would allow me to bridge my workstation at home with my mobile Internet tablet, the Nokia N900.

I found that using the sample configuration files from the OpenVPN HOWTO was the quickest way to get up and running. Apart from defining the necessary PKI files, These are the things I changed:

• For the server configuration. set or change the following options

push "redirect-gateway"
push "dhcp-option DNS 172.16.0.23"

• For the Nokia N900 client configuration, The DNS must be directed away from the internal proxy on the tablet. add this to the end:

script-security 2
up /etc/openvpn/maemo-update-resolvconf
down /etc/openvpn/maemo-update-resolvconf

• The server must have masquerading enabled as well for the VPN IP range. This involves using the following rules in iptables:

*nat
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]
:PREROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
-A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -d 0.0.0.0/0 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
COMMIT

• On Ubuntu 10.10 server, one can use “sudo iptables-apply rulesfile.txt” to apply the above ruleset. You may want to add this to a startup script in /etc/init.d – perhaps the openvpn startup script.

That covers the basics and gets me a faster, more open Internet connection from my mobile 3G tablet in China.

Please note that setting up a micro instance in AWS Console is fairly easy, I suggest you be careful not to choose a large image if you want to remain within the 10Gb free limit of Elastic Block Storage. The firewall will need to be opened up for port 1194 as well as the standard ssh.

Here is a video that my friend Alexei made of his wife Tanya and I performing at GuoMao SanQi, the tallest building in Beijing. Alexei is also playing guitar but cannot be seen because there were only enough stage mics for Tanya and me.

The video will start as soon as it is downloaded.

If you would like to book me to play sax, please contact me at this email: corley.kinnane (at) gmail.com

Length: 3:07 Size: 7.9 Mb.

Click here for a direct download of this video.

Note: The video is an AVC High Profile MP4, you will need a recent version of Flash to play it. If it it doesn’t play, upgrade your Adobe Flash Player here.

A fun 2 days in Shandong province. There’s me, Natalia, Tony and Sergey.

I wish I could say I found this in a butcher’s shop but alas, no. This was in a bakery that’s just opened nearby. Great bakery, run by an older lady, Macbeth I think her name is.

The New York Times had some great photos of chinglish recently. Here is another classic I snapped today.

Exploding cars please use other exit.

A nice example of a hu-tong (胡同) pathway in Beijing, I took this near DaWangLu which is an expensive area showing the close contrasts in Beijing. I think that maybe the original wheel.

Recently I looked up an old friend from High School and University, he is one of the few Christians I know. He is now a minister in the church. I had a look at his blog and found some digging at Richard Dawkins that I felt compelled to comment on.

Here is what I wrote in response to the digs at Dawkins ‘selfish gene’ concept – that we are at the whim of our genes and their deterministic drive.

Dawkins raises a point about the fact that being impossible to know with certainty for both theists and atheists, the question of inherent meaning in our objective reality can be known to relative certainty within the realm of human understanding.

Dawkins is pointing to the fact that there are deterministic building blocks to a humans everyday existence with their environment – theist or atheist, these building blocks are known to a relative certainty to be this way. Hence, the meaning we place on the life around is exactly that, placed there by us – the experience we reflect on is the music we dance to. The meaning is in the eye of the beholder despite any attempts to control or pretend the meaning was there without the human perspective.

Its the essence of anthropomorphosis for animals,things and even other humans. We do it all the time and to a large degree however giving our world meaning also creates consequences, it can in turn affect this deterministic existence.

What I think Dawkins is missing is that spacetime creates a unique existence for every human being, for everything – time cannot travel in 2 directions. so every moment in any location is unique – if there were such a being that could understand even some of the deterministic influences surrounding them, that being in that moment could make a decision based upon their simulation in their mind and create something in the moment that is more than the deterministic building blocks they are made of.

A man could walk down the street and be thinking of the pie he ate the day before and how he wants something different for lunch knowing with relative certainty that he will not be eating pie that day because he chose not to already. Emergent consequences from amazingly complex systems within the mans body and around him that in the end can be explained very simply with relative meaning from the man himself – in some way it can be said that his perspective drives the deterministic operations as much as they drive him, the emergent perspective this man has explains just as well how he ended up having pizza just as a complete simulation of this mans building blocks and the surrounding environment does also.

The uniqueness of his perspective though tips the scales his way, since it is impossible to have any accurate simulation of his perspective – its in the moment. This means that for much of one humans existence they control the events that effect their own lives to a large degree – its the gaps where we cannot control things for ourselves and the even larger inability for one to control their environment that is where the theists and atheists really argue.

So there is a relative certainty where a human can understand their own reality very well and when it doesn’t go their way we either say there is something bigger that can understand and control that which we cannot, or maybe the relative certainty we have is an illusion created by the deterministic building blocks.

I will stick to the realm of relative certainty, for I like to know my boundaries well and I am fairly certain the emergent meaning I find in it is real for me and any attempts to place meaning in the gaps must be uncertain by definition, even ascribing indifference to the gaps is too certain for me, it sounds self righteous to ascribe anything there.

I will finish my point by saying that by ascribing something in the gaps regardless of the truth about the gaps, it will change your perspective and therefore influence reality.

I want to repost this here so I can extend it a little and reflect on the new rise of atheism in popular culture. Religion in the west had for a long time played a role of moral coherence – to be there as a support system for people when in need of trustworthy guidance and direct family support. The issues of the content of the bible and of the lessons that these religions gave was in my mind secondary to the social support system it provided. In this day and age where we have government to predominantly play this role, the content of religions claims comes more and more into question by people in society whom are now in a position to question religions content safely without fear of reprisal.

In the past, someone who was in need knew how to listen to religions lessons and they knew that by practising and preaching, they were at the very least going to have a human support system for their daily lives. Only those who valued truth above their own welfare dared to be atheists and so for the majority of people who knew how to perform for a society to live well, religion was a reliable path.

Now, its not just the die-hard truth seekers who can question the content of religion, since their safety within society is now largely protected by law regardless of religion, the pragmatic can now question it without fear – they can safely speak opinions of a moral coherence that is innate to humanity, not provided by religion. Safe to question the implications of moral judgement of the many upon the few. It seems to me inevitable that now the actual details can now face scrutiny as any other support systems that society provides can and should do. The issues of how well our society can tolerate separatists and provide equal access to resources is one that is and should always be up for debate and systemic change.

There is evidence to show that moral coherence is innate to humans and that lack of moral coherence is a consequence of a lack of equal opportunities for a society’s citizens. I believe there are relationships between misguided lessons and social instability.

I live a spiritual life in that I realise the essence of living well is bound to the way we respect our environment, other human beings and to study the paradox of the ever elusive freedom we desire – I cannot abide by essentially good lessons wrapped in a religious context if that religion places requirements on its followers that the lessons belong to someone or that someone’s idea of god.

All good wisdom in life must respect the freedom of the individuals who seek it, it must not be conditional or require payment of time or money from anyone who speaks the wisdom to others, otherwise it is automatically tainted and open to manipulation.

I have met Chinese people who become Christians quite clearly to try and seek a social club they can trust, it really becomes difficult to hear them speak of Jesus and how he is their saviour and in particular, for Christians that were raised that way to think for a minute they aren’t being manipulative in these actions.

I congratulate Richard Dawkins for being so direct and questioning the value of blind faith in an age of technology and successful pragmatisim.