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Just last night I tried, for the first time, to use an export from the wonderful BrainWave Generator, which I had recommended to me by a reader and posted about previously.

I don’t have the $40 or $50 odd dollars to shell out on a full license for the program so I wasn’t able to try one of the presets from the website. Besides, I haven’t even tried the included presets yet. Well, yesterday I had decided to give it a try. I knew I had to get up really early, and I’m all too familiar with how long it normally takes me to fall asleep. So, I used the sleep induction (from wide awake) preset that comes with the program.

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Although I have been waiting for this album for quite a while, before I even heard the first single on the radio, I didn’t have very high expectations of it. I mean — how could I? I bought their last, self-titled album the very minute I could get my hands on it. It was that album that really brought their drastic, albeit gradual, change into the light. I liked the album, but it was just a lot different, and not what I wanted.

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Now I see why I got so hooked on this album so quick… I’m such a sucker for these spacey guitar sounds. To me, this album really seems reminiscent of Failure (especially Fantastic Planet). I’m always up for praising Fantastic Planet, so to make the comparison is certainly an honour. I especially heard this parallel when I came to the track, ‘Noticed’.

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I thought I’d do a quick follow-up on a previous post (On Hemi-Sync Lucid Dreaming, OOBEs) because I did get a couple of responses and was receiving quite a few hits coming from related Google searches.

In response to a few remarks that “John Q”. had made:

….which set of cds did you get? There are 3 sets floating around…

I seem to have misplaced the set I originally discovered. From the original MP3 CD that I burned I only had the first 3 “Discoveries” of the first “Wave” and that’s as far as I got. At the time I couldn’t get into it much or just got frustrated with it. I assume they are probably the lesser quality. I did come across the FLAC set which he mentioned, so I’ll have to give that a try.

I’ll also try the alternate focus technique that he suggested. I definitely do recall reading about it, but never really tried. Maybe it will also work for the same lucid dreaming Hemi-Sync set should I decide that give that a go again. Also:

you might try the brainwave generator… a small program that allows you to create your own beats … You can… customize the time it runs.

The aforementioned software can be downloaded from the BrainWave Generator website. I have tried it before, but didn’t think much of it. I spent some time fooling around with it a long time ago, just to see how it worked, but never really gave it a serious shot. It certainly might be worth looking into again just for fun.

As much of a positive attitude I have for this stuff (especially OOBE’s, after reading one particular Robert A. Monroe book), I still sometimes doubt the scientific credibility of the Hemi-Sync/binaural beats idea. Maybe I’ll try to dig up a few science articles about it to summarize for other people doing their own, understandably leery research on the subject.

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I’ve just watched a few interesting, somewhat thought provoking videos from Google Video over the last two days — especially with my recent discovery of Google Video Player and being able to easily download them on my PC. Anyways, here’s a short list of some noteworthy videos:

1. The Disclosure Project May 9th 2001 National Press Club Conference: This is quite an interesting video that I only discovered about 2 days ago. It’s a press conference of a project that has set out to let it be known the “truth” of the UFO/alien intelligence situation in the world. The speakers and witnesses consist of significant members of government or government-related platforms, each who have very convincing stories to tell about their experience with cover-ups. This definitely brought some new things into perspective for me.
2. The World’s First Time Machine: This relatively old (2003) BBC documentary brings forth some ideas about time travel and relativity physics that really provoke some interesting thoughts.
3. Jesus Camp: Just this morning I came across a post on digg announcing that the full copy of the movie was available on Google Video for download. Basically, it’s a documentary that outlines some brief time of the lives of the families (and most specifically, the children) who are Evangelical Christians. As an agnostic myself, this was quite frightening. This is certainly a must-watch. Note: sadly it’s not available on Google anymore, but go and rent it when it’s available. I’m sure you can find it as a torrent as well… not that I promote that sort of thing.

Recently at work I had ported over in ASP a very good, and very reliable user session class written in PHP 5. The original class came from the code download of WROX’s Professional PHP5 book. I had been using it for quite a while beforehand and it’s been nothing but a time-saver, so I decided to take the time to port it over to ASP so I could use it in some work projects. So if, god forbid, you’re still having to use the 7 year-old technology that is ASP 3 (note: pre-.NET) — and don’t worry, I feel your pain — then this class may certainly be for you. You can download it below:

clsUserSession.txt (Plain Text Format, 227 lines, 8.1kb)

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Because I know I’m always looking for new things to make my own web development easier or simply better, here is my collection of free web development-related tools that I probably couldn’t live with out:

• Firefox
  This is so obvious, but essential. Not just as a web browser, but as a tool in itself. My general design routine consists of, first and foremost, getting my designs to work in Firefox. Once I’ve got a design the way it “should be”, I move on and start doing the little Internet Explorer hacks.
• Web Developer Add-On
  This is easily the most essential thing you could ever have, in my opinion. If you could have one Firefox add-on, this would be it. While breaking down a design in just about every way imaginable, some of my most commonly used functionalities of it are: Display Form Details to show, inline beside form items, names and values of form inputs, Outline Custom Elements to show the box properties of specific divs, Resize to preview a design at lower resolutions, and View CSS to show all of the CSS styles on a single page. There are just so many more, and probably even more I haven’t fully made use of yet.
• Firebug Add-On
  While I just discovered this a few weeks ago, it’s already proved useful. Firebug allows you to quickly debug and inspect specific page elements. It’s especially useful to inline edit CSS styles or HTML tags/properties, as well as use the console to run and test Javascript functions. The CSS box modeling is great, and the rulers are really useful.
• Notepad++
  This is a fantastic, open source general purpose text editor with syntax highlighting for all the popular languages. It has everything you’d expect in a text editor, but it’s really quick, doesn’t eat memory, and the menus are organized really well. The plugins menu has a lot of additionally functionality, including escaping quotes, bulk changing of character cases, and plenty more.
• SQLyog
  If you do any MySQL administration or setup, then this tool is key to getting things done. It’s open source, and provides you a fast way of querying and administering MySQL databases and tables, especially if using phpMyAdmin in a browser isn’t your cup of tea.
• Color Selector
  A very simple tool which does exactly as the name implies. I don’t miss the days of taken screenshots, opening Photoshop, and using the colour dipper tool just to fetch the HTML hex code of a colour on screen. It’s easy to use and offers a lot different colour code formats should you desire them.

Although it took me a few tedious hours over the last couple of days, I finally got dreamtome.com back up and running. I haven’t been able to re-test everything, but it seems to be running just fine. I’ll send out an e-mail to all current members letting them know that it’s back up again. Feel free to head over and check it out.
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I just came across a very interesting project out of Port Perry, called the Linux Guitar Project. The project is pretty much what it sounds like: an “open source” guitar that utilizes Linux, and it’s primary goal is to offer both hardware and software built-in to the guitar for recording and practicing. This is definitely a great little project I stumbled across on Linux.com.

If I had the slightest idea how to integrate external hardware components with software, I’d love to start a project like this. Not a guitar, just anything… I’ve always found it interesting to create primarily hardware-based projects like this, but just have never had an idea where to start. I’ll have to do some Googling!

For anyone interested in the status of dreamtome.com — I saw at least a few Google search keywords referrals to here — I posted a quick notice on the dreamtome site itself:

For anyone who’s curious, I would like to set up dreamtome again (I made a complete backup the last time before I had to take it down), even if no one is going to use it regularly. Also what I’d like to do is make the source code available for anyone who wants to browse around and thinks they can learn from it. After that, I would also like to rewrite and redesign the whole thing from top to bottom because, well, it’s not as good as it could be. There are a lot of little things I could like to add and this is a personal project I don’t just want to throw away.

So, stay tuned. I’ll hopefully have the site back up in it’s previous form in a week or two, and the source code available for browsing soon after. If you have any questions or comments, or just some happy things to say to get me to put it up faster, go ahead and send me an e-mail.