Every three minutes there is a new diagnosis of invasive breast cancer.

Every 13 minutes someone dies from breast cancer.

More than 180,000 people, women and men, will be diagnosed with breast cancer in the US this year alone.

This has got to stop!

It’s time for all of us to step up, and do what ever we can to end breast cancer.

This whole train of thought was started a couple of days ago, when I got an e-mail from a dear friend by the name of Andrea Berman. We’ve been friends since college, and she’s a very cool person and a geek to boot. Andrea sent me an e-mail because she has committed to participate in this year’s Avon Walk for Breast  Cancer. She’s going to walk close to 40 miles in a weekend. It’s up to us to support her with our donations.

Please go to her Avon Walk for Breast Cancer personal site and donate whatever you can right now.

But there is more than not that we can do, as connected people on the Internet, we can blog and tweaked and Facebook and stumble and digg and whatever else you can think of to make sure that every one we are connected to knows about this challenge, and the commitment that we are making to help solve it.

Just to provide a little extra incentive, if you make a donation of any amount, and let me know in the comments of this post that you’ve done it, I’ll send you a link to a special meditation video that I’ve created. This 12 minute video uses my Binaural Journeys technology combining binaural beats, binaural drumming, natural sound and music to guide you effortlessly into a state of creative relaxation. The visuals in this program are amazing photographs of spectacular tropical flowers. As the imagery takes you into the miniature world of the flower, the binaural audio track guides you into yourself.

Just remember, the only way to get this video is to make a donation through Andrea’s page, and then let me know about it in the comments here. Of course, this is on the honor system, and there is no need to say how much you’ve given, what’s important is that every one of us give.

I was first introduced to the term “Inner Physician” through the work of Dr. John Upledger, creator of CranioSacral Therapy. this is an extremely gentle form of manual therapy, where the therapist uses his or her hands to listen to the patient’s body. From my perspective, as someone who has received a significant amount of this work, and read a number of Dr. Upledger’s books, in many ways what the therapist is “listening” for is this Inner Physician.

The Inner Physician is part of each of us, deep inside, that knows exactly what we need, right now, to grow and develop and heal and love and be ourselves, the most true, complete version of ourselves yet possible. Over time, I’ve come to realize that working through the body is one way, but far from the only way, of accessing and facilitating your inner physician.

It is because of this, I created a new audio program called Journey to the Spirit of Healing. Only, I didn’t really know that at the time. I’d like to share this story with you:

I love to absorb information by listening to it, so it’s not surprising that I have a subscription to audible.com, the downloadable audio book service. Audio books are one of my very favorite ways to read. I read all sorts of audio books, but one in particular started the chain of realizations and events that I am about to describe. That book is Inspired Marketing by Joe Vitale and Craig Perrine. I had been listening to this book, and mulling the idea is that it presents for a couple of days. I was inspired by the stories in the book to start some sort of an online business, I wasn’t sure what kind of business or product I wanted to create.

Enter the needles

I was listening to Inspired Marketing as I was driving to my regular acupuncture treatment.

<tangent> I love acupuncture, going regularly for treatment makes me feel better and somehow makes everything work better for me. I’m able to do this affordably because I go to the Manchester Acupuncturists Studio which is a community acupuncture clinic. Community clinics charge on a sliding scale to typically ranges from $15-$35 a treatment — whatever you feel comfortable paying. Everyone is treated in one large room, with a big circle of recliners. As you lay in a chair, the acupuncturist comes around, checks in with you briefly, and then sets your needles. And that is actually where the story continues. </tangent>

So I’m laying in my recliner, with needles sticking out of various places on my legs and arms. (No, it doesn’t hurt. Most of the time I don’t feel the needles all. Give it a try, you’ll be surprised by how comfortable it is, and how good you feel.) I’d been lying there for maybe five minutes when I was struck with what I can only describe as an inspirational “clue — by — four.”

All of the sudden, I just knew what my product was. I knew I needed to create an audio program called Journey to the Spirit of Healing which would combine binaural beats for brainwave synchronization, binaural drumming and self hypnosis/guided meditation. I knew what needed to happen in the journey, what the structure of it would be. I was inspired. I was so excited that my first thought was to ask the acupuncturist to take my needles out so I could go home and start working on it right away, I decided it was better for me to ask someone to write the idea down for me and then let the treatment finish working. Afterwards, I went home and immediately recorded the program. By noon next day, it was done, but I had no idea of how to sell it online.

So I began to study, and after a lot of work, and a lot of help from Pat O’Bryan and all of my colleagues in his Portable Empire Coaching Program, I am pleased to announce the launch of my Journey to the Spirit of Healing at http://www.journeytothespiritofhealing.com.

I am so excited about sharing this product, and getting it launched, I wanted to do something really special. So for the first 30 people who buy my downloadable audio program I’m going to offer a very special bonus. Each of those first 30 people will have a 20 minute phone call with me to develop a set of personal affirmations, just for them. I will then create a custom audio program, a customized Journey of Affirmation based on their personal set of affirmations. Each of them will receive their own, unique, Binaural Journey. Of course, this takes a lot of time to do, so I really can only offer it to the first 30 people to order.

So take a look at http://www.journeyedtothespiritofhealing.com, and if you feel moved to do so, order the program and get your own custom Journey of Affirmation.

I am really excited to hear about your results with this amazing tool that I was inspired to offer.

I am a little bit afraid that this post is going to start to sound a little like a broken record after my last two posts. Then again, I don’t know how many of you reading this are even old enough to remember records and how they would get scratched, and skip, and play the same segment over, and over, and over again.

But then again, I’ve sort of felt like my mind is a little bit like a broken record, going over and over some of the ideas in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. If you’re new here, start with this post I wrote last week for background.

I really have been struck powerfully by how unuseful extrinsic motivation is in my life, and the kind of work that I do; everything I do has creative components, and extrinsic motivation has been proven to reduce creativity.

I spent quite a bit of time over the last several days with friends from college, one of whom is a Montessori teacher. We talked about motivation, and the ideas in Drive at some length, and she loved the image that I created of the dangling carrot in the “no smoking” sign. I call this the “No Extrinsic Motivation” sign. She said that she wanted it on a T-shirt, so I decided to upload it to a cafépress store for anyone who’d like to get this cool graphic on almost anything. Choices range from T-shirts to throw pillows to underwear, and almost everything in between.

No Extrinsic Motivation Sign (click for the Cafépress store)

Check it out at: http://www.cafepress.com/mythworld

Tonight, I overnighted a bag of marbles to Pennsylvania. Why? Well, it’s a rather personal story, but it’s one that I feel like I need to tell. At some point when I was learning stage hypnotism I ran across a website called More Money With Magic, created by a magician named Eric Paul. Eric’s fundamental belief is that as performers, we should do what we love, make a tremendous difference to our audience — providing great value, and make money. He has dedicated a significant amount of time to helping entertainers — mostly magicians, but also hypnotists, jugglers, clowns and so forth to do just that. I really like Eric’s style from the beginning, and greatly enjoyed following his e-mails, postings and product releases; as well as the many videos that were often included.

Image by Muffet

So what does that have to do with marbles? Hold on, I’m getting there. Eric is a young man, I don’t know his exact age, but he’s probably in his 30s. Knowing that, you can imagine my surprise and horror to read a few months ago in an e-mail that he sent out to his list that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, despite having never smoked. He was admitted to the hospital with great difficulty breathing, and was set up for chemotherapy treatment. Eric was incredibly positive through all of this, confident in his ability to beat it, he has so much to live for — a business he loves, children that he loves more than anything else in the world, a deep religious faith that works incredibly well for him, so many people that he loves and is close to — but even with all of that in his favor, the cancer did not respond to treatment.

Of course, that didn’t stop Eric — he did stop performing, because he just couldn’t get enough air to keep his energy up and sustain his stage presence at a level that he could live with — but he put the time that he gained by not performing and hoping even more people with their own careers, and spending as much time as possible with his kids. Eric mentioned in a couple of e-mails to his list how determined he was to have a great Christmas with his kids, and they did, by all accounts. Then, on Saturday, having gotten through Christmas, Eric was admitted to the hospital for what everyone feels will be the last time.

On Sunday he recorded a video from his hospital bed which he posted on Facebook, as I watched it I could see how much energy it took him. The thing that still amazes me, he spent almost all of the video delivering content that he thought would be helpful to us — reinforcements of the key points of his work, the tenants on which he built his business. To have fun, deliver extraordinary value and service, and make money in that order. And also to find ways to deliver more than your clients could ever expect, he talked about constantly asking himself how he could deliver extra value every time he spoke to a client. At the very end of the video, he told us that he was in tremendous pain, and said he would be in the hospital until he passes, but not to worry because he’s okay and knows where he’s going when he’s called home.

I don’t know why I feel so connected to Eric, I’ve never met him in person, or spoken to him on the phone. We’ve exchanged a number of e-mails since his diagnosis, mostly from me offering support and some observations on things he said, and some discussion between us. But that, and his websites and list is really the only contact I’ve had with him. Yet, I find myself extremely, deeply emotional, sad and moved by the whole experience. As I write these words, I’m almost crying sitting at my computer.

When I saw that video but Eric posted yesterday, I felt like I needed to do something. So, I thought about what to do. The natural things seemed to be to send flowers, but I’m confident that lots of people have done, and that Eric is surrounded with flowers, and it didn’t feel like the right thing anyway. Then I remembered the marbles. A number of years ago, my mother had her knee replaced. The recovery, particularly in the first few days after the surgery when she was in the hospital was extremely difficult — from talking to my dad, it was clear that mom had lost her marbles, at least temporarily. So when I went to visit her, I did the natural thing (at least to me,) and brought her a bag of marbles. She loves them, it tickled her funny bone in the way he knew it would. It occurred to me, that that was what I needed to do for Eric — to send the marbles. So tonight, I picked up a bag of beautiful blue marbles and a card with a picture of an ostrich’s head — mouth wide open — saying “feed me chocolate.” I wrote to Eric, explaining that the marbles for spares, in case he lost his; and telling him how much have been touched by his work and his life, and how I see him as a role model for the kind of person that I choose to be in what I do. So, this card and marbles I went off to FedEx where I was helped by a lovely woman named Sylvia who will make sure that the package gets out on the right flight tonight.

When I left FedEx, my heart felt lighter, knowing that I had done what I could do. But then I realized that there was one more thing I had to, and that was, difficult though it may be, to share this story with you.

If you want to learn more about Eric, check out his websites:

He’s blogging about his situation at:

http://www.uncommon-success.com/

other sites include

http://moremoneywithmagic.com

http://www.successful-events.com/blog/

I said yesterday, that there was a whole area of music which I love that is so big and so unknown that it needed its own post. So, let me introduce you to the Theater Pipe Organ. Now, this is an instrument unlike the organs that you find in churches, or the Hammond B3′s which are commonly used in blues and rock, they really are a unique beast.

A little bit of background, silent films were never really silent. They certainly didn’t have a recorded soundtrack, but they were always shown with live musical accompaniment. In small towns, this was often provided by a pianist, but most theaters used an orchestra. As you can imagine, this became rather expensive for the theater owners. The Theatre pipe organ, more formally known as the Unit Orchestra, was, as the name implies, designed to give a single organist access to as much of the tonal range of the orchestra as it was possible to create with a 1920s pneumatic technology.

The instruments are amazing. In addition to the pipe work, most of these instruments have a tremendous variety of auxiliary sounds. Most of them have a piano which is played from the organ console, as well as various percussion instruments, also played from the organ console. These percussion instruments can include everything from glockenspiels and vibraphones to drums of every description to gongs, chimes, and castanets.

Of course, this tremendous range of both pipes and auxiliary instruments gives the theater organ an amazing range of both tone color and volume. A big theater organ at the top of its volume range can easily compete with many rock bands, yet often it is played at barely above a whisper. This ability to move through such an enormous dynamic range creates an amazing listening experience as a song can build from a single soft flute to literally shaking the building.

Of course the introduction of “talking pictures” spelled the beginning of the end for theater organs, at least in common use. Fortunately, quite a number of instruments have been preserved in many locations which range from private homes to theaters to at least one church that I know of and perhaps most unusually, pizza parlors. Much of the work of preserving these instruments is due to the incredibly hard work by members of the American Theater Organ Society, and its chapters.

Of course, all of this talk is somewhat meaningless. It’s about the sound. Before you listen, let me tell you that an instrument of such wide dynamic range is very difficult both to record, and to playback accurately. While this video gives you some sense of the range and power of the instrument, it’s nothing like the experience of hearing it in person.

So hopefully, that gives you something to whet your appetite to hear the theater organ.

I’m also a fan of the classical pipe organ and particularly of the organist Cameron Carpenter, who I think may be the greatest organist who has ever lived. He has both incredible musicianship and technical ability on the instrument which seems superhuman. Check out this video of Cameron playing his arrangement of Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude.

For those of you who happen to live relatively near me here in New England, we have a number of very fine theater organ venues. To find out about upcoming concerts, the best thing to do is to check out the website of the Eastern Massachusetts Chapter of The American Theater Organ Society. All of the venues where they produce events have good organs, however the Shanklin Music Hall is an extraordinary venue, in Groton Massachusetts. If you ever have the chance, you should experience it at least once.

So, have I opened your eyes, and maybe changed your mind a little bit about what the organ can do and how interesting it is? I’d love to hear your response in the comments!

please ignore this post – it exists so that Technorati can find this token

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and know that this is actually my  blog.  It has no value for human readers.  Please scroll down for a real post.

Thanks.

Andy

My intention for this post started out as a simple update. I wanted to let you know that while 60+ pianos were damaged in some way, the majority of the damage fortunately turned out to be minor. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, see my post from yesterday “Senseless Vandalism.” But I feel like this incident has affected me deeply enough that I need to respond more fully. First the update:

In a story posted today on the website of The Ithacan, the Ithaca College student newspaper,  Don McKechnie the piano technician at Ithaca College said, “It’s very difficult to say how much it will cost to fix them. What I can tell you is that the damage is not in the hundreds of thousands of dollars like we had originally assumed.”

While I was a student, I was fortunate enough to take Don’s piano technology class, so I feel like I know him pretty well. This is something that I don’t think Don would mince words about, so we can take it as solidly good news. The funny thing is, at least for me, the amount of damage in a monetary sense is actually not that important.

In a post on his blog (which has become one of the major sources for information on this incident,) Zach Ford said that he considers this incident a hate crime. When I read that it really rang true for me. I guess I’m not sure who was being hated or why, but this feels so clearly like an act of hate. I find this both as intolerable and as incomprehensible as any hate crime that I’ve heard of.

Even though I haven’t been back to Ithaca in 10 years, and compared to many of my friends, I spent very little time and practice rooms while I was there, I can’t help but take this personally. I feel personally attacked. I feel like this is a direct attack on the spirit of music, that spark that drives all musicians at their very best.

To me, instruments are sacred. They all are almost magical objects which allow us to express things which cannot be expressed in any other way. To attack instruments in this way, in that most holy of musical spaces — the practice room is inexcusable.  While I certainly hope that whoever did this is brought to justice through the courts, I hope more than that, they begin to truly understand how much pain they have caused so many people. Why would anyone do this? In one sense, I could speculate. In another sense, I can’t even begin to imagine.

I just don’t understand senseless vandalism. Of course, I suppose that that’s why it’s senseless, at least in my opinion. But I really disturbed, upset and angry in response to news that I just received.

Destroyed Marimba (click for more info)

Some of you may know that I went to Ithaca College where I studied Sound for Live Audiences — an interdisciplinary self designed program combining classes in the theater, music and communications departments and schools. Most of my college friends are musicians and many were music majors. Between my own study, and having so many musician friends I spent a tremendous amount of time in the music school building, at the time called Ford Hall. When I graduated a major expansion of the music school had just begun, expanded and renovated facility is now called the Whalen Center for Music.

I just received an e-mail from a fellow alum to spread the word about something that happened last night. In many ways, the practice rooms are the heart of any serious music school. There were most of the real work takes place, and in Ithaca I remember them being remarkably busy almost any time of the day. Apparently late last night a massive act of vandalism took place on the first floor of the Whalen Center. Something like 60 pianos and a variety of percussion instruments were vandalized. The latest information that I’ve seen here suggests that the majority of the damage is cosmetic, so things are not as bad as they could have been. Then again I just can’t imagine why anyone would do something like this particularly at the end of the semester just before finals and juries, and many music students are practicing harder than they have at any other time during the semester. What a waste.

I was looking at videos on YouTube about PowerPoint, having been inspired by the Don McMillan video that I posted yesterday, I came across a video version of a presentation which I had seen on slideshare.net and liked quite a bit. If you do PowerPoint, you need to watch this.

My friend Ian recently started an incredibly exciting project. It’s called The Grok Project

To quote the description from his “what is the grok project” page:

Over the course of three years, I will step through the history of science and technology … and, of course, blog about it.  Instead of just studying and summarizing this history, I am going to try toexperience it in any way I can.  I will smelt iron, perform the oil-drop experiment, build motors, etc….  This will go from the dawn of civilization through the present <reverb>and BEYOND!</reverb>

He is starting by experimenting with the Paleolithic diet which he describes on his blog grokproject.net. And it’s been a people fascinating and exciting to follow this project over the next three, or four, or five, or however many years.

As I listened to Ian talking about this project, it immediately brought to mind a book which I’ve heard talked about in some detail on a number of occasions on the Twit Network of podcasts (or netcasts as they prefer to call them.) The book is called The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.

It is me trying to describe it, I’ll let the author speak for himself in the video below.

Geek Atlas Video - Click to play

Have you read The Geek Atlas? What do you think of it? I look forward to your comments?

Welcome to my world. A world of Stories, and what they mean far beyond where most of us think that stories can go.

Now don’t worry, I’m not talking here about going into deeply psychological, technical, symbolic analysis of stories that we tell. Plenty of people have done that already. No, my interest is in looking at how we live, teach, learn, communicate and do business in terms of the stories that we are telling, consciously or unconsciously, as we do what we do.

The curtain is about to rise

My background is as a designer of sound, lighting, and projections for the theater. In great theater, a team of writers, actors, directors, designers and others come together to tell a single story.  In fact, one of the things that makes great theater great is that every single decision that has been made in the creative process is in support of telling the story.

When I work as a sound designer I often choose music, or create ambient soundtracks which play in the theater as the audience comes in. Even though many of the members of the audience may not notice consciously that this music is playing, it creates a “vibe” that prepares the audience for the experience that they are about to have, the journey that we are inviting them to join us on.

This example may seem obvious, but let me take it a step further than that. Often in my sound designs the sounds that the audience hears in the 5 to 10 minutes leading up to the beginning of the show, are very carefully chosen. It may be a particular piece of music that sets the scene especially well, or it may be building ambient effects to begin to draw the audience into the world of the production. Very often, I will very slowly and gently move the sounds that the audience is hearing forward in the theater, so that the sounds which were surrounding the audience, now unconsciously draw their attention forward to the closed curtains and create a sense of building anticipation. And all of this has happened before the play even begins.

I have found that taking this amount of care in the stories we tell, helps us to communicate better, and creates an emotional impact for the people who experience whatever it is that we’re doing.  I believe that this is key.

I wanted to start this blog with this ramble, to give you, dear readers a sense of where I’m coming from.  In future posts, I expect to talk about topics here that range from theater and traditional storytelling, to  teaching, business, life and how technology can assist us in telling our stories more powerfully. Please stay tuned.  I look forward to your comments.