Luke Judge

With more than 36 million members, LinkedIn is the premier business networking site, perfect for keeping in touch with colleagues, networking, finding–or filling–a job, participating in discussions, and much more. Unfortunately, LinkedIn for the iPhone and iPod touch allows easy access to only a subset of the service’s functionality. and glitches with performance and stability will leave most users yearning for an update to the application.

Much of the value of LinkedIn’s service comes from its ability to navigate the relationships between you, your connections, and other individuals. Need to connect with a company executive to pitch a business proposition? On the LinkedIn Web site, you simply search for individuals–using their name, title, past and present company affiliations, or other attributes. After you’ve identified the person you want to contact, LinkedIn will point out your connections who have a relationship with the individual. You can request your connections to introduce you to the individual through a referral, or you can contact them directly via InMail, a LinkedIn messaging service that protects the recipient’s privacy.

On the iPhone, much of this functionality is missing or reduced in scope. Searching, for example, offers fewer options for fine-tuning. and once you find your target connection, there are no options to send an InMail message or request a referral.

On the Web, LinkedIn provides an Inbox, containing messages and requests from other individuals. That’s an important capability completely missing from the iPhone application. Similarly, LinkedIn Groups–communities of individuals sharing a common background or interest–are largely missing from the mobile version. While comments or questions from group connections are available in a network updates section, there is no provision to browse, join, or create groups on the phone. LinkedIn’s productivity applications, from partners like Amazon, Google, SlideShare, TripIt, WordPress, and others–launched in October of 2008, just after the release of the iPhone app–are also missing.

LinkedIn for the iPhone has the potential for must-have status among business-oriented iPhone or iPod touch users. but gaps in functionality, combined with sometimes slow and unstable performance, leave that potential unrealized.

LinkedIn is compatible with any iPhone or iPod touch running the iPhone 2.1 software update.

[Dale Gardner is a freelance writer and aspiring photographer who lives in Northern Virginia.]

fiction Companions attributes, easy access, referral, relationship

Hello friends. Christian fiction thriller will thrill you with his thought-provoking novels and short stories including Ghost Finders, The Inheritance, and Solon. Raymond Springer is an American Christian fiction author who has been involved in the freelance writing field for more than 10 years. During this time, he has produced many notable short stories and novels, including Ghost Finders, The Inheritance, and Solon. Raymond Springer is already cranking out a series of short stories and a second novel. A family man as conscientious as he is creative, this proud father of five has made a memorable debut with a work of epic storytelling in Solon. As a short story writer, Mr. Springer has won numerous contests over the years including the 2008 Writing Room Novel Competition, in which he won 2nd place from a field of talented entrants. He has enjoyed an incredible amount of support from so many people in his life. To all you aspiring authors out there, I have a piece of advice for you: go to conferences, read lots of books, and talk to other authors. If we want to succeed in this industry, we must work harder than the generations that came before us. You can buy the Raymond Springer at his site to learn more about his latest Christian fiction Novels.See you soon.

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fiction Companions fiction novels, inheritance, writing room

Anjali Nayar watches a pickup soccer game on a beach in Togo. (Photo by Noel Tadegnon)

Lome Togo – The closer we got to the Togolese border, the bigger and deeper the potholes became, until finally the tarmac disappeared completely.

 

The last several kilometres of the journey were through a thick cloud of red dust. Despite the one-metre visibility, the driver expertly weaved in and out of disaster.

 

Border Patrol

 

We coasted into the border town of Aflao well after dark. The market was beautifully lit with rows of kerosene lamps made from cans of tomato paste and bits of rope. The air was thick with fuel.

 

Women with colourful buckets of goods balanced on their heads stood at even spaces along the road like standing pylons. If it wasn’t dark (and unsafe), I would have dropped my bags, whipped out my ball and dribbled through them.

 

But it was unsafe (and dark) and if customs officer Nathaniel Otoo hadn’t made me think highly of Ghanaian men in uniform, then officer Richmond Benson did.

 

I had only interacted with Benson once during the journey, when the van slowed at a roadblock. Vendors surrounded the vehicle and shoved their loaves of white bread and sacs of plantain chips through every window crevice. I swung around to take a photograph of the alien arms infiltrating the vehicle, at which point Benson complained about my tourist picture-taking. I shared the story of my journey, as a journalist.

Anjali’s trip across Africa

 

View Anjali Nayar – Destination: South Africa in a larger map

When we disembarked the car a few hours later, Benson introduced himself to me, with a quick flash of his Ghanaian police badge. Oh oh, I thought. Here we go.

 

But Benson proved to be nothing but a gentleman. He and his companion, in town for a family funeral, walked me through the rough border-town market all the way to the Togo side, around 500 metres down the road.

 

At each customs desk on the Ghanaian side, Benson flashed his badge, as if saying: “I dare you to try and extort money from her.”

 

Thirty minutes and zero bribes later, I stepped through the broken wooden gate into Togo.

 

“Be careful,” Benson said, handing me back my bag, which he had been carrying. “Over there it’s not like in Ghana.”

 

It was like another world when I entered Togo. Well, first of all, everything went dark. Instead of brightly-lit customs offices, Togo’s border patrol consisted of two officials working by flashlight. They were pushing and prodding the people filing through, taking identity cards in one hand and bribes in the other.

 

The officers didn’t seem too interested in my case, as I had already bought a visa in Accra. And after standing in front of them for a few minutes, I actually had to request one of them to take my passport. I don’t even remember the officer looking at my documents before he stamped them. “Next,” he said. Another cash transaction. The officer was, however, kind enough to escort me to a broken down car that charged me six dollars for a 100 metre trip down the road (normally around 50 cents). It was the only time I was ripped off during my entire stay in Togo and I blame the customs official.

 

“Could I overcharge you in front of a man in uniform,” the driver argued, when I tried to bargain.

 

Immediately, in the darkness, and through a windshield that was so blurry it must have been plastic, I fell in love with Togo. The beaches are flat, several fields in width and span the country’s 56-kilometre coast. Lome, the country’s coastal capital, is packed with decrepit buildings and bustling nightclubs, playing music from across West Africa.

 

Sidelined

 

The next morning I was woken just after dawn by a series of soccer chants. Dozens of teams were already warming up along the rust- coloured beach as part of their morning training session.

 

Walking down the beach, I secretly wished Togo had qualified for the World Cup so I could stay a few more days. Togo has a great team, considering the country’s small size (around 50kmx 600 km) and tiny population (about 6.7 million people).

 

But problems within the country’s national football association and a breakdown within the team after their bus came under gunfire on their way to the African Cup of Nations in Angola, currently has the team in shambles, and suspended from the African Cup of Nations for four years. The team’s captain, Emmanuel Adebayor (Manchester City, African Footballer of the Year 2008), announced his retirement from the national side on April 12.

 

I was dying to get into one of the beach games that developed the skills of players like Adebayor, but opted to watch instead. My affection for not only street-soccer but also street-food may be a bit too adventurous.

 

For the moment, I’m just taking it all in from the sidelines.

 

Next Up: A whirlwind tour through Benin to Nigeria, home of the Super Eagles.

 

You can also follow me on Twitter for more updates.

Canadian journalist Anjali Nayar is travelling across Africa by train, bus and foot (and when necessary by plane), and will arrive in South Africa just before the World Cup. Along the way, Anjali will tell the continent’s stories through its favourite sport: soccer.

 

For the trip, Anjali is bringing only the essentials on her back (camera, flip video, computer) and in her hand – a soccer ball. Every day, Anjali will play soccer, whether she’s on the beaches of Accra or stuck in one of Lagos’ impenetrable traffic jams. Sometimes she’ll play with children in the sprawling slums and refugee camps, other times she’ll play with adults in the rich diplomatic quarters of major cities.

 

Through her Destination: South Africa blog, Anjali hopes CBCSports.ca readers will discover Africa and what the World Cup and the game of soccer means to the continent.

fiction Companions border town, kerosene lamps, nayar, plantain chips, police badge, soccer game

Before I begin my examination of R. Puligandla’s “Phenomenological Reduction and Yogic Meditation,” I must mention that I am awfully sorry for not participating in last week’s Friday Flash. Here is my excuse: I was in Scotland, searching for the Loch Ness Monster. We didn’t find it. But I do find that R. Puligandla just so happens to be a brilliant author, an exceptional portraitist, and a magnificent storyteller. He writes:

“The role of fantasy in eidetic reduction cannot be overemphasized, for the fully arbitrary character of fantasy, without any regard to the reality or unreality of the object, brings out the essential character of the object, those invariant, necessary characteristics without which the object cannot be what it is.” (1)

And the best way to do it is the way Puligandla does it here (underlining for emphasis): “The object may be a color, figure, relation. feeling, perception, or a principle.”(2)

Look at how smoothly that reads. Wow. That’s how you write the letter “a.” He could’ve put an “a” after every one of those commas, which is exactly what I would‘ve done, but he didn‘t, because he’s number one, and there is no ‘a’ in number one. It’s smooth like slip and slide. Seeing that sentence, which is oh-so finely done, is a pretty neat experience.

Lucky for you I have the instructions. I will show you the three steps of seeing, experiencing and doing real things, but first you must relax and warm up.

Now I begin with having some deep breaths, eight of them, inhaling and exhaling through my mouth, and sometimes blowing smoke rings. I turn on some Rick James. With “Super Freak” at full blast, I do the robot for five minutes and fifteen seconds. Next I pour a highball and slurp the first two sips, then I slug it down. Before sitting on the carpet, I click my heels together and close my eyes and say “there’s no place like Neverland” three times. After that I sit down and cross my legs like I’m a kindergartener all over again. Then I think of a nothingness. Trust me, it works.

Basically if you really want to see things the way they really are, the way they should be seen, then you really need to start seeing things differently, because the way you presently see these things is totally way off and totally bogus and I totally mean everything, all things that you see, that you experience, that you do, are respectively all seen, experienced and done incorrectly: you have never ever even once been correct about anything; you are entirely wrong about everything; these things that you think are pretty real, and these people who you think are really your friends, are all really just fake; and your fantasy, you know the one, is real, or at least as real as your reality, and all you have to do is wake up and start dreaming, then you can start seeing, experiencing and doing real things.

The first step of seeing, experiencing and doing real things is called the epoché.(3) According to R. Puligandla, the epoché is when the agent separates, or, rather, “brackets”(4) the fabrications about objects in the world from the truths of objects in the world, so that the essence of the world and its objects are purified, detached from all beliefs and theories and assumptions about them, which have been established through studies in science, logic and mathematics.

The second step is when the agent abandons the “facts”(5) about an object, any object, in exchange for its essence. The agent then begins to fantasize about objects and fantastic things such as the Loch Ness Monster but a newer version, one which has yet to be seen or experienced. Fantasies should not be underestimated, as they are closer to establishing the essence of an object because they do not correlate with fabrications such as popular beliefs and theories and assumptions.

Step three is pretty simple. All you have to do is liberate yourself from knowledge. Knowledge includes everything. Everything includes logic, science, math, theory, belief, thoughts, dreams, etcetera.

Once you’ve done that then you can do some meditation. Here I will briefly summarize first five exercises (angas) of Patanjali’s yoga, which are called yama, niyama, asana, pranayama and pratyahara. These five yogic forms are very similar to the epoché, the first stage of phenomenological reduction. According to R. Puligandla, the purpose here is to suspend “the natural attitude” and put the mind “in a position to direct full attention to any object whatever and grasp it in its primordiality.”(6) Yama and niyama are exercises that will free yourself from mental distractions, which arise from unrestrained emotions and desires. Asana and pranayama are exercises that will free yourself from physical distractions, which arise from your sense-organs attachment to your mind. Next up is pratyahara, and what you want to do here is cut yourself, and your mind, off from the external world, which is a product, a fabrication, manufactured in your brain by your sense-organs.

When you’ve mastered these first five exercises then you’re good to go, to move on to the first three stages of concentration: dharana, dhyana and samadhi. Although samadhi is the first objective of yogic meditation, according to R. Puligandla, it is not the primary objective. Samadhi is only the gateway to kaivalya, which is also known as moksa, which is also known as final liberation, which is also known as “total freedom from bondage.”(6) It is the stage when the agent disappears. It is the stage when all self-awareness in the mind of an agent has disappeared, thus the object is all that remains, and its essence shines, shines, SHINES.

Here is how you get ready for samadhi: Dharana and dhyana are the preliminary stages of samadhi, in which the agent considers a single object. If the mind jumps and A.D.D. kicks in, then the agent must get back, returning his or her thoughts to the single object before it’s too late, before Dharana is lost. The less an agent loses concentration on this single object, the better their Dharana. When Dharana is pure, the agent will continue to the dhyana stage. This is the stage when there is no loss or lack of concentration on a single object, and the stage that leads into samadhi. The agent must master these two stages.

After that you should be ready.

WORKS CITED: 1. R. Puligandla, “Phenomenological Reduction and Yogic Meditation,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan., 1970), pp. 19-33. University of Hawai’i Press. jstor.org/stable/1397657 (accessed April 13, 2010)

2. Quoted in R. Puligandla, “Phenomenological Reduction and Yogic Meditation.”

3. Quoted in R. Puligandla, “Phenomenological Reduction and Yogic Meditation.”

4. Quoted in R. Puligandla, “Phenomenological Reduction and Yogic Meditation.”

5. Quoted in R. Puligandla, “Phenomenological Reduction and Yogic Meditation.”

6. Quoted in R. Puligandla, “Phenomenological Reduction and Yogic Meditation.”

fiction Companions blowing smoke rings, rick james, sips