The masses are waiting

Today I spent a few hours putting Spanish subtitles on the second part of the hilarious "Masses are Waiting" series.



I used subtitle.in, a not-quite-polished (there are some annoying bugs, and i almost lost hours of work) but still very cool tool for adding subtitles to YouTube videos.

You can see all of the videos here:

Masses are waiting (pt. 1) | with Spanish subtitles
Masses are In (Masses are waiting 2) | with Spanish subtitles

The videos are about the Ruhi courses that Bahá'ís around the world are offering to anyone who's interested. Check out this introductory video. Interested in joining a study circle? Fill out this form or call 1-800-22-UNITE.

Covetousness, Greed, and Information

I don't consider myself very materialistic in the acquisitive sense, that is, I don't think I have excessive desire for money or things, but I've noticed myself being rather greedy when it comes to information. I really like to have access to DATA in a clean, well-presented, easily accessible, quick-loading format (PDFs are my favorite). Not only that, I like it to be on my hard drive, not the internet. Oh yeah, and without copy protection. Some examples of this:

• I'm reading this book over at NetLibrary called Becoming a Translator. I can access it 24 hours a day, whenever I have an internet connection. It's as simple as logging in and clicking on the title in my favorites list. I'll probably read through it once and never look at it again, yet I found myself saving each page to disk (and taking screenshots of photos). These will probably end up compiled into one nice, polished PDF file.


• A while ago, I found a large plain text file that was a database for a bilingual Persian-English dictionary (the same one found on farsidic. The entries were encoded like this: "play bAzy krdn", with the Persian terms represented in Roman script. I went through the trouble of finding a script (buckwalter2unicode) designed to transliterate Arabic, modifying it to do Persian, and processing the files so that the entries came out like this: "play بازی کردن". Then I made the fonts pretty and converted the files to PDF (the English-Persian file is 1422 pages). Now I have a searchable, browseable dictionary that doesn't overheat my processor when I open it (the huge text files made the fans in my MacBook go crazy). All this, when I could just content myself with searching the same dictionary online.


• YouTubia. I just found this yesterday and haven't really used it yet, but it gives me a rush just thinking about it.

...and the list goes on. Today I read the following in the Hidden Words:

O QUINTESSENCE OF PASSION!
Put away all covetousness and seek contentment; for the covetous hath ever been deprived, and the contented hath ever been loved and praised.
Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words, Persian no. 50

I reflected a bit on the above, and thought of this quote from Some Answered Questions:

...greed, which is to ask for something more, is a praiseworthy quality provided that it is used suitably. So if a man is greedy to acquire science and knowledge, or to become compassionate, generous and just, it is most praiseworthy.
`Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, p. 215

So, is my informational acquisitiveness a praiseworthy kind of greed? I am, after all, thirsting for knowledge, right? Or, am I being covetous? What's my motivation for being so acquisitive? Am I afraid the internet will fall apart and I won't have access to this information forever? Or do I simply love HAVING stuff, whether or not it is tangible?

It's hard to say, there's probably a bit of both going on. I almost certainly overstep the bounds of moderation when my acquisitiveness clearly violates license agreements, as in the NetLibrary example above. Ah well, it's something to work on. More positively, today I paid for software! (I have been using Nisus Writer Express for quite some time, and had found ways to circumvent the limitations of the demo, but now I'm legit!)

Wow, that was a long entry. So much for easing back into blogging.