Mercifully I was sitting in the 24 hour kirtan in Canberra when news of Aindra Acarya's death reached me. Two of my godsisters in South America sent me the news via internets, which I was monitoring for feedback on the live stream of the kirtan.
The first question I asked when I heard, was: "What is the pramana (evidence)?" Carana Renu, my godsister in Brazil, forwarded me an email from a PAMHO mailing list.
I told Krishnapada after the first report that this news was out there, but that I was awaiting confirmation, and when Sati devi from Peru sent me an email announcement from ISKCON Desire Tree I informed Amala Kirtan. Then devotees passed my iPhone with the news around while the kirtan continued.
After 15 minutes Amala Kirtan's turn came on the roster, and we took a brief break to announce the news of the end of Aindra's manifest pastimes. Amala then lead a tribute to Aindra kirtan, which became our meditation for the remaining 20 or so hours of the kirtan.
I had planned to go home and sleep during the night, as we have a week or traveling and late nights doing kirtan ahead of us, and I just got back from an intense world trip, but after this news I couldn't go. I slept for a few hours in the temple lobby, where I could still hear the kirtan. Our time is limited, and we should never leave the kirtan of the devotees.
We are now traveling on the tour with the above picture of this modern-day incarnation of the sakti of Haridas Thakur.
Kirtan is ever blissful, renders eternal benefit, and is our only shelter in this world
Once again, devotees from all the major centres of Australia gathered in Canberra to do kirtan together
Aindra has influenced an entire generation of kirtaniyas and contributed not only a distinctive style of kirtan, but also a culture of kirtan, inspired by his quarter century-long non-stop 24 hour kirtan
Kirtan means the glorification of the Supreme. Sankirtan means the congregational glorification of the Supreme. Kirtan is the great unifier
Let this glorification go on eternally in this world and may we always be part of it, wherever we may be
I'm currently in the Czech Republic, working on JBoss Clustering docs in my hotel room and banging my head to some Czech Krishnacore: Kashmir 9:41.
Meanwhile, back in Australia, David Jorm just sent me the photo above. It's a tour poster for Amala Kirtan's upcoming Australian tour. I should arrive back in AU just in time to hit the road for 10 days of kirtans and concerts. Check out the tour schedule at Kirtan Australia.
So far I've been to the US and Czech republic; tomorrow I fly to Switzerland, and then to the UK, before heading back to Australia.
I'm working on my tour report for my work colleagues at the moment. The trip has been super productive in many ways.
As well, I managed to hit up a few KC things as well. Highlights include:
I have a bunch of videos and photos that I will try to get uploaded. I bought a Flip HD video camera from Amazon in the States to record some of my travels and also the Amala Kirtan tour when I get back to Australia. See you there! (Or in Switzerland, or the UK!)
I'm migrating my server data again - this time to the cloud.
I haven't followed stats on my site for years now, and didn't realise how popular atmayogi.com, planetiskcon.com, and kirtanaustralia.com had become.
For the past week the sites have been doing the equivalent of crashing on a mate's couch. Only these guys are so hungry, that they've eaten him out of house and home.
During Maha Kirtan 1 in Canberra Dave sms'd me to tell me that the server was pulling a solid gig an hour streaming the kirtan to listeners. What's a GB in bandwidth terms? Well, the hosting plan the machine is on is 50GB a month. We've put through 60GB in five days.
I've found another server in the States to host the kirtan stream on. It's a Godaddy Virtual Private Server with 2,000GB per month bandwidth. That should be enough. That is going to cost US$100 per month. We'll see how the speed for streaming is with them. They tell me the machine will be available in 72 hours, so Kirtan Australia Internet Radio is down until then.
I'm trying to move as much as possible into the cloud. It makes it easier when I have to move things, and it lets other people take care of the hassle of configuration and administration. I'm getting a bit old for that kind of stuff now. It was useful when I was learning it, but I'd rather focus higher up the stack these days.
I'm hosting my email domain (worldsankirtan.net) in Google's cloud. They give me 25 GB of storage and handle my domain MX and smtp for US$50 a year.
The other significant, as in 12GB per day traffic, piece, are the mp3s on atmayogi.com and kirtanaustralia.com.
These I am moving into Amazon's cloud. The files themselves will live in Amazon S3, and they will be delivered via Cloudfront, Amazon's content distribution network. I upload the mp3s to S3 and they are stored in Singapore. This has a cost for storage, bandwidth, and requests. I then publish the files via a Cloudfront url. When a browser requests a file, Cloudfront will serve it from the nearest server, rather than from Singapore. So this should lead to optimal download speeds all over the world. There is another cost for this, based on bandwidth and requests. The costs for both are quite nominal, although I have yet to see what it looks like with the scale of traffic I'm putting through.
I will be putting a paypal button on the three main sites and publishing a report each month on income and expenses. If you think you are getting some value from atmayogi.com, planetiskcon.com, and kirtanaustralia.com, feel free to show your appreciation with some cold, hard, digital cash. :-D
It's 1.28am and i have to wake the Deities here in a couple of hours. I've been up all night working on this script, which moves mp3s from my local server to Amazon's cloud.
It's kind of time critical, since the cost of keeping the sites up right now is being measured in dollars per hour, rather than dollars per month.
The script I've written will find all the mp3s under the directory it is run in, upload them to S3 with public visibility, move them out of the local directory to a backup directory so no-one can download them from the server any more, and generate Apache redirects to put into the apache config so that the mp3 download urls stay the same, but requests are now served from the cloud.
To run it you need a linux / unix machine (I'm running it on an Ubuntu server) with s3cmd, a linux command line utility for S3, installed.
The script is not extensively tested - I've run it once successfully.
#!/bin/bash SAVEIFS=$IFS IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b") # this script will find all mp3s in the directory it is run in and below. I run it in the webcontent root directory # it will produce a redirects.txt file and logfile.txt file in the directory it is run. redirects.txt has the Apache config that you can cut and paste for the redirects. Logfile has some information about what files were moved around # these files need to be manually scrubbed between each run at the moment. It would be good if the script rotated existing ones or created one with the time of launch as part of the filename # also it should fail if it cannot create the redirects.txt file # the script is not very safe, there is no transactional isolation - files could be moved to the backup directory without making it to S3 first, for example. Use at your own risk, and feel free to let me know of any improvements for i in $( find . -name \*.mp3 ); do filename=$i escapedshortname=`echo $filename | cut -c3- | sed 's/\([, ]\)/\\\&/g'` escapedname=`echo $i | sed 's/\([, ]\)/\\\&/g'` shortname=`echo $i | cut -c3-` directory=`dirname $i` shortdirectory=`echo $directory | cut -c2-` # you need to configure s3cmd before running this script; and obviously you need to set up an Amazon S3 account s3bucketname=YOUR_S3_BUCKET_NAME # backupdir is where the script will move the local copies of your mp3s. No trailing space backupdir=PATH_TO_BACKUP_DIR # This sets up the redirect for Cloudfront. You can figure it out for S3 by using s3cmd to push some files up and see the format of the url it returns cloudfrontcname=YOUR_CLOUDFRONT_CNAME # Move the mp3 to Amazon S3 echo s3cmd put $escapedshortname s3://$s3bucketname/$escapedshortname s3cmd put --acl-public $shortname s3://$s3bucketname/$shortname # Create an Apache Redirect echo Redirect \"/files/$shortname\" \"http://$cloudfrontcname/$shortname\" >> redirects.txt # Move the local file to a back up directory # Create the correct backup directory under $backupdir if it doesn't already exist if [ ! -d $backupdir/"$directory" ]; then mkdir -p ./../oldfiles$shortdirectory echo Create Directory ./../oldfiles$shortdirectory >> logfile.txt fi mv $shortname $backupdir$shortdirectory/ echo Moved $escapedshortname to $backupdir$shortdirectory/ >> logfile.txt #Uncomment the line below for debugging - this will allow you to run the process one file at a time and see what is happening #read -n 1 -p "Press any key to continue..." done IFS=$SAVEIFS
Check out a slideshow of Madhava's kirtan at Urban Yoga in Melbourne here.
Great support from temple president Varanayaka prabhu and temple manager Nitya Mangala prabhu for this program - including putting on a special breakfast on Sunday (pizza, pasta, lasagne, and cake!). Great sound system with two foldback monitors, 500W per side main system, 12 channel mixing desk. Great kirtaniyas including Sri Prahlada, Madhava, and Naveen and the boys from Canberra (who rocked it Sunday afternoon). Great community who chanted and danced late into the night, bringing the 24 hour kirtan in Sydney to 31 hours, topping New Govardhana's last week by an extra hour!
Madhava's "Yoga is Music" 2010 Tour of Australia is going well. We've done several kirtans at yoga schools and community centres, as well as two 24 hour kirtans.
We're doing a concert in the Sydney ISKCON temple in an hour. You can listen to the live stream here. Follow the link on that page to get to the stream.
We'll be in Melbourne next weekend. We're doing a concert at Prana House, at Urban Yoga, and a 12 hour kirtan at the Melbourne ISKCON temple.
These photos are courtesy of Varanayaka, temple president of ISKCON Sydney, who came to the kirtan at BML Yoga, and has been a big supporter of both Madhava's tour and promoting kirtan in Australia. The photos are downloaded from his facebook page.
Hey Beautiful Chanters,
Dave Stringer is back for 2010 with a concert in Brisbane on March 16. If you went to his concert last year you know what an amazing kirtan experience it was, and if you missed it - well, here's your chance!
Dave writes:
For this tour, I'll have copies of my new live kirtan CD, Joyride, with me. Nothing I've made previously captures the essence of the interplay between band and audience as well as this, and it sounds great. I'll be playing a lot of the new kirtans from this CD each evening, but I am also happy to take requests for old favorites. Just send me an email.
This year, again, the concert in Brisbane is at The Yoga Den, which is on Level 1 at 43 Vulture St. Tickets are $20 and are available for purchase online at www.atmayoga.com.au.
If you can't make it on Tuesday night, Dave is doing kirtan in Ipswich and Byron Bay on Wednesday and Thursday. I'll be playing bass at all three, so I hope to see you there!
Haribol! - Sitapati
BRISBANE, QLD
Tuesday, March 16, 8:30 PM
The Yoga Den
L1 43 Vulture St, Westend, Brisbane, QLD
0431 929 675
IPSWICH, QLD
Wednesday, March 17, 7:30 PM
Sacred Cow Yoga Studio
227-233 Brisbane St., Ipswich, QLD 4305
0732 012 586
BYRON BAY, NSW
Thursday, March 18, 8:00 PM
Byron Bay Community Centre Theatre
69 Jonson St., Byron Bay, NSW 2481
0266 856 807
Here are our upcoming gigs:
Dear Friends,
Thank you for purchasing your online tickets to Jai Uttal Live in Byron Bay.
Some of you may have already attended the events last week, others are about to join us this coming weekend at Durrumbul Hall.
The feedback we have had has been incredible. Each event was truly inspiring and uplifting.
This coming weekend we celebrate again together at Durrumbul Hall the finale of Jai's visit to the shire.
Those of you who would like to come back for more , we welcome you again and invite you to attend another event
We have added a Single Day Pass for entry to any day of the weekend workshop if you can not make all 3 Days.
Workshop times:
Tickets on Offer are:
All information and Tickets available online http://www.oneentertainment.com.au or through Santos (Mullumbimby) or Fairy Floss (Byron Bay).
Food will be available by 'Open Table'
And remember to bring your own cushion.
Please forward the word to people you love, as this will be a very special gathering
Vraja and I will be playing with Jai for the weekend workshop and concert.
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