What I'm doing

First day at Crossfit King. I got a six weeks for $20 deal from Grabone.com.au.

Warmup

• 1500m row 10min
• 800m run

Deadlift technique coaching
5 sets of 5 reps - 30kg

Cindy workout
5 sets for time of:

• 5x pullups
• 10x pushups
• 15x air squats

Time: 5m14s

Today is the appearance day of Srila Jiva Goswami, and also of Vamanadeva, an avatar of Vishnu. In honour of the occasion: "The Jiva Goswami Tribute Workout"

No Rest Superset

1. 1500m row (5m58s)
2. 20x kettlebell swings 20kg (good technique video)
3. 20x deadlift 40kg
4. 50 myotatic crunches
5. 25x medicine ball high wall bounce 12kg
6. 1500m row (6m23s)

Tabata sets
Tabata sets last 4 minutes and are composed of 8 cycles of 20 seconds effort followed by 10 seconds rest.

1. Crossfit Barbell Thrusters 20kg
2. Tacfit Commando Lunges (Recruit variation)
3. Air squats
4. Upright row 20kg
5. Vince Gironda dumb bell bench press 15kg
6. Leg press 100kg

All performed while reciting Jiva Goswami's Gopal Campu.

Drop by the Vaisnava Body Building Group if you're on Facebook.

Today's workout:

No break superset

1. 25 x crossfit barbell thrusters 40kg
2. 50 box jumps
3. 50 pushups
4. 50 overhead kettlebell swings
5. 50 x V situps
6. 25 x crossfit barbell thrusters 40kg

Hip flexibility

1. Baddhakonasana with 10kg dumbbells on legs

5 second up, 5 second down constant force set

1. 20 x Cross fit Deadlift 40kg

Here are some photos of Param Satya from the recent Canberra 24 hour kirtan:

Here's one of Prahlad. He played mrdanga for four hours on Sunday, and lead a kirtan on Sunday morning at 8:45am.

I'm working on the chord charts for the kirtan at Insync Institute next Friday.

Here's a track that I recorded for it:

• Radha Ramana Haribol (mp3, 6.5MB)

This is the radio edit version. I did a five minute one to show each part of the kirtan clearly, so that people can learn it easily from the chord chart.

Then, on Prema Yogi's suggestion, I did this sub-4 minute radio edit, which follows a standard pop song structure: intro, verse x 2, pre-chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, solo, mega-chorus, outro.

The sounds are all Korg MicroX presets, and I ran my voice through the Antares AVP-1 (rack mounted Autotune unit).

I got the original melody from Jai Uttal. The bass moving in the opposite direction from the keyboard in the chorus was Vrajadhama's idea.

I'm pleased with the way that it's turned out - it kind of starts abruptly because I wasn't paying much attention when I started to put it together, it's just a rough demo.

I'll see if Param has enough of her voice back tomorrow to record a vocal track for it. I'll copy Dave Stringer's technique of having a woman tracking his vocal on the call, and see how that sounds.

I'll also be working on Devakinanda Gopala and Om Namah Shivaya tomorrow.

Vish, Kana, and I get our Bollywood on at the recent Ratha Yatra festival.

Epic Rock Moment for good measure...

There are a bunch of great photos taken by Ananta Vrndavan here [Faceboook Photo Album].

Amala Kirtan and Tahir Qawwal rock it live at the Byron Bay Community Centre Theatre.

The Yoga Bliss Tour hits Brisbane.

The entire tour was dedicated to Aindra. We learned of his death on the first day of the tour as we sat in the 24 hour kirtan in Canberra.

At the Harmony Centre in Sydney.

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.

Amala Kirtan sings after the news of Aindra's death reaches us

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:

• 24 hour kirtan in New Vrndavan, where I played bass for Madhava, had Amala Kirtan and Ananta Govinda backing me up, and helped with the sound
• Meeting Madhava Ghosh in person. He took me to his place, but I hadn't slept in 72 hours, so I kept blanking out
• East Hartford Ratha Yatra
• Visiting the Bhakti(pada) Center in New York. Radha Vallabha, one of the residents there, took me on a whirlwind tour of New York's Holy Places
• Visiting Matchless Gifts, Srila Prabhupada's first Hare Krishna center in the West
• Visiting Tompkins Square Park and the tree at Ground Zero of the kirtan movement in the West
• Visiting the Haribol Restaurant in Brno, Czech Republic
• Meeting irl various people who are friends on Facebook

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