EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY IN LIFE AND LOVE

The only thing that's certain is uncertainty. Life is change and growth and evolution, which can be exhilarating but change can also feel taxing and painful. Change creates new tensions and uncertainties in our lives. There are so many events over which we have no control. Can you let go of control? In doing so, you are able to step back and appreciate the wonder of our world and learn to embrace uncertainty, a fearsome, yet beautiful certainty of life. To embrace uncertainty is one of the highest levels of spiritual growth. It demands a high level of spiritual fitness. We have all had moments of great clarity, when the world revolves and spins in perfect harmony with our own rhythm, like a precisely calibrated grandfather clock.You seek to find the highest level of your spiritual development. This is your enlightenment. As you grow and learn, new ascendancies offer greater rewards. One of these gifts and skills is an ability to embrace Uncertainty. All you can do is exhale. Breathe deeply. Relentlessly ride on through the cycles of your life.To embrace uncertainty in Love and Life, you need an understanding of the world and your place in it. Look for the interconnectivity in all things. You are a part of the network. You will come to appreciate the joy of change, like a cheese connoisseur favors a washed rind. We are not programmed to embrace uncertainty and fear. It goes against our nature. It triggers our fight or flight instincts. Carefully examine the situation. Put a light into the dark places. Dig deep and objectively and you will begin to understand what you fear. In the end, it is all quite simple. You will find your worries are baseless or understandable. There are many layers of confusion to sort through when we examine what we are afraid of. All it takes is time and clarity. This level of objectivity is required to embrace the uncertainties of Love. In Love, you bond for the comfort and security of a safe place. Safety is generally incompatible with change and this is where the danger lies. You must step back and always keep an eye on your relationship from a distance. Perspective is oxygen to Love. Sometimes you get so confused and enmeshed in the details, it is easy to lose sight of the big picture of the grand design. This perspective will remind you that Love is like a river - it keeps rolling along. The stability of your Love is as secure as a wide raft on a wild river ride. Your Love will always be tossed about, cresting waves and plunging down the trough. But you stay together. Your ideal relationship is akin to a long-lasting, deeply felt friendship. You have a partner with whom you will navigate Life. The unit that you create, by its nature, is always growing and evolving. Uncertainty in Love is like fertilizer for a flower. It keeps things fresh and exciting. Love does not have to be uncertain or suspicious. Together, you can make an adventure of the rocks and potholes in the road of your journey. You must treat all of the hardships that Life tosses in your way as grand entertainment. You must have faith in the evolution of your Love, the belief that your Love will triumph through all challenges, evolutions and uncertainties. This is how you embrace uncertainty. This is how you embrace Life. Find comfort in the process of the journey. Where does uncertainty originate? Why do we doubt? If your sweet pure soul were never influenced, you would never know uncertainty. Other people have influenced your Life. Circumstances, tragic and transcendent, have forged your character. You have been taught to worry about many things. Use this knowledge to maintain your perspective. You can disown the worry.On a physical level, laughter is a fast and easy way to embrace uncertainty. Laughter can relax you. It can cut a bully of a problem down to size. You don't need a joke to laugh. You can fake it. Your body does not have a sense of humor, but it does know the physical sensations of laughter. When you laugh, you breathe deeply, using all of your lungs. Your body moves and relaxes. Laugh and you will embrace uncertainty. To laugh is to breathe.Embracing uncertainty is one of the most difficult things you can ever do. The action resides on the highest levels of spiritual growth. This is the goal for the enlightened: To embrace uncertainty

WHAT IS FACE RECOGNITION AND ITS METHODS

Face, the foremost distinguishing feature of human body, making you the ‘unique you’, not only gives you an individual identity, but can also save you from security breaches and fraud transactions, can take care of your personal data, and prevent your PC, wireless network from plausible security threats!! Unlike the world of facebook, where you can wear different face every day, here The fast track technology has brought the world at your finger tips, be it anything, it is not more than a click away. The easier life is getting day by day, the more complex it is becoming to escape from the traps intended to crack and get access to your private data. The growth of e-commerce wholly depends on the integrity of transaction. The reason why a big percentage of people are still hesitant to employ e-commerce is the increasing cases of fraudulent fund transfer, loss of privacy and misuse of identity. End-to-end trust is must for its success. The ubiquitous methods of user id and password combinations, access cards are no longer free from security threats.it is the uniqueness of your face that makes all the difference uch scenario demands an infallible solution, the one that cannot be hacked, shared or stolen and that solution is present with us, as an innate gift of nature, the human biological characteristics.‘Biometrics’ is the study of measurable biological characteristics. It consists of several authentication techniques based on unique physical characteristics such as face, fingerprints, iris, hand geometry, retina, veins, and voice. ‘Face recognition’ is a computer based security system capable of automatically verifying or identifying a person. It is one of the various techniques under Biometrics. Biometrics identifies or verifies a person based on individual’s physical characteristics by matching the real time patterns against the enrolled ones.The quest of human minds to excel and explore the breathtaking possibilities that technology can meet, encouraged scientists in mid 1960s to teach computers to distinguish between faces. In its initial stage, the technique was semi automated. It required an administrator to calculate the distance and ratios of various features of face (eyes, nose, ears and mouth) from a reference point and compare it with the images in database. Later in 1970s, Goldstein, Harmon and Lesk tried to automate the process by using various specific subjective markers such as lip thickness, hair colour. Early approaches were cumbersome, as they required manual computations. However, it was in 1988, when Kirby and Sirovich used a standard linear algebra technique, ‘Principle Component analysis’ that reduced the computation to less than a hundred values to code a normalized face image and in 1991, scientists finally succeeded in developing real time automated face recognition system.

Facing the FACE: How it works?  

When you face a security check based on face recognition, a computer takes your picture and after a few moments, it declares you either verified or a suspect. Let us look into the inside story, which is a sequence of complex computations.The process of recognition starts with Face detection, followed by normalization and extraction which leads to the final recognition.Detecting a face, an effortless task for humans, requires vigilant efforts on part of a computer.   It has to decide whether apixel in an image is part of a face or not. It needs to detect faces in an image which may have a non uniform background, variations in lightning conditions and facial expressions, thus making the task a complex one. The task is comparatively easy in images with a uniform background, frontal photographs and identical poses, as in any typical mug shot or a passport photograph. Traditionally, methods that focus on facial landmarks (such as eyes), that detect face-like colours in circular regions, or that use standard feature templates, were used to detect faces.

Normalization:

The detected facial images can be cropped to obtain normalized images called canonical images. In a canonical face image, the size and position of the face are normalized approximately to the predefined values and the background region is minimized. Also, the image must be standardized in terms of size, pose, illumination, etc., relative to the images in the gallery or reference database. For this purpose, it is necessary to locate the facial landmarks accurately and failing to do so can make the whole recognition task unsuccessful. Recognition can only succeed if the probe image and the gallery images are the same in terms of pose orientation, rotation, scale, size, etc and normalization is meant to achieve this goal.

Extraction & Recognition:

A normalized image can be processed further for feature extraction and recognition. Here, the images are converted to a mathematical representation, called biometric template or biometric reference, to store them into the database. These image database, then serves for verification and identification of probe images. This transformation of image data to mathematical representation is achieved through algorithms. Many Facial recognition algorithms have been developed to get simplified mathematical form, to carry out the task of recognition. The way the algorithms transform or translate the image data which is in form of gray scale pixels to the mathematical representation of features, differentiate them from one another. To retain maximum information in the transformation process and thus create a distinct biometric template is crucial for successful recognition. Failing to which, may cause problems like generation of biometric doubles i.e. the biometric templates from different individuals become insufficiently distinctive.

ELECTRONIC WASTE (E-WASTE)

Have you ever given a thought what happens when you throw or sell your old cell phone or personal computer? Where does it go? And how it affects the atmosphere? Electronic waste or e-waste are those electrical and electronic items that are no longer usable or have been replaced by the new generation version. Computers, cell phones, televisions, refrigerators, air conditioners, DVDs, i Pods, copiers, and fax machines are common electronic products, which eventually turn to e-wastes. According to researchers nearly 75 percent of old electronic products are dumped in storage because of the uncertainty of how to manage these materials. Although many of these materials can be reused, refurbished, or recycled but unfortunately they are not, thus making the electronic discards as one of the fastest growing segment With the growth of technology many new companies are stepping in the market with new and/or new versions of the products like laptops, computers, cell phones, televisions, music players etc. Disposal of computers and cell phones is the major segment of electronic waste. As technology improves the lifespan for electronic devices such as computers and cell phones becomes shorter. In developed countries these electronics have an average life span of two years. In the Unites States there are more than 300 million obsolete computers. Although most electronic devices that are thrown away still have parts that are reusable.  Rapid product innovations and replacement especially in IT sector combined with migration from analogue to digital techniques have together shifted us to the electronic world. The growing economies of the world have given way to lower prices for many electronic goods which has in turn increased global demand for these goods. Increasing production of new electronic goods put the old electronis of world’s waste stream. People are upgrading their computers, cell phones, televisions, audio players and printers more frequently than ever before. Presently cell phones and computers are causing the biggest problem because they are replaced most often. That is the number of discarded electrical and electronic waste is piling up to millions. Electronics waste now makes up five percent of total municipal solid waste worldwide which is almost equal to the waste of all plastic packaging material. Not only developed countries but the developing countries also have its share in the production of E-Waste.  According to the reports, Asia discards an estimated 12 million tons of E-Waste each year. While the electronic waste stream has increased dramatically in the last 10 years; efforts to regulate or recycle them are being developed at a much slower pace. A recent report by United Nations predicts that by 2020 e-waste from old computers in South Africa and China will have jumped by 200–400 % and by 500 % in India compared to 2007 levels. It also states that by 2020 e-waste from discarded cell phones will be increased to 7 times than 2007 in China and 18 times in India. This report also mentions that in the United States more than 150 million mobiles and pagers were sold in 2008, up from 90 million five years before, and globally more than 1 billion mobile phones were sold in 2007, up from 896 million in 2006. The UN report estimates that countries like Senegal and Uganda can expect e-waste flows from personal computers alone to increase 4 to 8-fold by 2020.

AAM AADMI PARTY:A TURNING POINT FOR INDIAN DEMOCRACY?

Ramzan Khan was in tears as Arvind Kejriwal took his oath as the Chief Minister of Delhi. He could not take his eyes off the podium. It was also an emotional moment for all those around him. Khan had traveled all the way from Jodhpur, more than 600 kilometers from Delhi, to witness the moment. A carpenter, Khan describes the event as “a historic moment in India’s history.”The atmosphere in the sprawling Ramlila Ground, the venue of the swearing-in ceremony, was supercharged. Young and old wore the trademark cap of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP, or Common Man’s Party) and thousands had gathered to see the mascot of the anti-corruption movement assuming the mantle of Chief Minister, less than a year after forming a political party.“In 1947, the country gained its independence but today the people gained their freedom. For the first time in India, a real democracy of the people and by the people has been established. I feel liberated. Now people are the real rulers. This will take care of the problem of corruption prevailing in the country,” says 44-year-old Azam Khan who makes around $4 a day.“A revolution has started in India and this will bring real change in the way we conduct politics in the country. The new polity will not tolerate corruption in the country. The suffering of the people at the hands of government officials and the system will go away with the rise of people like Arvind Kejriwal. He is the medium for change,” asserts Ayush, a software engineer who traveled from Gurgaon to attend the ceremony with five of his friends.The fledgling Aam Aadmi Party, born from the crucible of the anti-corruption movement that began in 2011, is generating a new kind of energy and hope in the country never witnessed before.“For the first time, a civil society movement has transformed itself into a political organization and challenged established political parties. Similar attempts were made in the 1960s and 70s but did not succeed. This is a healthy sign for democracy,” says Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a Delhi-based political analyst.It was this signature of democracy that was on full display on December 28 at the iconic Ramlila Ground in the heart of Delhi. Fittingly, this venue was one of the launching pads of the movement against corruption. Kejriwal, under the leadership of the veteran anti-corruption crusader, Anna Hazare, rose to national prominence from this very place. The ground acted as a catalyst and transformed what was initially a rebellion against the system into one of the major political parties in Delhi.Arvind Kejriwal formed the political party in November 2012 after breaking away from his mentor Anna Hazare. Nobody expected the AAP to capture the imagination of the people of Delhi so quickly and become a thorn in the side of the political ambitions of the established Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress. The party came second in the recently held elections and won 28 seats out of 70, thereby restricting the frontrunner BJP to 32 seats and reducing the incumbent Congress to third place with just eight seats. A lack of numbers forced the BJP to sit in opposition and outside support from the Congress catapulted the AAP to the seat of power in the city state.

What does the rise of AAP signify for Indian politics? Will politics in India remain the same after the entry of an unconventional party like AAP?

“I never expected this kind of meteoric rise and endorsement of the party in a short timespan. Our success demonstrates this strong urge for change. Otherwise with a small party like us with limited resources and rudimentary structure, there is not much of a chance to succeed in a such a small time,” says Yogendra Yadav, one of the founding members of the AAP and a key strategist. In an interview with The Diplomat, Yadav further explains that “the AAP became an instrument and an occasion for people to carry out their wishes. There is a much greater appetite for an alternative pole in politics than anybody had imagined.”Manish Shishodia, another senior leader and minister in the first AAP cabinet in Delhi, subscribes to this view. Speaking with The Diplomat, the journalist-turned-politician says that “we came to channelize the frustration of the people towards the system. There is so much anger among the people against the present political establishment that the moment the people saw an alternative in us they supported us. So, is the AAP a reactionary anti-establishment party or does it have an ideology and vision beyond anti agenda. Political historian Shruti Kapila of Cambridge University says that “the media should actually take some credit, particularly for the rise of the AAP.” In an interview with Mint, Kapila surmises “in terms of ideology, it is certainly likely to cause a crisis for the party to define itself beyond, especially, the Delhi city state.” She further adds that the burden is now on the AAP “to think about a political vision which is beyond just deliverance, growth, governance and anti agenda.”Aditya Nigam of Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (CSDS), a New Delhi based think tank, argues that “even though it seemed as if the movement had a one-point agenda – that of combating corruption, the fact of the matter is that it had a fairly detailed critique of the actual processes of representative democracy and the business of coalition politics that made every party a shareholder in the loot of the people.”

Can the AAP be a real national political alternative or can it not sustain the momentum?

“It is too early and too premature to make such claim. We don’t know and we have to prove ourselves. This would be our ambition and this is what we would like to become,” says Yogendra Yadav.Professor Nigam seems to be more optimistic when he says that “the chances of it emerging as an alternative pole across the country are fairly bright in the short run. The same disgust with organized politics that was manifested in AAP’s victory in Delhi is pretty much in evidence elsewhere and it seems the party is already getting very good responses from other states.”But critics say that without any ideological clarity or clear political vision, sustaining the movement on a single issue of corruption will prove elusive.“For both replacing the Congress as well as providing an alternative to the BJP, the AAP will need to articulate clearer political positions and take ideological stands. Its willingness and ability to do so will perhaps decide whether it will grow to become a national force. Not doing so may have been a strength but may soon turn into a liability,” writes the Economic and Political Weekly. Professor Badri Raina of Delhi University, in an article in the magazine Mainstream, warns that “in the days ahead, the AAP may need to consider a party with only ‘honesty’ for its agenda may find it hard to go far enough in either comprehending the nuts and bolts of a caste and class-based democracy or realizing transformations that may have a lasting yield for the honestly laboring citizenry.”It is uncertain what fate awaits the AAP in future, but it has certainly unnerved India’s established political parties. Despite performing extraordinarily well in the recent state elections, the BJP seems to be nervous with the outcome of the Delhi elections. The party sees the AAP as a potential threat to its urban constituency. Not long ago, Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi was riding roughshod over the Congress, looking confidently towards victory in 2014. The BJP at its parliamentary retreat recently discussed at length possible strategies to combat the AAP’s growing urban influence. For the ruling Congress, the anti-corruption political organization attacks the base of its politics and threatens to hijack its inclusive and secular agenda.” It fixes Congress and the BJP and threatens to affect regional parties. Modi would be affected directly. In the urban areas where Congress is in decline, the natural winner would have been the BJP. But the Hindu right will be affected by the rise of the AAP thereby making Modi’s task difficult,” says Mukhopadhyay, who recently wrote a biography of Modi, in an interview with The Diplomat.As for Ramazan Khan, he is not worried about Delhi’s fate. He feels confident that in India’s future, it will be the common man and the common man’s party who will be the real rulers.

ROCK MUSIC (DEMO VIDEO)

                                                                                                                                

Rock, also called rock and roll, rock & roll, or rock ’n’ roll, form of popular music that emerged in the 1950s .It is certainly arguable that by the end of the 20th century rock was the world’s dominant form of popular music. Originating in the United States in the 1950s, it spread to other English-speaking countries and across Europe in the ’60s, and by the ’90s its impact was obvious globally (if in many different local guises). Rock’s commercial importance was by then reflected in the organization of the multinational recording industry, in the sales racks of international record retailers, and in the playlist policies of music radio and television. If other kinds of music classical, jazz, easy listening, country, folk, etc.are marketed as minority interests, rock defines the musical mainstream. And so over the last half of the 20th century it became the most inclusive of musical labels everything can be “rocked” and in consequence the hardest to define. To answer the question, what is rock, one first has to understand where it came from and what made it possible. And to understand rock’s cultural significance, one has to understand how it works socially as well as musically. Dictionary definitions of rock are problematic, not least because the term has different resonance in its British and American usages (the latter is broader in compass). There is basic agreement that rock “is a form of music with a strong beat,” but it is difficult to be much more explicit. The Collins Co build English Dictionary, based on a vast database of British usage, suggests that “rock is a kind of music with simple tunes and a very strong beat that is played and sung, usually loudly, by a small group of people with electric guitars and drums,” but there are so many exceptions to this description that it is practically useless. Legislators seeking to define rock for regulatory purposes have not done much better. The Canadian government defined “rock and rock-oriented music” as “characterized by a strong beat, the use of blues forms and the presence of rock instruments such as electric guitar, electric bass, electric organ or electric piano.” This assumes that rock can be marked off from other sorts of music formally, according to its sounds. In practice, though, the distinctions that matter for rock fans and musicians have been ideological. Rock was developed as a term to distinguish certain music making and listening practices from those associated with pop; what was at issue was less a sound than an attitude. In 1990 British legislators defined pop music as “all kinds of music characterized by a strong rhythmic element and a reliance on electronic amplification for their performance.” This led to strong objections from the music industry that such a definition failed to appreciate the clear sociological difference between pop (“instant singles based music aimed at teenagers”) and rock (“album-based music for adults”). In pursuit of definitional clarity, the lawmakers misunderstood what made rock music matter.

WHY GIRLS PREFER CLOR PINK ?

When shopping for baby gifts, everyone knows that blue is for boys and pink is for girls. But now there's evidence that those colors may be more than just marketing gimmicks. According to a new study in the Aug. 21 issue of Current Biology, women may be biologically programmed to prefer the color pink or, at least, redder shades of blue more than men. Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling, neuroscientists at Newcastle University conducted a color-selection experiment with 208 volunteers between the ages of 20 and 26. Participants were asked to move a mouse cursor as quickly as possible to their preferred color from a series of paired, colored rectangles, controlled for hue, saturation and lightness. Each person completed three separate tests, and then was retested two weeks later. On average, the study found, all people generally prefer blue, something researchers have long known. The study also found that while both men and women liked blue, women tended to pick redder shades of blue reddish-purple hues while men preferred blue-green. To assess whether the color preferences could have been due to culture, the researchers tested 37 Han Chinese volunteers from mainland China, along with the 171 British Caucasian participants, and found the same male-female differences. Though the Chinese participants showed a greater overall preference for red than their British counterparts (red is considered an auspicious color in China), Chinese women and men diverged in color preference predictably along the red-green axis.” This is the first study to pinpoint a robust sex difference in the red-green axis of human color vision,” says Yazhu Ling, co-author of the study. “And this preference has an evolutionary advantage behind it.”Ling speculates that the color preference and women's ability to better discriminate red from green could have evolved due to sex-specific divisions of labor: while men hunted, women gatherered, and they had to be able to spot ripe berries and fruits. Another theory suggests that women, as caregivers who need to be particularly sensitive to, say, a child flushed with fever, have developed a sensitivity to reddish changes in skin color, a skill that enhances their abilities as the “emphathizer.”Ling says that she and her colleagues plan to expand their research in future studies to other cultures not only British and Chinese and age groups, including infants, to further test the nature-versus-nurture concept.

 

ERIC JOHNSON "GUITARIST" (DEMO VIDEO)

                                                                             

Eric Johnson (born August 17, 1954) is an American guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist from Austin, Texas. Best known for his electric guitar skills, Johnson is also a highly proficient acoustic, lap steel, resonator, and bass guitarist as well as an accomplished pianist and vocalist. Johnson is skilled in a wide array of musical genres evidenced by the many different styles incorporated in both his studio and live performances including rock, electric and acoustic blues, jazz, fusion, soul-inspired music, folk, New Age, classical, and western. Guitar magazine has called Johnson "one of the most respected guitarists on the planet".His 1990 platinum-selling, full-length album, Ah Via Musicom, produced the single, "Cliffs Of Dover", for which Johnson won the 1991 Performance. Born into a musically inclined family, Johnson and his three sisters studied piano and his father was a whistling enthusiast. Johnson started learning the guitar at age 11 and rapidly began progressing through the music that would heavily influence his future style, including Mike Bloomfield, Chet Atkins, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Ric Bailey, Wes Montgomery, Jerry Reed, Bob Dylan, and Django Reinhardt, among others. At the age of 15, he joined his first professional band—Mariani, a psychedelic rock group. In 1968, Johnson and the group recorded a demo, which saw extremely limited release; years later the recording became a prized collector's item. After graduating from high school, Johnson briefly attended the University of Texas at Austin and traveled with his family to Africa. He eventually returned to Austin, and in 1974 joined a local fusion group called Electromagnets. The group toured and recorded regionally, but did not attract attention from major record labels and as a result disbanded in 1977. However, the strength of Johnson's playing attracted a small cult following to the group's early recordings, and decades later their two albums were given wide release on disc. Following the Electromagnets' demise, Johnson formed a touring trio, the Eric Johnson Group, with drummer Bill Maddox and bassist Kyle Brock. They played to audiences around Austin and between 1976 and 1978 recorded (at Odyssey Studios in Austin) his first full-length album produced and engineered by Jay Aaron Podolnick titled Seven Worlds. Although the album showcased Eric's sound, contract disputes held up the album's release for several years. Seven Worlds was eventually released in 1998 on Ark21 Records. Unable to secure a new management contract, Johnson began working as a session guitarist for some well-known acts, including Cat Stevens,Carole King, and Christopher Cross, among others.While a session musician, Johnson continued to perform locally, developing a flashy but tasteful electric guitar sound. His career rebounded in 1984 when he was signed to Warner Bros. Records. There is some disagreement about exactly how Johnson caught Warner Brothers' attention, with some reports suggesting that pop superstar Prince recommended him after hearing him perform on the television program Austin City Limits. Others suggest that it was singer Christopher Cross and producer David Tickle who recommended Johnson to the label. In any case, Johnson's major-label debut, Tones, was unveiled in 1986 with Tickle as co-producer. In May 1986, Guitar Player magazine ran a cover story about Johnson. The article helped promote the release of Tones and brought Johnson critical praise as well as elevating his profile in the guitar and music community. The album's track "Zap" was nominated for the 1987 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, but as a whole the album didn't sell well and Warner Brothers let Johnson's contract expire. He signed on with indie label Cinema Records, distributed by Capitol Records.By the time Johnson released his 1990 Capitol Records debut album, Ah Via Musicom, he was regularly winning awards for his musicianship in the guitar press. During this period, Johnson also drew recognition for the rich, violin-like tone he coaxed from his vintage Fender Stratocaster. The album's second track, "Cliffs Of Dover", exemplified his unique sound and won Johnson a 1991 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. Ah Via Musicom was a crossover hit, and was certified platinum. Fellow Texan, the late comedian Bill Hicks, opened for Eric Johnson on at least one occasion in the Eighties. The highly intoxicated Hicks made light of Eric's lack of hit singles, as well as hisvegetarian and teetotal lifestyle, by suggesting that if Eric were to eat a Hamburger and drink a beer he would be able to write more popular songs. After this incident Bill Hicks was not asked to open for Johnson ever again. Johnson is an admitted perfectionist, and those traits seemed to work against Ah Via Musicom's follow-up release. Unhappy with his recordings, Johnson mastered, then later scrapped, several completed tracks for the new album and delayed its release for three years, on top of the three years he had spent touring in support of Ah Via Musicom. He also had setbacks involving musical growth and personal issues while recording his next album Venus Isle.Venus Isle was finally released on September 3, 1996. It was a unique album with world influences that demonstrated Johnson's growth as a guitarist, songwriter, producer, musical arranger and vocalist. But the album received mixed reviews and did not match the success of its predecessor. As a result Johnson was dropped from Capitol Records. He rebounded with a successful tour from October to November 1996 with fellow guitarists Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. Named the 'G3' tour, it resulted in a successful platinum-selling compact disc and DVD titled G3: Live In concert.In 1998, Eric Johnson was among the judges in Musician magazine's "Best Unsigned Bands" competition, along with Ani DiFranco, Moby, Art Alexakis of Everclear, Keb' Mo' and Joe Perry of Aerosmith. In 1994, Johnson formed a side project called Alien Love Child and played shows sporadically while recording Venus Isle. The positive fan feedback from the shows made Alien Love Child a permanent gig. A live performance recording, Live And Beyond, was finally released in 2000 on Steve Vai's Favored Nations label, showcasing their new songs. The Alien Love Child project helped Johnson move away from his perfectionistic tendencies and loosen up enough to embrace and release a live album. Johnson eventually returned to the recording studio, releasing Souvenir in January 2002 on his own Vortexan Records. The album, released on the Internet, received nearly 65,000 plays in the first seven weeks after it was made available on mp3.com.^[25] Johnson promoted Souvenir with an electric tour in 2003 and an acoustic tour in 2004.In 2004, Johnson performed the song "Desert Rose" at the Crossroads Guitar Festival, included on Disc 2 of the 2004 Crossroads Guitar Festival recording. Johnson's next studio album Bloom was released in June 2005, again on Vai's Favored Nations label. The album was divided into three sections with different musical styles, intended to showcase Johnson's versatility. His December 1988 Austin City Limits performance was released on both DVD and compact disc on New West Records in November 2005. His instructional guitar DVD, The Art of Guitar (Hal Leonard Corporation), was also released at the end of 2005.In January 2006, a man named Brian Sparks was arrested for posing as Johnson and in the process defrauding businesses out of about $18,000 worth of guitars and equipment. Also in 2006, some of Johnson's guitars that had been stolen 24 years before were recovered. In September 2006, Johnson took part in a theatrical production titled "Primal Twang: The Legacy of the Guitar" the first definitive theatrical journey through the guitar’s colourful and controversial 3,500-year history. In September 2007, Johnson participated in a second theatrical production by the same company titled "Love In: A Musical Celebration" in which he performed a Jimi Hendrix set, a tribute to the year 1967, often called "The Summer of Love". Also in late 2006 Johnson participated in a second G3 tour in South America, with Joe Satriani and John Petrucci. Johnson had been working on an all-acoustic project and a live video from his 2006 Tour with Satriani.However these were shelved in 2007 in favor of cutting a new studio album. His hit single "Cliffs Of Dover" appears in the games Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and Rocksmith. Johnson has also signed up with "Operation Immortality", a project to create a digital time capsule of their DNA and humanity's achievements in the event of a global calamity.He began a six-date U.S. tour in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on February 27, 2013,followed by a 14-date European tour which concluded in Esch-Sur-Alzette, Luxembourg on April 24, 2013. Johnson is scheduled to appear as part of Guitar Player Magazine's Ultimate Musician's Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas Feb. 13-16, 2014, alongside guitarists Joe Perry, Steve Vai, Elliot Easton,Michael Anthony and others. He will be appearing with Zakk Wylde, Buddy Guy, Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Dweezil Zappa and Doyle Bramhall II as part of the eighth edition of the Experience Hendrix Tour, highlighting the music of Jimi Hendrix. The tour begins March 8, 2014, in Shawnee, Oklahoma

Guitars

Johnson is best known for playing stock Fender Stratocasters and Gibson ES-335 electric guitars through a triple amp set-up that consists of Fender, Dumble and Marshall amplifiers. Johnson has also played other guitar brands such as Robin, Rickenbacker, Jackson and a Charvel, which appears on the cover of the Ah Via Musicom album. In 2001, Johnson added a Gibson Custom Shop '59 Les Paul Reissue to his guitars of choice. Johnson has had several models built to his specifications for sale in the mass market. In 2003, C. F. Martin & Company released a limited-edition Eric Johnson Signature MC-40 guitar built to his specifications. Johnson donated 5 percent of the profits of the guitar's sales to his father's alma mater, Jefferson Medical College. In 2005, Fender released an Eric Johnson Signature Fender Stratocaster also built to his specifications. This was followed up in early 2009 when Fender released the Eric Johnson Signature Stratocaster Rosewood model, featuring the same specifications as the Eric Johnson Maple Neck guitar, with the addition of an unusual 3-ply, 8-hole white pick guard, hotter treble pickup and a bound rosewood laminate fingerboard with pearloid dot markers. Johnson has also released other signature gear such as GHS Eric Johnson Nickel Rockers Electric Guitar Strings, DiMarzio DP211 Eric Johnson Signature Custom Pickups, and a Fullton-Webb amplifier. Jim Dunlop also has released an Eric Johnson signature Jazz III plectrum and an Eric Johnson signature Fuzz Face. 2012 also saw the introduction of the Eminence Eric Johnson signature 12" alnico guitar speaker.

Effects

He uses effect pedals such as the Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face, BK Butler Tube Driver, MXR KD IV Stereo Chorus, Vox CryBaby wah-wah, Toad Works Barracuda flanger, Prescription Electronics Experience octave fuzz, Xotic AC Booster, MXR Flanger/Doubler, Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man delay, Boss Corporation DD-2 Digital Delay, MXR 1500 Digital Delay, Line Echo Pro Studio Modeller, and up to two Maestro Echoplex tape delays. All of these are connected to multiple A/B boxes to create sounds and tones that are both clean and distorted. Although the majority of Johnson's set-up is vintage, he has recently started using more modern equipment, including a stereo chorus made by Analog Man and a Fractal Audio Systems Axe-Fx

Guitar Rig & Signal Flow

A detailed gear diagram of Eric Johnson's 2001 guitar rig is well-documented

Recording

In late 2006, Johnson switched from recording in analog to digital format.Popular culture Guitarist Alex Life son of Rush gave a thank you to Johnson in the liner notes of Counterparts for being the inspiration for the guitar solo in the song "Cut To The Chase”. Guitarist Steve Morse recorded a song titled "Truth Ola", which is a tribute to Jeff Beck, Alex Lifeson, and Eric Johnson. The song is on Morse's album "Major Impacts".