It’s been reported that Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy committed suicide this week at 22 years of age; while no one is sure of the cause, of course, there has been a lot of speculation that Diaspora’s lack of traction might have been a trigger. I certainly hope not. I wish he hadn’t done it in the first […]
Author Archives: admin
Putting Out The (Notional) Guitar Case
As many of you who are regular readers know, I was kind of an early innovator in the realm of crowdfunding. I also regularly record and release my own music, which doesn’t make me a lot of money, but enough to occasionally pay for groceries and that sort of thing. As you probably also know, […]
Random Thought
This is from something else I’m writing, but it didn’t fit, so I’m throwing it out here: A sort of inverse version of Metcalfe’s Law is that any node that is not part of a network loses value proportionally as the network gains nodes. A computer without Internet access was no big deal when the Internet had a hundred computers on […]
Family Business
Family Business a short story by Joshua Ellis The iterating of these lines brings gold; The framing of this circle on the ground Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder, and lightning. –Christopher Marlowe There’s nothing strange about an axe with bloodstains in the barn ‘Cause there’s always some killing you got to do around the farm. –Tom […]
Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto
I have a problem with Coldplay. It’s not that they suck; they really don’t suck. They’re clearly talented musicians, and Chris Martin — as he proved all those centuries ago with “Yellow” — is clearly a talented singer. What bothers me is not that Coldplay sucks, but that their records suck. I don’t understand why […]
Thoughts on Occupy Las Vegas
I attended a meetup for the Occupy Las Vegas movement tonight, which is planning a protest march on the Las Vegas Strip on Thursday. By and large, I was glad to see so many people from so many different walks of life out to support this movement. However, I had some concerns and some suggestions […]
New Red State Soundsystem single – “Entropy”
The new Red State Soundsystem single, “Entropy”, was inspired by Neil Gaiman and Mike Carey’s take on the character of Lucifer in DC’s Vertigo comics line (specifically Gaiman’s Sandman and Carey’s Lucifer). It’s also a bit of an experimental track. The vocal treatments were achieved by tripling the lead vocal, pitch-shifting it, and doing some other […]
Corollary thoughts on auditory AR/ambient stuff
Many years ago I read about a dude who’d converted Unix server logs into a real-time auditory environment — specifically, a rain forest. Server load controlled the level of the rain, CGI calls were bird chirps, potential malicious attacks were the cough of a jaguar, etc. Sadly, I can’t find any info on this anymore. […]
Augmented (non-visual) reality
Been thinking a lot about augmented reality recently, for fairly obvious reasons. The other night I was talking to Yiying Lu at the first LaunchUp Las Vegas about AR and the possibilities inherent in it, and it got me thinking. I’ve always had a big interest in ambient information interfaces and what is apparently called […]
Ten Years On
I’m going to write about something I’ve never really written about before. I had just moved back to Las Vegas, to my parents’ house, after a disastrous stint in Seattle. I had ended up homeless up there as a result of a lot of bad craziness, most of it mine. I’d ended up sitting in […]