This is a letter I just sent out to several companies and individuals I do web design/development subcontracting for. I thought it was worth posting here. I’m not particularly secretive about what I charge (or, as you’ll see, am going to be charging from now on) for websites, so I don’t think it’s inappropriate to […]
Author Archives: admin
Random Ontologies, entry 3
Three concepts: Planck length, Planck time, Conway’s Game of Life. Read those Wikipedia entries and come back to this. Imagine a game of Life, played on a three-dimensional grid in which each space is one cubic Planck length. Each “round” of the game takes one unit of Planck time. The grid’s resolution is precisely that […]
An open letter to my social network “friends”
Like many people, I’m fairly liberal with the “Approve Friend Request” button on Facebook. I’ll add friends of friends, casual social acquaintances, former work colleagues, people I went to high school or grade school with or who laid in the adjacent crib to me in the hospital when I was born. I’d say 75% of […]
Random Ontologies, Entry 2
When I was a very young kid, maybe five, I found the book Stranger Than Science by Frank Edwards — a sort of compendium of Forteana, UFO tales and ghost stories. There was one story in the book about two American women — schoolteachers, as I remember — who were visiting Versailles on vacation. As […]
The Indelicates – David Koresh Superstar
I’ve given up trying to explain The Indelicates to people, but if you put me against a wall and put a gun in my mouth and told me to describe them, I’d say “Mrrgh mrrff wgggffh fggghh”. Then, when you took the gun out of my mouth, I’d tell you that The Indelicates are like […]
How can we go from 419 to Web 3.0?
Here’s a quote from an amazing TechCrunch article about former and current Nigerian 419 scammers by Sarah Lacy: Boakye’s sheer hacker genius was the most astounding. It’s not just technical ability– he tries to figure out how the person who set up the security system he’s trying to break thinks, and outsmart him at his […]
The New Record
I sat down and talked with Aaron Archer (my extremely talented guitarist and friend) about the next Red State Soundsystem record (the next LP, not the Sophia Sessions EP of acoustic versions of Ghosts In A Burning City songs that I’m recording right now), and what it’s going to sound like. I told him I wanted […]
“Heroes” « Pushing Ahead of the Dame
There’s a lassitude, an echoing, fading grandeur, in the sound of “Heroes”: its dragging beat; its backdrop of squalls and what sound like wayward radio signals; its lyric, set at the continent’s scarred heart; Bowie’s extravagant, metal-edged vocal; Robert Fripp’s feedback ostinato. “Heroes” is Bowie at his most empathic and at his most desperate, a […]
Thanks For All The…Well, You Know.
In 1987, when I was nine years old, I was living in the tiny village of Afşin, Turkey, with my grandparents — my grandfather was working on a coal refinery project for TEK (the Turkish electric company). We lived in a little compound for the expatriate workers, made up of a few blocks of Soviet-style […]
At Least Sometimes
So this girl comes over and asks you to dance She’s a warm refugee from the cold middle class And you wanna take her home and sing her All your love songs But you feel so awkward and stupid and lame That you can’t even manage to spit out your name And she walks away […]