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 […]
Category Archives: Short Cuts
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Music For Writing Desks
I’m currently working on a nasty horror short story for my friend Jarret Keene’s upcoming anthology of Las Vegas horror stories. When I write, I listen to music; generally instrumental stuff. When I’m doing horror, I tend to listen to a lot of post-rock stuff like Mogwai (the track “Auto Rock” being a favorite), as […]
I Like This Band
I’ve written a tiny web app called “I Like This Band” that allows you to enter a band’s name in a search form and get a random list of 20 similar bands. Click on any band and you get bands similar to that band, or click on the “Google ’em” link to Google the band. […]
That’s the last time you put a blade in me, you hear?
I’m really intrigued by the Switch, a multitool that you can add or remove components from yourself. The circular hole/pivot point reminds me of my own pocket knife, the Gerber Remix, which I carry with me constantly. The Remix is a skeletonized…well, remix of the older Gerber Chameleon, of which I owned two before I […]
Cooking miscellany
So I’ve got a smoked black bean soup on the stove cooking right now, and I thought I’d drop some of my totally anecdotal cooking science on you. I’m an improvisational cook; I tend to make recipes based on what I have in the kitchen, rather than buying ingredients to make specific dishes. Because of […]