CL XXXV: Fading · This year’s Cot­tage Life chap­ter is over. Not the best, ei­ther; what with my new gig and all we vis­it­ed less, and the kids would as soon be in the city. Stil­l, it’s a rare priv­i­lege ...
 
Industrial Music · I just fin­ished read­ing The Song Machine: In­side the Hit Fac­to­ry by John Seabrook, which taught me that the big hits be­ing pumped at us via the big di­vas with the great thighs are most­ly the out­put of a re­pro­ducible mech­a­nized pro­cess, and the me­chan­ics are Swedes. No, re­al­ly ...
[3 comments]  
Paywalls Don’t Scale · Here’s the prob­lem: Every day I get emails about great of­fers ex­pir­ing re­al soon, bet­ter act now. They’re sub­scrip­tion deals from pub­li­ca­tions I most­ly like, but I’m not sign­ing up. I’d like to pay them though; here’s how ...
[12 comments]  
PMs Gone Bad · “PM” stands for Prod­uct Man­ag­er or some­times Pro­gram Man­ager; these are the peo­ple in soft­ware de­vel­op­ment who don’t write code and don’t man­age coders and make all the dif­fer­ence. A good one is be­yond price, and a bad one has a unique pow­er to in­flict bleed­ing neck wounds on what you’re build­ing. Let’s il­lus­trate this with ex­am­ples from Adobe, Google, and Ap­ple. This piece is pro­voked by Lightroom’s ab­ject sur­ren­der to an­gry users af­ter they tried to re-work their im­port di­a­logue ...
[3 comments]  
re:Invent in Vegas · That was in­tense. AWS’s cus­tomers are great. But I wish I could like Ve­gas more ...
 
Ingress in 2015 · Yes, we’re com­ing up for the third an­niver­sary of In­gress, the game; I’m one of the few from the first late-2012 wave who are still on-board ...
[1 comment]  
Bad Tory Craziness · We’re hav­ing an elec­tion, one that’s more en­ter­tain­ing than usu­al, and while our pol­i­tics in Cana­da are in gen­er­al a lit­tle san­er than our south­ern neighbors’ (and our elec­tions mer­ci­ful­ly short­er), we shouldn’t get too smug; here’s the ev­i­dence ...
[2 comments]  
Money and Ads on the Web · My good­ness, the iOS-9 ad-blocker tech is rat­tling cages all over the In­ter­net. Here­with some links, in­clud­ing a cou­ple you like­ly haven’t seen, and one to a pos­si­ble so­lu­tion to the prob­lem, from Google ...
[5 comments]  
Girls and Axes · I’m talk­ing about Rock-&-Roll as sung by charis­mat­ic young wom­en ac­com­pa­nied by pro­fi­cient elec­tric gui­tar. I dun­no if it’s a trend or any­thing, but I’m hear­ing a lot of it and I sure like it. Some of the artists are wolves ...
[5 comments]  
Good Zombie Fluff · Zom­bie, as in sham­bling brain-eating un­dead. Fluff, as in a book that’s an evening’s worth of page-turning. Good, as in way bet­ter than it needs to be and will leave you smil­ing. I’m talk­ing bout Warm Bodies by Isaac Mar­i­on, which I rec­om­mend ...
 
Mid-life Stark · This is a quick note on Killing Pret­ty by Richard Kadrey, lat­est in­stal­ment in the ex­cel­lent Sand­man Slim se­ries ...
 
Distributed Hardness · The oth­er day this, from Mathias Ver­raes, got thou­sands of retweet­s ...
[1 comment]  
Inside Amazon · Gosh, it seems that my employer’s at-work cul­ture is the talk of the In­ter­net. Don’t know if I should share on the top­ic, but I feel the urge and blog­gers with the urge got­ta blog ...
[9 comments]  
CL XXXIV: The Great Grey Room · It’s been long and hot, this sum­mer, so it’s easy to like Cottage-Life days that are less bright and high and blue and green ...
[1 comment]  
Google Music · I use iTunes at home, and oth­er­wise Google Play mu­sic, which re­al­ly isn’t ter­ri­ble. Since the Net is echo­ing with screams about Apple’s cloud-music prob­lem­s, now might be a good time for a few words on the sub­jec­t ...
[3 comments]  
Cranes · What hap­pened was, Shane & Al­ly asked us to a rooftop bar­be­cue with views in ev­ery di­rec­tion. Most of them fea­tured cranes, and I don’t mean bird­s. And it would be un­fair to omit the moon ...
 
Sitting down with Trudeau on C-51 · A cou­ple of months ago, ten peo­ple spent an hour sit­ting down with Justin Trudeau, Lib­er­al Par­ty lead­er and po­ten­tial­ly Canada’s next Prime Min­is­ter, to talk about Bill C-51, anti-terrorist leg­is­la­tion from our Con­ser­va­tive gov­ern­men­t. I was one of those peo­ple, and per­haps read­ers might be in­ter­est­ed in hear­ing about it ...
[7 comments]  
Meet Jude and Raziel · I re­cent­ly read When Every­thing Feels like the Movies by Raziel Reid (A.K.A. @ra­ziel­reid) and en­joyed the hell out of it. Then Raziel came to our book club meet­ing, which was weird but good ...
[1 comment]  
CL XXXIII: Fire and Water · We’ve had week af­ter week of blue skies and warm air; which in the green/­grey Pa­cif­ic North­west be­gins to feel op­pres­sive, you can al­most hear the plants, great and smal­l, whim­per­ing for wa­ter. After a while ev­ery morning‘s news told of new for­est fires march­ing up one tinder-dry moun­tain or an­oth­er. Which lent vi­su­al dra­ma to the Ju­ly 4th week­end but I have to ad­mit soured the Cottage-Life am­bi­ence ...
 
Destroyer of Sleep · I was less than 100% ef­fec­tive at work to­day, be­cause I fool­ish­ly bought Ghost Fleet by P.W. Singer and Au­gust Cole, and read till 2:30AM. I just now fin­ished it. Is it a great book? No. But it’s a rip­ping naval yarn, an old-fashioned war sto­ry. Al­so: Rail gun! ...
[1 comment]  
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