6 Music Degrees Stress Test

I have been having a good time wasting time trying to find the most obscure and/or ridiculous links between musicians using this handy tool. The examples provided Kanye-Tayor Swift, for example seem like easy lobs for a social graphing system.  Here are some far more interesting tidbits of commonality that I have unearthed for your […]
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TV theme music – back from RIP

Are Netflix and HBO are rescuing the TV theme song from sad decline? A few years ago it was widely reported that the TV theme song was likely to disappear altogether as hunger for ad slots encroached on once sacred 30-60 second intro/outro time real estate. Today, the theme song is once again a critical […]
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It is April but this Ain’t Paris

I have always thought Vernon Duke / Yip Harburg’s April in Paris is particularly evocative of a time and place and a fantastic marriage of melody to lyric but I never really gave it’s origin much thought. It turns out Yip Harburg had never been to Paris. He wrote the lyrics at Lindy’s while looking out […]
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Checking Out Soundslice

Adrian Holovaty of Django project fame has launched an HTML5 interactive music notation app that works really well. Back when I was learning how to play, everyone owned a Marantz tape deck that you could slow down to “half-speed” (optimally an octave lower) in order to transcribe solos. These were durable machines but they were […]
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Low-fi Success Teaching People How To Code

I may love geeking out and working on big complex systems but I also appreciate business simplicity and good content. I have found Scott Allen’s AngularJS courses to be very useful and it turns so do a lot of other people. Scott has found success paring his considerable teaching talent with simple onscreen videos and […]
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“Outstanding” Funk

I love the punchy congas and low end piano in the intro to this fine piece of Gap Band funk craft. Enjoy. Inspiration http://uproxx.com/smokingsection/2012/10/the-gap-band-outstanding/
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Is the mobile web really dying?

There are multiple ways to interpret data pointing to relative decline in mobile web usage. There is evidence of massive consolidation around a few key app behaviors vs general web usage on mobile devices but it also seems that evidence of the death of the mobile web is probably exaggerated or at least premature. If […]
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Great Talk on Debugging Production Systems

Bryan Cantrill (VP of Engineering at Joyent) gave an excellent and entertaining presentation about Debugging Production Systems. It is well worth an hour of your time if you work on large distributed cloud stacks in production. Some of the key things I took from the video: Every failure is sacred. Seek to build a system […]
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Thinking about the AWS Success Story

It is often said that great start-ups are born when the founders are the users and the problem to be solved is going to make that founder/user person happy. You get some important related things for free with that setup:  A very tight and inexpensive user-product feedback loop  Version dogfooding by the same highly invested […]
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Unhappy and You Know It

I was interested to see that “Senior Web Developer” is the forth unhappiest job in the world according to Forbes. I have had this job several times in several industries. Indeed, these were often dirty, frustrating jobs – especially back when web standards were non existent and IE ruled supreme. But fourth unhappiest of all […]
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