Wow this must have been an amazing show. The video is high quality. If you were there, you were bound to be affected. Boing Boing: “The Ramones at their best in London, 1977”.
Author Archives: Karl
A visualization on the growth of public APIs and open data
GOOD: “Out in the Open”
“a staccato hit, three more accents, then the infamous descending chromatic riff”
My brother, Dante, runs one of my favorite blogs focusing on Metal, and recently featured an interview he held with former Iron Maiden and Wolfsbane singer, Blaze Bayley. It intimate and revealing look into his struggles.
Rock Nightmare: “interview with blaze bayley”
Another of my favorite Metal blogs has been running a series of ruminations on individual songs from Metallica’s first four albums. A few entries that are must reads – not because they express exactly why *I* had thought those songs so interesting, but because they might pique your interest if you’ve never really listened to them, or if you are fan, provide you with a new perspective (he’s also a guitarist so there is that ingredient as well). Among my favorites:
“Seek and Destroy” – A Metal anthem.
“Escape” – On asserting individuality.
“Fade to Black” – A song that hasn’t aged as well, that lifts up musically, while lyrically is about giving up.
“For Whom The Bell Tolls” – An analysis of the music, rhythm, speed, and lyrics and how they work so well together.
“Creeping Death” – Again you have a synthesis of music and lyric that few bands could muster.
“Disposable Heroes” – A powerful anti-war song. From a thrash metal band. Not what people who don’t listen to Metal would expect.
“Master of Puppets” – Where the title of this post comes from. Brilliant analysis of a brilliantly structured, visceral song about drug addiction and being manipulated – a theme of the album.
“Sanitarium” – Probably my favorite Metallica song and as his analysis puts it, “thus ends the greatest side to the greatest metal album ever.”
“One” – Metallica’s “Stairway to Heaven”. What is required to play a song like that night after night. Do you think you’d be up for it convincingly? How good are your acting chops?
Invisible Oranges sometimes features guest writers, and recently Beth Winegarner who wrote about the issues with Metal’s culture and women – and most important – steps to improve it.
Florence Nightingale… the Statician and Data Viz Scientist
A good read about an aspect of Florence Nightingale that isn’t mentioned commonly. Hugh Small: Presentation to Research Conference organised by the Florence Nightingale Museum: St. Thomas’s Hospital, 18th March 1998: “Florence Nightingale’s statistical diagrams”
The history and background of Processing
Vimeo: Eyeo Festival: “Ben Fry & Casey Reas – Eyeo Festival 2011”
A short presentation where they give the background and insight into the future of a tool that has empowered artists, programmers, journalists, and story tellers in the same medium.
Remembering 9/11
Steve Jobs said, in his well linked commencement speech, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards”.
Learning from experience, gaining perspective, carrying it forward, is the roots of wisdom.
So when we say, ‘Never Forget’, about 9/11, what is it we want our children to know? I don’t think we know yet, what we do know can’t be summarized in a single post, let alone by someone with my skills, and the story is still unfolding. The boomer generation, and my generation, is in the mix of creating that legacy right now. What will it be?
I don’t want to write about my personal memories of the day. I am thankful I was home with Richelle.
Thank you to all who put themselves in harms way to protect us.
And thoughts, prayers, and love for those who have lost so much that day, and in the days that followed.
Thank you CmdrTaco and Slashdot
Rob Malda and Slashdot have done more to establish working, successful patterns for others to follow in online communities on the Web that few others (Metafilter, IndyMedia, and Salon.com come immediately to mind), can match, and are recognized for. Everyone keeps re-inventing elements of what they established, and missing lessons they learned the hard way.
A huge thank you to them all, and a good luck on your next endeavors Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda. Slashdot the community, and Slashdot the idea, has been a huge influence in my life and helped to show the world that online communities on the Web can work and help people connect.
Related:
Wired.com: Slashdot’s CmdrTaco Looks Back at 10 Years of ‘News for Nerds’
A few thoughts on Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple’s CEO
Apple is far more than the creation of one man. A casual scan of Folklore.org, a site focused on its history, will tell you that.
But so would Steve Jobs.
He’s created a culture at Apple that is going to go on long with out him.
A few reads about Jobs stood out for me today and I’d thought I’d share them here:
WSJ: Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes – as someone said on Twitter, you could avoid reading a few business/programming/design tomes and just absorb these and be better off.
His Stanford University commencement speech: ‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says. He ties in his life history as an adopted child of working class parents, into his pursuit of his dream, the failures he encountered, and the lessons that he absorbed that made him stronger. There’s a bit about life, death, perspective and mission. It is worth reading in full. There are reasons it went viral. You can watch it on YouTube as well. But the text is best.
Anil Dash on “What they are ‘protecting’ us from” connecting Jobs liberal, working class background, with his success, and wondering why some are fighting the policies that enabled stories like Job’s to be possible.
You won’t find much Apple fandom here and I’m not going to wax poetic about Apple products, but in a way, for programmers of a certain age like myself, one of the leaders of the personal computing revolution is now walking off his most visible stage and we have much to be thankful for.
So thank you everyone at Apple, Pixar, and NeXT, and thank you Steve Jobs for providing inspiration, and the foundation for so many careers reflecting creativity, communication, and passion.
Java on… Heroku!!!!
Heroku adds suport for Java: Heroku for Java.
Take note of how simple a basic Java web app can be. Sure it’s not Sinatra or Flask, but it is still mighty simple.
Folks who claim that ‘Java is dead’ or that it should die, aren’t facing up to where it shines and what it provides. It has a place alongside Python and increasingly JavaScript in my tool belt.
I’m a happy polygot programmer and have used Groovy, and custom DSLs in Java to help speed application development by enabling those who are closest to change, to be able to harness it.
“Right Now”: On the present, being present, and practice (TEDXPhilly related)
1. Breathe.
2. Remind yourself: Whatever you are doing – right now – you are practicing.
3. Remind yourself: Whatever you practice – you are improving, you are building, you are growing.
4. Ask yourself: Is this what you want to improve, build or grow?
Do this a few times a day and I’m betting it will re-center you.
Things that compete for our attention are everywhere, I get distracted too easily myself, and I am doing this to retrain my focus when it drifts.
“Right Now” was the theme of last year’s TEDXPhilly. For some terrific thoughts on the theme see TEDXPhilly’s organizer (and so much more in the Philly region), Roz Duffy, and her post “here and now”.
This year’s theme is “The City”. It will be fantastic.
For more thoughts on “Right Now”, see Rahul Bijlani’s great essay, “You are not running out of time” and Umair Haque’s “The Builders’ Manifesto”.