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June 2013

10 posts

My Book is Now Available in Paperback

I originally published my book I Know You’re Dead, But I Still Worry About You as an ebook, and availability has been limited to Amazon’s ebook store.

Thanks to CreateSpace, the book is also available as a paperback.

For the rest of this week,…

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Jun 18, 2013
Back to Reality

Amazing how one can become consumed in a project. For the past week or so, I’ve had this compulsion to write little, mini stories of the fictional variety. During that time, words just flowed. I’d go out to breakfast and a dozen thoughts would come to me…

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Jun 17, 2013
Star Date 666 Billion

(A draft of yet another of my short stories)

Serial Transmission
Linear Encoding
No Use of Standard Compression Algorithms
Lowest Bit Rate Possible
Pared Down for Low Intelligence

Dear Human of Earth in Your Year 2020 C.E.

Let me first assure you that…

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Jun 17, 2013
A Stellar Interview

(A draft of another of my short stories)

Popular late-night TV host Emcee Em recently interviewed God. A transcript of the interview follows:

E: Welcome, sir. I cannot tell you what an honor it is to have you on the show.

G: Thank you, Emcee. This is a…

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Jun 16, 2013
What If ... On the Pursuit of Happiness and Purpose

In The Silence of Animals, John Gray notes:

For Freud the pursuit of happiness is a distraction from living. It would be better to aim for something different – a type of life in which you do not need a fantasy of satisfaction in order to find being human…

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Jun 15, 2013
“For Freud, on the other hand, it is the hope of a life without conflict that ails us. Along with every serious philosophy and religion, Freud accepted that humans are sickly animals. Where he was original was in also accepting that the human sickness has no cure.” —Gray, John (2013-06-04). The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (p. 85). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 
Jun 15, 2013
“If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience.” —Gray, John (2013-06-04). The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (p. 75). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 
Jun 15, 2013
Ain't No Sunshine Bill Withers
Jun 9, 2013
#music #spotify
Immortality

Avril Origami was not unhappy being the director of bioengineering at Berg Biophysics. True, she had grown wary of constant administrative hassles without the excitement of discovery that can come with managing just one project. But, for a young woman…

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Jun 5, 2013
“There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.” —An insight from Christian Wiman. Seems pretty spot-on to me.
Jun 2, 2013

May 2013

11 posts

A Keener Arrangement of an Old Spiritual

Yes, Jesus Loves Me. Not You. Me. Just Me.
Seriously, I hope you enjoy my arrangement of the old spiritual, Jesus Loves Me:

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May 30, 2013
Kiss On My List - Remastered 2003 Daryl Hall

One of the best songs evah!

May 30, 2013
#music #spotify
Free May 28 - May 30, 2013: I Know You're Dead, But I Still Worry About You

Thanks to a promotional offer on my new book, I Know You’re Dead But I Still Worry About You, you can get the book free during May 28 (starting around Midnight Pacific) through May 30 (ending right before Midnight Pacific).

Is that cool or what? Well, of…

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May 27, 2013
Still The One Orleans

Solid Gold. I have loved this effin song for 40 years!

May 26, 2013
#music #spotify
“After making a mere $84 million at the U.S. box office, Star Trek Into Darkness is considered by some to be a disappointment. Perhaps the problem is that it was a touch confusing. To help our readers better understand it, we’ve complied and answered these Frequently Asked Questions about the movie.” —

Star Trek Into Darkness: The Spoiler FAQ

Chock full of spoilers, but absolutely hilarious!
May 21, 2013
This Is Water :: How To Make A Connection

In 2005, three years before his tragic death, David Foster Wallace gave the commencement speech at Kenyon College. Entitled This Is Water, it has become one of the most famous speeches ever.

It is published in its entirety in the Wall Street Journal(link…

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May 18, 2013
“Netflix has more than 36 million subscribers. They watch about 4 billion hours of programs every quarter on more than 1,000 different devices. To meet this demand, the company uses specialized video servers scattered around the world. When a subscriber clicks on a movie to stream, Netflix determines within a split second which server containing that movie is closest to the user, then picks from dozens of versions of the video file, depending on the device the viewer is using.” —

Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley’s Elite - Businessweek

A fascinating writeup on a fascinating and inspiring man and company (Reed Hastings and Netflix)
May 18, 2013
“I flipped the switch on my new blog last night. If you’ve been here before, you might not notice anything different. The design hasn’t changed, but behind the scenes everything is new. I’ve written a CMS for the blog in Node.js and Express. It’s hosted on EC2, S3, and Cloudfront. All the content is written in Markdown and pushed to my server using Dropbox. All the code is pulled from repositories on Github and NPM. I use responsive design to adapt nicely to all screen sizes, and use feature testing with has.js and hascan to adapt nicely to all browsers.” —

Dropbox is my publish button - Joe Hewitt

Sounds like a neat, no nonsense publishing platform. So why not just use Tumblr, I wonder? Not being a smartass, I just wonder why not. Maybe a problem with importing? (The reason I haven’t moved my old blog to it)
May 18, 2013
“The pages of “The Great Gatsby” are suffused with romance and dusted with sexual implication, but perhaps the most intensely and disturbingly erotic scene — the one that distills the novel’s seductive blend of desire and sorrow — involves clothes. Showing off his mansion to Daisy Buchanan, the great love of his life, and Nick Carraway, his diffident, dazzled neighbor, Jay Gatsby opens a cabinet in which his shirts are “piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.” He throws them into a pile, and as Nick notes the wondrous textures and colors — “stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue” — Daisy bursts into tears: “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.’ ” A reader might speculate about other causes of her weeping, but there is no reason not to take Daisy at her word. One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann’s wildly extravagant adaptation of “Gatsby.” The movie has been faulted, not entirely without justice, for its headlong embrace of the materialism that the novel views with ambivalence. Mr. Luhrmann, though following the book’s plot more or less faithfully, does not offer a stable moral perspective from which the world of its characters can be judged. Rather, he immerses the viewer in a sensual swirl of almost tactile opulence. That scene with the shirts is a triumph of production design and 3-D digital cinematography. Really, you have never seen such beautiful shirts before.” —Gatsby, and Other Luxury Consumers - NYTimes.com
May 18, 2013
Ain't Nobody As Stupid As Me

A poe m by Bruce Keener

Ain’t nobody as stupid as me,
Ain’t nobody got my brain,
Ain’t nobody as stupid as me,
Leaving my neurons out in the rain.

Ain’t nobody as stupid as me,
Watching Criminal Minds on my TV,
Ain’t nobody as stupid as me,
Leaving my…

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May 9, 2013
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