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Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design seems like a swell chap, but his recent post on applying the GPL to premium Wordpress themes exemplifies the kind of erroneous thinking I frequently find in the creative community. In trying to apply scarcity rules to infinite goods, he misses out on an opportunity to utilize, rather than fight, information sharing. Continue Reading »

Waterfall. Pastel, completed May 2010. I started this picture back in 2004 and got about as far as the charcoal underdrawing before I put it aside. One year of high school and four years of college later, I decided to pick it up, take art class again and finish it. I took some pictures of it while it was still a work in progress as much to show the progression as to convince myself I was getting somewhere with it. Now that it’s finished, it’s rather interesting to be able to look back and see the steps. Continue Reading »

Now that the social purge is complete, I’ve begun adding people back to my Facebook friends list. In addition to grumbling about Facebook’s cluttered, opaque interface (remember when we all joined it because it was so much simpler and cleaner than MySpace?), I’m placing new friends into category lists as I go along. Because friends can be added to multiple lists I’m able to use them as sortable metatags. Continue Reading »

I’ve been threatening to clear my Facebook account for a while now, and with the EFF’s latest revelations of how the site attempts to “zucker” private information from its unsuspecting users, today seemed like as good a time as any. And so it is done: zero friends.

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This past fall I began taking art classes again, with the hope of finishing a picture I’d started in ye olde 2004 or so.I thought it would be cool to photograph it after each session to track the progress. While the shots aren’t consistent enough to do a true time-lapse, I think it will be interesting to see how the picture develops. Continue Reading »

Even as content industries, patent trolls, and cretins shamelessly abuse their monopoly privileges, some of their behavior filters down to creators with even less to gain from such behavior. The false concepts of idea “ownership” and permission culture are a flesh-melting venom chewing away at our creative body. Continue Reading »

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy reading Tycho’s writings over at Penny Arcade. His command of vocabulary and rich, fantastic metaphor fills me with a tingly delight. After finishing Lolita, I think Vladimir Nabokov tops it, like a Tycho writing in the 1950s if Tycho was a trilingual synesthete. Continue Reading »

Over the weekend Rachel and I drove up to Penn State Hershey for the College of Medicine’s second look day. The whole thing was organized by the med students, and while they did squeeze a lot of information and activities into the day, I was impressed once again. I was also quite surprised by how many parents were in attendance alongside prospective students. They actually had a session for parents while the “kids” were sampling the school’s problem-based learning assignments. Continue Reading »

There’s been quite the foofaraw surrounding the leak of the latest iPhone prototype (Spoiler: one of the employees left it at a bar, a guy found it, Gizmodo bought it from him and posted a teardown). It’s the expected incremental upgrade scheduled for release this summer that continues the process of making the iPhone more like what people thought it was going to be when it released, making the ballyhoo surrounding the story even bigger than the story itself. Continue Reading »

A while back the leasing office started advertising a “breakfast on the go” event for this week. It sounded great and the time included when I normally leave for work; unlike most events, I planned to avail myself of it (this was assisted by the placement of the ad above my mailbox). The night before it was supposed to take place, I even bragged to Rachel that my cereal and yogurt would be supplemented with free goodies the following morning. Continue Reading »