Archive for December, 2010

Rat Park Album Art

Friday, December 31st, 2010

My good buddy Doug’s (under the name Ichabod Hate) new album is out and arrived in my mailbox today. Buzzsaw instrumentals ala Ministry, Big Black, Foetus, etc. For sunny, pleasant days. Also, I did the album art for this slab o’ cd. Dig it.

I don’t know where or how you can still order this, but you could probably just drop Doug a line. I won’t release the poor boys e-mails to the wolves here, but I’ll set you up with it if you message (massage) me. Happy New Year.

Posted in music, print | Comments Off

Ard-wee-no?

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Mom and Dad be praised, I got an Arduino for Christmas. It’ll mark must first and most rudimentary probings into physical computing, and I’m excited for the many experiments to come. Below is my first, from Makes: Getting Started With Arduino by Massimo Banzi. Just turning an LED on and off with a button. The code is trivial, as is the effect, but there is quite thrill to plugging this device into you USB port, uploading the code, and the immediate satisfaction of having it work right there on your desk. Many many hours of learning and experiments to come. They’ll live here with the rest of my learning and experiments.

//Blinky LED
#define LED 13
#define BUTTON 7

int val = 0;
int old_val = 0;
int state = 0;

void setup(){
  pinMode(LED,OUTPUT);
  pinMode(BUTTON,INPUT);
}

void loop(){
  val = digitalRead(BUTTON);
  if((val == HIGH) && (old_val == LOW)){
    state = 1 - state;
    delay(10);
  }

  old_val = val;

  if(state == 1){
    digitalWrite(LED, HIGH);
  } else {
    digitalWrite(LED,LOW);
  }
}

(picture of the circuit when I can find my camera cord)

Posted in Code, arduino | Comments Off

Banned Film – Lydia

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Included here is a film made by a buddy of mine from over in Malawi. He and a group of students made this for the Malawi International Film Festival and it was subsequently banned in the country the day after its premiere. Western audiences will not likely note anything particularly racy or objectionable about the film, but it depicts a homosexual transvestite in a sympathetic light. Homosexuality, as you may have heard, isn’t very popular or viable in many parts of Africa right now, so shutting down screenings of this film down is just another, and relatively milder, example of the type of restriction, censorship, and in some cases, violence that is currently being cultivated in many parts of Africa against homosexuals.

All the best to my friend and his now fractured crew. Interesting to note that in this work of fiction, the protagonist, Lydia, is played by a straight Malawian male, which seems culturally a rather brave move on his part. Have a watch. Enjoy. Happy Holidays.

Posted in africa, video | Comments Off

NaDA, now with Blarg

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

NaDA has a blarg now. Look here for updates, announcement, writing contests, bit and bouts of original fiction, non-fiction, fits and thoughts. Should serve to break up my personality a bit, keep things compartmentalized, and clean this town up a bit. And please check out our, their ongoing fundraiser, and recently launched eBook division.

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Didn’t Die Young Yet ePub

Saturday, December 11th, 2010

You know, for Kindles

After week(s) of research and nearly as much real time hacking together a conversion, Didn’t Die Young Yet by Jacob Cholak is available for $3 on Amazon as an eBook.

eBook formatting is much more akin to website development than anything approaching or resembling design. I happen to know quite a bit about web development, and I was also horrified to see what any of the “pdf to ePub” or even “html to ePub” converters did to my beautiful little book, so I had to start from just about scratch and format that damn thing properly by hand. This involved a lot of mindless and blinding precision copy and pasting, liberal use of search and replace and the delete button. I had to write a number of scripts (shell and javascript) to expedite the tedium. I will probably write some set of tools that will make the translation of our other book, White Horses much smoother.

The interesting thing I found in my research into eBooks is that no-one really cares about them yet. The designers haven’t latched onto them because they’re still a fairly “ugly” format that lacks most of the control you get with the much more standardized and documented web. And on the other side, the programmers haven’t jumped in to flesh out those controls and standards, because it’s still books, which everyone knows is for the grandparents of extinct dinosaurs. This means that the whole format is in an exciting state where it’s still unpolished and developing. Commercially the medium is growing by leaps and bounds (we’ve all seen the charts), but, strangely for the internet, the technology is lagging behind just a touch. This is exciting news for someone both obsessed with books and internet technology. A fertile but unplowed ground to combine two fetishes.

So the (e)Book is up and there’s another one coming. Also if you’re a sucker for paper, the real thing is still on sale too: Didn’t Die Young Yet and NaDA has the fundraiser going on for the rest of the month. Please support our thankless labors.

Posted in NaDA, Writing, web | Comments Off

NaDA Nother Year Fundraising

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

“White Horses” / “Didn’t Die Young Yet” Audio-Book Auditions (short-form) from NaDA Publishing on Vimeo.

With a new year looming, new projects blooming, and old projects requiring work, NaDA humbly asks our friends for support. We have a laundry list of items we’d like to see tended to and we would be forever grateful if you would like to lend a financial hand.

To Do:
- Reformat and re/release White Horses and Didn’t Die Young Yet on Amazon.com
- Order more review/promo copies of the books to send out and about
- Begin work on two new top-secret titles
- Build a backend to the NaDA website
- Register as a business with the state of New Mexico
- Buy our authors dinner and a drink if and when they come visit
- Print business cards and letterhead

In an effort to rally support all NaDA titles will be discounted 10% for the month of December.

Go here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nada/nada-nother-year
to support the project on Kickstarter

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