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Over the month of October I made a series of podcasts to celebrate the spookiness, the paranormal, and the overall joy of one of my favourite holidays. When I was cleaning up the podcast files for archiving, I glanced at my folder full of text and realized, hey… there’s a small book right there. I wonder if people would want that?

Well, actually, I don’t know if anyone wants such a thing, but it wasn’t all that much work to take those Markdown files and roll them over into Scrivener and build an eBook. So over the last few days, I’ve been working on exactly that, along with the editing, cleanup, and eventual fighting with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing content management system. It likes to put HTML where there was never any HTML before.

Anyway, you can get this book one of three ways. (Actually, I suppose you could get it all three of these ways, and who am I to stop you?) You can pop over to Amazon and buy the Kindle book for US$1.99. I don’t do Patreon or Kickstarter or any of that, and I don’t advertise on this site or within the podcasts. But if you want to throw some money at me, well, here’s a way you can do that.

If you just want the eBook, or want to try before you buy, that’s lovely too! You can download it via the links below.

Thanks for tuning in to WRTH  – AM 800, and enjoy the book, my friends!

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A row of stalls in the bathroom.

A rare look inside the data centre for an online advertising network.

I consume a tonne of online content every day.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. I’m sure many of you reading this do too. Hey, you’re having a look at this post, so I assume you’ve read other things before this and that you’ll click on something afterwards. I seriously appreciate you taking a few minutes to read my drivel and I appreciate others who share their thoughts, creativity, journalism, and work on the web.

But I’m blocking your ads, and I’m sorry.

Continue reading

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Music is, oddly enough, an incredibly important part of the shows, or at least it is for me. I say that it’s odd because, well, these are shows about libraries, technology, cyberpunk, Generation X, and librarians in space. Sure, lots of podcast have music breaks or a musical intro or outro. But for me, the music is just as important as the subject matter. I’ll go through dozens of songs, making notes, trying to find ones for the show I’m working on or a show that I have in the pipeline. All for some twenty to thirty second bumpers between sections and maybe a little something for the episode’s conclusion.

It might be because I’m a musician.

Carl Sagan

This guy changed my life…

I remember becoming fully aware of music as a thing when I was five years old. I was sitting on the floor of my parents house watching PBS. Not because I was a precocious, bright little child who showed an early love of learning. No, I just knew that if I watched PBS long enough, then I would get to see Muppets. That’s it. I had no concept of channel schedules, or that certain shows came on a certain times. PBS showed Muppets on the regular, so I’m watching PBS… can’t miss the Muppets. And one night, another show came on. There were no Muppets, not a single one.

Vangelis

But not as much as this guy changed my life.

But there was space, and spaceships. There were stars. There was a guy who invoked a groove like a scientific Mr. Rogers. And there was music. Fantastic, wonderful music like I’d never heard before. The show was an episode in the award winning documentary series, Cosmos. It was hosted by Carl Sagan and featured the music of Vangelis.

Decades later, I compose, record, and listen to a lot of space music.

I include a lot of it in the show which also features downtempo, chill-out, chiptunes, and the occasional composition by me. A while back a listener wrote in asking if I had my own music available somewhere for listening and downloading, or if I had a catalogue of the music I’ve used on the podcasts. At the time, I didn’t.

But I do now. I’ve compiled a selection of tracks that I’ve recorded over the years, along with all of the albums I’ve recorded. I’m warning you, some of these sound rough, man. Because the earlier stuff involved me trying to figure out how to plug a Yamaha keyboard into a computer and trick both the computer and the keyboard into recording multi-track audio.

And then there’s the list of music that’s appeared on every episode of every podcast. I’ve even alphabetized it because, you know, I’m a librarian or something. Alphabetizing lists is something librarians do.

So sit back, click, listen, and enjoy.

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I’ve got a lot of projects I’m currently working on, both professionally and personally. I don’t think I have quite too many, though I think it might be approaching some kind of limit. At the very least I started to consider some options for trying to apply some level of organization to them, even if that organization isn’t fully complete. My brain is such that, even if I don’t see an item on a list, I sense its presence by the other items on the list. It’s nothing like clairvoyance, I just know that to do to Item C in Project D, I’ll also need to do something else first. In other words, it’s not about laying out all the individual steps more than it is just getting a high level overview.

Yeah, this stock image is cheesy, but it does convey my message pretty well.

For that, I’ve turned to Trello. I created a large, and still growing, board that I’ve un-creatively titled Projects. On that board I currently have 13 projects listed with to-dos and info under them. Trello calls these things cards, and I’ve not bothered to count all of them. Part of me kind of doesn’t want to know how many cards there are and the other part of me just doesn’t care. There are how many there are and there will be more and there will eventually be fewer. That’s the idea, right?

Each project has its own stack of cards and these cards can be moved around and marked in various ways. Some cards I’ve marked complete and left on the boards just to show that I’ve done something on the project. Some projects have obvious names and some projects have code names. I’m not trying to be secretive or all G.I. Joe or anything, I just don’t want to drop a lot of details on certain things until they’re closer to realization, or at least something approaching finality. Some projects will take longer because they’re lower priority or because they’re a more involved, time consuming thing. Other projects will be done more quickly even through they’re not as high priority simply because there’s not as much to do with them.

I’m telling you all this, writing it here on the blog, because I want to share that Projects board with you. Why? Well, it’ll keep me honest. If people are looking at this board, or if I think people are looking at this board, then I’ll be more apt to work on things. I’ve not really categorized which projects are professional or personal, but it really doesn’t matter much. Progress on anything is progress, and if you’re willing to take a peek every so often, I hope you’ll see progress and change as things move forward.

And hopefully, I’ll get more done that way. Here’s hoping. If you have the interest, here’s the board.

Symmetrical book stacking. Just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947. ~Dr. Raymond Stanz