An Open Letter to NHL Players and Owners
To all 30 NHL owners and the roughly 700 players represented by the NHLPA: Get over yourselves. Now. You are destroying goodwill that took nearly all of the last seven post-lockout seasons to rebuild. Most NHL fans are figuring out how to spend less in the coming year, and you’re arguing over the last few [...]
A Christmas List
I’ve been listening to Christmas carols in my car this week, mostly checking out the traditional and pop holiday stations on XM, finding that I know most of the old school songs due to seven years of playing clarinet in a variety of school concert bands. We didn’t use “holiday” as a placeholder for “Christmas” [...]
“Professional WordPress: Design and Development” 2nd edition
My five-year love affair with WordPress hits another milestone on January 9, 2013 when the 2nd edition of the book I co-authored with Brad Williams and David Damstra is released into the wild. You can pre-order it from Amazon now and you’ll have it the day it’s released. Not as exciting as getting “The Deathly [...]
Tend Your Garden: Three Views of Rush’s “Clockwork Angels”
“Hey Dad, play that ‘We Are Young’ song again” asked my then-four year old son. Referencing by chorus rather than title, I knew he meant Rush’s “Dreamline” and the request was another case of life imitating art reflecting life again. He’d heard it as the opening song for the Rush show at the PNC Bank [...]
What Happened to the Novel?
[Mild spoiler alert, but if you read this all the way through, hopefully you won't buy or read either Michael Chabon's "Telegraph Avenue" or JK Rowling's "Casual Vacancy", the two novels I'm about to skewer.] What has happened to the art form known as the novel? I’ll drop the superlatives of “great” and geographical restriction [...]
There But Not There
I’m now one-third of the way through my Movember campaign, growing out a moustache to raise (visible) awareness and funds for men’s cancers. I’ve gone from the “sloppy shaving” starting point to actually having to work carefully around the wire brush that’s growing above my lips. The last time I sported any kind of facial [...]
Borrowed Tone Store
I love toys. The bigger, flashier, and more accessorized with knobs, dials, cables and batteries, the better. For the past year and a half, I’ve been a huge fan of BorrowLenses, a web site that stocks an inordinate variety of lens formats, focal lengths and camera mounts. I “borrowed” (rented) four different Canon telephoto lenses [...]
It’s Movember: Let’s Get Hairy
Here’s the very short form if you’re already bored: Click here to support me Click here to join my Movember team Click here to read and share my Mo-ramblings And now for the long form: Sandy was so….October. Now it’s Movember, the moustache-ruled, hirsuite adventure to raise awareness and funds for men’s cancers. As favorite [...]
Sandy: The Weather Tilt-A-Whirl
You know that tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag I got on it last night and my shirt got caught And that Joey kept me spinnin’ I didn’t think I’d ever get off “4th of July (Sandy)”, Bruce Springsteen Week of October 22 We’re hearing reports of a superstorm brewing in the southern Atlantic, [...]
Coheed and Cambria at Webster Hall
[Setlist spoilers] I’ll make my concluding argument first: Coheed and Cambria’s show at Webster Hall (NYC, October 11) was easily one of the five best shows I’ve seen in more than thirty years of concert-going. I put it up there with Springsteen’s “The River” tour in 1981, Genesis, Rush, and Yes (with the Wakeman-White-Howe-Anderson-Squire lineup), [...]