Frankly Anything

So, this is a bit embarrasing. 14 days after kicking this blog off and there’s still just that same mediocre first couple of articles. I’m a firm believer in cause and effect however and so there’s good cause involved here. Chiefly, that school and work have joined forces to keep me a safe distance from the blog. But it’s early on a Sunday morning and both school and work are still sleeping so I’ve snuck away to dash this off. Unfortunately not only do they keep me from simply doing the actual writing but they keep me from being able to even do a lot of thinking about what it is I want to say. So, while I have a number of ideas I want to write about, I’ve not had the time to really flesh any one of them out just yet. And because I don’t want this blog to be something half-assed, I’m not going to try to hastily hammer out something here.

Instead, I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss the blog roll over there on the right. Specifically, why I chose these links in particular.

CounterKnowledge – Having been raised in an environment where I was surrounded by people who pretended to know things they didn’t know, I’ve become almost maniacal in keeping an eye out for claims that aren’t’ supported by evidence or reason. This site is a good resource for separating the real from the imagined. Are there others? Share them in the comments.

Data Evolution and Flowing Data – In addition to sunsets, landscapes, portraiture and the other usual artful suspects, I’ve always thought that the numbers, symbols and expressions employed in math and science shared a similar aesthetic quality.  When I moved into consulting and discovered Tufte that appreciation evolved into the visual representation of data. The New York Times does a particularly excellent job of this and there are a number of sites out there where you can learn to do this better. I’m still learning.

First Look, NYTimes Developers Blog – I plan to dedicate an article to what the NYT is doing digitally generally. For now I draw your attention to their developers blog here as they’re doing some really interesting and progressive things (not just for a newspaper but for digital generally) that deserve our attention.

KONIGI – My entire professional career has been devoted to user experience. When I worked in audio post-production it was all about using music, sound effects, dialogue and the techniques of mixing the three to evoke a response in the viewer or listener. The 10+ years I spent honing that skill greased the skids quite nicely for my transition into digital media. KONIGI is a site I stumbled across a few months ago and read regularly for inspiration.

MBV – Along with pitchforkmedia.com this site is the place to go for the latest in indie/alt rock. Another great one is fluxblog.org but Matthew from fluxblog also works on MBV, so if you had to choose just one (as I chose to) choose MBV.

The Bitstream – Always one to champion the little guy, I’ve added the blog of a longtime acquaintance, Oliver Masciarotte. Oliver and I met each other when he was at Sonic Solutions and I was in still doing audio, using the Sonic Solutions toolset. Oliver’s responsible for taking my forensic audio chops to another level.