Inside the black box

Engineers describe a system whose input and output behavior are known and whose inner workings are otherwise mysterious as a black box. Bruno Latour describes the black box as: the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one …

In the sequencer, the notation is the performance

In my laptop band Revival Revival, we use Reason for all of our instrumental sounds and sample playback. The newest version has a handy color-coding feature in the sequencer, which makes it easy for me to be able to keep track of which part of which song happens in which order. Having all the tunes …

Fun facts from the usage logs

Ethanhein.com has had 465,689 hits so far, mostly distributed among my blogs and mp3 pages. A single blog post about Family Guy generates a disproportionately large percentage of that traffic. October 2008 represents a typical month, with 40,611 hits total. That’s around 1,310 a day, 54 an hour. A large percentage of those are from …

Social bookmarking is delicious

The most practically useful thing on the whole entire social web is Delicious. Its original point was to store your web browser bookmarks online. That’s reason enough to use it. But the real value of Delicious is how it connects the thoughts in your head to the thoughts in the heads of innumerable internet strangers. …