Category: long story short
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amanaplanacana
I hope to release my record, No One Does It Solo Only, later this year, maybe a little sooner if I suddenly have a lot of unstructured time on my hands, and anyhow true to the title of the record, the process of releasing it will be a team effort just as the songwriting, arranging,…
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Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend
I was anticipating the new season of Severance since they started announcing it last fall and now life has gotten so crazed I am tending to catch the newest episodes days late instead of right when they drop. And then all of a sudden a show about a job where the people at the top…
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Oath takers and oath breakers
The whole concept of swearing an oath can feel antique, or worse cringe-y. Sad creepy quasi-militia guys exchanging rings with their daughters, that kind of thing. But I have worked for two governments now, and three administrations. When I was appointed to a role in the California government I swore an oath to defend the…
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For those who don’t have the spoons
We will all do what we need to do to keep our loved ones safe in times of tribulation. For now, I choose the spoon, for myself and for those who can’t.
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Reports of our death…
I appreciate all the folks who’ve reached out (including some of our partners at work) concerned by what they’ve been reading about our team and wanted to send a brief acknowledgement to the folks out there that we are still in here fighting the good fight:
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Technical difficulties
If I seem at all distracted it may be that my new boss’s old boss who is also possibly the actual boss of the country’s new boss is currently attacking the team I work for, and doxxing my colleagues. 18F’s account on Twitter was apparently deleted (actually a good thing, if you ask me) but,…
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What a lot of people forget about the 80s
For nearly a year there smack in the middle of that decade of excess nobody was permitted to mess with anybody’s toot-toot. Jello remembered, thirty years later…
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From the nation’s capital
Just got back from DC and boy are my rights tired! I still need to catch up on my “fitness journey” as I think they call it nowadays. Thinking about how to illustrate a total knee replacement without gruesome medical Butthole Surfer type aesthetics. I’ll figure out something but the #longstoryshort is that I feel…
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Into the belly of the beast
No real news today except that I have not yet fully digested the anger that consumed me this weekend, I burned four hours wasting my time at SFO because Everything is Shitty these days, and I’m headed to DC right now just as political things appear to be metastasizing. Posted from 30,000 feet or so.
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Hacking time
As I’ve gotten older like everyone else I have noticed how time speeds up. Each new days is a smaller fraction of your life than the previous one. A summer that lasted a lifetime when you were nine passes in the blink of an eye when you are 50. But there is a positive side!…
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Dispatches from the edge
Microblogging never really found its way. Not like real protocols like email and such. Monopolizing status updates all in one place never made sense but it hung together chaordically for a long while between twtr and the nazi bar it became. Much like the yellow-pages style centralization that facebook rode to meta, this ultimately provided…
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The new phonebook is here!
I was unwinding on Friday afternoon near the end of a long week and tuned into Human Music with Bill the Cat on Humboldt Hot Air, coming soon to actual airwaves near you (if you live near Humboldt, one would assume). As expected (disclosure: I am long time fan of Bill’s deejaying, mixtape, and playlist…
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Underneath the big starry-ass sky
I won’t lie. It’s been a hell of a week. Being on an enemies list is a lot. Trying to support and take care of a team of anxious, good people feels like a lot of emotional labor, though I recognize that it comes with positions of responsibility and authority. Still, it’s a lot. By…
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Fired up, ready to go
OK, one day off to gather energy and back to it we go.
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Before I ever wrote a real song
A live take of “Sham Song” from September 9:
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The show must go on
For the first time since starting this recording project back in February of 2023, we were not able to schedule at least one session last September. Around the same time, Cecil and I got together to play a little and I struggled to find my hands on my own tune, “The Long Haired Kings.” This…
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Sometimes late when things are real
When there’s a lot going on a lot of time can pass before I feel ready to say something about it and by the time I am ready usually something else is going on and other things have happened in the meantime. It’s almost enough to make me want timestamped logs like this site to…
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So… this happened
Like an aging AAA slugger called up to the majors, like a prep-school outsider starting college, like a choreographer with bad knees getting access to the biggest stage, I find myself leading the product management chapter at 18F as it celebrates its tenth anniversary. 18F is a consulting entity in TTS (Technology Transformation Services) in…
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ODI, ride or die
This past Friday I finished my last day on easily the greatest job I’ve had so far in my long, strange and oftentimes charmed career. I started at ODI, initially as a contractor, when it was still called the Office of Digital Innovation. I joined the team working on California’s statewide Covid site (covid19.ca.gov) as…
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Swim-two-birds logo ideas
As part of my songwriting trip I established a music publishing company for publishing my songs and managing that side of their rights (I also signed up with BMI for the songwriter side of the equation, and included my alias, Crispy Bacon). The company is called At Swim-Two-Birds Music in full but generally I just…
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You’ll know when
This whole album project evolved somewhat naturally from my ongoing songwriting efforts. As far as I can tell, writing songs is the best writing medium for me. I’ve written short stories, novels, poetry, and plays, and in each case I feel that I was able to carve out something worthwhile from time to time, but…