The soundtrack of my youth was illustrated by Storm Thorgerson. He made music visual, and in his passing, music lost a leading member. A tribute to Storm.

Flip phones are "old-timey"? I'm not yet forty years old, and a once coveted piece of advanced cellular technology is now considered old-timey. My kid has never heard a busy signal, and I doubt he'd recognize a dial-tone. In my lifetime, the flip phone represented everything cool about electronics, and for many years elevated the social status of the owner. Until it was unseated by the smartphone, the flip-phone was king. Now, it is old-timey. The world has moved on.

For the past couple of years, I've enjoyed finding craft sodas, and my son has developed quite the palette for fine root beers. While ginger beer (or ginger ale as some call it) is not his favorite, his mom and I sure think it is nice. So we decided to make our own. In the end our first attempt at _Straughan's World Famous Ginger Beer_ was a success, and is now open-source.

Last month I made my first game: html5-lightcycles. It is a Tron inspired lightcycle game, a humble recreation of the 1980s arcade classic. The whole truth behind the lightcycle game includes the tidbit that when I first started playing around with the creating that game, snake was my original intention.

For the past few months I have been playing with the HTML5 canvas element off and on. In recent years it has been the subject of much excitement in the web development community, and as matured rapidly in modern browsers. Now there are a wide variety of games and activities that utilize this relatively new element. For whatever reasons, I just assumed manipulating the canvas would be a pain in the ass, so I avoided it, until now.

NoNews is a Google Chrome extension that was built to assist me (and you) avoid passively reading the news. I wrote a blog post about why I wrote it, and explored the inspiration behind the endeavor. In this post I'd like to walk-through the source code, explain how the extension is constructed, and talk about things that can be done to improve the extension.

No news, as the title and aphorism declare, is often good news. Like many internet users, reading the news online has become a passive activity for me. I find myself checking news sites when I have 30 seconds to kill, for no reason in particular. When the actual news airs on television, on the few occasions when I happen to catch it, I find myself secretly enjoying that I am so "plugged in" the news is ancient history by the time the TV gets ahold of it. An essay by Aaron Swartz made me rethink my constant news exposure, and drove me so far I created a browser extension to aid me in changing my ways.

New year, new blog, new blog engine. For the last few years, my blog has successfully sat stagnant with 2 posts in it. Despite my total lack of attention to this site, it still managed to garner a few dozen readers a day, mainly from stackoverflow and some Russian blog. For several months I have been eyeing jekyll, the blog engine from Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub fame.