Poor Minstrel by Gustave Doré

Best new music of 2011

Thought I’d get an early handle on my best-of-the-year list this time around. I’ve blogged surprisingly little about music in 2011. That doesn’t mean that I listened any less, or less attentively. In fact, audio-wise, it was just this past year that I finally managed to get my hands on digital playback equipment that allows [...]

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Library Shelves by Binary Ape via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

Building your consulting library: the ethics and practice of knowledge reuse

The opinions in this blog post should not be construed as advice, especially not legal advice. Whether you act on anything I suggest here is entirely up to you—I would strongly suggest you take a close look at your employment or contracting agreement and/or take legal advice from someone qualified before you take any action [...]

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Coeur de pirate: Blonde

Listening to: Coeur de pirate

Béatrice Martin, who goes by the stage name Coeur de pirate, is a wildly, fantastically talented singer-songwriter from Montreal. She has just released her second solo album—the excellent Blonde—and she’s only 22. Like many listeners outside of France and Quebec, I first noticed Coeur de pirate as a guest duet vocalist on Bedouin Soundclash‘s lovely ’Brutal Hearts’ from [...]

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Office Mac 2011 Icons

Office for Mac 2011 – One year in the real world

As a relative newcomer to the Mac, my perspective is that of a switcher. As I blogged at the time, I was originally attracted to the beautiful and affordable hardware but couldn’t conceive of a scenario where I’d actually run any OS other than Windows. My work is for a software consulting firm that works [...]

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Pure i-20 iPod Dock - Frontal

Review: Pure i-20 iPod dock

I had read about the i-20 iPod dock a few months ago. It seemed like a very exciting proposition: a dock that could extract the digital signal of the music stored on an iPod without relying on the iPod’s own digital-to-analogue circuitry, and pass the music to an external DAC (digital to analogue converter) for [...]

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Jennifer Johannesen - No Ordinary Boy

Read: Jennifer Johannesen, No Ordinary Boy

My partner Jennifer recently published her first book. It’s a slim volume of 145 pages called No Ordinary Boy: The Life and Death of Owen Turney. One could generically describe it as memoir or narrative non-fiction. No Ordinary Boy is the story of Jennifer’s journey with her severely disabled son Owen, who died last October—unexpectedly, and [...]

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A Quiet Place in Paris by Alias Rex via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

Buddhism, moral philosophy, Derek Parfit

I recently read this in an article in the Shambhala Sun, a magazine about Buddhism: Here is another practice, rooted in Zen tradition, which you might enjoy. Sit down with someone you care about and have a cup of tea. The practice is just sitting and having tea and conversation for its own sake. Drink [...]

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