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 …
Author Archives: Ethan
Why I love Gawker
I’m a jazz guy. I like improvising in front of an audience. I like publishing a post while it’s still only a third finished. It keeps the fire lit under me to get the rest written. I was looking for a blog platform congenial to this method of working. Then I read a PC Magazine …
Digital audio is just long lists of numbers
How do you get sound in and out of a computer? There are two steps. You have to turn the sound into electricity, and then you have to turn the electricity into numbers. Turning sound into electricity At the physical level, a sound is a rhythmic vibration of air molecules. Your ears can detect subtle …
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In praise of Auto-tune
My experience with Auto-tune has felt like stepping out the door of a rocket ship to explore a whole new sonic planet. Auto-tune entered my musical life mainly from my work with Barbara Singer, who I met in 2003. She posted in the Craigslist Musicians section about this gig she had at the now-defunct Korova …
Visual outlining with Flickr
I’m a visual thinker with an art background, and through playing with Flickr, I stumbled on the idea of a visual outline to complement the written one.
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. …
How to write something long and complicated
I find myself in the new and delightful position of writing for money. So I needed to step up my game in terms of workflow and file management. The last time I tried to write something long, I was in college, using Windows 3.1 and good old Wordperfect 6. Then the Microsoft hegemony set in …
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