Portland Sucks

It was a quiet Friday morning in mid-June. I was working from home while Zoe, my 16-month old daughter, was in the middle of her morning nap, when a there was a knock at the front door to my apartment. Read more

I love this commercial and wrote about it because: a) it’s cute, b) it’s happy and upbeat, c) it pisses off racist assholes. Read more

Last week The Guardian ran an excellent article on Portland written by Portlandia’s Fred Armisen; excellent if your literary standards hover around a middle school level and your idea of thoughtful insight is an in-flight magazine, that is. Read more

While it might be considered Good Twitter Etiquette to use hashtags for their intended purpose, the sad news is that “Good Twitter Etiquette” doesn’t exist in reality so expecting everyone to play by a particular set of rules is absurd. Your hashtag is going to get hijacked, intentionally or not – it’s how you deal with it that matters. Read more

Several months ago I took on the task of writing “independent” blog posts for an electronics company. In exchange for a decent paycheck and free products, I was to write SEO optimized posts about the gadgets I’d receive. I was never paid to lie, mind you; in fact I was encouraged to be truthful. Read more

For more than 12 years now I’ve struggled to explain my various means of breadwinning to my folks, and for more than 10 years I’ve failed. The world has been changing rapidly since the rise of the Internet; and just when your parents think they’ve caught up with the times, they realize that they haven’t even come close. Read more

Maybe the next time a popular, bored tech blogger wants to kick the social media and smartphone habit, they should just take up smoking for a week instead. Sure, smoking kills, but at least the people doing the smoking don’t seem to be wasting their days looking for the meaning of life on a 4” screen. Read more

Today I found out completely by accident that a former friend died late last year. At the time of his death he’d been clean for over 5 years but his body had begun collapsing some time ago from the damage he’d done to it for so long. Read more

Meat is murder, or so the popular phrase (and album by The Smiths) would have us believe. Yet a large percentage of we humans, myself included, continue to consume dead animal flesh on a regular basis without giving much thought to fate of the various domesticated four-legged foodstuffs that make up our diets. Read more