Originally posted on Instagram: http://instagr.am/p/Tt2ntJMnmM/ On December 26, 2012 at 02:26PM
X-Mas Parties with Anneke’s Family
Anneke and me at her family’s X-Mas Eve party
Photo by genequisisem on Flickr.
Photo by genequisisem on Flickr.
Here’s me at her family’s X-Mas party
Photo by genequisisem on Flickr.
Anneke at her family’s X-Mas party
Photo by genequisisem on Flickr.
Anneke and me at her family’s X-Mas party
Photo by genequisisem on Flickr.
Anneke and me smiling Wallace and Gromit style
Photo by genequisisem on Flickr.
I got a kiss on the cheek from Anneke at the X-Mas party
Photo by genequisisem on Flickr.
Here’s me #photobombing Anneke and Gene’s photo at the X-Mas party
Photo by genequisisem on Flickr.
90s Photos of Bands
I used to go to shows a lot. Not so much anymore. When I did, I usually took my camera and took photos. When I started it was with my mom’s crappy point and click 110. Later I got my own 35mm. I asked for a fully manual camera, but got a fully auto one. I went through a black and white phase while I was in art school, mainly because it was cheaper and I could develop it myself. But also because I thought it was cool.
Today I ran into a dude from an old band that I shot once. Like most bands, I never was able to give a copy of the photos to the band. It made me realize that while most all of the photos I took back then are on Flickr, people who would care to see them mostly don’t know they exist. So, here’s a blast shot into the abyss, that maybe someone will hear.
I shot almost everything that I went to. As it turns out, it was all on film (110, 35mm, Polaroid). By the time I got a digital camera, I had stopped shooting photos and had moved on to digital video (another post for another day.)
In writing this post, I realized that there are still a handful of bands that aren’t scanned/uploaded yet. I’ll get that remedied some day. I started when I was 15. My first show was Shelter and Enkindel (which was supposed to be Earth Crisis, but they crashed their van). Here’s a very small sampling of bands that I photographed.
- Hardcore bands
- By The Grace Of God
- Birthright
- Boy Sets Fire
- Punk rock
- Avail
- No Use for a Name
- Good Riddance
- Ska bands
- MU330
- Assorted Jellybeans
- Citzen Fish
- Big bands before they got that big
- Limp Bizkit
- Goldfinger
- Sugar Ray
- (and for some reason a mountain of ICP photos)
- Big bands that were hopelessly far away
- Rancid
- Rage Against the Machine
- Little hometown hero bands
- Neena Foundry
- Eiffel Tower High
- Cheese Weed
- And weird bands
- Pug
- Blaster the Rocket Boy
- Boris the Sprinkler
Judith Shipstad of Los Gatos, California is The Homophobe of the Day
Today I noticed that I had a submission to The Farmhouse Labs form. But it wasn’t a Labs idea. It was someone using this form as a kind of “contact us” form. Below are the values of the submission.
your_name: Judith Shipstad
your_email: judithal2000@yahoo.com
your_phone: Don't have; prefer email
your_twitter: CatJoker
project_twitter: I
project_budget: ""
project_title: I
your_bio: |-
Kate Darling's subject matter at the Farmhouse Conference almost reads as if you, or she, endorse porn. Can you comment on that please? (I couldn't find any other way to contact anyone there.) I wouldn't want to arrange to attend the conference and then find myself walking out before my favorite speaker arrives. Also, how early in the morning does the conference begin?
Los Gatos, California
October 15, 2012
project_description: I
project_starts_on:
project_ends_on:
created_at: 2012-10-15 19:40:41.226045 Z
updated_at: 2012-10-15 19:40:41.226045 Z
Before responding, I decided to look up Judith Shipstad on Facebook. I didn’t recognize her and her profile is private, so I couldn’t learn much about who this person was except from her About. Here is Judith Shipstad’s Facebook About (as of Thu Oct 18 17:40:04 -0700 2012, screenshot).
Judith Shipstad‘s About on Facebook:
I live vegan and support animal liberation, but I do NOT support gay rights or same-sex marriage. I am American by birth and live in northern California. On peux me parler en anglais ou francais. I am a Khadafy loyalist and support the Green Resistance in Libya, especially the brave people of the hero city of Bani Walid. I am a member of the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC and believe in the evolution of the soul through birth and rebirth. Ledger’s Joker is my favorite movie character. I love cats and all animals and insects, and my favorite feline is the Canadian Lynx. Napoleon has long been a hero of mine, and I accept the former CEO of General Electric, Mr. Jack Welch, as being the reincarnation of Napoleon, as identified by the trance medium Kevin Ryerson. I read the Koran and enjoy Saidi music from southern Egypt.
Judith Shipstad wrote in the Labs submission:
Kate Darling’s subject matter at the Farmhouse Conference almost reads as if you, or she, endorse porn. Can you comment on that please? (I couldn’t find any other way to contact anyone there.) I wouldn’t want to arrange to attend the conference and then find myself walking out before my favorite speaker arrives. Also, how early in the morning does the conference begin?
Los Gatos, California
October 15, 2012
I wrote back:
Hi Judith.
I’m Shane. I live at The Farmhouse and organize Farmhouse Conf.
Thanks for reaching out to me about Kate Darling and Conf.
Kate Darling’s subject matter at the Farmhouse Conference almost reads as if you, or she, endorse porn. Can you comment on that please? (I couldn’t find any other way to contact anyone there.) I wouldn’t want to arrange to attend the conference and then find myself walking out before my favorite speaker arrives. Also, how early in the morning does the conference begin?I can’t speak for Kate, of course. But I can say with a high degree of certainty that she does “endorse porn”. It says as much in her twitter bio. “
Magical pink unicorn princess. Robots, law econ, pr0n. Intellectual property researcher at MIT @medialab.“I can also say with a high degree of certainty that she (and most all of the attendees) do support the right to marry anyone of any gender. While it’s not explicitly a talk topic, it’s a part of the larger conversation. I saw in your fb bio that you do not. “
I live vegan and support animal liberation, but I do NOT support gay rights or same-sex marriage.“There are certainly no political belief requirements to come to Farmhouse Conf. Anyone can attend, but gay bashing bigots tend not to fit in.
With regards to Kate’s talk. I’m not going to get into The Porn Talk with a stranger on the internet, because it’s far too nuanced and complex. Regardless of whether or not she or I or anyone “endorses porn”, porn exists. And Kate’s talk is about porn and technology.
You are certainly welcome to leave during Kate’s talk if you don’t want to hear her. I’m sure her talk will acknowledge the existence of porn.
Thanks
SbPS. The house email address is at the bottom of every page on the site. barn@farmhouse.la
PPS. Your twitter account @CatJoker seems like it’s either spam or has been hacked.
(Here’s twitter.com/catjoker at the time of the email, screenshot.)
Judith Shipstad responded in email:
Thanks for your reply. This is an event, and a venue, that will not have my support.
Have a gay, porny day.
Judith
And again, Judith Shipstad wrote:
P.S. If you’ve got porn and pro-gay going on at the old farmhouse, you might want to stop calling yourself “straightedge.” The Straightedge Movement would appreciate this courtesy.
My Twitter account looked fine to me, but thanks for the alert.
Judith
I decided to not reply to her anymore in email and instead to write this blog post.
So there you have it. Judith Shipstad of Los Gatos, California is The Homophobe of the Day.
Mixtape #2 – Let’s call this “Mostly Hardcore”
I made another mixtape. It’s been sitting my iTunes sidebar for months now. It started as making a mixtape of hardcore bands that I thought a friend (who’s mostly into metal) would like. And turned into hardcore-plus-other-things-still-kinda-close-to-hardcore.
This one runs 1 hour, 29 minutes, 18 seconds long.
36:0:30:33
36 days. 0 hours. 30 minutes. 33 seconds.
That’s how long it took from crazy idea blog post to offer letters.
I was inspired by
Ryan Davis’ blog post
a few years ago that (secretly) announced that
he,
Eric Hodel,
Aaron Patterson
and John Barnette
were available for hire. They didn’t last long.
8:05:24:52 long.
Simply put, I said:
I’ve put together a cross-functional product team of technical people. We’re available for hire as a package deal.
The team includes:
- Team Lead / Product Manager (Me)
- Brand and UI Designer (Photoshop / Illustrator)
- Front End Developer (HTML / CSS)
- iOS / Ruby Programmer
- JavaScript / Ruby Programmer
I didn’t name names. And that was a turn off for some potential enquirers.
But I couldn’t yet. Two of them still had jobs.
I didn’t name names then, but I can now.
- Me
- Software Engineering Manager
- Heather Peterson
- UI/UX Designer
- Chad Crissman
- Front End Software Engineer
- Jessica Suttles
- Software Engineer
- Bookis Smuin
- Software Engineer
I’ve worked with all four people in the past few years. They’re all top notch.
I couldn’t be happier to call them my team. This will be the first time that I’m
going to leading people, instead of pushing pixels, angle brackets or codes.
I’m excited for the next new challenge.
We started from a ridiculous premise: let’s pick our coworkers first.
And from there: let’s pick the role we’ll fill as a team.
I shopped us around as a package deal with the goal building a new product from
scratch as a team of us five.
A little over a month after that blog post, we were signed on to start in September at
G5 to do just that.
To the next adventure…
I Have A Team. Hire Us.
I’ve put together a cross-functional product team of technical people. We’re available for hire as a package deal.
The team includes:
- Team Lead / Product Manager (Me)
- Brand and UI Designer (Photoshop / Illustrator)
- Front End Developer (HTML / CSS)
- iOS / Ruby Programmer
- JavaScript / Ruby Programmer
I can’t name names as some of the team still have jobs, but if you know me you probably know some or all of them. You know me and my work. They’re all top notch at what they do.
You can hire us in to build a product that you already have planned or just set us loose. (We have a whole list of product ideas that we’d like to build.) We’re looking for full-time not contract work.
So Long and Thanks for All the Shoes
At the end of 2010, I quit AT Interactive. I wrote a goodbye email to co-workers and friends at the company. I published that goodbye letter here on this site. Continuing this theme, my time at Engine Yard ended at the end of 2011. I wrote a goodbye letter to them too. Here it is.
My dearest Engine Yarders.
This time last year, I had just quit working at AT Interactive vowing to never work for anyone else again. Instead, I would finally take My Dreams™ off the back burner to take a shot at them. Shortly there after, I got seduced by VMware to help them launch Cloud Foundry. After just a few minutes there, I re-remembered that me and BIG companies don’t mix.
And then there was Dr Nic. He gave me what I had tried to get for years: working on Rubinius evangelism. For the past several months, we’ve succeeded at raising the profile of rbx in the Ruby community from an interesting toy project to a serious contender that everyone’s talking about. When Rubinius 2.0 drops, it’ll really shake the Ruby world up.
Evan and Brian are the real reason that Rubinius is as awesome as it is. I just got to tell people about it. On top of everything else, I’m super grateful for the support from EY to give users, fans and friends so many and such quality shirts and stickers. Everyone always loves them so.
Same goes for all the JRuby swag. Really quality stuff. Several times people told me that these were the best shirts they owned. Not bad, Engine Yard. Not bad at all.
I’m especially stoked that JRuby and Rubinius are first class citizens in EY stack. Kudos to everyone that played a role in making that happen, both socially in the company and technically in the infrastructure.
So, it’s the end of another solar revolution starting from some arbitrary point in linear time. It’s when we get all kinds of self reflective and make bold proclamations about who we are, who we’ll become and what we’ll do with the next revolution.
Here’s mine:
No more work on other people’s dreams at the expense of my own.
To that end, I’ll be spending the next foreseeable future working on:
If you know about those things, cool. If not, I’ll tell you offline or in person if you care to know. Both are software projects focused on data ownership.
Also, I’m starting an open source organization with a few others called:
Open Source Offsets. Its purpose will be to raise money to hire people to work on open source projects full-time. I’m excited. More about that soon.
Twenty eleven has been a kind of crazy year.
Twenty twelve is going to be totally amazeballs.
There are so many super smart and incredibly talented people at EY. I wish you all the best, as a company and as individuals. As friends are made and lost I always look back smiling never moved by struggle fate or cost.
I’m forever reachable at:
(801) 898-9481
veganstraightedge@gmail.com
http://iamshane.com
@veganstraightedgeDon’t be a stranger.
XOXO SB
Talk Proposal for Quit Your Job. Srsly.
I recently gave a talk at LA Ruby Conf called “Quit Your Job. Srsly.“. I would like to present it a few more more conferences. After giving it once live, I’ve realized that there are a few places it can be refined. Like all performances, it’s a living changing thing. I want to give it a chance to evolve a bit, to breath and stretch its legs.
If you’d like to have me out to speak at your conference, email me at veganstraightedge@gmail.com. At least one person thought it was “keynote quality“. I’m open to keynote possibilities, but not just keynotes. Thirty minutes for a normal talk slot is good by me too.
Here’s the talk proposal.
Quit Your Job. Srsly.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”– Jeff Hammerbacher http://buswk.co/eCdfFpWe can rewrite Jeff’s quote like this:
“The best programmers of my generation are working on solutions to problems that do not matter.”The crux of it is you are better than your job. You have a greater potential than your job is realizing. You can do more than you think. You are worth more than your job is paying you. You can make the world a better place.
You don’t have to be limited to building mobile/geo-based/social/ad-driven/gamification-influence/fully-buzzword-compliant bullshit to get people to buy things they don’t need while giving up more privacy to corporations and becoming less happy in the process.
You’re better than that. Quit your job. Build your dreams. Change the world. Srsly.
New Speaker Bio
I’ve never put much effort into my speaker bio when submitting a talk proposal to conferences and meetups. I usually just slap one together. Last night I wrote up this little thing. I’m open to edits, suggestions, rewrites, etc. Get wild.
Shane is still vegan, still straightedge. Starting in the Mosaic days and for over half of his life he has been making websites for fun and for profit. The shipping of Rails 1.0 and the 15 minute blog screencast initiated his love affair with Ruby. Through building websites, designing logos, tshirts and stickers he has contributed to many open source projects (Rubinius, Nokogiri, JRuby, Cloud Foundry, et al). Shane can currently be found employed by His Own Damn Self avoiding a job™ like the plague. He is concentrating on the building of two big open source web projects focused on personal data ownership striving to transform culture.
