#seth barkan

[sethbarkan]

Ermagerd: I love my little power planer. For those of us who don’t have the money, the space, or the workload necessity for a frigging planer or joiner (I don’t even have space for a table saw for fucksake; how am I gonna spend like $4k for a frigging planer and joiner), the slightly more affordable ($50) https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00OW5AJTG?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title handheld power planer is great for DIY/crafty alternative.

Here are three photos of the mini workbench I am working on. The first two, look at the far board (the one furthest from the camera): that board had a twist on the end of it that made the last 1/3rd look like a hump. 6 passes with the planer and see how flat it looks now.

The third pic is front ortho of the middle of the first board; notice how flat it looks?

Obviously, not gonna get perfectly squared lumber this way, but for this little bench, I don’t need it perfectly squared, just close enough for jazz (it’s a mini workbench for Christ sake, not the moon landing), BUT: this would have been at least an hour of tedious sanding (belt or orbital, it still would have been brutal). I love my little power planer!

[sethbarkan]

Time for a brief rant about why FOSS rules and *nix based systems will pave over anything else

You know... I fucking love FOSS... never have to reinvent the wheel alone, always move the bar forward byhiwever massive or minuscule a measure, build, document (a little), share first, benefit from the insight of many thousands, provide the solution for many many many thousands who once had your question... after 18 years now, we're getting someplace: built the internet we did. Built your phone in more than a few and less than subtle ways... whatever you make (just like music or language or logic itself) isn't truly YOURS, but if you are jealous enough of credit or fearful enough of the fragility of your rights to an idea to refuse to already acknowledge that you're standing on the shoulders of many generations of giants just to read this sentence then chances are you're not just part of the problem, you ARE the problem... in that case YOU ARE the roadblock to any meaningful innovation (if you jealously and zealously and fearfully attempt to conceal and obfuscate and make secret whatever bauble you've built up in your tower of darkness)... the alternative is to (in ways most of which are invisible to the individual, but enormously impactful to the greater organism, especially over time and no matter how small the contribution) actually not solve a problem but to make LESS OF THE NUMBER OF PROBLEMS that have yet to be solved... and with this diminution of problems that haven't been solved or documented or discussed or even argued about (provided that such arguments are productive and not ego driven), each day sees ten or a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand minds whose day does not have to begin with reinventing the wheel from whole cloth but instead can start working on (once again in their own small and peicemeal ways, usually inadvertently) contributing to the knowledge base from which we are building the fulcrum that ultimately will allow us to topple ALL problems. Without FOSS, you are pissing in the wind; building SAND castles in the afternoon and deluding yourself into forgetting the fact that there is a tide. With FOSS we are better, faster, smarter, and more useful to the world than ANY proprietary secret undocumented walled garden of a project or a problem, because our work benefits actual understanding at the cumulative level. The answer to one question (however trivial) doesn't just answer one instance of that question, rather, it can answer the infinite number of times that question will be asked by all people from the present going forward; a thousand people who all have the same question doesn't just mean that there's ONE QUESTION; there are A THOUSAND UNITS OF THE SAME QUESTION. But if you answer it once and make that answer available to the world, you have answered a thousand questions.

[sethbarkan]

Super ultimate web-domain-name vengeance

My name is Seth "Fingers" Flynn Barkan, and has been both my professional and "real" name for the last ten years and change. When my second book was going to come out, someone urged me to register "sethbarkan.com." It was a busy time, but I remember checking (thinking the idea was lame) and finding the domain was already taken. This was pretty much fine with me; I never thought anyone would ever look "FOR ME AS CRITERIA BY NAME ONLY" (because, to my mind, that means you don't even need a search engine, because you already know what you're looking for/the actual name of the person who you - ostensibly - didn't even know you were actually searching for)... I was pleased to get whatever blue-wizard-based-url I got and used that.

Years go by.

My life (like so many others of my particular generation) had become a polyglot tapestry of multiple, simultaneous, demi-interwoven career paths, all occurring in parallel with each other. I was a musician, a journalist, a composer, a poet, a writer, an arranger, a musica preservationist, a podcaster (when it was neither easy or popular to be one), a visual artist, a stringer, and several other things in between. So the need for an umbrella domain became apparent to me; help my customers, clients, and employers find me, ideally at a url characterized by the name they would (hopefully) print on the check...

SethBarkan.com was still taken.

So... I created something like "fingersflynn.com" or whatever (because, when it's your name, it's... just hard to try to settle for secondary or tertiary depressing compromised domain extensions like "whateveryoureallywantedhere.biz"), and got by until this week.

Now, a full decade after my last major publication was sent off to the printers, it has become absolutely essential that I have my name as a domain name. Tonight, I searched again. It is still taken.

This time, I whoised sethbarkan.com, and thus, VENGEANCE HAS BECOME MINE:

A man named Peter Barkan owns the domain name that most closely defines who I am. I know that I have a distant cousin by that name, but am not close to him. The whois revealed that the company name was something like "The Barkan Companies," based out of Boston (which is not where I remember having any relatives, but I could be wrong or whatever)... 

For the entire duration of the internet in its modern iteration (to whit: as most people who read this now know it, not as the crazy hardcore difficult problem world it was when I was 12 and 13 in 1992) I have been unable to have my own fucking name as a ".com." I (whether rightly or wrongly, and discounting whatever reason this stranger may have for holding the domain, and whether or not he has been the person who has been preventing me for forever from having it)... regardless of these things, I assume that Messer Peter Barkan has been the obstacle against which I have been pitted for all these years...

So... Vengeance.

Thank you folks: I am now the new owner of peterbarkan.com for the forseeable eternity. He takes my name, I take his. MOOOHOOOHAHAHHAHA

[sethbarkan]

I will begin cross posting them here as of... nOW

[sethbarkan]

Premonitions of death, etc.

Had this utterly bizarre, twacked out moment today, sitting in all black, as if having just gotten off from playing at the frog or the steer... I was trying to assemble this stupid crazy kite - designed for sheer complexity, and for no other reason apart from that. This was this afternoon, after I had spent the day having hit, lost, hit, hit, lost, lost, hit, lost, and then lost again... It was a crazy shitshow. 

But, there I am, and I am alone in this wonderful park, and the kite (which I was determined to make functional) at my feet, on a Saturday afternoon, after all these runs of luck (EXTREME, here; absolutely statistically marvelously insanely impossible), and I remembered the hallucination I had experienced several nights before... I had seen (very clearly, at least, to my seasoned reckoning) death, hovering as if it were an aura, around a particular woman at the bar. It was so vivid (and I was so sober at the time) that I remarked of it discreetely amongst the bartenders and other staff (aka: my friends).

They were shocked somewhat at the vehemence with which I reported this experience (while simultaneously pleading for them to watch out for the Asian broad in the near-tearm). And then it hit me: maybe the hallucination was like a dream; maybe it wasn't the Asian broad that was going to die very soon, rather, perhaps it was me. 

And then this crazy luck. And then the empty park, 4:15 pm on a perfect Saturday afternoon. 

There was much more, but we'll stop there. Enough synchronicity for one day. BUT: i also found my will; it's in a black portfolio case and is handwritten on strathmore sketchpad paper. It's legit... I happened to find that (synchronisticially) the day after the major hallucination. 

"Get six gamblers to carry my coffin

six chorus girls to sing my song

put a JAAAAZZZ BAND on my tailgate

to raise hell as we ride along."