Stop Censorship

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Today is the day!

small http://t0inpaydayloans.com

While the House of Representatives discusses America’s first system for censoring the internet, sites everywhere are sending their users to contact Congress to stop this bill.

Click here to write Congress now!

Huge sites like Boing Boing, 4chan, Reddit, Mozilla (on the Firefox start page!) are participating, and more are joining fast. If you have a blog, a Tumblr page or a YouTube channel, black out your logo in protest. If you have a website you can also run a splash page asking your visitors to contact Congress.

Visit AmericanCensorship.org to write your representatives.

Joel Kehle

P.S. If you haven’t heard already, there’s a new bill in Congress called ‘SOPA’ that could pass *this month*. It would let the US government shut down websites, and jail users for posting harmless copyrighted clips to sites like YouTube or Tumblr. The bill would chill innovation, create huge liability for startups, and would set a terrible global precedent for government censorship of the internet. There’s a video at the link above if you’d like to learn more. After you take action, keep spreading the word!

Etymology of Quadratic Equation

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I’ve always wondered why an equation with a squared variable was called a quadratic equation. Since ‘quad’ means four in Latin, shouldn’t a quadratic equation have cubed variables? Also consider quadrilateral and quadrant: both involve four elements. In case this has been keeping you up at night, Wikipedia has the answer!

The adjective quadratic comes from the Latin word quadratum for square. A term like x2 is called a square in algebra because it is the area of a square with side x. Quadratum is the Latin word for square because a square has four sides.

Whew! Now I can sleep at night.

If I only had paid more attention in my Latin class in Gymnasium (but that’s another story…)

It’s Not Far to My Heart

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I’m pleased to finally have a my best song uploaded to the interwebs.

Click the link to listen to It’s Not Far to My Heart

In wrote this song in the early 90′s and recorded it over a weekend with the help of the masterful Fred Drake.

Listening to it brings back so many memories – Leaving Quorum Software in the middle of the day to walk around San Francisco and cement the song in my mind, hanging with Fred in the studio in Hollywood which had all the mythical and magical overtones of Francesca Lia Block’s Weeztie Bat, writing the song’s interlude during a dream… I’m very proud of this particular piece of work and feel exceedingly lucky to have spent a weekend recording with such a gifted and lovely musician.

Enjoy.

My 44th Birthday

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I turned 44 on Tuesday March 9th 2010.

Anthony and I were going to celebrate on the Saturday prior by going to dinner at our friend Lauren’s new restaurant on Highland, but Anthony was under the weather. A strong antibiotic was giving him and the infection a rough time. Instead we went to the Come On In Cafe for lunch, walked over and saw Crazy Heart at the arclight and then bought a copy of BioShock for the PS3. It’s an old and popular game, so we had to go to two different GameStops to purchase the game. The rest of the day was spent at home with Anthony napping will I got my geek on blowing monsters up in an underwater Ayn Rand fantasy gone very wrong. I’m not much of a first person shooter guy but the game conception was smart and the graphic design was evocative, ironic and beautiful.

On Sunday I finally opened my mail which includes two cards – one from my mom and one from my dad and Sylvia. Both had checks. It’s so funny that I’m old enough to have kids in college and my parents are sending me checks. I think I will always be their child no matter how old I get.

On Monday I started working out with a personal trainer at work. Yet another Qualcomm perk. Great trainer. Qualcomm gym. Very good rates. My birthday gift to myself. I need to invest some time on the machine. The trainer seems like a perfect fit. A guy named Gabriel who does free weights and yoga. He also trains people of all ages (up to the 80s) so he knows not to train me like a 20 year old. Exactly what I want right now.

On the actual birthday I was floored by the amount of Facebook love I was experiencing. So many well wishes! Work itself was fun. I got some great news (that I will discuss at another time.) After work I had a great cardio kick boxing class. For some reason the teacher played an “old” tape that had some of my favorite music: Lady Gaga, Pink, Katie Perry… It’s so funny to think hits from the spring of 2009 as old but that’s pop for you. I capped off the day by dining with Jopsy at Ono Sushi. The most excellent host Tony sat us at the sushi bar where chef Kato served his own choice of mouth watering sashimi, Mark made an equally delicious dirty sapphire martini (3 olives. Up.) with a birthday shot of his own devising thrown in for good measure. The staff at Ono is so cool! Since Jopys is lactose intolerant we passed on the ice cream and had frozen yogurt down the street. Not as high brow or hip but tasty nonetheless.

Later when asked how my day was going, I replied “The universe has been blowing copious amounts of rainbows and unicorns up my ass all day long. I like it! ”

Life is good.

Notes to Myself

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I changed the tagline for my blog today. Instead of “I wonder if I can make soup out of this” (which is a joke that only about three people will get), the tagline is “Notes to Myself”. I don’t consider myself “a blogger”. I don’t write with enough frequency and I’m not really writing for others. Instead I’m writing to remember. My partner Anthony and I both find that we are having trouble remembering what happened during “milestone” events in our life. What did we do for that anniversary? That birthday? New Years? With so many memories from my teens and twenties crystallized in my brain, its odd to find that my 30s are a blur… or at least not very well organized in my head. So enter the blog. It’s time to start writing little notes about events like anniversaries, birthdays and holidays. Yes – this could be called a diary but I also like to post things that I think are interesting at a particular point in time. I think we are living through an exciting period of history and it’s fun to document from my own point of view. So not quite a diary. More like notes to myself… which of course anyone is welcome to read.

Music Page

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I’ve added a music reference page to my site at http://www.kehle.com/music/ This is a reference page for all of the pop music that I’ve either been involved in creating or performing. Some of the recordings on this page were used for live performances and won’t contain a vocal track. I am putting the reference page up first but plan on writing blog entries to go with each of the bands. The reference page will link back to the blog postings for more detailed information about the songs.

Songs that I have written are “Escape with Me”, “Give it up to Rhythm” and “It’s Not Far to My Heart”*. All the other songs were written by other artist.

*due to technical details I can’t upload “It’s Not Far to My Heart” yet – which is a shame because it is my best work. As soon as I get the technical issue worked out, it will get a post of its own. In the meantime, enjoy the music.