Other Interests

Belfast Murals & Graffiti

Extramural Activity — "Life In Belfast As Represented On Its Walls", a blog of murals, boards, stencils, street art, graffiti, and flyers tracking the political situation and life generally. It also contains an 11-part Visual History and a Murals Map of the murals, past and present, in the north-east of Ireland.

Disc Golf

Find a course near you at Disc Golf Course Review or UDisc.

A brief video explaining the game.

Music

For twelve years (1994-2006) I ran OLGA - the On-Line Guitar Archive. OLGA was a thing of great beauty, dating back to the pre-web internet (1992) and Usenet. It was a communal, entirely volunteer, money-free, endeavor. (Here's a screen-shot of the home page from 2005.) It was mirrored around the world (here's a list from the mid-90s) and so successful that it was forced out of existence by music publishers. (Here's the one that broke the camel's back.) But you can still find the OLGA files on-line: the archive's 33,000 files at the time of its shuttering are the basis of every tab archive on the web.

My own favorite music is roots rock and alternative country, which express, um, the desire of urban-dwellers to resist the anonymity of economic atomism. Whatever that is. Check out the YouTube channels of Kathleen Edwards, Tim Easton, Richmond Fontaine, Slaid Cleaves, Steve Earle, Tift Merritt, Gillian Welch, Ryan Adams, Adam Carroll, James McMurtry. You can see what I've been listening to on my Last.fm page

While at the University of Puget Sound I had a radio show called "The Open Road". Here is a picture of me in the booth at KUPS Tacoma. That sweater will be back in style any year now ...