Last last year a number of industrial heavy hitters - Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Haujobb, Youth Code, and S4NtA_MU3rTE - came to San Francisco as The Alliance of Sound. We missed the first few bands due to traffic but arrived just in time to catch one of my favorites, Front Line Assembly whose work was a staple of my misspent youth's soundtrack. It was a joy to watch their retrotech-heavy visuals and hear their newer work live (along with a couple of old favorites). We stayed as long as we could, but I have to be honest the lot of us …

The state of the art of personal 3D printing is still in a state of flux. Mostly, we're still limited to variants of low-melting point plastics and we're still figuring out new and creative ways of making more complex shapes that are self-supporting to some extent. What isn't getting a whole lot of press right now are some industrial applications of this technology, some of which date back a good decade.

For example, a research team consisting of personnel from Monash University in Australia, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and Deakin University recently unveiled the world's first 3D …

Earlier this month Lyssa and I took the daughter of a good friend of ours to her first concert at the 9:30 Club in downtown DC. We decided that we wanted her first concert to be a memorable one, so we took her to see VNV Nation when their latest tour took them through our nation's capital. So, one evening, we hit up a local restaurant for dinner and then headed downtown, a remarkably short jaunt these days since the move.

Shortly after arriving I ran into Mike and Tara, two old friends of mine from a previous trip …

While talking with Lori-Beth at Spellbound last weekend she brought up something that had been bumping around in the back of my head for a while, which was that northern Virginia and Washington, DC had some great club nights for older folks - Spellbound, Midnight, Umlaut, what have you - but nothing for the younger folks who aren't of legal age (regardless of whether or not they want to drink). These days, it's harder to sneak into clubs when you're still in high school because most every club really does check ID these days. Not that I'd know or anything...

Starting at …

Who hasn't sampled The Exorcist 3 at least once for their music?

On Friday the 15th I turned 30.

I know that I didn't make a big deal out of it, and that wasn't out of any shame or wanting to keep things low-key as it was I've been really busy lately and didn't have time to post about it anywhere. The company I work for has pulled me from fieldwork for at least the next couple of months after what happened in Tuscaloosa. I've been moved to another project much closer to home and I spent all day Friday in the field with my cow-orkers getting stuff set up and running …