This is the bluegill that Bill accidentally gigged when reeling his line in last Saturday.

I've spent my free time over the past couple of days hacking away on my current project-slash-obsession and thus I've been doing a lot of reading up on microcontrollers, or at least the basics of them.  Knowing nothing about them as a technology or about sound synthesis for that matter, I find myself having to start from first principles, which are never as easy as they seem to grasp no matter how much experience you have under your belt.  I'm trying to design a synthesizer coming at it as a code jockey as well as a musician (or one-time musician …

This Saturday past, the Pentagon took a major leap sideways when it had to distance itself from one of its senior officials, one Charles "Cully" Stimson. Stimson went on the record during a radio interview as saying that US companies should boycott legal firms that employ lawyers who represent Guantanamo Bay detainees that are US citizens. He then went on to recite a list of a dozen legal firms that should be boycotted. When last I checked, if you were a US citizen you had the right to legal representation under the Sixth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Lieutenant …