In the first post of my new Essential Copywriting series, I talk about rules: rules that govern rules, the rules you’ve made for yourself, and the rules others will expect you to follow.

The ring modulator in the 2600/TTSH can be DC coupled, so you can use it as a VCA for control voltages with the switch in the DC position. You probably won’t be using the ring modulator in every patch, and that means you often have a spare VCA for other interesting and useful duties.

If you learn one thing from this article it should be back up your data – all of it, frequently and redundantly. Or maybe, if you find life kind of boring, and you have lots of spare time on your hands, don’t. Be like Inspector Clouseau, waiting for your man Kato to jump you when you get home, just to keep yourself sharp.

Stephen Jay Gould posited that evolution isn’t as gradual a process as people often imagine it to have been, that in fact it is more like a series of plateaus punctuated by dramatic leaps. I’ve been meaning to redesign this site for over a year now, and have hashed together a few designs, explored what feels like hundreds of existing templates, and even briefly toyed with the idea of switching to another CMS platform.

Lest you think there’s nothing going on here behind the scenes at the vast steve of the web internet empire™, in celebration of the fact that I got myself an iPhone last year I’ve mobile-enabled SteveCastellano.com – surf here on your smartphone and you will be automatically redirected to the mobile theme, which should look something like this picture.

We saw Penn & Teller for the first time in Vegas this past August, and because we also had tickets to their Toronto show in November they were on my mind when I was trying to decide what to carve for this year’s pumpkin. Of course the project called for two this year, and my task was further complicated by having chosen slightly smaller than usual pumpkins.

Dear Steve Castellano,

Thank you for using Waste Management’s Bagster® Dumpster in a Bag®. To continually improve our services, Waste Management would like to hear from you to evaluate our performance.

Google recently added an instant sidebar option that allows me to import a list of my favourite reader articles into a WordPress widget, which you should now see in the right margin, under the heading “News I read.”

The links page on this site dates back to days of yore. It was originally created because my bookmarks menu was getting unwieldy, and it stayed up for as long…

I actually had a pretty good weekend and I’ll tell you all about it soon, but first here’s some cold, ugly reality.

The latest bad news about the Gulf oil spill comes via @ebertchicago. Have a look at an animated simulation of a satellite’s eye view of the Gulf spill from April 22 to May 3.

If it makes you feel any better, you can blame it on Dick Cheney. I’m guessing it won’t though.