Chris L Keller ...

How much time and effort should be spent on intake, on inbound messages, on absorbing data…

and how much time and effort should be invested in output, in creating something new.

— Seth Godin

It’s fitting that on the first day of a new job, I should find a message that says to stop putting off creating content.

Perhaps the thing I am most excited for as I advance and begin a new phase in my career is that I will be gaining more time in my day.

After spending the last five years driving a total of 72 miles to and from work through Chicago — an average one-way trip of 55 minutes — I now work a whopping 2.2 miles away.

By my account, that’s a 10.5 hours per week that I haven’t had for more than five years. Gotta use it constructively.

I put this little number together months ago and never really did anything with it, so why not post it here.

I named it “Slippy.” It came about thanks to some regular jam sessions with Ben Haley on guitar and Peter Torres on the turntables.

Doing what any good editor does, I spliced some things out here and there, and re-arranged some other things. I think I rigged a Guitar Hero guitar to layer some of the transition. Some of the sample levels are lost and inaudible, but maybe that’s a good thing. 

Let me know what you think.

Slippy.mp3 Listen on Posterous

So of my goals for 2011, I managed to work on two of them this weekend as part of the same project: Doing something with all the old writing I have laying around — an annual goal, believe me — and learning to do more with javascript besides make an alert box pop up saying you clicked something.

I think I did ok with this presentation for The Raw Man, which I wrote back in 2002 after reading some Hemingway short stories.

Now I will never — obviously — reach the man’s ability, but I wanted to convey mood and tone with stunted dialogue and limited imagery.

With the coding part of it, I figured out a couple jQuery functions and went to town. The scripting is nowhere near as efficient as it could be.

The click function runs seven or eight times based on each specific ID, but it’s what I could do with the time I had. Figuring out how to traverse the div structure to isolate each ID and then run when $(this) happens within one tight function will have to come another time.

But all said, I identified a project that I could finish, and saw it through despite knowing I could make it better. That is a step for me and my rampant expectations of things.

Now, onto Packers football. Payback time for 2003 at Lambeau and 4th and 26.

Thanks to Rebecca Wensel for passing this along…

½ stick butter

½ loaf of bread

½ sweet onion

2 stalk celery

mushrooms to taste

½ tube of meat (breakfast sausage in the tube)

1 egg

1 cup chicken broth

Seasonings: pepper, garlic powder, poultry seasoning, celery salt – all to taste.

Melt butter in skillet, soften celery & onion then add mushrooms. Remove from heat and put in separate bowl then brown meat in same skillet. Combine in same bowl.

Cube bread  (to dry breadput on oven rack at 225 for about an hour), add the seasoning mix you just made, add egg and gradually add broth. Stir and mix everything up. 

Put in muffin tin and dot with butter (or a quick pump from the spray butter) and cook at 350 degrees for 45 to 50 minutes.

Each muffin should have a crispy top, if it is still too squishy after 45 minutes leave in and just watch until top is browned.

Top with gravy and reheat for about 5 minutes.

Makes 12 muffins.

In no particular order…

• Write a javascript function from scratch — ok maybe using google — to create something other than an alert box.
• Be able to play guitar and sing “Long Road,” “Heart of Gold,” or “Gloria” at the same time in a voice that I can be proud of.
• Earn one freelance gig redesigning someone’s wordpress site.
• Write something once a week. Anything.
• Do something will all my old writing.
• Quit smoking…while I am at the office. Outside the office will come in 2012.
• Record one spoken word piece.