About this site:
This site is first and foremost the online portfolio of Michael Crane (that’s me). In addition, it holds my blog, and some other amusing items.
I’m always interested in doing freelance work. My specialties lie in the areas of pagination, document creation, writing (from technical to creative and most things in between) and graphic design. I also do web development and calligraphy on a per-project basis (if it’s out of my league, I can help you find someone who can assist you). Please feel free to contact me with any questions or for more information regarding my work. To see samples, take a look through my portfolio .
Today’s Mighty Oak by Michael Crane is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Communities:
Some favorite blog posts:
My blog is a personal blog, it doesn’t necessarily have a set topic. However, the general rule is that the title will not relate to what I write about. I have a vast quote file and pull my post titles from there. Here are a couple of my favorite posts, they should give you an idea about my writing style here on my blog:
- You were right in front of me-a mask of silence
- I smile because I have no idea what’s going on
- in the words of FMG, “i’m off to “eff” the ineffable”
- Mike’s 2008 Election Wrap-up
- Now I went to public school, tell me again, why did Japan start the Civil War with us?
- None of us are free until all of us are free
- And truth makes a better man
Recurring Posts
In the fashion of other blogs that I love, I have a few posts that recur each year:
- Good Friday – Because you have to be able to laugh with your religion
- Stonewall – Because I’m proud that I’ve survived
- Remember, remember – Because ideas have power
About me:
I’m very laid back and find pleasure in simple things (also things that are shiny). And now, some bullet points:
- My favorite philospher is Socrates, although I do like a variety, including Hume and Augustine.
- I look good in antlers, or so I’ve been told.
- I love the Myst series of games as well as its spin-off, Myst Online: URU Live.
- I am a certified Scuba diver.
- I love reading, a lot. I read multiple books at once, or else I get confused. And I understand that that makes no sense, I’ve accepted that fact.
- I enjoy odd music, specifically movie/game scores and instrumental music. A tangent: I usually have a soundtrack playing in my head, as if I’m in a movie, although that music alternates between instrumental and garage band rock.
- I keep list of movies that I haven’t seen so I can someday rent them (right now it’s about two pages long).
- I love my AP styleguide.
- I am good at setting up canvas tents, a skill I acquired by working for the Boy Scouts at a summer camp for eleven years, where I became part of the freedom pit crew and everyone really did work for me.
- I spread myself thin senior year, but for good causes (running the campus newspaper, one nationally-recognized retreat, Scouting U and the Ad Club, as well as working with another retreat team, Orientation, PRSSA and three fraternities). While I was able to keep my grades up, I didn’t have much of a social life outside of meetings, it reminded me a bit (in a backwards way I guess) of Bellah’s lament about the decline of civic membership in his work, “Habits of the Heart.” Not that I’m complaining, if I had the opportunity to go back, I wouldn’t change much, just musing I suppose.
More often than not, Mike can be found doing something outside or being distracted by something shiny. Easily distracted and always looking to experience new things, no matter how mundane, Mike’s writing is sometimes irreverent, oftentimes seemingly irrelevant. Mike enjoys camping, scuba diving, geocaching, reading, strange music, even stranger television and jumbo paper clips. Mike is a firm believer in the power of web 2.0 and runs and contributes to a multitude of websites scattered across the internet. Oh yeah, Mike sometimes writes in the third person.
