maetl . aka mark rickerby

About

Mark Rickerby is a programmer-artist and writer in Berlin.

This website is a journal, notebook, sketchpad, portfolio and channel to broadcast news about works in progress, things I'm thinking about, places I’m exploring, and various excursions into the giant apocalypse of information otherwise known as the world-wide-web.

The information contained in this vesicle is a wide tab sweep of links, stories, popular ideas that strike my attention, and thoughts on philosophy, technology and society.

Software and Web Design

My Design Portfolio and Technical Resumé contain highlights of projects I have worked on over the past few years.

Open source projects: SilverStripe, SimpleTest

Writing

I’m currently working on an e-book about parsing. Contact me if you are interested in reviewing a preview copy. Follow this page for further announcements about the project.

Music

I do freestyle rap performances and record music appearing as Maxwell Sparks.

Contact

You should follow me on Twitter.

You can email me at me@maetl.net.

What’s a maetl then eh?

maetl was always the name that I used on online forums and the like. It came about in the time that I was working for The package in Wellington, and seemed to take on a life of it's own the more I used it.

The word itself originates from Autechre's debut album Incunabula, a naïve mathematical masterpiece of early 90's electronica. Apparently the track was named when Autechre were in the studio calling each other ‘mate’ in a silly voice. There's also a typeface named maetl, designed by the legendary Mike Cina.

Attention clustering

I have been collecting personal attention data with this website since 2004. Recently, I started experimenting with different ways of introspecting the relationships of all this linked information.