Previously, he was a senior contributing writer at Spin Magazine, and has also written for such publications as The Washington Post, Blender, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, MTV Magazine, Complex, and Magnet.
After a brief tenure as Blender magazine's senior critic, in March 2006 she accepted a position as chief pop-music critic at the Los Angeles Times, where she succeeded Robert Hilburn.
The name is explained in this comment from the source code: "BassOmatic gets its name from an old Dan Aykroyd Saturday Night Live skit involving a blender and a whole fish. The BassOmatic algorithm does to data what the original BassOmatic did to the fish."
The trick is derived from a combination of the "Mc" in McGill and the word "twist"—twist had previously been introduced by Lance Mountain and Neil Blender, with their invention of the "Gay twist" (a mute-grab, fakie 360-degree aerial).
The film was funded by the Blender Foundation, donations from the Blender community, pre-sales of the film's DVD, the Netherlands Film Fund and Cinegrid Amsterdam.
He is known as the original creator of the open-source 3D creation suite Blender and Traces (An Amiga ray tracer which was the forerunner of Blender), he is also known as the chairman of the Blender Foundation, and for pioneering large scale open-content projects.