Had a really great show last night at Johnny V’s. It was my first time singing, and so it was really great that we got to have a good time. I’m really grateful for everyone who came out to support us.
The best part of the show was hanging around afterward meeting the guys in the other bands. NotForNothing played a cool set mixing a female lead vocal and rap. They had a nice groove. BellaBella tore up the house for the closer with absolutely solid bass lines and a supercharged vocals.
I have so many thoughts about the show and how it went:
- The quality of the music wasnt the best and there were a few train wrecks, but I think we made up for it by having a good time. Would be good to practice more.
- Having the props to mess around with before the show was a great idea, mostly because it kept me distracted and kept me from getting nervous. It also gave people a reason to talk to us.
- The bands after us really got more movement with a little funk sound. I think we should try to incorporate this into some songs.
- Had some feedback with the vocal fx/mic combo which was a little annoying, but tolerable.
- I really think that singing three songs is close to the right number for now. John and John’s vocals were pretty good, and it’s just good to mix it up a little.
The gift
Above all the biggest difference in this show was that I wasn’t that nervous because I wasn’t so worried about trying to impress everyone. Last year I was so new at this that I wanted everything to be perfect so people would be into the performance because I wanted them to like me. I think the biggest difference is that this year I have Anne, and she loves me already, so it doesn’t really matter what other people think. That kind of support is so empowering and so rare that I feel like I’m really lucky. Thanks so much baby - I love you!!! (just in case you ever read this 
)
The Focus of a Show
There’s actually a really valuable lesson here for all of life. I started playing music because music tapped into all of these feelings that were buried inside me, and it was a way to connect with the part of my self that didn’t really have a voice. The songs that came out of that period were a sort of coming out - me saying what I couldn’t really say, and a lot of the material was aggressive and dark. All the songs we’re like “hey, look at me, I’m so [sad/angry/frustrated]“. It’s really just a way to get attention.
I don’t really feel this way about life anymore, I feel like I’m finally figuring things out because of Anne. One of the great things about being loved is that I can change the direction of the love arrow. Instead of making the show about trying to get love and attention from people at the show, I can make it about sharing the gift of love that I’ve been given. How awesome is that?!!!
So now the goal for me is to see if we can get people to let loose and dance.
(Photos courtesy of Flavian Vasile.)
Because you have been down there Neo, you know that road, you know exactly where it ends.
-Trinity, The Matrix
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. …Many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
-Morhpeus, The Matrix
I’m working on a project now in journalism and it’s a very interesting study in team dynamics and motivation. We have a large group of seven really bright people on the team and there are a lot of ideas competing for attention.
Since I pitched the original concept for the team project I kind of got selected as informal project manager. The management style I’m experimenting with is getting people to come up with their own ideas and run with them. On two occasions I’ve noticed a tendency for people to try to give other people direction, which results in the ’subordinate’ person feeling trod upon or pissed off.
The theme of escaping mindless drudgery is a popular one in films like the Matrix, but it even works its way into books like ‘The Four Agreements’. Most of us know what it’s like to be Neo at the beginning of the Matrix - facing a dead-end job which we probably wouldn’t choose but for necessity.
The funny thing is that this system of drudgery is built collectively by all of us. When we gaze through the clerk at the checkout stand or ignore people passing on the street, we’re being Agent Smith.
We had a visit from Chris O’Brien of the Mercury News today, and it was very insightful. He talked mostly about the efforts they are making to transform the way the newspaper works, with lots of slides showing practices at Ideo and other new newsrooms around the globe.
As I was listening to this I picked out a couple big pain points:
- Newspapers are saddled with debt from acquisitions, which puts them at a competetive disadvantage with newer media. They are also weighed down with union contracts and physical capital that isn’t an asset today. It seems clear that a new player that isn’t hemmed in by old commitments and rules will destroy these older organizations in a few years.
- In my view it’s not the internet that is hurting the Mercury as much as a combination of the internet and CNN. US Newpaper circulation actually peaked in the eighties, well before the advent of the browser.
- Print side advertising dollars are still 10x what online ads are. It now seems more likely to me that print rates will gradually decline to current internet rates. This represents a problem for the newspaper business, who have lost their oligopoly on information, but it is a boon for advertisers who now can narrow-cast their message to particular users, track which users receive that message, and know exactly where their advertising dollars are going.
Let’s stop lamenting the decline of traditional newspapers and figure out how to do something completely new.
Who wins in the new information economy:
- CNN
- Google
- The Daily Show (News as entertainment)
- Thousands of bloggers
And oh yes, readers…
Ok - this kind of stuff is really boring to most people, but I’m just writing it down because I’m going to forget it.
During server migratation, symbolic links stopped working. The solution here was to set the open_basedir in php, which can be done in the vhosts.conf file. It seems that the path name needs to be enclosed in double quotes to work.
Two hours gone for this stupid problem!@#(*$&)@#($*!!!
Just finished reading the Four Agreements by Manuel Ruiz. It’s a nice short book. In case you haven’t read it, the four agreements are:
- Be impeccable with your word
- Never take anything personally. (I liked this one best.)
- Dont make assumptions
- Always do your best
The book has a couple big concepts that are worth remembering:
- “The Dream of the Planet” (miyote) is the set of beliefs that everyone has that we learn after birth. The dream of the planet is described as being a hostile, arbitrary set of rules that we often feel in conflict with.
- Judge/Victim: Inside our selves we carry with us a “Judge” and a “Victim”. The judge is an internal voice which is essentially a copy of discipline and punishment handed out by our parents when we were young, and the Victim is the part of us that suffers this. One of the purposes of the four agreements is to get away from the influence of the Judge so we can live our own authentic dream.
- The Angel of Death: Facing death allows us to be ourselves, because we just don’t have the time to try to please everyone else.
(more…)
I’ve been ruminating on a system of note names that copies solfege, but is easier to remember for english speakers and solves the problem that notes like “C-sharp” take too long to say when reading scales.
There are two systems: one for note names and one for scale degrees.
Note Names:
The basic idea is that sharp notes end with the “ar” sound and flat notes end with the “ad” sound. (”ad” is easier to say than “at”.)
- A ar ad
- B bar(really C) bad
- C car cad
- D dar dad
- E er(really F) ed
- F far fad
- G gar gad
Scale Degrees:
Same system, but minor intervals, diminished and augmented intervals. Flat intervals use the open “ah” sound.
- One
- Two - tad(flat 2), tar(#2)
- Three - thray, thra
- Four - fay, far, forg (aug 4th)
- Tri (for tritone),
- Five - fav, fige (augmented)
- Six - sax, sig(augmented)
- Seven (sev) - sav(flat 7)
- Eight (could be one)
A natural minor key would read “one, two, thray, four, five, sax, sav, eight”.
Where’s the Innovation in Business Models?
Chris O’Brien
“Last Friday morning, I was one of many Mercury News employees who carefully watched their phone for two hours waiting to see if they got a call informing them their career was done. And make no mistake: In this day and age, getting fired from a newspaper for most people means your journalism career is finished.
What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.”
Citizen Huff
“Success on the Web is defined by spotting niches and serving them well,” said Micah L. Sifry, the editor of the blog TechPresident.com. “Will people go to The Huffington Post for great sports blogging? They’re certainly not going to go see what Arianna says about opening day,” he added.
A number of people have ungracefully departed in the past year, a situation Mr. Lerer attributed to the difficulty in transforming “old media” employees.
The site has other challenges. Despite its number of visitors, it still has a high “bounce rate,” referring to users who visit one page and then leave the site. Drudge still records seven times the monthly page views of The Huffington Post, meaning that readers are frequently refreshing for the latest headlines.
A Radio Host Tries His Voice on Television
I’m a big fan of his radio show:
“We want to do people on a human scale without a lot of shouting,” Mr. Glass said. “The subjects don’t need to be exemplars of some national trend. They can just be people with interesting stories.”
joel
Notes from Guy Kawasaki’s talk at our class:
Future business model - one or two guys sitting in their underwear cashing advertising checks. Example business:
Online feed aggregation/bookmarking. Easier than google reader.
Trick question from VCs - why is this market defensible?
- tech no, patents no - no resources to litigate
- good answer is: we’re going to work harder, fix it faster, relationships
- defense is critical mass before anyone else
Key to sucess for business is the quality of the implementation of the idea.
Entrepreneurship is all about making the playing field unfair.
Promotions: advertising through rss feed readers.
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Q: scale of internet business - # employees/viewership per employee
Two guys in a garage: 100k pageviews /day 3M/month 250k/yr with high CPM
With full business: 1M per day
The aim at these small scales is to develop an interesting property and be bought out by a bigger player with a complementary organization.
Big ideas:
- The media revolution of the internet is in the same stage as TV was in the early 50’s just at the beginning of TV’s adoption.
- Erik Barnouw
- Example about remote controls - period of experimentation
- Example about the printing press and how trashy novels were one of the first applications of the printing press
- Blog is not sustainable (pampleteering)
Quips:
- “Venture capitalists sleep like babies - they wake up after 2 hours and cry”
- “Failing forward”
- “One sure fire way to tell if something is going to take off is that it alarms parents.”
- “Most stuff on the web still looks like a page”
- Three things determine success - who you know, how fun you are to work with, top quality work
- Any company that is a control freak fails
![agent-smith-standing-in-rain-matrix-revolutions[1].jpg](http://www.zonalibre.org/blog/moe/archives/imagenes/agent-smith-standing-in-rain-matrix-revolutions[1].jpg)