RasterWeb!
Inspiration can come from the past. Something that inspired you more than 20 years ago can return to inspire you all over again. Music + Words. Those two things combined can be the most powerful thing in your life. And I’m thankful for that.
See Also Verbal Assault (Affected Me!)
Sam McPheeters and I are the same age. We didn’t know each other growing up. He grew up in New York, and I grew up in Wisconsin. We didn’t meet until about 1991, when his band was on tour and came through town, and then again when my band was on tour and we played together in D.C. It was a good show… A memorable show.
There was no World Wide Web back then… I didn’t connect with Sam through some social networking site. We met people in person, bands went on tour, people traveled, we published zines (think blogging, but on paper, delivered by the USPS.) And most of all, we had some degree of privacy. I mean, if you wanted someone in New York to see a picture of something, you had to get some film developed, and either mail it to them, or put it in your zine and hope that somehow they got a copy. It’s weird to think publishing was to a small, select audience, instead of, you know, to the entire world, as it is now.
So Sam and I are of the age where all the stupid stuff we did in our youth was not put up for all to see on Facebook, or Twitpic or some other web site where in less than 5 minutes your embarrassment can be shown to the world. (At least, it wasn’t then, but thanks to the future, it could show up, right now, today!)
In Screwed by Search Sam touches on the topic:
I know now that there is an angry, overweight black woman lurking over everything I do. Her name is The Internet, and she will not rest until every self-inflicted pie strike has been chronicled, archived, and exposed for all to see.
We didn’t grow up online, but we’re here now, and we’re the last generation who can say that. Kids today are growing up used to living their lives online. It’s completely normal. In fact, when I met a college kid a few months back who didn’t use Facebook, everyone thought he was a weirdo.
It’s obviously your destiny. What can you do besides accept it?
I love Last.fm. I love music, and I love data, so it makes sense. Last.fm, for you unhep cats out there, allows you to keep a log of what you listen to by “scrobbling” your music – that is – it submits the info about the songs you listen to the Last.fm web site via various bits of software. There’s scrobbling clients that work with iTunes, and your iPod, and your iPhone, and other things that don’t start with ‘i’ or come from Apple. (Oh, I’m rasterweb at Last.fm)
It’s interesting to see what I listen to, and who my top artists are, and all that jazz that comes with logging data… charts, graphs, etc. Fun stuff!
But as you’ve seen, I’ve been on a kick lately to pull all that data back to my own site. (See Also: Scuttle rides again!, Tweet Nest: Archive Your Tweets, Data goes in, Data comes out., Reclaim What’s Yours… Take Back Your Data!) So I figured it was time to get the data I’ve been feeding into Last.fm since 2006 back to me, and back to my own site…. thusly “Heard” was born.
Heard is a bit of PHP code I whipped up which uses the Last.fm API to pull my scrobbled data back to my own site and stuff it into MySQL, and from there it simply displays the data. Once again, this is my insurance policy. If Last.fm goes down, disappears, loses all it’s data, or something else happens, I’ve at least got an archive of all of my listening data.
Last.fm is a great service, and they’ve provided a great API that makes doing these sorts of things possible, and I thank them for that.
So Heard is really just some hacked together code right now… I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few hours on it, but it is functional, and syncs data once per hour. Once I implement all the ideas I have for ways to improve it, I’ll upgrade my version, and think about releasing some code if there is any interest in it. I’m a pretty poor PHP programmer, but I’m dangerous enough to build simple things. If someone else loves this idea and wants to run with it, let me know, and I’ll share whatever I can.
And yes, the design (or lack of design) of Heard is minimalist to say the least. In one part it pays homage to Last.fm’s display of data, and in another part, I didn’t want to get too caught up in the look at this point, but I do have some plans for later.
(And one more thing: Thanks goes out to Pixis Creative for doing a bit of CSS debugging for me.)
Update: The code for Heard is on GitHub. I’d love if people smarter than myself found ways to make it better.
This is a Music Video for the “This Time Tomorrow” project, which is helping raise money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to help find a cure for blood cancers. I worked on building the set, preliminary lighting, and served as Assistant Camera and DIT. We shot it on our RED ONE at the Z2 studio in Pewaukee, Wisconsin.
Find out more about This Time Tomorrow at ThisTimeTomorrow.org
Sorry folks, No RPM Challenge this year. But honestly, saying “no” this year was more difficult than saying “yes” two years ago, and I didn’t actually officially say “no” until February 28th.
See, I was really looking forward to recording an album in February. I was looking forward to it months ago, and in December, and even in January, but once February hit, it wasn’t looking good.
2008 was easy, I’d just fire up GarageBand, find some drum loops, grab the guitar and bass, and a few hours later, I’d have a song done. I did 10 songs in 2008. 2009 was harder, and I wanted to set my standards a bit higher, but I did manage to do 5 songs, which came out to 35 minutes of music. I was happy with what I produced within the time limits. 2009 was a bit harder as far as getting the time to do it all as well. I think my final mixing session was like 5+ hours straight, and ended after 2am.
Still, I was looking forward to doing it again in 2010, especially since I wanted to dig into Logic 9 a bit more. (Amp Designer and Pedalboard!) But.. and everyone I know has a big but… it just couldn’t happen. Between work, work, work, and the Winter Olympics, and family time, and oh, more work, it just didn’t happen.
I did record a bit, but not enough. Last year I joked that for 2010 I’d just record 1 single 35 minute long song, along the lines of Sleep’s Dopesmoker, but even that couldn’t happen.
I also made the mistake of upgrading to Snow Leopard, which broke my FireWire audio input for two days. So I put in probably 3 or 4 hours fixing that so I could record, instead of actually recording, so by the time I got it working, I had no time to record. The whole month sort of went like that. Even though the Doctor (who doesn’t really appreciate the music I make, but supports me nonetheless) was very supportive. Still didn’t happen. I finally got down to the last weekend of the month, and thought “Hey, I’ve got 2 days, I can do it!” but I ended up spending Saturday driving all over Waukesha County, and the rest of Saturday meeting various deadlines. At that point, I knew all hope was lost. Just to top it off, I was at the office for about 5 hours on Sunday, because on Monday I was involved in probably the most important presentation of my life. That trumped it all, so I really don’t feel too bad about not finishing an album.
The sad thing is, now that I think maybe I’d have some time to record, I need to return the Fender to it’s rightful owner, so I’m out one good guitar. Damn…
Well, there’s always next year!