#26 Making Music Together

JamStudio is supercool. I can definitely see a lost weekend of Hostess snack cakes and JamStudio in my future. While I was there, I created a rockin' little 3-chords-and-a-cloud-0'-dust masterpiece.

Of the Social sites I visited, I like the idea of eJamming the best. But the news and notes, as well as the recommendation pages on Mog were cool.

The music share sites are nice and much like librarything, etc. you can follow your tastes to find new stuff, which is a cool thing, because back in the old days we had to actually interact with living breathing people to get that kind word-0f-mouth, and fact is that most of the folks with the really good skinny didn't shower very often. (but I kinda miss the actual mouths in all this word-of-mouthing). It's all really neat, really helpful, and really sterile.

#25: Internet Piracy

Burned a CD. I must admit I've done it one or twice before. I use iTunes to catch podcast feeds from several poetry sites and occasionally burn a CD's worth of readings/interviews from those sessions.



I still do use CDs but only because I've yet to invest in an mp3 player for myself. My daughter has an iPod and she's shown me a thing or two.



As to file sharing, I'm a writer and my gut-level, first-instinct is to rant about intellectual property rights and the bloodsweatandsnot of the artist's soul being ripped from her/his chest by the xerox machine, youtube, and napster yaddayaddayadda, but the fact is that we all buy books, fall in love with them and lend them to friends so they can fall in love with them too. When some one sells his/her books at half price books and the store resells them the writer does not get an another royalty check.

Copyrights are a fairly new phenomena and on many levels make little sense. My bottom line is this: once I have paid for something it is mine to do with what I will (within reason). There should be no problem with me sharing legally purchased copies with my friends and family. The thing is that the line between sharing and distributing is real blurry on the internet.


Question: Do you think music and musicians benefit more from strict copyright protections online or free and open sharing?

I don't think there is any doubt that music benefits from the wide-open exchange of ideas that the internet and file sharing engender.

Whether or not musicians benefit is less certain. It's a pretty basic tenet of economics that s/he who controls the means of production is the one who gets paid. But the means of production are splintered on the internet; control devolves to anybody who cares to re-produce a song or performance which by any objective standard does not belong to them.

All I can tell you is what I see and I see a lot of musicians embracing the 'net and file sharing in a big way. As with all things the internet touches, the paradigms are shifting. revenue streams are drying up in one area and digging in in others. Record labels will become less and less viable, while DIY distribution will blossom. I think the ideas behind Creative Commons are the wave of the future. Letting the artist determine fair use for his product.

iHCPL NexGen #24 Sound: The Sound of Music

Howdy ya'll.

I'm back and ready to ramble.


I plowed through all the pay-to-download sites. I think I found that Napster and Rhapsody are basically the same price ( in the $13 range). The Apple/iTunes site was nearly impossible to navigate and I could not find any figure resembling user cost. I use iTunes 8 on my pc at home and like it a great deal. It collects all of my podcast feeds, shows me a playlist and lets me choose those I want to download.

The free music download sites are interesting, but the selection seems pretty much like open audition at the Sad Cafe. I'm sure there is a lot o' good stuff there, but slogging through the buckets of angst-pop and American Idol Wannabees is an off-putting thought.

I've been into internet radio for awhile. I listen to the Rice student station, ktru, quite a bit. There are also some non-broadcast services, like 1clubFM, that offer a slew of stations from garage/punk to trance to old school funk to the sound of a dripping water faucet 24/7. These are pretty good for short bursts every so often, but because they tend toward a limited playlist in fairly tight rotation, you'll get sick of even the good songs in a matter of days if you listen regularly.

More Readings

Tuesday May 13, 7:00 pm at Borders Books on Kirby. Group reading in support of The Weight of Addition.

Saturday Sept 20 7:00 pm at Barnes & Noble/Woodlands as part of the Poets Unleashed series hosted by the estimable Daniel Rice. (you have six months to make arrangements for baby sitters and covered wagons, etc. so you have no excuse to miss my first solo gig).

#30 Weeding the Files from M and Z drives

I did find that I was pretty organized. There was very little of my stuff on the M drive that needed to be deleted. I tend to use it for storage of stuff I am certain I will need and files that need to be accessed by others in the dept.

My Z drive was a little more work. I had a Projects Completed file that had about thirty items, some of which were left over from my first months at HCPL. I deleted files that were duplicated on M. I kept templates for recurring projects, but deleted 2005 and 2006 files. In the end, I was left with only one folder and two word docs out of the thirty items, so was able to move those out into My Documents and delete the Projects Completed file entirely.

On the M drive, we have Branch Profile files going back to 2002. These are fairly big files (7 - 8 MB each). I'm thinking that 2002 thru 2005 could be moved to CD and deleted. Of course I will need the Selection Specialists permission to do this.

#29 Cleaning Up Email Account

I have a pretty good folder/file system for my email, but even with that, stuff can pile up quickly. I went through all my folders and deleted ruthlessly. I would say 90% of the stuff I discarded was stuff I saved for good reason, but have since finished the project they were concerned with, so should have deleted them before now.

I do this fairly regularly, but every time, I find that I delete at least one thing that I will need in the coming weeks, and it's almost always a CMA (Cover My...er...Anatomy) document.


My biggest weakness is not wanting to throw anything away immediately. I've been trying to get better at discarding emails that require no action from me.

I never keep more than five or six messages in my inbox at one time.


The most useful thing I learned here was in the netiquette section. A couple of my duties require sending relatively large attachments to branches. They are customized to each branch and are not to be seen by other branches (it's all v. cloakanddagger), so the S drive was not an option. I had never heard of YouSendIt and will try it out next time I send out the attachments.

Spring Cleaning #28

I set up a Google Calendar account and didn't much like it --too slow and cumbersome. Tried Remember the Milk to do list and found it slightly more helpful, but still not enough so to get me to let go of my pen/ink/paper calendar. One of the aspects for which I prize pen & ink is its accessibility. I keep the calendar open on my desk all day. I can make quick jots, glance at daily/weekly/monthly views with a turn of the head. No mouse clicking/scrolling/waiting for the boot, etc. The only advantage to the online calendar is that it is accessible from any computer.

If I were in a position with more responsibilities and had to think about work when I'm off-duty, then I think I'd be more inclined to make the switch. As it is, I have a desk calendar/schedule/to-do list here, and a pocket-size moleskine for real life.

GTD:

I really like the emphasis on perspective and control that the article talks about. The whole "prioritize and conquer" model always seemed unrealistic to me. It's too linear. My paper calendar is organized on four levels day/week/month/year. Each has it's on physical location(s) on the page. It's more like the tag-cloud idea.

Also love the idea of "the bucket." The place into which you unload the stuff in your head. Seeing tasks on paper or monitor de-fangs the amorphous jumble of half-seen monsters in your head. It is always better to be able to see things in black and white and in two dimensions no matter how massive the list is. The stuff in your head just accrues and accretes things like guilt and dread and fear. On paper they are at least partially inanimate.

One thing I put into use immediately after I read it about a month ago is "if it takes less than two minutes, do it immediately." I keeps your desk so neat and tidy and allows you to keep your to-do lists for more complicated matters.

selah.

dave c

Upcoming Readings

I will be participating in a group reading to promote The Weight of Addition Anthology from Mutatabilis Press at 7pm on Sat. Feb 23 at Covenant Church (4949 Caroline Street, Houston, Texas 77004) Here's hoping the walls of the place won't come a-tumblin' down when I walk thru the doors.

Jeannie Gambill, Lewis Garvin and Sasha West among many others will be reading as well.
All three are wonderful poets and readers. All three have taught me a lot in their different ways and I owe each my undying fealty.

I'll be reading a couple poems including the editor's choice prize winner.

At 7:00pm on Sept 20, I'll be reading solo at Poet's Unleashed hosted by Daniel Rice at the Barnes & (ig)Noble in the Woodlands (1201 Lake Woodlands Drive
The Woodlands, TX 77380 ).

(I tell you all this as if there is actually a "you" out there).

It's 2:30am on Super Bowl Sunday

The only real holy day-- the last communal experience-- in which we all bow down before the same altar.
This is a feast day that is about the commercial in every sense of the word, but make no mistake, it is a religious ceremony complete with mystic/mythic transformations (men into goats or gods), burnt offerings, gods of misrule and gods of wrath, danger and redemption. For all its baroque pageantry, its high-church profundities, the Super Bowl is primitive religion. It is genuine in ways canned and sterilized religions of the whitebread, white-haired Santa Claus God and his straight teethed, heart-throb son can't hope to approximate. There is real danger here, the outcome is very much in doubt, lives hinge on the moment.

When was the last time you went to church not knowing how life would look when you walked out?

Hell, son. When was the last time you went to church?