Holy Bazolies!
Well, it happened – I guess when you take a week off you get slashdotted. And then your site goes down, and with it, your email. I woke up this morning all geared up to dig myself out of this email hole, but I don’t seem to be able to send or receive. And I can just barely see this site (sometimes). Someone somewhere is working on it. Just so you know, if I haven’t answered your email or comment it’s probably not because I hate you.
I can tell you I had a lovely vacation. I tried an internet cafe once, but all they had was a French keyboard and it was a little difficult to type coherently. I also had Road Runner dialup via some kind of phone card, but you know, (Road Runner + dialup)/pina colada <> productivity. There was in fact no song, and I am right now going to refund a dollar to you paying subscribers.
Len sent in an image for Code Monkey which I didn’t see before I had left, and then he checked himself and sent a new one sometime mid week. I’ll show you both here, because I can’t decide which one I like best. The old:
The new:
Double image! The man is prolific. For your further enjoyment, I point you to the flickr group Len is putting all these images into. AND: this wikipedia article about Code Monkeys that has been updated to include a reference to my song and a link to Len’s new image. The world has been very busy while I was resting…
Thing a Week 29 – Code Monkey
Yay, monkeys. This is not autobiographical, but I did indeed used to have a job writing software. VB! MS SQL! I affectionately referred to myself and my co-developers as code monkeys, especially when a client asked me a question that I didn’t want to answer (“What do I know? I’m just a code monkey.”).
Now this part is important: tomorrow morning I leave for a week long vacation in a sunny place, and I don’t know how easily I’ll be able to access the internets. I think it’s unlikely I’ll be able to get anything posted, so I’m giving you notice now: I’m taking the week off, I think. If I am in fact unable to post anything, I’ll refund a dollar to all you paying subscribers. The rest of you will just get nothing for nothing, which seems fair.
See you in a week…
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I am full of events
I’m very pleased to note that demand for Coulton is high over at Eventful – thank you all for the support and the love. Last I checked there were 43 places where people want me to come play, admittedly some of them only represent one or two people so far, but there are some larger ones there too (but I’m no Wil Wheaton: THAT guy is famous). A few people have been asking what the threshold is, how many people need to sign up before I’ll go to a city and play. The answer is I don’t really know, it’s complicated, it depends. I had an interesting conversation last night with someone from Eventful in which we talked about this stuff and tossed around some ideas on how the whole thing might actually work. I think it’s a compelling idea, and I’d love to make something happen.
So, I think that in order to move some of these things forward we need to discuss a couple of things all of us. If the city is particularly driveable and I have friends I can stay with (I’m looking at you Boston and DC), then my costs are minimal. If I have to fly there and rent a car and get a hotel it’s a whole new ball game – as much as I love each and every one of you, it doesn’t seem right for me to lose money by putting on shows. Either way, an event is more interesting to me if 1) it’s profitable, 2) it’s for a lot of people, 3) you locals put me in touch with a suitable venue or host a house concert. Keep in mind that no matter how many shows I do in Ohio I only need to fly there once, so we can also think about combining shows into little mini tours, that’s another way to make it work financially.
I’m really excited about it though, if we can pull one of these off we’ll be creating a totally new thing in the world. But until those demands get up into the quintuple digits, it will help if you guys drive the process a little – instead of just asking me to play in Cleveland, figure out where I should play and how I can make it financially viable. Make me an offer I can’t refuse.
I told you I was lazy.
Visual TAW
Len and Nora over at the Jawbone podcast have been big Coulton supporters – always with the airplay and the plugging (Len frequently states that he believes this to be The Year of Coulton). And they’ve recently started making Thing a Week a regular feature of the podcast, with a song from the series and a little phoned in explanation from yours truly. But Len has just upped the ante in the poker game that is our symbiotic relationship by offering to do a weekly visual interpretation of Thing a Week. Below is his first installment, which he seems to have done immediately after the song was posted, and with little difficulty. Or maybe he has access to the same secret audio feed that the New York Times uses to spy on me and steal my ideas.
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