P'unk Avenue Window

In January of 2008, we organized a Junto on music distribution. Kristin Thomson of the Future of Music Coalition and Mike Kiley of The Mural and the Mint were on the panel. As a bit of a lapsed musician, I find a great deal of pleasure hanging out with people that love to make music. The passion for music is infectious and uplifting, however, the realities of having a career as a professional musician have become more uncertain in this transitional time.

At the Junto, we touched upon many of those issues and it got me thinking about the future of the music industry. About a year and a half later, I spoke on a panel at DIY Days and met two more people that are deeply invested in figuring out ways to enable musicians to make and distribute their music: Brian McTear of the Weathervane Music Project and Jesse von Doom of CASH Music. In the green room, Jesse, Brian and I had a free-ranging conversation about music, Philadelphia, our personal histories, Weathervane, and CASH Music. It was one of those conversations that gets you pumped up and makes you want to figure out ways to help.

Fortunately, both have ways to kick in a few bucks to help make things happen… but both campaigns end TODAY! Please consider contributing to Weathervane’s Kickstarter fundraiser or CASH Music’s Public Fundraiser.

Addendum: You can also help out by attending the First Annual Weathervane Music Year End Concert-Fundraiser on Thursday, Nov 12, 2009 at Johnny Brenda’s featuring {{{Sunset}}}, East Hundred, Danielson and BC Camplight.

P.S. The Danielson video above is a recently released Weathervane project that is part of one of those interesting loops in life. My wife and I went to Rutgers with Dan. Isn’t life magical?

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I like making custom greeting cards for people. But I hate, hate, hate rotating the individual “pages” and lining them up correctly in programs like OpenOffice Draw.

Thus: Real Cards Win.

Draw your pages in the graphics program of your choice (heck, even Windows Paint will do), then select and upload them. Real Cards Win scales, rotates and positions them correctly and generates a ready-to-print, ready-to-fold PDF file in which everything lines up just so. Doesn’t get a whole lot simpler than that.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to praise ServerGrove for their excellent, cheap VPS web hosting. $19/month for full root access to a box of my own on which PHP 5.2.11 and MySQL 5 are already configured properly, with the gd library, the APC cache and everything else serious PHP geeks demand for performance. Can’t beat that. isitrainingout.com and realcardswin.com are happily sharing a VPS at present. It’s possible to secure so-called “shared hosting,” but it takes a lot of extra work, and at this price there is no reason to put yourself through it.

In the fine tradition of istwitterdown.com, isobamapresident.com and shouldiusetablesforlayout.com, I give you:

Geeky aside: NOAA weather feeds + CSV zipcode data + MaxMind’s GeoLite City IP geolocation database + PHP’s serialize function = love.

Required notice: “This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com/.”

In Philadelphia, the cobblestone street and trolley tracks are only inches beneath the surface.