elliot winard

Inspired by Scott’s list of 10 good things from 2010 and refreshed from a week & a half off from work, here’s my list of 13 good things from 2010 - 3 rock ‘n roll, 2 non-profit, 6 technology, 2 general ones.

1. Recess – My new band!  Mary, Kate and Elliot play rock ‘n roll.  4 shows in 2010. Lots more coming in 2011.
2. The Whores, The Pioneers of Seduction, Clinical Trials, Crazy Pills – One of the great things about playing gigs again is the fact that I get to see so much AWESOME local music!  Based on the music from these local 3-piece outfits, rock ‘n roll is alive and well in Brooklyn!
3. Mojo’s night at The Trash Bar – Free PBR from 8-9, great local bands, awesome bartenders, close to the train.
4. Lexington Readers Club.  The LRC doesn’t have a web site yet.  Patrice Covino put together a monthly program where professionals and artists spend an hour a month reading with third-graders,
5. DonorsChoose.  DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that connects public school teachers with people who want to help.  They call it citizen philanthropy.  Yeah, this isn’t totally new for 2010 but they were one of Oprah’s favorite things of 2010.
6. The Monkeysphere Project – Why do you trust the web sites and servers you connect to, the people that you communicate with?   The Monkeysphere and the OpenGPG web-of-trust add add a layer of authenticity to online connections.
7. DebConf 2010. This year DebConf was up at Columbia University in NYC. DebConf is an international gathering of free software advocacy, free software in design & government and the Debian operating system.
8. DropBox. This online backup service allows you to “sync your files online and across your computers automatically”.
9. Ruby on Rails.  I’ve never been a fan of “web development” but the test-driven-development approach and conventions/best-practices that are part of a standard Ruby on Rails projects almost force good coding practices.  Sure beats the head-ache of dealing with other people’s sloppy undocumented code.  Yeah, I still like Django/Python and Perl but the Ruby ecosystem is really sweet.
10. Arduino and open-source hardware.  At the TechCrunch hack-a-thon we stayed up all night and built a “welcome mat” that greets you when you get home, asks about places that you’ve been and people that you may have talked to.
11. Git source-control management.  Also not new for 2010 but git is a pleasure to work with.  Thank goodness I can use git as a front-end to the Subversion repo that we use at work.
12. Samuel the amazing cat.  Yeah, he’s a little crazy but he means well.
13. Babies.  What can I say?  I like hanging out with my sister’s and friends’ kids.  They call me Uncle Elliot.

I went to eat lunch with some of my old co-workers at Macr^H^H^H^HAdobe on Friday. It was nice seeing the old crowd. The (relatively) new building is pretty fancy, complete with a cafeteria area that makes good food – salads, burgers, fish and other tasty vittles.

My friend James (a.k.a. Halon) told me that he’s quitting his day-job at Adobe to spend more time working on his online music site Fake Science. I must say – I’m impressed. They have a growing collection of DRM-free music, much of which is locally-grown (SF Bay Area!). You can tell from the categorization that Halon, Cedub, Xtopher and Lunchmeat are into electronic and ambient music. Check ‘em out!

The show went really well – 25 minutes of white-hot rock, a club full of friends and fans (well, friends mostly) and good feeling all around.

Jenelle’s cousin’s husband (cousin-in-law?) was nice enough to capture the first half of the set on DV and I spun it into a little concert video. Check it out, consumers of QuickTime video. Tell me if you need me to upload an MPEG-4 or other format vid.

Enough sitting at home every night with my headphones on making sounds that only I will ever hear.

I’m the first band playing at the Bottom of the Hill on 15 December in SF so show up early. I think I go on around 8:30pm and will only play for 20 or 25 minutes, so get there early.

It’ll be all new stuff. Sorry folks that are itching for the oldies like ooh i love you girl. I even set up a myspace account for the throngs of future fans. I must say, I’m not super impressed with myspace (or Friendster or any of the other ‘social networking’ sites that I’ve played with for that matter) when it comes to GUI. Drop me a line – lzsocial AT caveteen.com (replace the AT with an @) – if you’re interested in talking about creating a social networking app using Laszlo. I should have more time to think about new personal projects after the show is over.

I had dinner with a few folks at a friend’s house and after dinner the five of us sat around talking. Playing in the background was a tape that my friend made of a MTV’s 120 Minutes, circa 1992.

Although that was made some 13 years ago, I still consider much of the music featured on the show – “grunge”, some self-aware hardcore, the budding manchester scene – to be new music, music that was released after my core musical ideas formed & taste is music was burned into the aural/memory portions of my brain.

A few formative musical selections -

• Depeche Mode – culminating with Music for the Masses, or perhaps Violator
• The Cure – culminating with Disintegration
• The Smiths broke up in 1987 but Johnny Marr, Morrissey, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce have continued to put out great music on other projects
• The Stone Roses had their second coming in 1994 but broke up soon after
• Cocteau Twins only released two albums after 1990′s Heaven or Las Vegas
• Richard Blade’s Flashback Lunch on KROQ – rock of the ’90s
• Sonic Youth – still going strong?
• The Pixies, the Cure and Love & Rockets played an amazing show at LA’s Dodger Stadium
• Jane’s Addiction’s first three albums
• Red Hot Chili Peppers’ albums up to & including Mother’s Milk
• Public Enemy’s hard-hitting sounds
• The Beastie Boys’ albumbs up to and including Check Your Head
• Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails’ first album – Pretty Hate Machine
• Alain Jourgensen’s projects of the late 80′s & early 90′s – Ministry, RevCo, Pigface
• Christian Death’s 1993 Only Theatre of Pain
• D.I.’s Team Goon
• Joy Division and New Order
• The Sugarcubes!

“new-school music” -

• all of the above artist’s post-late-80′s/early-90′s records
• Dr. Dre-style gangasta rap
• ‘grunge’ (What was I doing in 1989 when Bleach came out? Listening to the British electronic music of Depeche Mode & releated projects like Erasure)
• Marc Almond’s solo years
• All of Björk’s solo music
• New Order
• Does MTV play muisc videos any more?

Since my formative years in the late 1980′s, early 1990′s I’ve grown to listen to both new music and older music – I (thankfully) re-discovered the Beatles, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan & Van Morrison. Thanks in part to my interest in watching new music and in part to folks like Greg of San Francisco’s Fallout I’ve been able to get a bit of information about new independent bands.

Gosh, what a masterbatory blog entry. I suppose I think that if I write regularly I may actually get good at it or come up with something useful to say.

Last night I went to Macromedia‘s annual corporate party at The Fillmore San Francisco with Sarah Allen. Sarah and I both worked at Macromedia before we moved over to Laszlo Systems. I think this is th elast real hurrah before the Macromedia/Adobe merger goes through.

The bar was open, the music and drinks flowing. “Headlining” the event was the band Modest Mouse. Having not seen Modest Mouse before and being a less-than regular consumer of TV (other than the Simsons) I always imagined that the singer of Modest Mouse looked just like Doug Martsch, the singer in Built To Spill. The show was pretty good even though they had a bunch of technical problems. Only a small chunk of the audience seemed really into the music. Friends still working at the MACR explained that the latest Modest Mouse album was piped into the company’s cafeteria during lunch for the past few days. This explains how most of the people knew some of MM’s more popular songs.

It was great to see all of my ex-coworkers — folks from Director, Flash, Breeze and Flex including Peldi, Cedub & Halon & Lunchmeat (!) from Fake Science, Libby Freligh. While it’s nice to visit my old co-workers, I’m still excited about hacking LZX code both at work & in my spare time. I’ve also started looking into Ruby on Rails, an open-source framework that practically writes web-apps by itself. Not really, but it sometimes seem like Rails is doing most of the boring heavy-lifting.

listen – lowsine000 lowsine001 lowsine001_24 lowsine002 lowsine003 lowsine004 lowsine005 lowsine006 lowsine007 lowsine008

everybody should learn emacs and/or vi. they’re so very useful.
i see little use in being very wordy at the moment.

Music is back – serpentine
Chord changes are not back. Yet.

This song has both lyrics and chord changes in it, but they’re just not recorded yet. And it’s mixed with *way* too much bass.

Here’s the first go at the lyrics -

if you have the disposition
if you have the dime
look beneath the murky water
stay away from serpentine
slither princess dither invert
share the merit on the line

client meeting angel funding
i’d rather gather than waste the time
mother loving mother breaking
for goodness sake the sake wine.

Dear Madames, Sirs -

I would like to propose the first meeting of the Caveteen Collective at an yet-to-be-decided date during the month of February. As I am sure you are curious as to the nature of the Collective, I take it upon myself to address your curiousities with enumerations of her qualities.

• The Caveteen Collective is a group of people who assemble.
• The Collectivists assemble once a month at an undecided location.
• The location of the monthly Collection (a name given to both the event proper of the and assemblage of Collective congregates) need not be static, although there is nothing wrong with assembling multiple times in the same locale.
• The initial meetings of the Caveteen Collective will be accompanied by food of some sort.
• The food can either be prepared by Collective members or purchased from unrelated parties.
• Each Caveteen Collection Session will be recorded.
• The set of Caveteen Collection recordings will be available for free or at the cost of the recording media.
• Each Session will have an audio focus.
• The meaning of the Caveteen Collection is sure to change, to grow, to shrink and to flow.
• Only time will tell.
• Time will always tell.
• The Caveteen Collective is not an exclusionary group.
• Guests are always welcome to attend.
• Membership in the Collective is non-binding.

Sincerely yours,
Elliot Winard
Primary Caveteen Collector

the song: rice
There was a punk band (back in the 80′s or early 90′s, I think) called “rice” that only released one album. Every song was about 25-30 seconds long. If I remember correctly, all of the words were “rice” over and over again.

This song is not so very punk rock. Lyrics are simple and repeated again and again, though – “Rice is eaten by most of the world.” This is a true thought. Think about it next time you sit down to a dinner with a bowl of delicious brown rice, a sensuous pilaf, or a heap of good ol’ Uncle Ben’s Minute Rice.

(republished 2004-06-27 17:10:58 entry after making files accessible on new server)