Manlio Rules

Seriously I like nothing about the life of the business traveler. I don’t like to fly, I don’t like talking to random people at hotel bars, I get easily confused in rental cars and all things being equal I would take my own bed and a 10am wakeup time over a freshly made hotel bed and an alarm for 6. And this seems pretty obvious to me. The one thing I love about business travel is the corporate card. Colleagues drive free, expenses get paid, and I can feel like a big shot expensing hotel Internet so I can set up the demo before bed and check into my flight.

Over the past four winters, I have driven over 10000 miles back and forth to lake tahoe. Here are some things I’ve learned:

1. Everyone just wants to get there safely, except for the people in huge pickup trucks, who just want to get there as fast as possible and give you the finger if you drop below 50mph, even in a blizzard.

2. When in doubt, chain up.

3. Make sure the first time you put the chains on isn’t also the first time you need them. In other words, practice.

4. white smoke out the exhaust is bad. Stop immediately and find a shop.

5. Traffic on the way? Bad. Traffic on the way back? Unbearable.

6. Tahoe is tough on cars. If you love your car and can’t bear a scratch on it, rent one you care less about.

7. If your car gets stuck in the snow, put it in a low gear, get outside, and gently rock it back and forth, only pushing the gas when the car is going forward. This is easier with more people.

8. Which reminds me, don’t drive alone in bad weather on mountains.

9. If you get a chance in a snow filled empty parking lot, practice quick turns and stops. Useful AND fun.

1. Snowboarding
2. Warm weather in the city
3. New year means new changes
4. Lent.
5. Spring training.

Also fantasy baseball, even if I don’t play anymore

http://misadigital.com/index.html

My obsession in life is to have a midi guitar. There, I said it. I have always been obsessed with using my chosen musical platform (guitar) to make sounds commonly not found with guitars (pads, horns, violins). Waaay back in 2001 I owned a roland divided pickup for my fender strat, along with the accoutrements needed to play. It wasn’t a bad tool but it had a few annoying habits, most commonly triggering notes that i didn’t play. I will admit to being a “loose” guitar player (sloppy) so it’s not uncommon for me to hit strings i don’t mean. on the guitar this isn’t a huge deal since i can instantly mute them, but the roland would still trigger those notes, often quite loudly. This was not ideal

In a case of really terrible timing, i sold this guitar right before I started graduate school, where i spent my first year learning… wait for it… all about midi software! brilliant. My first semester of my second year i actually went so far as to BUILD a midi guitar. It was called “midi guitar”. it had about 20 buttons, a few knobs, and it caught on fire one time during the ITP show. Also, Vernon Davis from Living Colour played it! But i don’t think he liked it very much.

About a year ago i bought a yamaha ez-eg “teaching” guitar which also happens to function as a midi guitar. on the plus side, it was very affordable ($300). On the minus side, the damn thing just loves to play notes. All the time! Right notes, wrong notes, any notes it can think of. It can’t get enough of triggering notes. So i started using it less and less, since i found that even my stupid fingers could play a keyboard with more reliability than this thing.

But now, now we have something. This guy in sydney has apparently built a touch screen midi guitar that’s also a linux computer. I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but my price willingness for such a thing is embarrassingly high.

And yes, i realize that if i had just spent the last 7 years learning keyboards I wouldn’t be having this problem.

I’ve spend the last year without a car (thank you transmission failure!). San Francisco is a strange place to be without a car. sometimes it’s refreshingly awesome to not have to think in the back of my mind: “where am I parked? when is street cleaning? Is tomorrow considered the fifth monday of the month, and if so, do i have to move the car? what color is the curb? what the hell does that mean?”

and other times it’s remarkably frustrating, like when i’m trying to get from SOMA to the Marina and there are no buses that get me there before a half hour, even though the walking time is probably less than that.

I’ve been using zipcar, and i get a lot of people asking me: “how is that”. this is what i think:

Pros:

1. sometimes cars are right near you! for example, i have a lot across the street, and 4 more lots within 2-3 blocks. this is awesome.

2. gas and insurance and parking included in the price, which is sweet

3. you can park anywhere else that zipcars live! actually that’s a lie, you can’t do that, and i would never do such a thing. ever.

4. the cars are generally in pretty good shape, except for the mazda on lombard and polk with the battery that died on me.

5. i can’t speak more about not having to deal with street parking when i’m done with driving. just a relief.

Cons:

1. if you need to use the car more than one full day a week, it’s VERY expensive. like, easily $500 – $600 a month assuming 2 full days a week of use. eek.

2. if you don’t plan well or live in a place that isn’t near a lot of cars, it’s a pain. i had to walk a half mile to get to a car one time, carrying like 4 bags. not ideal.

3. more often than i’d like, the cars are either not where they’re supposed to be, or the gas has been left too close to empty

4. it is hard to learn how to drive a new car every few days. i find that i’m a less confident driver if every time i get behind the wheel, it’s a different car.

all things considered, if i didn’t have access to my girlfriends car most of the time (moochy moochy). i would probably not still be doing zipcar, unless i lived and worked in the city.

i keep thinking about doing a much smaller “car share”. like, get 4-5 people, split the cost of a used car and parking, and then find a way to insure it and share the time usage. i’m not sure how much this would cost but it may be cheaper than the monthly zipcar cost. everyone would need to live pretty close together, which makes it a little bit trickier.

one other good thing i will say is that for trips to tahoe, the larger zipcars are competitive price wise to renting an awd car from the normal rental channels, when you consider that insurance and gas are included with the zipcar. for tahoe trips that’s a lifesaver, especially if you can split the cost with someone else.

been an exhausting month. tired. but i recently re-upped my max/msp license and it’s amazing how much i’ve forgotten about that. i keep looking at objects, knowing that there’s a really simple object that will do what i want and forgetting how to do it. i need to really hit the tutorials. on the plus side, in an hour i made a rudimentary thummer out of my computer keyboard, and i’m pretty sure i could swing some arduino skills to make a really basic one for playing.

also, i am thinking of selling my big amp and my pod in exchange for the guitar rig controller. yay music!

and happy holidays

мебели варна

I turned 32 a few days ago, on Tuesday, and I have some observations about the birthday complex.

1. I think that I am approaching the line where having a lot of people meet me at a bar is less enjoyable than a nice dinner with some friends. which isn’t to say that i didn’t have fun at the bar with everyone, but i found myself having difficulty mustering enthusiasm for it after a few hours of being jostled and trying to talk to bunches of different people. i think this is why having a house party was such a good idea the last few years. now i just need a house

2. Facebook is great in that it allows tons of people to wish me a happy birthday. also overwhelming, because now i feel like i should respond to most of them. but in truth, i probably won’t do that… i think that if the only way you wished me a happy birthday was over facebook, hopefully you are not expecting a personal response. hopefully… that being said, was great to hear from people who i haven’t talked to in a long time.

3. birthday cookies with M&M’s FTW!

4. I’ve been having a LOT of “what have I done/should I do with my life?” issues lately, and having a birthday did not help that. I am still stuck between not wanting to totally start over and yet feeling that i may have made some poor choices over the past 15 (gulp) years that need to be remedied before they spiral out of control. Of course, that’s half my life, so trying to make changes now that remedy bad choices for the last 15 years is going to be difficult. but you gotta start somewhere. Which is a good segue for what i’ve been wanting to tell all of you…

5. I”m going to clown college. I think it’s the right time and the right fit, and i’m tired of all of you holding me back. Next time you see me i’ll be spraying you with a flower on my lapel and then making a balloon doggie for your child.

6. Actually, i have been thinking about more education. but what? and to what end?

7. Also, I would like to say that having someone come and clean my apt once a month is a wonderful thing. I don’t know why i didn’t do this earlier. Oh wait, yes I do.

8. it’s almost snowboarding season! I have new boots, a new zipper on my jacket, and a new season pass. i still need new pads (tore mine apart last season), a replacement buckle for my hydration pack, and a good tuning/sharpening/waxing for both my boards.

9. What is your favorite computer solution for home media management? Roku? that new blu ray player? PS3? Media PC? Apple TV? tell me!!!

some of my friends and I have been attempting recently to form an improv group, and we’ve been pretty flustered in the attempt. it’s gotten me thinking a lot about the nature of groups and organizations, especially those centered around a creative premise. I’m just going to riff off of some personal experiences and see if i can group the generic problems i’ve encountered.

1. Attendance. The most basic requirement for all of these groups is that everyone shows up on time. In a band, it’s hard to rehearse without all the musicians, in a play you need all the actors, in an improv group, you need all the performers, etc… The trick is that typically there is no penalty for failing to attend, and the individuals have not invested anything, so participation is strictly voluntary. And that’s good, for a number of reasons, since it will weed out those less committed. But that assumes you have an endless supply of willing participants, waiting to engage in the activity, and that the group values any potential replacement as equal to the current member. I know that for improv, even with 6-7 people in the group, it was hard when 2-3 wouldn’t show up, because the typical activities are difficult with fewer people. But you also don’t want 20 people to show up (space, organization issues), so you keep invitations small, which means if someone is “in” the group, they really need to be there in order for the group to function. Once skipping the activity becomes commonplace, it’s easy for even the more dedicated members of the group to schedule conflicting activities, since they are used to either a sub-optimal experience or last minute cancellations. So how does one fix this? One way is to make membership in the group a privilege, or structure it like a class, where you have to “pay to play”. this seems like the opposite of what you want to do in a recreational creative environment, but i’ve found that for my bands, when people are on the hook for money for rehearsal spaces or some other cost, attendance tends to be more constant. Of course, there’s always the Clay Shirky example about the pre-school that tried charging parents for pickup up their kids late and found that late pickups actually increased since everyone was ok with paying the penalty in some instances. I know that while i feel guilty about skipping voluntary activities, I can justify skipping paid activities since “it’s my money, if i skip it’s my choice.”

2. Leadership. I could also call this one: “everyone has a role”. Every group has different internal dynamics. I do one thing, that other guy does something else, and maybe that woman over there does a bit of both. Defining roles in a group is very valuable but what’s even more valuable is everyone finding a role that they’re comfortable with. I am personally never comfortable as a leader in any group setting. I can organize, I can gather feedback, I can make decisions, but doing so stresses me out to a much larger degree than most people, so what seems like an easy task for some becomes a colossal pain for me. That being said, I have a large ego and if we’re not doing something that i feel is personally valuable to me, I have no desire to participate. So it’s important for someone to be comfortable taking the reins of leadership, providing structure and organization, but with the knowledge that no one is under the obligation to follow. I personally feel that leading a group is a thankless job in most cases, but can be quite rewarding with the right mix of people.

3. Tasks. An ex-girlfriend once said to me (as a comment on our collaboration for a joint poster design): “this is great! i will sit here and tell you what to do, and you can do it!” Finding a balance where everyone gets to do enough of what they want to do is very difficult, and usually requires some trade-offs. I used to be in a band where one guy wrote the majority of the music, did all the singing, and was responsible for booking our shows. After awhile he got frustrated and requested that the rest of the band take up some of the responsibility for bookings and planning. I personally felt that since we weren’t playing any of my music and i wasn’t getting to front the band, it didn’t make sense for me to exert any more effort than I already was by coming to practices and showing up for gigs. I was at my equilibrium point. And it’s important for every member of the group to find that point for themselves.

4. Goals. It’s important to understand that everyone wants something different out of most collaborations. Some people are doing it as their career, some people are doing it for fun, some people are doing it because they feel compelled and can’t get out of bed the next day if they don’t spend some time doing the thing that drives them every day. The point is, frictions can arise if everyone’s not on the same page in that respect. If i’m in a band, and i just want to go to some gigs, have some fun, drink some beers, and jam with my friends, and somehow I end up in a band with a guy who is trying to get signed and make a record, we’re going to HATE working with each other. He will be frustrated by my lackadasical approach to the music, and i will be annoyed by his inability to “chill out” and just enjoy the process. Neither of us are at fault, we both just want different things from the activity. In improv, i’ve met some people who are focused on performing, and some who are content just “playing”, without any real goals in mind. Either one is acceptable, but there will be some understandable tension between the two.

5. Fun. At the end of the day, I insist that anything I spend a significant amount of time on be fun. It doesn’t have to be fun all the time, nothing’s fun all the time, but if I’m participating in an activity and I find myself dreading practice, or finding new excuses to avoid meetings, or some other sense of constant stress relating to the activity, it’s probably not a great fit for me because I look at these things as recreational activities. Some of my most rewarding creative experiences haven’t had any greater point, they’ve just been my friends and I hitting a groove at the right time or telling jokes or really nailing an art piece together. And having fun doing it at the same time.

I guess the only other thing i should mention is that despite all these hurdles, i find myself constantly in search of new collaborators, hopeful that if we continue to work on the project, it will prosper.