For the past 9 years, I have written songs and fronted for a music side project slash band called Onalaska. This week, we released our second album, You and the Fishermen, a project started in June, 2005.

Rather than finding a record label to fund the  manufacturing and distribution of compact discs or vinyl, the album is available for download at the link below. The download is free, and the album is presented as eight MP3 files with absolutely no digital rights management restrictions. The album  is released under a Creative Commons license that permits reuse and republishing of the content, so long as attribution is provided with any reuse, and so long as any reuse is licensed under the same CC license.

To date, the band has spent $5,000 to produce the album, most of which went to equipment and hall rental, and to the purchase of a Pro Tools rig for the recording session. This is a pretty modest budget for an album, and I will leave it to your judgment to determine if the modest budget affects the quality of the final product.

Given the small investment, and the limited revenue potential of the project--Onalaska does not tour, and it is becoming increasingly clear that touring is the most effective way for musicians to make money--there seemed little point in making You and the Fishermen into a commercial endeavor. In an attempt to recoup some of  the sunk costs, an Onalaska T-shirt (the first and only official T-shirt associated with Onalaska) is available for purchase at Cafepress.com. The shirt runs $23, a steep price that is hopefully made more acceptable by the price of the album.

Since its release last Sunday, over two hundred people have downloaded the album. That's a pretty good result considering the minimal publicity (a MySpace bulletin entry, an update to the little-visited official Onalaska web site, a photo on Flickr, and now this blog entry).

I am proud of the work and am extremely gratified to know that so many people are giving it a listen. While we did not initially expect to spend over two years crafting these eight songs--there is a ninth, and I reserve the right to release it at some future date--I am glad we did. Each song has been fully realized, both in lyrical content, structure and arrangement. Every moment on the album is deliberate. Each song has a significant personal meaning to me. What a luxury it is to have complete creative control.

And since the album is released as a free-as-in-free-beer download, I reserve the right to remix, altar and re-post new versions (1.1, 2.0?) of the album in the future. This is a definite benefit--though one I am unlikely to exercise; two years is enough!--of an online distribution model. Compare this to the CD distribution model, where tens of pounds of plastic and paper lay in cardboard boxes for months and years, where the band's chief challenge is to convince people to take said plastic and paper off their hands. No thanks. This free download online distribution model feels much closer to how things should work going forward.

Download You and the Fishermen now  

·         Bullets are a despicable form of withholding information

·         Do whatever it takes to present the content

·         Do not let the mode of presentation harm the understanding of the content

·         Handouts are higher bandwidth than slides

·         The map is the best content presentation metaphor

Other quick thoughts:

·         First and second act were strong.

·         The third act was a little unsteady. What did he have at lunch?

·         Tony Cuozzo was in attendance. We belly ached and riffed over Ivar’s at lunch as only GSO veterans can.

·         My Day With GFS presentation on capacity planning fails on almost all of Tufte’s principles of content presentation (below); rework required! I can’t believe 1,300 people have so willingly tolerated my defective presentation. The next round will be stronger, I assure you.

·         Stop by my office to peruse the books, they are beautiful.

Here are my raw notes from the event, transcribed from paper.

1.       Opening

a.       Chopan and midi-like visualization of piano piece

                                                               i.      Represents the notes, the patterns, past, present and future in one view

b.      Has us reading from the books like a bible at church service

2.       Theme for the day: Do whatever it takes to convey the information

3.       Info flow practices

a.       Focus on causality, you can only control the situation by regulating the cause

b.      Multiple sources of data

c.       Attitude: Find whatever data you need to convey the truth

d.      Diagrams are analyses

e.      Ignore your own style, strengths, tendencies and comforts

4.       Annotation is credibility and texture

a.       Linking lines are verbs. Annotate linking lines to add texture to the relationship.

b.      On an org chart, annotate link lines to differentiate types of relationships

5.       A cluttered presentation is evidence of bad design, not bad data

6.       The eye-brain system is high bandwidth

a.       System runs on 10MB at 16-bit color depth per eye

b.      Visual information overload is impossible

c.       The eye is capable of about 1000x bandwidth of a PC display

7.       The map is the chief metaphor when presenting data

8.       Provide reasons to believe

a.       Provide the parenthetical (this is the truth until a better view of the truth comes along)

b.      Leave the door open to getting trumped by better data; this is progress!

9.       High resolution data presentation is genuinely interactive

a.       With sufficient data presentation resolution, each viewer will engage their own cognitive patterns to process the portion that interests them most

b.      Gets lots of people thinking about your data

10.   Supergraphics

a.       Aerial photographs

b.      Cancer maps

c.       History of pop music

d.      Texture, interactive, transparent design, rich, luscious content presentation

e.      Avoid contraptions

11.   If your numbers are boring, get better numbers

a.       It’s about your content

b.      If your content stinks, then your presentation will stink (duh)

c.       Boredom is a function of your content, not your presentation

12.   Graphic layout rule: 1+1=3

a.       Two lines (1+1) creates a third element, the white space between the lines

b.      Lower the contrast (gray lines instead of black, for example) to reduce impact

13.   Bullets

a.       Profound denial of information

b.      The slow reveal angers Tufte!

14.   If you bring handouts and the audience reads ahead, GOOD! GREAT! Your goal as a presenter is for your audience to engage with your content.

15.   Always use annotation as much as possible.

16.   Tables

a.       B.E. pp 176 – slops in table, very cool!

b.      Resort to graphics only to represent 500 or more data points, otherwise use a table

c.       Performance data always belongs in a table

17.   Tufte’s all purpose advice

a.       Steal from the best

                                                               i.      “Talent imitates, genius steals” T.S. Eliot

                                                             ii.      Get out of the amateur design business

                                                            iii.      Employ taste in choosing what to steal

                                                           iv.      The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the journal Nature are great sources

                                                             v.      The NYT has a 30 person data design staff!

b.      Avoid pitchy, kinky marketing design

c.       Target documentary presentation of evidence and content

d.      View design as a research activity, not a creative activity

18.   Don’t dumb it down or condescend

a.       “People have not suddenly become stupid just because they come to your presentation.” – Tufte

b.      Your audience is smart

c.       They read the newspaper every day and know how to process graphics and tables

19.   Project management: Employ the wall chart with 11 pt font

a.       Spatiality overcomes sequential presentation of content

20.   Break

21.   Everything interesting is a multi-variate problem

a.       3 or more variables

22.   Flatlands: Our task is to boil down multiple dimensions to two for presentation

a.       Data density and dimensionality go hand in hand

b.      What’s the bandwidth of your presentation?

c.       Minimize design admiration time, maximize content messaging time

d.      Use models when possible to escape Flatland for “real land”

e.      Build a little model

23.   Napoleon’s march

a.       B.E. pp 124

b.      6 dimensions of data

c.       Ultimately, an anti-war statement

24.   The principles of content presentation

a.       Show comparisons

b.      Show causality

c.       Show multi-variate data

d.      Integrate data, tables, diagrams, graphics, words, references, qualifications in one presentation or diagram

e.      Document your sources

                                                               i.      This is what 6 pt type is for!

f.        A note on these principals

                                                               i.      There is one meta-principle here: Analytical content design and analytical thinking are the same process

                                                             ii.      Thinking = design

                                                            iii.      The components of analytical thought processes are the components of content design and presentation

                                                           iv.      This is about turning fundamental cognitivie process into design process

g.       Serious presentations depend upon integrity, quality and relevance of the content

                                                               i.      Get better content!

                                                             ii.      Make sure the mode of presentation does not harm the content

                                                            iii.      “Galileo sounds a lot like Feynman”

                                                           iv.      “Both from Brooklyn”

h.      Do your important comparisons in adjacent space, and not stacked in time

                                                               i.      On one page

i.         Use small multiples

                                                               i.      Leverage the audiences understanding of a common format

                                                             ii.      Show all of the data

j.        Aside

                                                               i.      Cherry picking is the greatest threat to truth in content design and presentation

                                                             ii.      The character of evidence should make the point, not the selection of evidence

1.       Cherry picking is ultimately fraudulent

25.   Sparklines

26.   NASA Columbia disaster post-mortem

a.       Use Powerpoint as a slide projector

b.      Use handouts, not slides, to convey data

27.   Presentation advice

a.       Preparation       

                                                               i.      Practice! In front of a video camera! Brutal!

                                                             ii.      Consider improving the content.

b.      Beginning the presentation

                                                               i.      Avoid the opening universal joke. Ugh! Ack!

                                                             ii.      Show up early. Get to know people as they trickle in. Some good will come of it.

                                                            iii.      Open with Problem, Relevance to audience, Solution in about 100 or 200 words

c.       Ending the presentation

28.   Tufte has ambitions to sculpt

a.       Like Judd and Richard Serra

b.      Cool stuff!

c.       Does he know Michael Pestel? 

Joanna Newsom's new record, Ys, consists of five long songs. Half way through the third song, the exact center of the record, the music climaxes. The second half of the record falls just as the first built. It's a perfectly symmetrical song cycle. A stunning achievement. Textures from Vespertine come to mind, but the songs, the lyrics, the subjects, the swelling strings, feel more like a play, a stage production, an epic play. There are moments--usually background parts--where her voice crawls out of its childish, mid-register nook and sails above the music that send chills up my spine.

Check out the credits! Van Dyke Parks (yes, of Smile fame) arranged it. Albini recorded it. O'Rourke produced it. Bill Callahan sings on it. It was mastered at Abbey Road studios. All of these contributors are evident in the final product. What a dream team. I wish I could pipe other great records (Graceland or Blood On the Tracks) through this production team.

This is a special album where Newsom is established as a musical giant. A musical giant.