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.

Welcome to MSN Spaces 10.5! Lots of new features. Check the Spacecraft and Mike Torres for a full rundown. Moz might post something, too. My team has spent the past few days with the Spaces team and the MSN Networking team hammering out last minute hang-ups and blocking issues to bring Spaces 10.5 to you without service interruption.

One new feature I love? The /members node has been removed from the URL for individual spaces. What was http://spaces.msn.com/members/tom is now http://spaces.msn.com/tom. Why is this a favorite feature? I’m a human friendly URL advocate.

Another favorite change? Comments are sorted in ascending chronological order. The sorting order used to be the opposite.

For the past few days, the Service Operations team (that's my team) and the Dev team camped out into the late hours getting the bits out the door. It's a fun process, a good chance for bonding and getting through issues as they are encountered. It's hard work.

I feel very fortunate to work with a great group of people. Everyone pulled together to help out and we deployed successfully as a result.

What's it look like to deploy new Internet services? See attached photos.

Yesterday was my five year anniversary at Microsoft. I could ramble. I won’t.

I have worked in MSN Service Operations for those five years, first as an engineer and later as a program manager. Apart from music, my career in MSN is the only thing I have focused on for five or more consecutive years. This is a bit of a milestone then.

I love working at Microsoft because it’s hard. For all of its accomplishments, this company has only just started to make progress toward what computing should be. There is so much more to do; even with fifty thousand employees, we can’t make progress toward solving these problems quickly enough.

We need more people who are excited about making computing better. If you have ever thought about working at Microsoft, drop me a line at tomharpel@hotmail.com.

On reaching this milestone, I want to thank all of the great people here who have helped me to get better at what I do over the last five years: Elango, Saravanan, Donald, Heather, Lilli, Janene, Dave, Brent, David, Steven, Deepak, Joe, Colin, Catherine, Frederic, MC, Bill, Greg, Larry, Todd, the list goes on. There are so many great people here.

I grew up in Redmond, and always believed I would one day work at Microsoft. Now, after ten years at other companies and another five at Microsoft, I feel like a part of this company; I feel personally responsible for Microsoft's success. I will apply myself to making this company called Microsoft better.

This can be a better place to work. I can do better. My colleagues can do better. Our products must improve. We need to be better corporate citizens and members of the community. It’s time to get on with the work of making this place better. On to the next five years! Yar!

I am reposting here my friend Brian's excellent rhetorical response to some talk radio gay bashing he had this misfortune of hearing while driving through southwest Washington.

On a recent cross-country drive, I had the displeasure of listening to Christian AM talk radio. Navigating the wet roads of central Oregon at 3am, I listened as two men discussed the evil and corrupt ways of homosexuals. With numerous quotes from the bible and slippery slope arguments, these voices on the radio told their audience that gays and lesbians were angry, lost souls hoping to topple Christianity. As a gay man who was raised in a religious household, I really wished I could call in and debate their venomous statements. Unfortunately, being out of cell phone service range, I have to settle on writing my argument down and hope that it falls into the laps of people who might have been suckered by the words of fundamentalists and assholes. I wish I could quote these speakers, but instead Ill simply address each of their arguments. Chances are youve heard a few of these claims before.

Homosexuality is unnatural.
Really? Says who? It happens all over the animal kingdom. I fail to see how my first crush at the age of four was an act of deviancy. And those strange feelings I had in the fifth grade for pop singer Rick Astley certainly werent consciously constructed by me. Hell, I couldnt even figure out why I was so obsessed with a guy who wrote such awful music. It took another few years to put the pieces together. So how does someone argue that human emotions are unnatural? Do you mean that the fact that gays and lesbians cant procreate through their acts of intimacy makes it unnatural? Does that mean infertile heterosexual couples are unnatural? Is kissing unnatural? Is it possible that blowjobs are, in fact, supernatural?

AIDS is Gods way of punishing gays.
So what was God punishing us for with syphilis? Colonialism? God must really be upset with Africans, because theyre really getting the worst of the AIDS epidemic. What exactly did entire villages of African people do to warrant decimation? Maybe God is lashing out at people not using condoms and making too many babies. Lets face it; the current population growth cant sustain itself for very long. Either people stop having babies or God brings on war, famine, disease, and natural disasters. Hell, weve had a whole lot of that in the last year. Maybe God makes people gay as a positive alternative to bringing on another plague. Or perhaps shit just happens and God doesnt have any vindictive motives behind it. Pat Robertson claims that the Florida hurricanes were punishment for the gays in South Beach. Hey Pat, maybe God is pissed at Jeb, the 2000 election, and Pensacola abortion bombers. And Fred Phelps, please quit protesting dead soldiers funerals. They didnt die because America is tolerant of gays. They died because our Christian president sent them off to an unjustified war.

The gay lifestyle is unhealthy
Im going to need to see some statistics before I even try to tackle this one. I do know that nearly half of teenage suicides are committed by teens that are struggling to come to terms with their sexual orientation. Before you attack someones predisposed needs for affection, why dont you look at the environment these people endure? Gay people are criticized and attacked every day. People live in the closet out of fear. No one wants to be the next Matthew Sheppard. No one wants to be disowned, ostracized, shunned, beaten, humiliated, or excommunicated. People want to live with the people they love, not live alone or in a lie. Drug abuse, suicide, and other self-destructive behavior should be expected from people who are routinely told they are inherently evil. Tell a kid that hes bad and rotten every day of his life, and hell grow up to be a bad and rotten kid. Any DSHS social worker can tell you that.

Gays are trying to corrupt the institution of marriage
This is usually said in the same breath as the gay lifestyle is unhealthy and immoral. Of course we sleep around! What other choice does one have in a society that doesnt accept or recognize our relationships? What options do we have? Its almost as if conservative Americans were okay with gays as long as they were in the closet or in bathhouses where they could pretend we didnt exist. But when men hold hands on the streets or expect others to recognize theyre in love and committed to each other, well, thats just wrong. If youre so concerned about the institution of marriage, why not focus your efforts on combating easy divorce laws or picket reality shows like Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?. I think most gay people would agree that you can keep the word marriage, we just want to be able enter the same legal and civil relationship that allows us to declare our love for each other. And wed like to be able to visit each other in the hospital and gain all the other special rights that come with being married.

Homosexuality is a sin. The Bible says so.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And while youre compiling your own list of moral transgressions, lets look at what the bible actually says. Im going to borrow heavily from the work of Walter Wink, Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary here. In his article Homosexuality and the Bible, he points out that in addition to men laying with men, the bible prescribes equal condemnation towards: intercourse during menstruation, celibacy, marriage with non-Israelites, naming of sexual organs, masturbation, and birth control. The bible does permit, however, things like: polygamy, levirate marriage (if the husband dies without producing offspring, the woman becomes the wife of his brother by default), prostitution, sex with slaves, concubinage, treatment of women as property, and marriage to young women (girls of 11 to 13 years of age). And really, the bible says nothing about homosexuality. It attacks men having sex with men in pagan rituals and in the form of rape on the battlefield, but never acknowledges homosexuality as a sexual orientation. Also bear in mind that Jesus says nothing in regards to gays and lesbians, and that Jesus time on Earth officially ends the Old Testament and a huge chunk of biblical law. However, Jesus did speak out against divorce, so Im not sure why that issue has fallen by the wayside.

Homosexuality is gross
To quote Shakespeare, The lady doth protest too much, methinks. If youre not gay, then why should you care what gay people do? Freud believed that homophobia results from peoples own uncertainty regarding their orientation. So next time you hear two Christians on the radio discussing the abhorrence of homosexuality, rest assured that they secretly long to get in each others pants.

Brian plays bass in These Arms Are Snakes and Onalaska, and sings and plays guitar in Roy. He and Reno married in 2004.

This rumor is too hot and weird to ignore: Bill Clinton will replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft’s president. I like Steve a lot, but Jesus, if Bill Clinton took the helm, that would be radical. And I thought the speculation that Microsoft was buying Yahoo! was exciting.

In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea and Soft Bulletin are probably the two greatest American records produced in the 1990’s. I’m excited to report that Soft Bulletin will at last receive a much-deserved reissue. Pitchfork reports:

In the meantime, the 1999 F'Lips masterpiece The Soft Bulletin will be reissued on DVD on January 31. In addition to the full album, remastered in glorious Dolby 2.0 and 5.1 sound, the DVD will include a buttload of outtakes, radio sessions, and videos.

I added this release date to my Outlook calendar and will be duly counting the days. This news is almost as welcome as last year’s Smile re-release.

I just had lunch with Greg, a person—like Douglas—who I first met through Flickr before realizing that he too worked at Microsoft. We discussed the current Spaces situation, digital photography and musicianship. On the last two, Greg is notable for being a drummer, and for taking great photos at shows in Seattle, most recently as an official photographer for the great KEXP.

We discovered we worked on the same campus when I recognized fellow MSN employee Rick in Greg’s photo series regarding a beard growing contest.

From this article: “There have been recent hints that Google, like other firms, could be wrestling with its data demons. According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, the firm’s capital expenditures more than doubled, growing from $259.9 million in the nine months ended September 30, 2004, to $592.4 million for the same period in 2005. Google expects to spend more than $800 million on property and equipment, including IT infrastructure, land, and buildings, to help manage and expand its operations during 2005.”

More speculation here, where in that author makes a case for Google’s telco ambitions.

I sold a few items on eBay recently, among them a wooden wine glass rack and a Roomba vacuum. I received $20 for the wine rack, but wound up paying $35 to ship it (unusual size).

The Roomba recipient paid $100 but was not satisified with the condition (the virtual wall was missing and the battery holds a 45 minute charge). Rather than press the issue, I decided the simplest course of action was to refund the Roomba buyer her $100, no questions asked. I also asked her to keep the unit. Why bother with the additional hassle of UPS receiving, in which I inevitably need to drive to the UPS center in South Seattle to pick up my shipment, etc.

Net of my recent eBay transactions: -$15.

eBay is a pain in the ass. Go Fremont!