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April 21, 2006
MySpace Blogs
I've been liking Chris Stroffolino (who also writes for Big Takeover) and The Creature with the Atom Brain's MySpace blogs lately. Lots of insight and cool playlists.
Posted by timothompson at 12:50 PM
April 19, 2006
AABondy/LNuby
Former Verbena songwriter Scott Bondy has started to post some of his new demos on MySpace. There's one lofi rocker (blacklaffin), a folky Nick Drake-style song (Killing Tree) and another track reminiscent of "Souls for Sale"-era Verbena (hey preacher). Drummer Les Nuby has branched out on his own as well.
Posted by timothompson at 04:10 PM
April 18, 2006
Dwight Schrute Bobblehead Now Available
Beth wrote to inform me that the Dwight bobblehead is now available from the NBC Universal store! Using DUNDER10 at checkout will give you a 10% discount. Woo!
Posted by timothompson at 06:24 PM
April 15, 2006
It's Wiki
If three is a trend, then I suppose Matador and Mission of Burma starting a wiki preceding the release of its new album The Obliterati means having a wiki for your favorite band is the new black. Other sites started in the last few months include the Destroyer wiki and the Silver Jews wiki.
Posted by timothompson at 12:33 PM
April 11, 2006
The More You Know...
Some would say television is rotting our brain cavities. Some might be right. Some often pontificate to the malleable who believe everything they read. Who are these some? That is not for me to say. However, I am here to tell you that there are valuable nuggets to be absorbed through gazing at the hypnotic screen. Even through that most denigrated of genres—reality television.
Let's take last night's second Apprentice episode, where the reward for the winning team was a trip to Washington, DC, to spend time with congressman Charles Schumer. Schumer told the Apprentice wannabes that he believes in the Monday morning gut check as the litmus test he applies to choosing a vocation. On Monday mornings, do you feel an excitement in your gut to be starting your week or do you feel an apprehension or sick feeling (I'm paraphrasing)? If you're not feeling an excitement, you probably should be doing something else.
The second morsel gleaned from my catatonic hours in front of my TiVo last night came when I was watching the Surreal Life contestants appear on a segment of Action News. CC DeVille was so nervous to be sportscasting that he pondered the possibility of having a drink (he's an alcoholic). After he passed the test with flying colors, DeVille said to fellow Surreal Lifer Tawny Kitaen: "We're really going to grow doing this. This is really going to make us grow as people because we're being thrown into shit that we wouldn't do—that I'd be scared to do. And you face the fear—you go through it."
Within these two shared reality television experiences lie two essential truths of life. We receive messages like these at random times, when we least expect it, and they can come through any medium, from a television show to a person that you might meet in your daily wanderings. You can either absorb the lessons or ignore them, but they are there. End of sermon.
Posted by timothompson at 11:14 AM
April 05, 2006
Update on ACL Festival Pre-sale Ticket Snafus
I was contacted by Jesse Richardson, a site coordinator for the Austin City Limits Festival, today to talk about what went wrong with the pre-sale on Monday. Originally I thought this might be due to my blog rant yesterday, but Jesse told me that people who had made email complaints about what had happened (as I also did yesterday) had been distributed amongst the team in an effort to make amends.
From what he told me, the ACL Festival list contains over 150,000 email addresses, and the email vendor they used had a server crash that delayed the announcement email for some list members. The email vendor had said they had handled large lists like this in the past, so perhaps it was a freak occurrence. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't think about pursuing another vendor in the future.
He asked for my address so that they could send out some swag in order to ease my pain. This wasn't exactly what I was hoping for–I was thinking that maybe another batch of 3,000 tickets might be sold in another unannounced pre-sale or that perhaps there might be some kind of discount. However, I do appreciate the gesture by the ACL organization to smooth things over among those of us who got our feathers ruffled about this incident.
That's the last I have to say about it. Thanks to LHB for linking to my last post.
Posted by timothompson at 05:56 PM
April 04, 2006
Austin City Limits Festival Pre-sale Encounters Technical Malfunctions
Life's not fair. But you'd think after running an award-winning festival (or 2) for a few years running, the Austin City Limits Festival promoters would be able to handle server loads during their annual $35 limited pre-sale event to newsletter subscribers. I realize that the pre-sale is a crapshoot and that we should be grateful that the promoters allow people to buy some 3-day passes at such a affordable rate (and that the festival has been a sweaty torture chamber for the past two years due to unseasonably hot Indian summers here in Austin). However, it's piss poor performance for such an esteemed festival to have failed to email their entire list at once. Whatever the case, I finally received my announcement email at 10:36 p.m. (and others had similar experiences). I probably won't boycott the festival like Derek, but I'm feeling a little sour grapes about it right now.
As a big-time operation, it's time to invest some money into a ticket service provider that has scalability. As for me, I may be investing my $35 elsewhere this year.
Update: I was contacted by an ACL site coordinator about the issue.
Posted by timothompson at 12:11 PM