| Devo Spice Update - 7/15/09 |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|01:17 pm] |
Hey everyone,
I'm back from Nerdapalooza, just about caught up after having been mostly offline for 3 days, and am almost recovered from a weekend of minimal sleep.
Nerdapalooza was awesome! I have posted a write up of it on my blog (http://www.devospice.com/news.php?id=162) which also has a link to my Flickr page with all my pictures, so check that out. This is just the short version of the story. The full version, which is 3 times longer, will appear in the first issue of the new Fan Club PDF newsletter which will go out to subscribers as soon as everything is ready.
Want a cameo on my new song?
I debuted a new song at Nerdapalooza called Platform Wars which is a battle rap between the guys in Apple's "I'm A Mac/I'm A PC" commercials. It went over great! But I need a little help. I need recordings from various people saying "I'm a PC! Yo!" For reference listen to this: http://www.devospice.com/temp/pc.mp3 Record yourself saying that and send me a high quality sound file (high quality MP3, AIFF, or WAVE). I can't promise I'll use all of the recordings but I'll use as many as I can. I need 7-10 of these for the song but I can probably squeeze in a few more. Here's the catch, I need the recording by Friday night. Saturday morning I'm going to start sequencing everything together.
While I was away at Nerdapalooza Byron Lee filled in for me on Manic Mondays. Unfortunately I couldn't post the song until after I got back but it's up and posted now. Here's a direct link to the MP3: http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-54323/TS-245403.mp3
That's all. Next up for me is AlFest. Oh, and I hit 300 followers on Twitter, so I'm happy about that. :)
->Later.....Spice |
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| Nerdapalooza Wrap-Up |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|07:46 am] |
This is the short version. The full version will be a feature in the first issue of the newsletter for my new Fan Club which will be launching soon.
To say that Nerdapalooza was "freakin' awesome" would be an understatement. To say that it was "like OMG totally R0XX0RZ!!!11!" would be more accurate, but less intelligent, so I'm going to go with "simply amazing."
 Friday night my flight was delayed causing me to miss the entire Nerdapalooza pre-party at A Comic Shop. I finally arrived around midnight and Luke took me back to the hotel where we went to one of the post-pre-party-after-parties. This one took place in Schaffer's room, so I got to meet up with him, along with MC Lars, MC Frontalot, YTCracker, MC Gigahertz, Chozo Ninpo who tackle-hugged me, and a few other people.
 Saturday the show started about an hour late. Odd Austin went on first. I don't know how many shows this guy has done in the past but I was shocked to find out he's only 17 years old. He did a good, solid set, opening with the official Nerdapalooza theme song. I joined him on stage for Vampires Suck so I could do my verse which I had meticulously memorizing about 20 minutes before the show started.
 My set went great. I think I took the stage around 2:30 or so. I opened with Cellular Degeneration and then called Insane Ian up on stage to fill in for Shoebox on Pac-Man. He is substantially shorter, thinner, and has far less hair than Shoebox, but he did a good job regardless. Then I did Why Are You Friending Me On Facebook. After that I called The Great Luke Ski up on stage to do a song that was so new it not only hadn't been recorded yet, but we hadn't even rehearsed it yet. The song is called Platform Wars and is a battle rap between the guys in Apple's "I'm A Mac/I'm A PC" commercials. The song went over great despite a few minor flubs here and there. I finished with Reign Of Error and then Inner Voice.
My set was very well received. I got lots of compliments from lots of different people steadily for the rest of the weekend. Many of them commented on Platform Wars which made me more excited about finishing that song.
 I spent the rest of the weekend switching off watching the merch table with Luke and watching the acts such as Captain Dan And The Scurvy Crew. They did a great show as expected, however, I was surprised to find out that pirates apparently are fans of the Wii. Captain Dan's DJ controlled their set using a Wii remote. He would hold it up, then shake it like he was hitting a drum with it and the backing track would start. During the songs he would shake it and as he shook it a sample would play in time with the shaking. It was very cool to watch.
 Tom Reed took Luke and I out to dinner Saturday night (thanks, Tom!) during a rain storm of biblical proportions and got back in time to catch the headliners. YTCracker was the first of the headliners, followed by MC Lars, and finally MC Frontalot. These guys perform with a live band behind them which adds another level of energy to the performance. They were awesome.
 Luke went on Sunday afternoon. He was nervous about this set because it was the first time he was using a projector during his set, and also he didn't know how well a pure dementia act would go over at a nerdcore show. He wisely did many of his rap numbers, starting the show with Stealing Like A Hobbit, which the audience absolutely loved. I joined him on stage for Peter Parker. Then I did some beatboxing while Luke impersonated MC Frontalot and did a rap version of George Carlin's routine about hair. (Irony note: Frontalot is bald for those who have never seen him.) He ended with Dementia Revolution. MC Lars joined Luke on stage and Ian, Austin, and I went up for background vocals. The entire FuMP contingency was there in full effect, although with a slight fashion faux pas as Lars and I were both wearing Worm Quartet t-shirts.
I have a habit of missing their set whenever Dual Core performs so I made a point to watch this one. They were awesome. Later Uncle Monsterface took the stage. They describe themselves as "sock puppet rock" and I spent their entire set in the crowd with a huge grin on my face. It's hard not to smile when you're bouncing large, inflatable dinosaurs around the crowd and watching a vampire do battle with a pile of mashed potatoes all while being serenaded by a sock puppet.
 But I think the greatest performance of the weekend goes to Schaffer The Darklord. Schaffer has a presense and energy on stage that is just incredible. He is articulate and easy to understand, and he is funny. His lyrics are sometimes funny, and his between song banter is funny. And the songs themselves are just fantastic.
 At some point I introduced myself to MC Chris. He was the only other performer there who I hadn't yet met and since he's arguably the most popular one there I figured it was a good idea. We spoke for a few minutes, discussed music and his role on Adult Swim, and I explained to him what I do. At the end of the conversation he said "Hey, can I sign your badge?" I was like, "um, OK," and he grabbed my Artists badge and signed the back of it. I gave him my card and headed back to my merch table. Later he offered Luke some of his pizza.
MC Chris took the stage around midnight and put on a good show. It's obvious there is still somewhat of a divide between him and the rest of nerdcore, though, as the regular nerdcore fans gradually trickled out to go to the after party. Chris ended around 1:30 and by the time we got back to our hotel room it was after 3:00. Luke originally said he wanted to go to the after party and I was tempted to join him and Kiki but I had an 8:00 AM flight. I figured I would be better off sleeping for three hours because if I stayed up all night I would probably be useless to my family when I got back home.
I found out later that at the after party MC Lars and MC Frontalot filmed a music video for one of their songs. Now, of course, I wish I had gone. Oh well. Maybe I can email them some footage of me playing Wii Cheer or something to splice into it.
All my photos from the event can be found here.
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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| Manic Mondays |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|10:05 am] |
I'm not bringing my laptop with me to Nerdapalooza this weekend so I won't be able to record my show while I'm away.
Anyone want to do a fill in episode for me?
->Later.....Spice |
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| Just Plain Folks Nominations |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|07:40 am] |
The nominations for this year's Just Plain Folks Awards were just announced and I've got 2! Fatal Error is nominated for Best Novelty Album and Pillagers is nominated for Best Novelty Song.
I'm absolutely thrilled about this because, as they say, these are the world's largest music awards with the most albums considered, so getting a nomination here is awesome.
If you would like to see the full list of nominations, or buy tickets to the awards which take place on August 29th in Nashville, TN click on this link: http://www.jpfolks.com/default.php?page=awards
A big thank you to everyone involved with Just Plain Folks for making it such a wonderful organization and for considering my music for the awards!
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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| Manic Mondays 216 |
[Jun. 28th, 2009|09:03 am] |
This week's episode of Manic Mondays is posted, temporarily, here: http://www.manicmondays.net/mp3/manicmondays0216.mp3
I can't upload the file to TalkShoe for some reason, and since that is where the feed is now programmed to get it the feed isn't going to update until that problem is solved. Hopefully they'll fix it overnight and I can update the feed first thing in the morning. Sorry folks.
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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| Bug Jar Show Report |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|10:57 am] |
 The Rochester show was very cool. Worm Quartet, Seth Faergolzia, and I performed at The Bug Jar, which for some reason had an entire kitchen set up on the ceiling, complete with dirty dishes in the sink and food on the plates.
 I went on first, and rocked, except for when Longer came on. I missed my queue on the first verse, couldn't recover, and then my mind went blank. I had to stop the song and poll the audience for the lyrics because my brain had completely shut off. Thankfully Shoebox recalled the beginning of the song, prompted me, and I restarted the song and continued rocking.
 For the first time I was able to perform Why Are You Friending Me On Facebook in front of the girl who lent her pictures to my video for the song. We staged this picture, which I love, but I just realized while uploading the pictures that it should be the other way around. She should be smiling and excited and I should be brushing her off. Oh well.
 Then Seth took the stage. Damn that guy is talented. I don't think I've ever seen anyone sing and play guitar quite like that before. It's difficult to explain, but let's just say that this guy has some impressive vocal control.
 Worm Quartet finished off the night with his usual technique of not sucking. I signed The Rabbit Song along with him and banged on invisible drums for Frank's Not In The Band Anymore- which, oddly, earned me a compliment from a real drummer.
After the show I was interviewed by Seriah Azkath for a new DVD he is putting together. He also video taped the entire show and I'm pretty sure some of that footage will make its way to YouTube. When it does I'll post about it. All the photos I took are posted here.
I crashed with Shoebox, who had purchased a box of 1 dozen donuts that were on sale for $1. I had one. Oddly it was about as good as the ones from our local Dunkin Donuts, if that tells you anything about northern New Jersey. I did not give him the 8.3 cents for it.
Then I got 4 hours of sleep and drove back to New Jersey to put in a half day at work. I'm not sure how productive I was. I don't remember too much of it.
Next up, Nerdapalooza!
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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| Devo Spice Update - 6/23/2009 |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|12:25 pm] |
Hey everyone,
Tomorrow (Wednesday) I'm performing in Rochester, NY along with Worm Quartet and Seth Faergolzia of Dufus. The show is at The Bug Jar. Doors open at 8:00. Hopefully I'll see a few of you there. It's always good to see my old Rochester buddies again.
In case you've missed my postings about it Manic Mondays now goes on live every Sunday nights via TalkShoe. I'm going to try to stick to the 10pm slot. (Last week I had to push it back to 11 due to Father's Day related activities.) You can join me in the chat room while the show is on, or just listen live to the stream.
The link for the show is:
http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/54323
Note that the link won't work until the show is actually on the air. So check that link at 10pm on Sundays. Follow me on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/devospice) or Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/tomrockwell) for up to the nanosecond updates with the status of the show and everything else.
Finally, Nerdapalooza is in just 3 weeks and I can't friggin' wait! This show is going to be epic! The "tentative" schedule has me going on Saturday at 3:00 right after Captain Dan and The Scurvy Crew. (Full schedule here:
http://www.nerdapaloozafest.com/?page_id=40)
As always check my web site http://www.devospice.com for all the gory details on these shows and the other ones I have (like AlFest!) coming up.
->Later.....Spice
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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| Manic Mondays Episode 214 |
[Jun. 14th, 2009|11:22 pm] |
This week's episode of Manic Mondays was recorded live on TalkShoe! I'm considering doing this from now on, so please let me know if you like this or not. This week we hear some classic Worm Quartet, and some new music by some newly discovered acts like Norm Sherman and In The Loop.
I am planning to make the show more interactive and have people calling in, but I wanted to start simple. I'm also not sure how to record the other callers yet since I record locally.
The feed has been updated to point to the TalkShoe hosted files, however I can't actually test it until it goes live at midnight Mountain time, so if your podcatcher doesn't pick it up just sit tight and I'll fix it tomorrow. Additionally here's a direct link for the download:
http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-54323/TS-235206.mp3 |
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| New test for The FuMP - NO |
[Jun. 12th, 2009|11:17 am] |
This is a new test for The FuMP blogs. This post SHOULD NOT show up on The FuMP. |
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| Technology Is Not My Friend |
[Jun. 11th, 2009|10:56 am] |
The other day while I was out taking my mandatory day off without pay due to the crappy economy both our CD printer and CD tower burner decided to just stop working. Being human I don't have this luxury, and was forced to use our old CD printer and old tower burner which my co-worker hooked up while I was out.
The old tower burner is fine. It's just slower than the new one and can only burn 5 CDs at a time. The printer on the other hand presents some problems. First of all, it's a serial printer, and our file server doesn't have a serial port. We ran into this problem before and used our old project manager's laptop to get it running, so that's what we did again. Except this time I could not get that laptop on the network no matter what I did. In fact, come to think of it, I don't think I've ever managed to successfully network a Windows PC here. I don't know if it's this place or Windows or what, but it just doesn't happen.
So I exclaimed something to the effect of "Screw this. I'll burn a CD" and did just that. Then I found out the hard way that the laptop's optical drive is dead and wouldn't read the CD. OK, Plan C: USB key drives! I pulled out one of the many USB drives we have laying around the office, stuck it in my computer and... nothing. My PC would not read the drive. I tried another and another and finally decided that my PC just doesn't like USB key drives. So I put the file I needed to print on the network and went to my co-worker's machine, inserted the USB key in his computer, copied it to the drive, then brought it to the laptop and was thankfully, finally able to print the file.
That's how I've been printing CDs for the past 2 days. Oh, and did I mention the laptop's screen is shattered?
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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| Interview Tomorrow On NRRRadio.com |
[Jun. 9th, 2009|12:35 pm] |
Tomorrow night (Wednesday) The Great Luke Ski and I will be guests on the premiere episode of The Geeks Come Out At Night, a new weekly show happening over at NRRRadio.com.
You may notice that the title of the show is the same as the song I released last year on The FuMP. That's because the host, Syrinx, is a fan of mine and asked me if he could use my song as his theme. And why the hell would I say no to that? It's also why he is planning to have Luke and I on as the show's first guests.
Tune in tomorrow starting at 8pm (Eastern time) for the live broadcast.
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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| Feedback On Fan Club Wanted |
[Jun. 2nd, 2009|02:05 am] |
I'm considering putting together a subscription based premium fan club, kind of along the lines of what The FuMP and Erfworld are doing and I'd like some feedback. This is going to be a bit of work to set up so I want to make sure it's worth it for both of us before I do anything.
What I'm planning is, for a small monthly fee you'd get:
1. Store credit. 100% of your subscription fees become store credit, so when my new album comes out or a new shirt or something you can buy it using the credit you have on the site.
2. High quality download credits. You'll get a few free high quality (192k) downloads from my web site each month.
3. A quarterly newsletter with exclusive content of some kind.
Now, here's where I'd like some feedback.
#1 is pretty straightforward. The only caveat to that is if you cancel your subscription you have 30 days to use your store credit. After 30 days it's forfeit. Sound fair?
With #2, should these song credits be cumulative, or just so many per month, period? What I mean by that is, let's say you get 3 credits per month. If you download your 3 songs this month next month after your payment goes through you'll get another 3 credits. But if you don't download any songs this month when your next payment goes through should you then have 6? Or should it max out at 3? What do you guys think?
Third, with the newsletter I'm wondering what format people will prefer? I basically have 3 options: printed, PDF, or HTML. A printed newsletter would be something tangible that you'd get in the mail like I used to do with The Roadkill Gazette. A PDF newsletter would save me time and money, and be printable so if you wanted to print it out to have me sign it or whatever you could. An HTML newsletter would be the easiest to produce and distribute, but not all email clients fully support HTML and I couldn't do any of the really cool stuff with it anyway (like have a Flash player to stream a rough mix of a new song I'm working on). (Can you embed an SWF in a PDF? I'll have to look into that.) Right now I'm leaning toward the PDF and sending it as an email attachment, but I wanted to see what you guys thought.
Now, what would you guys be willing to pay for something like this? I have a price in mind, but I want to see if I'm in the ballpark here.
And how likely is it that you would sign up for this? Please tell me either way. I want to gauge fan interest before I spend the time necessary to build the infrastructure for this. (Wow, that sounded way too corporate.)
Finally is there anything else I should offer? Any feedback is appreciated. Please comment here or email me.
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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| Interview on Erkpod |
[May. 31st, 2009|12:24 pm] |
During BaltiCon last weekend I was interviewed by the Australian podcast Erkpod. That interview is now online. You can download both parts of their BaltiCon series here. I'm in part 2. He also played my new song Why Are You Friending Me On Facebook?
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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| PHP question |
[May. 27th, 2009|05:31 pm] |
Can someone explain to me why the strrchr function is giving me weird results?
Behold:
$test = "These are my last words";
echo strrchr($test, "These"); // returns "These are my last words" as expected.
echo strrchr($test, "are"); // returns "ast words" instead of the expected "are my last words" ?!?!
echo strrchr($test, "my"); // returns "my last words" as expected.
echo strrchr($test, "last"); // returns "last words" as expected.
echo strrchr($test, "words"); // returns "words" as expected.
The second example above is what I'm running into. I have a much longer and more complicated string and I'm trying to find just the last few words starting with a specific word. The function is skipping that word, the data I need, and the next few words and just returning the last word of the string.
Anyone else ever run into this? Any ideas on how to avoid this problem?
->Later.....Spice |
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| BaltiCon Report |
[May. 26th, 2009|10:40 am] |
The short version is that BaltiCon was awesome! It was great fun, and quite profitable, which is always good (especially now that they've cut my hours at work again).
I only attended a few panels, mostly promotion and marketing panels, since I tend to suck at that. I ducked away from the con Friday night to see Star Trek.
 Saturday night we did a round-robin show on the stage by the bar which really wasn't big enough to contain us. Hopefully next year we'll get the main stage again. It was me, Rob Balder, Geordie Keitt, and Danny Birt, with a special last minute appearance by Insane Ian who was married the next day. (Congratulations, Ian!)
Beyond that I did lots of hanging out with friends who I don't get to see often enough, recorded an episode of Manic Mondays with Podcasting's Rich Sigfrit and author Matt F'n Wallace, and finally got to meet Scott Sigler. So as I said at the beginning, it was awesome.
I tended to forget I had my camera with me, so I only took a handful of pictures. They are posted on my Flickr page here.
Originally posted at DevoSpice.com. You can comment here or there. |
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