Tour de Big Wheel
Posted: 2 June 2005 at 01:32:51
"I feel like I'm in the Tour de France... and I'm on a tricycle."
That's pretty much epitomizes how I felt most of today.
It's been an interesting week so far. Monday night, I tried to make a list of all the outstanding Iodynamics projects, estimate the time we could commit to them this week, and note possible personnel assignments. It's the first time I've done anything like that and I'm not satisfied with the results. It needs a lot of work, but it's an early attempt. I'm sure I'll polish the technique and find a better way to do it.
Despite my ambivalence pertaining to my primitive attempt at project management, the experience did give me an appreciation of how much work we actually have in front of us right now: A lot. Prior to actually putting that out in front of me so I could see a bigger picture, I was just beating myself up for not doing more. Now I realize, there's no way I could work enough to finish all these projects. I need help.
I've had Stephen working for me for a couple months now and he's been an invaluable amount of help. I think we're going to be hiring one or two more contract people soon as well.
Part of my stab at project management was also an attempt at scheduling myself throughout the days of the week. This was also a noble effort, but when it really came down to it, our clients don't get along well with schedules -- especially when there's a "red item" on the agenda.
Tuesday afternoon, a client we manage several servers for had gotten complaints from one of their customers that attempts to go to an unconfigured website (via a domain name that was pointed to their IP address) would bring up another website -- a competitor's site hosted on the same server. This made a few people pissed.
This landed a great deal of pressure squarely on me and my "schedule" was scrapped as I spent several hours Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, and tonight fixing the web server configuration to deal with these requests the "Right Way."
It wouldn't have been so hard, but our predecessor had compiled Apache, mod_perl, and mod_ssl from source (and Apache without DSO support). To make matters worse, what worked for one of the load-balanced servers didn't work for another. It was a mess.
So, my job was building Apache 1.3.x, mod_perl v1, and mod_ssl RPMs for these servers (which are running Red Hat 9), removing the old hard-coded crap, testing several dozen websites, and deploying the modified services all without any detectable disruption to client services.
When it was all done and all the sites were loading with flying colors, I forgot all about my frustration with the lack of acknowledgment of my attempt to schedule myself. I was more pleased with the outcome of all that hard work.
Nonetheless, ther'es a LOT of work to be done the next few days.
*sighs*
The Velveteen Pigs
I haven't written about last Thursday's Sons Of Nothing show at The Velvet Room in Salt Lake City so here's my take on it.
This show was a tragic achievement. I say that because everyone -- myself included -- seems to agree the performance was very good, but despite our best efforts to promote this show like no other local show has been promoted, only a small crowd (50-60 people) showed up.
Now, don't get me wrong. Those 50 or so people were a great crowd. Their enthusiasm made them sound more like 150 people.
We knew it was going to be a bit of a challenge being that the show was scheduled for a Thursday evening -- a Thursday evening before the four day Memorial Day weekend. But I thought we had made up for that in our marketing efforts. I really expected and hoped more people to come.
In fact, I had said to a couple of people that if a good-size crowd didn't show up for that show, then I was going to quit the band.
As far as Sons Of Nothing is concerned, I'm really conflicted right now. It's obvious to me that I consider my involvement to be a lot more of a hobby than a career possibility. Because of this, I think I'm both less inclined to put up with crap in the name of "climbing the ladder to success" and less likely to put my real career on hold for band-related activities.
I really want to be involved. I really want to see great things happen. I want to put a little money into this hobby every month or so so I can get more equipment like lights, projection hardware, etc. to put on a killer show.
Therein lies my conflict. Part of me wants to say "screw it," and walk away because it's not going the way I think it should go and I don't feel like anyone else has the same vision I have of where it should go. At least, nobody else in the band seems interested in going in a direction that is minimally disruptive to normal life. Everyone else seems to want to go on two week jaunts out of state and play show after show after show. That sounds great in theory, but our last trip to Colorado was a wash for me. I got very little "work" done while on the road mostly because Internet access was difficult or impossible to come by and our lodging was... yucky. I'm not looking forward to more of that.
Part of the reason everyone wants to play out of state is because the local music scene just plain sucks. Bars are not a popular place to hang out in Utah but there aren't many other places to play live music. I tried suggesting to Thom last week that the band change its collective attitude about the local scene from "this sucks, we're leaving," to "This is going to be hard, but once we conquer the local area, the rest will be easy." I could be wrong, but I don't think he was impressed.
In order to "conquer" locally, I believe the band would need to play new, different places. We'd probably need to bring our own lights and sound along too. All age events would be a must.
The downside is that the band would probably need to play a few shows with no pay soley for publicity and there would be more work setting up and tearing down because of all the extra equipment required to do lights and sound. The upsides, as I see them:
- More frequent shows.
- Shorter drives to show.
- Band would be able to cater to all-age crowds.
- More profit potential - clubs or bars may not be in the middle.
- More freedom to do the show the band wants to do.
- More freedom/responsibility to promote the show.
- Total control over lighting and sound.
So there we go. I don't know what my future holds with regard to the band. I'm up in the air right now; Not really sure which way I'm going to go. It sounds like we've got some gigs coming up in Vail in a couple of weeks and I don't know yet if I'm good to go. I have come to dislike that particular club, but maybe it won't be so bad. We'll have to see how things shake.