Um...

Can somebody explain this to me?

That's "Mr. Nerd Gnome" To You

We're in Wired this (where "this" = next) month. Therein we are referred to as "the nerd gnomes in Beacon Hill." This is, in fact, an improvement. At the beginning of my career in software I worked at That Software Giant in Redmond™ on their initial foray into the internet, MSN 1.0. Wired did an article in which they likened we happy few original web developers to the million monkeys typing randomly on tiny keyboards. So now I am, professionally speaking, a gnome. The metaphors grow ever more humanoid.

There isn't a ton in this article that I haven't already covered here at The Odds Are One over the last couple of years (oh please, Wired: web services hype is soooo 2006). I haven't yet mentioned Amazon DevPay in this space, which is weird on account of in most of the Web Service things I announce the launch of I am only peripherally involved, whereas DevPay took up my entire life until it launched last December. DevPay is a billing application wherein you the developer create a software product that runs on Amazon's Web Services, then we sign up and bill your customers on your behalf. The concept is actually pretty cool, and like the rest of Web Services, if it turns out to be a killer app, the thing it's going to kill is venture capital.

Amazon (and Google, Yahoo, and IBM, who aren't wasting any time getting into the space either) is taking away the big upfront IT costs: you want to run a business that's going to need four high-powered servers just to get going? You don't need to spend $10,000 on hardware and $100,000 a year on a sysadmin just to get off the ground. You rent the space from Amazon for $0.40 an instance/hour and $0.10 a Gigabyte/month. When you want to get bigger, you rent more space (AWS even gives you a volume discount). We are hoping, it seems, to provide the big guns for the revolution, and then to watch the little guys fire them off.

It Came From 1977

The Odds Are One and The Calculus Affair are pleased to announce the release of bad quarto*, a ten and one-half song E.P. recorded for the 2008 RPM Challenge (which has, as will be noted by those of you possessing clever and new-fangled calendar-reading skills, just ended).

The full album will be released in approximately twelve lines of text. Here now is the advance single from the album. Click play. You know you want to.




The Calculus Affair quoteth now from our liner notes as regards bad quarto*:

This album is composed entirely of songs about or pertaining to plays by William Shakespeare. In addition to being The Calculus Affair's effort for the 2008 RPM Challenge, it is also an E.P. which heralds the release of a future album of epic scope: one song for each of Shakespeare's plays (37 or 38, depending upon whom you read). If you are a fan of The Calculus Affair, and you enjoy excessively long albums that sound like they fell out of 1977, keep an eye peeled.

And now, the long (for an entirely abstract and arbitrary definition of the word, "long") awaited (for a definition of "awaited" etc. etc.) downloadable mp3 version of bad quarto*.

1. Duke Of The Stratosphere


2. Every Day


3. Bone & Matter


4. Rude Mechanicals


5. The Archer


6. Prince Of Tyre


7. The Mob


8. Hell & Night


9. Q.E. I


10. Exit, Pursued by a Bear/Your Mother's a Statue


11. Coda (Duke Of The Stratosphere)

This EP also comes with the fun built-in game, "Guess Which Play The Song Goes With." This game may or may not actually be fun. As with all music by The Calculus Affair, we remind you of the following: Unauthorized duplication is strictly encouraged. We hope you enjoy.

OaO Presents: Hilarity for Nerd Sportsfan Rockstar Wannabes™

Picabo Street, if I may digress again, is my second favorite winter Olympics subject, after curling. In my musician days I made up a song inspired by her name: "Peekaboo Street." My baby lived on it. It was writing songs like that that made me the man I am today: a former musician.

-King Kaufman

OaO Presents: Hilarity for Nerds™

From my friend Tom:

I failed my saving throw against charisma and became a die-hard Obama supporter.

10 Gadfly Things

I like this meme. I'm doin' it too. Ten things I've done that you probably haven't:

1. Played guitar with Jon Auer
2. Attended 3 months of public school held in a language I didn't speak at the time
3. Flagged down a British Rail train from a platform in order to get it to stop and pick me up
4. Acted on stage with Hilary Swank
5. Experienced the Ballmer Peak (during which I wrote a script to keep a fulfillment-center mechanical sorter running after the program that was supposed to run it had crashed)
6. Written a series of comic books
7. Written a role-playing game based on the character from those comic books, complete with 30-page rule-book
8. Recorded an album in the month of February (and will again)
9. Appeared on a PBS Show
10. Been at the Trevi Fountain on New Year's Eve

"Yes, God forbid that while talking to 60,000 public school students, the President should appear smart."

Barack Obama is making me a little sad that we don't have a tv (a feeling which arises during the baseball post season and at just about no other time ever). I think this is because I'm pretty sure his speeches are written by Aaron Sorkin. He speaks of "workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land." He promised last night, "We will remember that something is happening on the streets of America, that we are one people, that we are one nation, and that together we can begin the next chapter in America's story with the three words ... Yes, we can." It makes me weepy.

But my question is this: is falling for Obama because of the poetry, because he's so good with the words, really any less shallow than voting for someone because he's young and attractive or because he looks like a cowboy and what's more 'merican than a cowboy or because he talks stupid just like me or because he's someone I'd like to have a beer with? Beers, cowboys, and stupid people do nothing for me (young and attractive I consider on a case by case basis), but then I wasn't the target audience on those, but boys with words...well he had me at "audacity."

And while I would argue that facility with words suggests other qualities like intelligence which might come in handy when running a country (but then I teach facility with words for a living and Obama didn't write his anyway), it could just be a question of what gets your rocks off. Still, if the folks who know about these things (myself, I wouldn't have guessed that stupid=electable or that speaking French=unfit to serve as president, so shows what I know) think that poetry is more marketable this season than dumb cowboy, already I feel we've won one. (About damn time too).

P.S. Bonus points for naming the West Wingepisode that lends the post title.

--mtg