On the 37Signals blog today there was some talk about Axl Rose and Frank Sinatra, two musicians I love to gab about:

Sinatra’s one take style produced classics. Axl’s dithering produced a pile of mush. We can all learn something from that. It’s easy to fall into a trap of nitpicking over things that don’t really matter. Instead, focus on the essence of what you’re doing. Press record, get it done, and get it out there.

Lately I’ve taken our first takes on demos for the new band, or just scrapping them and coming back to it when the time is right. Sometimes that means a different approach, sometimes a better room sound. I almost always go for a first take on a guitar solo, if I don’t double it with another one for maximum shred \m/.

With that in mind, an update on our progress with Strip should be forthcoming.

Something is apparently cooking over at unspace, the people who’s brainchild was the RubyFringe conference last Summer.

I’d been thinking of trying to put together some kind of geek talent show or battle of the band geeks or what have you, and talking to some other hackers about it (as in Zed and Hampton), and this is bringing the idea back into my head. (I’m a bit of a ham, so I’m inclined to do these sorts of things.)

Zed’s Freehacker’s Union (FU) is a really cool group/grouping/idea and he’s pretty into doing technology and instrument hacking and the idea of putting together regular presentations or performances. I had been thinking of just trying to find the various Rubyists and hackers in the amorphous community who have bands or performance projects and get them all to play some show together in tandem with a conference like RubyFringe or as some kind of accompanying nighttime event. There seems to be interest in this sort of thing. Hampton had mentioned he was looking to put together some kind of website or page presenting hacker music projects (or maybe mixtapes??? just occurred to me now).

Anyway, enough thinking out loud from me, there’s work to be done.

July 9-12: the nerds are planning something!

My daily workspace is in Brooklyn at the Williamsburg Coworking space. I have to say it’s been a pretty rad place to work, and it’s way better than working out of the house or in a corporate office park. Needless to say, it’s your coworkers and environment that make it worth doing, and I’ve been pretty lucky that this space is run by a politically active art collective, and the people who show up here are all creative, positive folks who are also good coworkers; no one is noisy or rude, etc, and the atmosphere is quite relaxed.

In addition, we sometimes have really cool events here:

on friday, we will host “work at jelly” and at 2pm we will pipe the inaugural session of “Jelly Talks” featuring Chris Messina (Board member, OpenID) and Dave Morin (Senior Platform Manager, Facebook). starting at 5pm, we will break into a vivacious happier hour! we hope that you can clear your schedule, snag your laptop and join us – this friday (25 July) from 9:30 till 7pm!

I realize this is a bit late notice, but if you’re in Brooklyn today, feel free to drop by, say hello and check it out.

My friend the writer Warren Ellis is full of good ideas (and various poisons), and the one that he’s been kicking around to some of us lately is really compelling. He calls it PAPERNET:

The social letterbox may just be as simple, in the first instance, as a dedicated Gmail account, where I can just press Print without opening the attached document. In kicking this around within a Secret Society, my friend Alasdair Watson knocked together a proof-of-concept in an hour — email comes in, paper comes out. Automagically, like a podcast that spits out paper.

It’s not like a fax machine, where some bastard buys your number and there’s a sheaf of junk hanging out of the thing in the morning. It’s roll-your-own one-sheet POD. And it’s also subscription-based POD, if you know someone who semi-regularly does interesting things with a sheet of paper and decides to share. They’re either sending directly to your letterbox-email, or you’re on an announcement-only mailing list (or Google Group). Or, as I say, as simple as me pressing Print so they’re spat out for me to take to the pub, or on a train journey. And if they’re not especially personal, I can just leave the buggers on the table or the seat when I’m done with them, too.

Wouldn’t it be cool to set something like this up, the input AND output end of it?

Apparently there are more than a few people looking to keep an eye on our progress with Strip for the iPhone. Development was delayed in December and the beginning of January by a rush of year end work for some of our largest clients, which needed to take precedence. While that put us a bit off schedule, we’ve been making great progress in the last couple of weeks and should have more news soon on a beta of the application. Thanks for keeping on us! Since most of the inquiries are coming from users of Palm Strip, we’d love to hear from you about your favorite features, things you can’t live without, and things you never liked that you’d like to see resolved in the new version for the iPhone. Feel free to leave comments or write us: support@zetetic.net.