Because I'm surprised that I haven't taken the time to do it earlier, I've logged on to CD-Baby and dropped the digital download price of Coffee, Computers, & Song from $15 (which is where they set it by default, I guess) to $9.99. I probably ought to set it up on Bandcamp, too.
DFW, 4:52pm: grumps
The oncologist was called away for an emergency, so Colleen's ultrasound was done by a tech who wouldn't tell her anything. I'll keep you posted.
There doesn't appear to be any free net in the terminal: all tmobile.
Damned if I'll pay $10 or whatever for less than an hour
ten minutes on the net.
At least I can charge for free.
8:12pm OVFF: Grins
A really pleasant flight, with a good conversation with my seatmate, Carol, who was heading to an Information Science conference. Gave her a promo copy of CC&S.
About to head downstairs to socialize and maybe even sing.
Ben Jones has a piece about my book, Free Culture, being made available on Kindle, a platform that uses DRM.Speaking as a singer-songwriter with CC-licensed works available both freely and via DRM-encumbered media such as iTunes, I must say I agree.
In my view, the "free culture" test for a work is whether it is available freely -- not whether it is also available not freely. "Free Culture" is available freely -- meaning, it is licensed freely here. One can put that freely licensed version on a Kindle, freely. I hadn't known my publisher was going to make Free Culture available on the Kindle, but now that they have, I'd be very keen to have a version I can make freely available on the "Free Culture" remix page.
CD Baby just send me email saying I'd sold another copy of "Coffee, Computers, and Song!" Sales have been slow this year, so there are still plenty in stock. Go for it!
Expect news of the next album sometime next week (i.e., after
Death Tax Day).
I recently got a postcard from my Aunt Jean; my Mom had sent her a copy of my CD. She said, in part, "You have a wonderful voice with great pitch and great guitar playing!"
Now, normally I tend to discount praise from relatives, because, well... But she didn't have to put in that bit about pitch. And she's a professional cellist. Must have done something right, then.
Not my most productive day ever, I'm afraid, but I've gotten a few things done. Mainly, I've updated my personal business cards and my album mini-fliers, which were last printed before CC&S came out and so had the pre-order URL on them.
I took the opportunity to start copying things over to steve.savitzky.net,
which will eventually become my main site, over on dreamhost.com.
At the moment it's just a mirror of theStarport.com/Steve_Savitzky/, and there are a number of broken
links. It's mostly useable, though. Hopefully I can get it totally
up-to-date and functional by OVFF.
I also wasted some time partially disassembling the old panel PC I rescued from the discard pile at work. The plan was to see whether it could be silenced by replacing its noisy fans; the answer is a definite maybe. I couldn't get it apart far enough to replace the power supply fan, but I figured out how to disconnect it. Maybe I can add a large enough case fan to compensate for its absence. The CPU fan might be replaceable, but it might be better just to replace the heatsink with a fanless one.
Time for a bath, and then to bed.
Made my hotel reservation for OVFF yesterday, at the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
flower_cat's insistence. (Anyone who didn't know her might think
she was trying to get me out of town so she could spend time with her
lover. I personally suspect she just wants a weekend without my snoring
waking her up.)
I'll send in my registration on Monday, and probably book my flight then as well.
I don't normally get to OVFF, but with a newly-released album it would appear to be a good idea. I may need to get a bigger suitcase.
... will be all that's left of SCO.
-- (from "High
Barratry", on Coffee, Computers, & Song)
The first stage in the formation of a caldera is a gigantic volcanic eruption that empties the magma chamber, which subsequently collapses. Now that SCO has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, we're starting to see the eruption tapering off.
This filing stays all pending legal action against SCO, including the trial in SCO vs. Novell that was scheduled to start on Monday. But Pam Jones of Groklaw points out in the cited post, and in an earlier comment, that SCO isn't exactly off the hook here. First of all, Novell already has a summary judgement that SCO is liable for conversion (the civil equivalent of theft) of the royalties it was owed. So SCO is, in effect, in posession of stolen property, and that's not affected by the bankruptcy. The only thing left to determine is how much. Tuesday's hearing in Delaware should be interesting.
There's also the interesting fact that, up until yesterday, they were telling the court and the SEC that they were still solvent. Is it remotely possible that they were, um, shading the truth a little? There's also a fascinating paragraph in the bankruptcy filing where they continue to claim that they own Unix. In spite of Judge Kimball's recent ruling that they don't.
The soprano is warming up.
Coffee, Computers, and Song! is back in stock at CD Baby.. Probably arrived late yesterday; next time I'll try not to wait until they get down to a single copy before I restock them.
The last remaining orders will be in the mail in about an hour. Still need to consolidate the databases (actually flat files, but PayPal and paper are in different formats) and make sure I haven't missed anyone with my haphazard piling[sic] system, but at this point I think it's done.
The final count brings me up pretty much to C0 (decimal 192) with a handful of "interesting" numbers reserved and a few sitting around at work and at home waiting to be sold. Call it 175 pre-orders, which is enough to cover my production costs and most of the artwork. 70 to dealers, which easily covers the rest of the artwork. Four through CD Baby, who are presently out of stock -- their shipment should be arriving today. (Need to be a little more pro-active there -- waiting until they get down to one disk doesn't really give me enough lead time.)
Need to print some more business cards and fliers.
Shipped my first two international pre-orders this morning, along with a box of 10 copies to CD Baby -- they're down to one copy. Somebody please take it off their hands? They'll have more by Saturday...
The rest of the shipping should go quickly now that I know what I'm doing on the customs form. Eight more labels, all but one international IIRC, plus a couple that hadn't been entered yet. I really need to set down and consolidate all the customer and sales data, ...
CD Baby has just informed me that the iTunes listing for CC&S will be here. They say it might be up now, or it could be 5-30 days. So how about somebody with iTunes letting me know when it gets there.
They've also informed me that they're down to one copy out of the five I sent them; I'll have to call them in the morning to see how many they want. (They say to send as many as I've sold in the last three months -- it's been up for less than two weeks.)
Picked up the chaoswolf at the airport yesterday evening, home
from six weeks with her fiancé (selkit) and ready for
home cooking. (She made dinner tonight -- a salad, and porkchops with a
barbecue sauce based largely on honey, lemon juice, and espresso. Yum!)
Spent most of the evening preparing packing material for tomorrow's
preorder mailings, reading LJ, and listening to Nancy Freeman (nimuejohn)'s Stardust
County. Wow! Probably a good thing I didn't listen to it while I was
working on CC&S, or I would have been too intimidated to finish. It's
gorgeous. Go buy a copy.
Somehow the house seems more complete with both kids here, even when they're both upstairs asleep.
... not gone yet, but getting there. Even as I type, a stack of 50 address labels is slowly grinding its way through the print queues (and getting stuck somewhere). They'll need to be checked against the lists to make sure I haven't already shipped them or handed them out in a con (I know one or two slipped through). Then I have to go back through the list to make sure I didn't miss anyone (and I'm pretty sure there are one or two recent PayPal payments I haven't processed). And I have to compare them with the list of signing instructions and quantities.
They were generated using a sequence of egregious hacks, but thanks to perl, emacs, and glabels, they just might get printed. (OTOH there seems to be some problem with the print server, which is admittedly underpowered for the job. I'll deal with it tonight.)
But I expect I'll have the rest of the pre-orders shipped by sometime next week.
... but I'm going to try to have the next two albums done in a year and a half.
I have reasons for wanting to get Amethyst Rose done -- at least at the duplicator -- by next August. On the other hand, two years is a long time to wait for the one after that, Hacker's Heaven, especially since that will be more upbeat and have more of peoples' favorite songs in it. Also, I've been feeling particularly mortal lately, and have both cancer and heart disease on both sides of my family. Should have started a decade ago. Oh, right.
On the gripping hand, a lot of the time I spent mostly not working on CC&S was spent learning how to use the tools, trying to figure out what needed to be done and how to do it, working on things like the bonus CD that didn't really need doing, and not knowing when I needed to ask for help. I've done that now. Got the T-shirt (from Oasis), even.
( So here's my plan. )I spent most of my year-end vacation last year working on ABT, hacking on the website, and building the toolchain. When I sat down and analyzed what I've done over the last couple of years, I really did crank out two albums. (Facepalms.) No wonder it took longer than I expected.
OK, you can call me crazy now.
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