Arghh! Why does Basecamp often go down at weekends? And more importantly, why does it go down most when you need access to some files that are only in Basecamp?
That’ll teach me for wandering around Inverness today listening to Ayria with a smug ‘I can do anything’ look on my face.
Never mind Track of the Day. This is Track of the Year. It’s piano. It’s trance. It’s bliss.
But I wish I had been. From The Guardian:
“First there’s talk of dead dogs on empty beaches and confused old ladies talking to parrots. Then comes some advice: if you want a trouble-free crossing over the US/Canadian border “act like a total junkie”. Welcome to Kristin Hersh’s world, where the banter is almost as strange as the songs.
“It’s 25 years since a teenage Hersh formed influential indie band Throwing Muses and invited the world to share her brutal fairytales. Her chilling vocals, both a sugary glaze and violent attack on the band’s chiming melodies, made Hersh a cult princess. But her complexity was no act. Suffering from bi-polar disorder, it wasn’t until she broke up the band in 1997 and embarked on a solo career that her demons influenced her art, rather than controlling her life.
“With her new band, 50 Foot Wave, satisfying her need to rock, Hersh turns instead to the bare folk-blues of her solo work. Joined by only a violinist and cellist, her court jester-aping blue and red check trousers are soon knee-deep in the tears and darkness of her back catalogue. “Ducking under, cramming it in/ Isn’t falling in love,” she sings in 37 Hours, her voice a trembling sigh, her eyes gripped in an unblinking stare.
“Perched on a chair, gripping her acoustic guitar, Hersh lurches between warm stories and smiles and a haunted mask of mental anguish. After sharing an insight into life in the Catskill Mountains before it got trendy – “the people across the way called both their boys Errol Flynn” – her shoulders hunch, slowly rolling as her raw voice picks over the uncomfortable truths of A Loon. “Some woman in San Francisco told me I was vividly transparent,” she muses. “Which isn’t actually possible.” Certainly not for Hersh, who remains startlingly opaque.”
And whilst we’re on the same page: an interview.
Joel Spolsky just posted his estimate of where the effort goes in his software business. He reckons that just 2% of effort goes to new code. This is a little unfair, since he also reckons that 55% is spent on debugging, beta testing and minor tweaks. So the real figure should be about 57%.
He then says that this is the reason why software companies started by programmers fail: There’s another 43% of the business (or 98% depending on what you measure) that these guys can’t do, and potential customers spend most of their effort evaluating the consequences of this other 43%, leaving the products almost as an afterthought.
I’m not sure I’ve ever met a programmer (or at a stretch a software engineer) who even would have thought of starting their own business. But based on my experience of them, there’s only a few who would have the balls and passion to do so. Never mind whether they had the skills.
Which brings me to some points about our company. And something about opportunities.
When I first left university I joined a company as a junior systems engineer – and getting that position was a whole lotta trouble (since the company never employed graduates straight into that department). Shortly after I joined I was offered a major engineering role on a new cutting edge project. I took it, although I knew little of the technology surrounding it, and I turned my responsibility into a management role. To this day I still don’t think that my managers realised this.
After I had been in that position for some time, I found out why I was offered the role: no one else wanted it and everyone assumed I knew the technology (but I was never questioned on this). I learnt pretty quickly two other things: If you work in a large organisation and you turn an opportunity down, you rarely get asked again. But more importantly, if you cock-up big time (and I did once), you get noticed and you get remembered. And that means more opportunities come your way.
What has this got to do with Junctionbox Media? Well, it too got set up just because an opportunity came my way and I was bored with my full time job. A few years later when I was made redundant from another job I decided to move onto Junctionbox Media full-time. Now, I do know how to engineer software – I can get by. But more importantly, the management opportunities I had previously led me to appreciate and realise that this 43% (or 98%) of other stuff is really important. We now have a small team of people who complement and overlap each other’s skills to make sure that 100% of our business is covered.
Despite all of this, I’m still amazed by the number of contracts we get from people who’ve never seen our website or examples of our work.
Cinerama:
I tasted the ocean
When I kissed her fingers
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