Author Archives: Alex
Dreamland
He’s got a road map of Jupiter
A radar fix on the stars
All along the highway
She’s got a liquid-crystal compass
A picture book of the rivers
Under the Sahara
They travel in the time of the prophets
On a desert highway straight to the heart of the sun
Like lovers and heroes, and the restless part of everyone
We’re only at home when we’re on the run
On the run
He’s got a star map of Hollywood
A list of cheap motels
All along the freeway
She’s got a sister out in Vegas
The promise of a decent job
Far away from her hometown
They travel on the road to redemption
A highway out of yesterday — that tomorrow will bring
Like lovers and heroes, birds in the last days of spring
We’re only at home when we’re on the wing
On the wing
When we are young
Wandering the face of the Earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Learning that we’re only immortal
For a limited time
Time is a gypsy caravan
Steals away in the night
To leave you stranded in Dreamland
Distance is a long-range filter
Memory a flickering light
Left behind in the heartland
We travel in the dark of the new moon
A starry highway traced on the map of the sky
Like lovers and heroes, lonely as the eagle’s cry
We’re only at home when we’re on the fly
On the fly
When we are young
Wandering the face of the Earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Learning that we’re only immortal
For a limited time
We travel on the road to adventure
On a desert highway straight to the heart of the sun
Like lovers and hereos, and the restless part of everyone
We’re only at home when we’re on the run
On the run…
Ask the composer for sync rights? Why thank you!
Something happened a couple days ago that genuinely increased my level of hope for the human race. Someone from the Indiana State School Music Association contacted me because they wanted sync rights to a couple of my unpublished pieces which were being performed by marching bands this fall. For those that don’t know, sync rights include things like recording audio/video (at least I think so, although I’m no copyright expert, so don’t quote me). For the record, no one from that organization or any other state school music organization has ever contacted me about sync rights. I thought it was a nice gesture on their part, and it was obvious to me that they were trying to do the right thing. I told them how refreshing it was to see an organization doing something like this.
There is a pretty large debate going on right now about copyright law, who owns music, how it gets shared, who can do what with music, etc. For whatever reason, I’ve always been more interested in observing and analyzing all sides of these types of issues than actually forming opinions myself, so I often wondered what I’d think if something ever happened to me regarding my music and copyrighting. For example, I’ve never been active about finding video companies that record bands playing my music to stick them with a copyright violation for not getting sync rights, but there are some composers that do. This isn’t because I’m a spineless hermet, its because there is so much grey area surrounding copyright right now that I don’t feel the need to get involved in causing controversy. Its a very nebulous subject.
Either way, in the meantime, I think its great that organizations like ISSMA are trying to do their part to keep the composers happy. After all, we can’t keep track of every performing group in the world.
An Interesting Blog
I was recently reading composer Eric Whitacre’s blog when I came across a link to an interesting blog that he apparently frequents. After skimming for a while, I came across this interesting post in response to the popular Kanye West incident at the VMAs with Taylor Swift: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/09/cultural_plasticity.php. Just thought I’d share since I hadn’t posted in a while.
Happy Birthday, September 21st.
Financial Web App Follow Up
A while ago I wrote a post about the 4 major players in the personal finance web application world. To my surprise, it attracted a lot of attention. In fact, it has been the most viewed page on my site in the last month. I got responses from the CEO of Wasabe, as well as several e-mails. I thought I’d do a follow up to show people where I’ve gone since that last post.
As it turns out, Mint.com finally got support for my bank. I was really excited to see this and I quickly added my loans back on. Everything worked well and it continues to be the application that I use today. I only have one major problem with Mint, and that is that you can’t automatically put transactions into certain categories based on user defined filters. Mint does a lot of this for you, but there are some transactions that don’t get categorized and I’d like to be able to say something like “if the transaction has X text, put it into Y category”. The main reason for this is that my bank actually posts the Pre-Auth ATM “charge” before every use of my debit card. This is basically a fake charge that occurs before the transaction posts for good. When Mint gets my bank data, it essentially thinks the Pre-Auth charge is just a normal transaction and so it removes double the money from my account. The weirdest part is that the transactions clearly don’t add up to my current balance, probably because it pulls the balance by itself and doesn’t even worry about adding up all the transactions.