March 2009 – ZekeWS

For Broken Strings: New Acoustic EP by Josiah Thiemann

My buddy Josiah is taking the Fort Collins music scene from all angles – he is at once a solo acoustic performer and a drummer in heavy metal band Split Second. (A year ago we got to share the stage in Deliver Me Seven). His new acoustic EP, For Broken Strings (warning: iTunes link), just came out for $3.96.

As always, Josiah’s songwriting comes through as the genuine article: his lyrics are meaningful, unpretentious and contemplative. In For Broken Strings, he delivers them in the context of acoustic guitars, light percussion, and strings. The title track gradually builds from subtlety to catchy pop-punk.

I suggest you check it out – it’s a steal at under four bucks – and pass along the word to your friends if you like it too.

Finally 21… Pics and Video from Ronda, Málaga, Birthday

So I’m 21 already.

Sure, it’s a bit less meaningful in a country where the age of majority for everything is eighteen, but still… ¡Hay que celebrarlo! I had a really fun weekend. I went to Ronda and Málaga with my study abroad group. Ronda is an old town founded by Celts and later transformed by Romans, Moors, and finally Catholics. The best part of town is a series of three bridges built by different resident cultures. Ronda was hot and we endured (yet another) multi-hour guided tour of the city. I am starting to prefer time running around less touristy parts of the city with a small handful of friends.

Málaga was great. It’s a beach town on the Costa del Sol of the Mediterranean, so the climate is a bit different from mountainous Granada – more humidity, and palm trees! It was foggy for most of our visit but it finally cleared up an hour or two before our departure – enough to feel like we’d really gone to a beach town. I saw a lot but definitely want to go back later when the weather is more remeniscent of summer.

I snagged a quick video of the cathedral bells at noon in Málaga:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNxUayP43dM&w=480&h=385]

I got back to Granada on the afternoon of my birthday and went out to celebrate with a few friends for a couple of hours before the bars closed (it was a Sunday night, so the typical Spanish epic all-nighter was unfortunately not an option).

As for photos, my WordPress plugin that auto-imports my Picasa album is acting up for some reason, so I have to embed this crappy slideshow. I highly suggest clicking through to the actual album to see higher-quality pics:

21st Birthday in Ronda and Málaga

Open Source Entrepreneurship: How to survive while starting a FOSS web app project?

Today I had an idea about a pretty big web publishing / content aggregation platform that I’d like to get started on as a FOSS project. This post isn’t really about that idea – I’ll share that later when the time is right – but more about my own uncertainty of the right way to proceed with a rather large undertaking at this point in my life. There are quite a few unknowns in my mind:

My age / career situation: I am a year away from graduating from college. I think a project of this scale would demand a lot of attention, but also has high potential for success in both terms of adoption and related commercial opportunities. I know of plenty of very successful young programmers who dropped out of college once the success of their product made formal education unnecessary for them: Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg and Mullenweg are all great examples. Now I’m not in a rush to drop out of school – I wouldn’t even consider it unless the project had such momentum that it was obviously justifiable.
What I’m more worried about is what I could do after graduation. I should be thinking about what career moves are wise at that point. That might mean full-time tech work, it might not. I think that especially at first, this project would require a lot of attention without lots of financial backing. I might be able to manage it at the same time as a part time job, 20 to 30 hours a week. And that’s assuming I don’t end up at a job that has weird IP policies that say they have a right to all of my code. Ideally, I’d like to find a way to fund the development of this OSS product so that I could see it turn from idea into reality while still being able to do things like have health insurance and decent food and beer 😀
How to go about development: At this point, the project only exists as a few ideas floating around my head. My business classes have taught me enough to know that others probably have pretty similar ideas, and since this product would be something open source and available to all, I’m more interested in having it done right than I am in being first to market or whatever. As a total newcomer to open source web applications, and as a fairly unskilled programmer, I’m not sure about the best way ahead. I have the potential to learn a lot more of the technical backend and do a lot of the initial work myself, but it might be a better strategy to bring other people on pretty early and just provide input as an “idea man”.
How to pace myself and avoid scope creep: My idea starts out with some very big-picture concepts about current developments in content publishing and media consumption, and gets more detailed with some ways that I could implement my new system. In other words, I have a large vision for where this could go, how it would open content publication and facilitate media consumption for many people, and of related commercial opportunities that would be created. Organizing that vision into smaller action items and not biting off more than I can chew will be the hard parts.

So in short, I’m really excited to get into working on this project, but need to figure out how to do it without shooting my own wellbeing in the foot. I know it’s possible, I just need to find some more of the answers first.

With the folks in Andalucía (w/ lots of photos)

I got an early birthday present this week:

My mom and stepdad came to visit me in Granada! We spent the week running around Granada, both touristy attractions and more typical parts of the city. We got to walk through the Albaicin, toured the Alhambra, had tapas with my Spanish host parents, and took a day trip to a wonderful bed & breakfast in a tiny pueblo in the Alpujarras (Alps).

Jean Claude, the cook/owner of L’atilier (our B&B), made us some amazing vegetarian food – our dinner was the best meal I’ve eaten in many years, possibly ever. Our friends Beth, Lee, Dave and Cory had highly recommended L’atilier to us and practically insisted that we go – and for very good reasons. Thanks, guys, for making sure we got to experience such wonderful cuisine and hospitality! 🙂

Having my folks out for the week was so much fun… It was great being able to show them my new stomping grounds and share the city with them. They’re spending the next few days in Amsterdam before returning home. (My Amsterdam trip will be in early May.)

I got a lot of great pictures during their visit, I will post them after the “read more…” link since there are so many (Facebook and RSS readers, this means you’ll have to follow the link to the original post to see all the pictures.)

Continue reading With the folks in Andalucía (w/ lots of photos)

ZekeWeeks.com revamp

(Facebook and RSS readers, please disregard this post)

I’ve made a few minor updates to ZekeWeeks.com… It now uses Fusion, a great theme from Digital Nature. Threaded comments are now enabled: hover over a comment and you will find “reply” and “quote” buttons.

Also, I’ve added a sidebar with my recent posts on Twitter. I update Twitter much more often than I write blog posts, so if you want to follow my smaller, more frequent updates, you can keep an eye on the “What I’m doing” section of the sidebar.