Jim Alfredson

Another $100 is in the Paypal account. I'm just blown away. Concerning organissimo's CD debt, freeing up the income from CDBaby and the like will help diminish that fairly quickly. We're going to start recording in my home studio hopefully this month. When we're ready to have it mixed and mastered professionally and also duplicated, we'll do pre-orders and the sponsor drive thing that we did the last time for "This Is The Place" to help offset those costs. I am hoping that by recording the album ourselves we can save some good money and get out of the red quicker than the past two projects. I'm also working on more video, possibly a DVD. I have to see what we have so far... I can't thank everybody enough.

Today's Active Topics and View New Posts send queries to the database that are pretty intensive processes. So if there is a big load on the server, which I guess there was according to the most people online stat that changed today (322 people at once!), those queries will have a tough time getting processed.

Neat! The old "record" was when we moved hosting companies and so all the DNS servers and Google bots were registering the new IP.

I added a subtitle.

This morning the Paypal account has almost $2800 in it. I just initiated a transfer of $2400 to my bank account and when that goes through (Paypal says 3 to 4 days) I will contact CIHost and see if I can pay for 16 months of the server at once. I might even get to do more, since I think if you pay for a year in advance, they give you a break in price. I'm going to leave the other almost $400 in the Paypal account for the moment. I expect when the checks come in I might be able to pay up through 2010, which would be fantastic. I can't thank you guys enough. I think organissimo owes you all some more holiday tunes!

The plan right now is to recruit two or three people to help moderate the whole board. I am going to take my time thinking about who they should be. I am also taking the concerns of members like brownie, king ubu, Daniel A, and neveronfriday seriously. I think they are valid concerns. I don't necessarily know what the answer is or whether there is an answer that will appease everybody. Now that the financial burden is lifted, I am going to take my time figuring out a fair way to address these concerns. I do not think the board is "sick", but I do recognize a problematic undercurrent.

It must be the server's clock. It's ahead by an hour. I'll email tech support.

Okay, first and foremost I can't even believe what I am seeing in my Paypal account. Stop donating please before I have enough money to open a Swiss bank account and skip the country! We have more than paid for the site for this year, and even into the next. The total in my Paypal is $2655.06!!! And that's not even including any checks that have or will be sent. I am in Indy right now, but I'll be back home tomorrow afternoon and I will call CIHost to see how far in advance I can pay for my server. I can't even imagine not having to worry about this place financially for almost 18 months! Wow! I've tried to write a line to thank everybody but I keep deleting it and re-writing it and I just can't find the words to express my gratitude and the love and support I feel from everyone. It's just amazing. I guess the next step is to pick two or three moderators that can help carry the load of maintaing "law and order". I'm going to think about this one for awhile and any suggestions are welcome. Perhaps PMing me is the best way, so people don't feel put out or left out or whatever. Again, thank you all. I'm just in shock. Absolute shock.

WOw, that's cool! GregK, I miss WEMU. When I lived in AA, I listened every day for hours. Great people and great programming. I hope you can make the gig.

Well, I agree with Christiern; this thread is proof that the spirit of this place won't allow it to be shut down without a fight. It's really taken me aback. Thank you all for the support. I think doing an annual yearly fundraiser to try to raise the full yearly cost is probably the best solution. Right now we're at $662.37, not counting any non-Paypal forms of donations that people might've sent. If we could pay for 2008 now, boy would that take a load off my mind. Yeah, the cable modem is expensive, but everybody in the family uses that: Zora loves to play the online games on pbskids.org and my wife is constantly looking up recipes and such. So I don't think covering that bill should be the responsability of the members. Covering the server costs and any software costs are the most important. The live-chat feature costs $75 a year. I just got billed for that last month. My forum software subscription, which covers tech support and free upgrades, is $25 every six months, so $50 a year. So the grand total to run this place as of now is $1925 per year. Do any of you know any software out there that could do the "donation meter" thing? Seems like I could pop something like that up at the top as a reminder to people how far we need to go to reach our goal and then once it is met, take it down until next year. As for moderation, I would like to have at least one helper. My brother used to help me, but he is also very busy and doesn't have as much invested in this community anymore anyway. I think the most logical person would be Sangry, but it is a job that requires a time commitment and I do not blame anyone for not wanting to be a part of that. Or maybe, as suggested, the chair can rotate every few months. Thanks to everyone. I got some much needed sleep last night and now I need to head to Home Depot and try to figure out what I need to patch a huge chunk of crumbling plaster in my dining room. Here's an idea I had while falling asleep last night that would help to further our sense of community: Organissimo-con 2008. Find a nice joint in Chicago, get organissimo, jazzypaul's group, maybe even the Reptet if they are in the area (I can't remember when JohnnyE said they were coming east again), and have a organissimo board get-together in Chicago where we can get together and hang. Tape-Op has a big one every year with discussion panels and workshops and such. Obviously we'd have to start small, but it would be fun to do, I think. Have our esteemed Larry Kart have a discussion of his choosing or maybe just read from his book, etc. Just an idea.

Oh I want to, but I realize that wouldn't be fair to the community at large and would be rather dickish of me, I think. And that's why I hate asking for money. Believe me, I understand and I don't want anyone to feel bad for not donating. Its an internet forum for Pete's sake; there are so many more important things that need money.

I've purposely stayed away from the board (and the internet for that matter) today to allow myself time to think about this. I will admit that my reaction was "in the heat of the moment", but it is something that has been bothering me for a long time. It is very multifaceted and challenging to put into words succinctly, but I will try. The financial part is well documented. The current costs to host this site with CIHost, based in Texas, is $99 per month for a dedicated server and $50 a month for weekly back-ups of that server. Hosting your average website is cheap, yes, but when you move the amount of data around that we are, you not only use up your monthly bandwidth quickly, you also move extremely slow. Remember when this board dogged like crazy? That was because it was on a shared server for awhile. Sure, it only cost $20 a month, but with the current 600+mb database and numerous people visiting every day, you'd reach any limits very fast. So a dedicated server is a must. And having backups is a must. I've gone through the numbers in public here before, but the bulk of this site is paid for by the band through CD sales from CDBaby and any money from the search bar above linked to Amazon and CDUniverse. Not much comes down that pipeline; maybe $20 every two months. CDBaby sales vary but average around $50 a month. Sometimes we don't sell any for the month. Whatever is left comes directly out of my pocket. So, $150 a month doesn't sound like much, I realize. But to me it is. I have been playing music all my life. I've been a full-time musician, with no other income, since 2001. In the past six years I've seen gas go from $1.25 a gallon to darn near triple that. I am making the same amount of money, on average per gig, that my dad was when he was a full-time musician 30 years ago. He was able support a wife and five kids on that income. He finally got tired of being out all night, and became a piano technician and eventually had two more kids. I could not support my family on the income I make and I only have one child. The only reason I'm not homeless is because my wife works. She is the main bread-winner, but even so we live month to month. I'm not telling this for sympathy, just to try to explain my situation. Yes, my situation is my choice, a choice that I am seriously reconsidering right now. The music industry has always been hard but this year was one of the worst years as far as gigging goes that I've ever seen. And I don't see it getting better any time soon. Everybody is scraping. I just played a gig tonight for $80 at a college bar where everybody was pissed off at us because we were playing while they were trying to watch MSU basketball on ESPN. $80 to haul a Hammond organ and Leslie through the snow and be out until 2:00am, away from my family, around unappreciative drunks. It sounds like I am complaining; maybe I am. What I'm trying to say is that I have several things weighing down on my mind stemming from money. I have a new baby coming in April. My wife has to have a c-section. She'll be out of work for at least 6 weeks. Her current job has no maternity leave. I have nothing booked past February and what is booked is few and far between. Besides that, the money that the band gives to the operation of this site from our CDBaby sales could have easily paid off our current debt from our last two CDs. We're still in the red from those discs and we don't really feel comfortable making another record until we've paid off what we owe on the first two. We could've been in the black a long time ago with the CDBaby money. Okay, so financially things are being strained, yes. Subscriptions might be an answer. This software does allow automatic subscription services. But then that might conflict with the other thing: The health of the forums. How many new members are we getting? When those members post, are they welcomed or instantly ridiculed? Is this a boys club with a special handshake or an open forum that welcomes new people? I have expressed this before, but sometimes I feel like this place is playground for a select few. I want people to feel comfortable here. I want people to want to join in the discussions. I want people to feel welcomed. I do not like the clique-ishness that is evident here sometimes. Would subscriptions then push away even more people? Who pays a subscription vs. who doesn't? What does the subscriber get that the others don't? Or should they be voluntary subscribers? I am not happy that Chaney left (awhile ago), Jim R has left, Bev left a long time ago, and J.A.W. just recently left. When I first read couw's comment about it, I got pissed off and you can kind of read that in my reply. But after thinking about it for a few days I realized that he's partly right. I still don't know what to do about it, but he's right. I would like less personal attacks and less name calling. I would like people to use the features of this software (like the ignore function) and exercise self-control. I would like more problems between members to be dealt with via PMs, instead of airing your dirty laundry to everyone. The jazz community is small enough as it is; do we really need to piss on each other? Getting rid of political and religious discussion might help. Then again, one of the most contentious rivalries currently active on the board is between two members active in the baseball thread, which is in the miscellaneous forum. So whaddya gonna do? Another thing that has been gnawing at me: As some of you know, Zora broke her elbow three weeks ago. I was in the room when it happened. I saw her leap off the chair. I was not paying attention to her, I was absorbed with my playing, practicing the organ. Nobody thinks it is my fault. But I still feel guilty about it because I was not paying attention to her. Several times today she got upset at me because I wasn't listening to her. My mind was somewhere else, even though she was in the room trying to interact with me. God, I do not want to be the distant dad. This board is one of several distractions in my life that I personally need to get a handle on. I spend too much time on the computer and not enough time interacting with Zora, writing music, writing poetry, talking with my wife, etc. This is something that I must change. This place takes a lot of time to manage. I do like the idea of moderators. I do not know who to enlist for that job. The other thing that is always in the back of my mind is the association of the board with the band. Is it helping? Is it hurting? Does it matter (no such thing as bad publicity)? Should I change the name and put it on a different domain? I honesly don't want to shut the place down. But some things need to change. I don't know what the answers are. Let someone else take it? Change the name? Moderators? Be more persistant with the fundraising? I don't know. I'm re-evaluating a lot of things in my life right now, most fundamentally whether I want or can afford to be a musician anymore and how to provide better for my family. I'm sorry for freaking everybody out, but I need your help to figure out the best course of action that will satisfy the community and myself.

Coming from you, that's quite ironic. The tense is off. I'd use past tense here. Cool! The board is ruined. That's good news! Now I can shut the whole thing down and get on with my life. It will be a relief not to have to check in here every morning, every afternoon, every evening just to make sure that things are going okay since people seem incapable of avoiding certain posters and topics themselves, even with extremely handy features like "ignore member". I don't know how most of you live with a television. I mean, I know Bill O'Reilly is an asshole, so I don't watch his show, you know what I mean? Anyway, this is really good news. My wife and I were just talking last night about how expensive our monthly cable bill is, what with my need for a high-speed internet connection. So this will solve two problems with one stone: No more $150 a month server costs, and no more $100 a month cable bill. Sweet! As of January 1, 2008, this place will be no more. Enjoy it while it lasts. And no, I'm not kidding.

http://www.gibson.com/robotguitar/

Would you like to become a Patron of the Arts? To quote Lon, "Awesome!" Glad you're still here! Good news!

Nicest thing to happen to me this year is that my wife and I found out she is pregnant back in August! We're at about 20 weeks now and should have a new little baby around late April (same as Zora!)

Okay, I'll bite: Why is living outside the magnectic field worse than living outside the earth's atmosphere? When you put it that way, it isn't worse. But replicating the earth's low-altitude atmosphere is a relatively simple technological problem. The earth's magnetic field enables advanced life by deflecting the hordes of alpha particles, electrons and protons spewed out by the sun as a consequence of fusion reactions. Replicating this is far more difficult. You'd have to encase the spacecraft in so much led that no current rocket could get it off the ground (and it is worth noting that a vehicle this massive would be very difficult to maneuver). You'd have a similar problem designing space suits that provided adequate protection. Thanks. I kinda realized that after I posted. I remembered that the sun emits these massive solar flares now and again and it is the earth's magnetic field that reflects most of their nastiness away from the earth.

Okay, I'll bite: Why is living outside the magnectic field worse than living outside the earth's atmosphere?

Ha! Priceless.

Moving this to a more appropriate subforum. Welcome to the forum!

The whole thing is silly. What would you or Hans have me do? Ban people for making snide comments at each other? Edit every single post with a hint of negativity in it? Become a sterilized, heavily moderated forum like the Hoffman forum where nobody can disagree and everyone is scared to death of me? Sounds like a blast. Hans, in an email to me, spoke of people being held accountable for what they say. That's what YOU are for. I expect the forum members to moderate themselves and call each other out when somebody is talking crap. What can I do? Nothing. I can only ban people. I don't think people should be banned for being rude (in the eyes of a few) or for calling names. What good would that do? Yes, people say (write) shit to each other on a forum like this that they wouldn't say face to face. Welcome to the Internet. If you don't have a thick skin, you're not going to have a lot of fun. Sure, I suppose I can delete posts, and sometimes I do. And then those who have posts deleted and the people who appreciate those posts for whatever reason are pissed at me. If I don't, then those that find the posts offensive for whatever reason are pissed. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Everybody seems to be an expert on how a forum should be run, but I don't see anybody else actually running one except for Tom1960, who I respect, but I personally find that forum extremely dull. Hans left of his own accord for his own reasons. That's his right and I wish him the best. This place has been going for almost five years now and its about as healthy as its ever been. It really hasn't changed much.

Dude, I never noticed that she has one man-hand!!!

Cool, Peter! I'm glad things are turning around, despite the crummy circumstances.

Not much I can do about that except to delete all his posts which now that he is unregistered I cannot do anyway.

We should name an original on the next CD "No Grim Oasis".