It's been quite a while since I made any postings here…seems that my life has gotten a bit off track from the blueprint. It's astounding how quickly things can build up and steal away a person's focus (or desired focus). So, as they say, no better time than the present to get started again.
We recently spent a couple of hours with some friends at Featherdown Farms, a local horse farm and riding school, during one of their competitions. Unfortunately, none of my photos of the actual competition turned out very well. I may need a new lens (wink, wink, nudge, nudge Mardi!). The low light and fast action didn't make for very good photos without a fast lens.
But, we were able to spend some time back in the stables with a few of the horses and who doesn't like photos of horses? A slideshow is below.
Why is it uncomfortable to use a laptop in your lap?
With the myriad designers of technology, don't you think they could design a laptop that didn't get so hot in some of the more sensitive areas of your body?
Seems to me that the air vents located exactly where the machine sits on your legs is a dumb design decision.
Many thousands of users would be grateful. I'm just saying.
If there were any doubts about the power of social media to turn an industry upside down, look at the recording industry. The story of the band Cults at the Austin City Limits Festival is included below.
ACL is a powerful venue. Has been for years. I remember watching ACL on PBS back in the 70s and 80s, even today when I can catch it, and seeing great bands, singers and songwriters. Some were famous, some not so much. But a great venue nonetheless.
Cults is a great indie group. They have a loyal following. But over half a million views? Comparable to the mega group Coldplay? That's social media power.
The recording industry has nothing to do with it.
It's all the fans.
The fans have the power now in all music genres.
Except for maybe Top 40 radio which still seems to think that they are the buzz makers - they are heavily influenced by the recording industry - thus the demise of Top 40 radio.
Good on ya Cults!
Good on ya ACL!
Good on ya fans!
Keep it up!
Something phenomenal happened during our Austin City Limits Festival live webcast this past weekend. A band blew up right before our eyes DURING the Festival weekend. It happened online. And it further proved that in 2011 Festival webcasts are making a difference for artists.
Full disclosure: I produce the live webcasts and the video at the ACL Festival (and Lollapalooza and Coachella).
Here’s what happened.
In addition to the live webcast of 50 bands, we were asked by YouTube if we could clear at least 4 artist-approved songs for the online Archives by the end of Friday night. If so, they would promote these videos on the YT Home Page on Saturday, and drive traffic to the ACLFestival page. We scrambled and got approved titles from Coldplay, Foster the People, Brandi Carlile, and Smith Westerns. And an emerging band called Cults, who played first-up on Friday at 11:45am, in front of a few hundred on a small stage, just about the lowest slot at the Fest.
The YT Home Page promo went up mid-Saturday. By midnight on Saturday 160,000 people has streamed the VOD of Cults buzzed-about song ‘Go Outside.’ At that point Coldplay’s new single Paradise was at 150,000 streams. Foster’s hit also had big numbers. By Sunday the Cults number was 320,000; Coldplay tracking right with them. As of Tuesday evening when I’m writing this, uber-stars Coldplay are at 502,817 streams, and Cults are right there at 502,416. Five Hundred Thousand Streams in 4 days!!! It’s not a dancing cat or a cute baby. It’s a song. I knew Cults had a buzz, but WOW.
All these videos and dozens more below:
I just like this story.
Young band, barely out of the basement, gets blog love, still getting their shit together, hasn’t toured much, record just out. Then HUGE CRAZY numbers of fans find them this week online, and see that they are cool. And this costs the band nothing. The label didn’t do it. The festival promoters (C3 Presents) made this happen (and YouTube, more on them later). Everyone on the band’s team gets jazzed. They sell-out more shows. Get to make more records. Rock ‘n Roll lives to fight another day.
And it’s surely not our video genius that’s making this happen. Frankly, our video for Cults is not so damn good. It was Noon (!), first band of the first day, our smallest stage, director hasn’t settled in, doesn’t even know his cameramen’s names yet. It’s 101 degrees in Texas, band is barely awake, crowd is just arriving. We only had 3 cameras working there, so I’m just thrilled we even caught it properly. It’s all live/live, no edits, no remix. But a hit’s a hit!
Cults are far from the only ones to benefit from Fest webcasts. At Coachella the indie-band Freelance Whales told me they vaulted into the top Twitter Trends during their webcast performance. Foster the People at Lolla got crazy numbers for their perf video of Pumped Up Kicks. Coldplay has blogged repeatedly about their Festival webcasts, and the traffic has followed. My Morning Jacket’s's online fans came back to the band with tons of love for their Lolla and ACL shows. Just a few examples, but literally every band connects.
So what changed in 2011? It’s on YouTube, that’s what. You need a great Festival, committed promoters, and a sponsor who wants to be part of it all. But YouTube brings it to the people globally, and then let’s them know it’s there. At Coachella, we cleared Arcade at 5pm on showday, and Kanye at 8pm on showday, and YouTube still got the word out. They sit in our trucks all weekend, and tweak the user experience non-stop. And get this, they care about the music. I’m telling you, they are passionate.
So good for Cults AND Coldplay. And good for another band next time.
Click the photo above to get to a really nice post about photographer Roberto Dutesco and his gallery exhibition The Last of the Wild Horses. Some haunting and beautiful black and white photography from one of the most inaccessible and remote places on earth.
We're going to be seeing a lot of the retrospectives over the next few days, but this one from The Atlantic magazine is very compelling and moving. Warning - some images are disturbing, but are an integral part of the full story.
We've had some terrible flooding in Maryland today. I've included a gallery of photos below from the area in Parkton where Little Falls passes underneath York Road. Most of the photos were taken from the parking lot of Elizabeth Jacobs Salon.
This is post from MichealHyatt.com. Great site for management and leadership skills:
Years ago, my boss suddenly resigned. I was pretty sure his boss would offer me his job, but it didn’t happen immediately. He told me he wanted to think it over and consider his options.
Frankly, I was disappointed. From my perspective, it was a no-brainer. I was the logical choice!
I could have reacted in several ways:
I could have pouted.
I could have written a memo, detailing my qualifications.
I could have launched a campaign, asking people I knew he respected to recommend me.
Instead, I smiled and said, “No problem. Take your time.”
I then maintained a positive attitude and worked hard. A few days later, he made his decision and offered me the promotion. I was thrilled.
In this brief transaction, I was acting on a piece of advice I had gleaned from Dr. James Dobson’s book, Love Must Be Tough, an unlikely but powerful negotiation resource:
He who needs the other person the least is in control of the relationship.
Love it or hate it, this is the best negotiating advice I have ever received. I have put it to use in countless situations:
It works in buying a car, real estate, or other property.
It works in negotiating the salary and benefits for a new job or a promotion.
It even works in parenting and other interpersonal relationships.
The trick is to really put yourself in the position where you don’t need the other person as badly as they need you. How do you do that? Three suggestions:
Be a “don’t-wanter.” Never fall in love with something you are trying to acquire—at least not at first. Be a little aloof. Don’t get emotionally attached. Kick the tires. (I learned this concept from Robert G. Allen, author of numerous financial books)
Don’t get too eager. I have usually found in negotiations that the first person to name a number looses. Let the other person go first. Pace your responses to theirs. If they take 24 hours to respond, you should take 24 hours to respond.
Give yourself options. This is the most important suggestion. The more options you have, the more you will believe you don’t need any particular offer. For example, want to sell a car at the best price? Generate multiple offers. It will change your negotiating posture and put you in a position of strength.
This may sound manipulative or even unethical, but I don’t think you can afford to ignore the very real psychology that is at work in serious negotiations. You do so to your own determent.
And if you are ultimately committed to negotiating win-win relationships (as I am), you can still do so. You can just ensure that the other party doesn’t win at your expense.
By the way, if you want to beef up your negotiating skills, I highly recommend Roger Dawson’s very helpful book, Secrets of Power Negotiating.
Question: What is your best negotiating tactic? You can leave a comment by clicking here.
Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
I love going back and browsing through older images. It’s both fun to remember the experience, and sobering to see how much we’ve changed in such a short period of time. It’s hard to imagine that our girls were so small just four years ago!
Going through all these old photos got me thinking. The invention of digital photography has been a tremendous boon to the amateur and professional photographer alike. We can take hundreds, thousands of photographs without worrying about wasting money on developing a sorry roll of film. A downside, however, is the overwhelming number of photos that we now take, good and bad, and how to keep up with them. It takes a critical eye to weed out the photos that, had we shot in film, we would have kept as “keepers” only because they were the only image we had of the memory. This really hits home when I look and realize just how many photos I’ve uploaded to our Smugmug site. It’s an overwhelming number, and then how do you organize them to make them easily found and accessible. It drives home the point of having a well thought out filling, naming and tagging system for your photos.
Regardless, take the time to peruse old photos. Go find all those old hard drives, thumb drives and CDs and see what you find. It will be fun and eye opening!
When Mardi asked me what I wanted to do for Father’s Day, my first response was “something that will inspire”. I really needed a respite from the normal daily grind, so an escape was in order. Mardi and I would have loved to have spent the day at a museum, but the girls would have been moaning after 20 minutes. So a day mixed with outdoor walking, indoor nature centers, inspiring gardens all finished with ice cream fit the bill! A quick search of local gardens helped us to settle on a visit to the Cylburn Arboretum, a Baltimore City park in the Mt. Washington area of the City. We were very impressed.
With a brand new visitor’s center, Victorian-era mansion and sprawling gardens and grounds, the Cylburn Arboretum is a great day trip for families in the Baltimore area. Even though not open to the public, the mansion is a very typical Baltimore Victorian-era mansion. Surrounding it were different types of gardens for different conditions – shade, sun, rose, mixed vegetable – all sensibly set out to inspire you to try your own. Sometimes, public gardens a way too intimidating in their scale and complexity. It was nice to see the Cylburn’s gardens experiencing some of the the same challenges that we see in our own.
The Cylburn Mansion
Looking towards the Allée
The Carriage House contains a small, but nice nature center where the girls were intrigued for quite a while with the menagerie of animals and fossils. The gardens were a mixture of formal, semi-formal and woodland, all in a state of subdued order – just like our yard!
The Formal
And the Not-So-Formal
There was a lot of work that needed to be performed by the arboretum volunteers, but, for a volunteer staff, they were doing a pretty good job. All in all, the visit to the Cylburn Arboretum was a great way to enjoy the company of my girls, in a learning and inspiring environment.
So, what more can you do to top off the day? Ice cream treats at Uncle Wiggly’s in the Mt. Washington area of Baltimore…
Uncle Wiggly’s
She loves waffle cones!
And she loves sugar cones!
…followed by a steak cookout at home! It was a great day!
Rib eye with grilled red peppers, leeks, zuchinni and mushrooms! Delicious!
My
name is Jonathan Hasson and I’m a man on a mission…a mission to
discover as much as I can of the blueprint that God has for me. So far,
the blueprint has held many surprises, some tears and many blessings. It’s
taken me to a place today where I sometimes refer to myself as an
engineer with a creative side hiding inside, dying to escape. That’s
probably an exaggeration...
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