“Cabin Pressure” is the first song I’ve recorded in three years and wow it feels good to get this one out. That link is the MP3 and you can see the lyrics here. I wrote all the parts from scratch and it took about 15hrs in all to record and produce it from start to finish. Granted I don’t have the best voice but like most things I think passion can make up for a lack of raw talent. This is a big deal for me because this tune has been gestating inside me for awhile now and feels something like I imagine childbirth being like to be finally able to manifest this thing into the world for others to experience.

The quick backstory: like most songs it’s about a girl. And specifically the mixed emotional bag of emptiness/anger/sorrow when someone with whom you feel a close connection is able to casually exit your life and never look back. The recording is about 90% close to what I wanted and while I’m not entirely satisfied, I am done tinkering with it. The one thing I couldn’t figure out was how to normalize the volume of the final track so that it’s equal with other songs in my iTunes. It’s way more quiet than most songs but when I tried to boost the volume levels it would clip the audio (if anyone knows how to do this please share). I do have some random thoughts on the mechanics of songwriting and specifically Garageband as a tool for recording and producing audio.

On songwriting

1. Chickens and Eggs - the classic question is “which comes first, the lyrics or the musical idea?” For me they’re usually inextricably intertwined and tend to emerge over time where one affects the development of the other. I usually get a musical riff stuck in my head first and the lyrics start to gel around the melody as nonsensical mouth sounds. I can generally sing the lyrics “in tongues” before the exact words coalesce, but once they do it tends to alter the song itself. Like any chicken/egg problem at some point you have to bend one of the flaps and dig into it.
2. Discovery vs. Invention - I was talking with my friend Brian Chartrand of the band Ten Dollar Outfit about this (and btw i consider Brian to be one of the most talented local musicians in the Phx Metro Area). We agree that songwriting feels more like a process of discovery than invention. It’s this whole process of unearthing a song that’s in you like the archaeologist that chips away at a ruin buried underground.
3. Iterate using different playback sources - you get a different perspective when you take the song while it’s half-baked and listen to it in the car or while running. The frustration of recording comes when you get in a rut and from my experience you can avoid that by constantly seeing the song from different angles.
4. Professional vs. home studio - it has to be on your own time. I love recording at my own pace using my own equipment. No doubt I could get better quality audio going into a studio (I used the internal mic on my Mac and I know singing into a laptop screen doesn’t yield the best acoustics). But studio time is expensive (~$150/hr) and more importantly, because it’s a ticking clock you end up rushing it and there’s nothing worse than being stressed while recording and settling for something you’re unhapy with.
5. Alpha and omega - I like songs and albums that start and finish back at the same place. This song in particular lent itself well to this idea of fading in and out with ocean surf. I know this is possibly considered cheesy by some but for this one I had a really profound experience here and couldn’t get that vision out of my head while recording the song.
6. Let it marinate - it always works better for me to do it in chunks and distance myself from the recording in between. I spent 4hrs the night before I drove to San Felipe and layed down the basic melody and framework of the song. I put it on my iPod, spent a few days away from it and then listened to it on the road back home. I think you can screw things up if you try to force it all out in one recording session. Again, being able to record at your own pace is key.

On Garageband

1. Less features = more power - I love this program. It’s amazing to me how much functionality Apple can expose but in a way that still makes it dead-simple for a beginner to get started. Kathy Sierra always talked about helping your users to get over the “suck threshold” as quickly as possible. Garageband 3 is a shining example of an app that does this well. Kimbro pointed out to me that Apple tends to strip away features and that in doing so the program may be able to do less but you’ll actually get more out of it because you’ll be more likely to use it. I couldn’t agree more.
2. Sequencing and recording all in one - so did I mention I love this program? I have experience with using Sonic Foundry and Cool Edit in the past to record and produce songs on a PC and I find Garageband on a Mac to be superior in just about every respect. It merges the important features of both programs and has a few extra features that make things way easier. I picked up an absolute nugget from watching 15min of the Apple Tutorials - the arrange track makes it so you can divide your song into sections and manipulate groups of tracks as a unit. Very useful.
3. Make it sloppy - the over-quantized drum sounds that you get from using a drum machine make songs sound starchy and synthetic. What’s cool about Garageband is that via the Apple Loops feature you can get an onscreen drum pad for a track and pepper it with sounds that manually dub in realtime. The Takes feature allows you to build a drum track by layering different percussive instruments without having to manually rewind, do separate tracks and then merge. Making it “sloppy” by adding drums by hand gives the rhythmic section a more of a human-made feel.
4. Extend the library of sounds- I bought the percussion Jam Pack from Apple and it gave me 5 gigs of drum sounds to work with. They have Jam Packs for symphonic, electronic and other instruments. It’s neat to be able to have access to a big library of sounds. I wonder when the iStockPhoto of music will emerge?

Specific nerd details on this track (for anyone interested)

I used three physical instruments in recording:

The staccato pianic effect in the beginning is from doing tap harmonics on the acoustic and adding the “Acoustic Guitar Echoes” effect in GB. The ocean noise is a royalty free sound I got from imeem.com. I applied a flanger effect to all the verses to get an “under water” sound (because frankly that’s what it’s felt like) and dynamically maxed it at the end of each verse cause I thought it sounded cool (aka made my voice less annoying when i scream). I added distortion to the refrain vocals via the megaphone effect. The squealing guitar solo is proprietary ;-) It uses the distortion from the Line6 - I found that using the distortion effect from GB to added just enough latency to where it didn’t feel right. I compressed the mp3 at 192kbps for max quality so that’s why it’s larger filesize than most mp3’s of equivalent length. The entire song is only 3 chords with no change whatsoever but it still works (hey Jane’s addiction proved you can make a winner with 2 chords ;-) And that fat 80’s-style wah bass sound at the end is the filter effect applied over a slap bassline played on the Ibanez- i was really happy with how that part turned out.

Oh yeah, lastly feel free to redistribute, burn, mix, whatever. Everyone unless you’re Rhapsody (F$#@ you and your 2hr hold times to cancel service Real Networks). Music should be free with concerts generating revenue for musicians. If anything come out to our next concert or open mic and throw quarters at us onstage. Sign up on our site to get an email before our next show.

It’s been a goal of mine to someday publish a kid’s book and that day came today. I’m officially a published author having used the Lulu.com system to self-publish my first book “Rebuild it with Moonbeams.” I wanted to condense some thoughts here after having gone through the process start to finish and I also want to publicly “tap” a few people I know to write a book of their own.

How

I looked at a couple different sites for self-publishing including Lulu, iUniverse and Cafepress and ultimately I went with Lulu. Their 5min video tutorial adequately shows the process for how to use their system - you basically create a word doc with the pages of your book, upload it to their site and then set a bunch of preferences about how you want your book to be printed. They take 20% after covering manufacturing costs which seems completely reasonable. Start to finish this project took a total of about 30hrs working nights the past 2wks with most of the time going towards doing the coloring on the illustrations. I sketched the illustrations at Starbucks then scanned them in and colored via Photoshop and used a creative fill technique with iStock photography. The publishing process via Lulu took the least amount of time of anything and was only about a 20min process. The book is a 40pg full-color paperback consisting of a series of whimsical “what-if” scenarios for kids in the same vein as Cooper Edens’ masterpiece “Remember the Night Rainbow.”

Why

The “how” of this process was relatively easy. Perhaps the more interesting question was “why?” And there are a couple of reasons. I started the book as a birthday present for a girlfriend-now-just-friend but the more I got into making it, the more I was curious about trying this as an experiment to see if I could do it. One of our goals with Grid7 is to know how to do a bunch of different things, to help others to build stuff they’re passionate about and to create a series of small, passive recurring revenue streams. This project was consistent with those goals and also satisfied a goal I’ve had for some time of wanting to write a kid’s book.

Kathy Sierra has a great post here that talks about the power of embracing constraints and forcing yourself to build something good in thirty days. It’s a great exercise and truly does satisfy something primal to just go and make something. I think about the story of JK Rawlings authoring the Harry Potter series on the train to work every day and I imagine what the world would be like had she not done that. I also think about “what would it be like if everyone rode the bus once a week and used that time to work on a book of their own?” You never fully realize the ripples of what you do - the prospect of creating a moment of shared closness between a child and parent via one of the scenarios in Moonbeams book is mind-blowing and is truly at the core of why I wanted to do it.

So without any more words, here’s the book. You can get the PDF online or purchase the paperback via the site. I put 1/3rd of it up on WithMoonbeams.com so people can get a flavor for what it is. I’m also challenging the following peeps to write a book of their own because selfishly, it’s something I would buy and read if they wrote it:
Noah Kagan - The Burrito Diaries
Jamon Metz - The Cobblestone Thesis
Amanda Harbin - The Wishmaker’s Playbook

I recently wrote an article for Law Office Computing magazine on a piece of technology that functions as a “Lojack” for your laptop. The article is not linked on their web site but thanks to Jamie Tyo from the magazine for permission to republish the article here. The highlights of the technology are:

• A very small program gets installed that dials in once each day to a secure data center to report the location of your computer.
• In the event that you flag your computer as stolen, the next time it calls in, it bumps up the call frequency to every fifteen minutes and notifies their recovery team.
• THEY handle the legal process of working with local law enforcement to retrieve your computer and will insure each unrecoverable machine up to $1000.
• If it’s a lost cause and your computer went to Colombia with sensitive data on it, you can remotely delete the contents of the hard drive.
• There are other reporting features in the administrative interface that can offer useful data for large enterprises like software compliance, hardware changes and hard drive usage.

I ran an actual field test for the article and it worked as advertised. I fired quite a few questions at their recovery officer and he had impressive responses to all. Check out the article and if you have any questions about the test or the technology itself, feel free to post them here.

© 2005 Lights Out Production - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Well I found out today that the article I was asked to write over Easter for Law Office Computing was rejected because it violates their editorial guidelines concerning “touting your own stuff” as a vendor (except that we’re not actually selling anything, the app is free). It was intended to be published in their May edition under the “Consultant’s Challenge” column but after going back and forth with their editor, we determined that given the nature of the issue, it made more sense for them to publish a news story on it rather than in the column for which I had written. Rather than scrap the article I figured I’d post it here - it is an pressing issue confronting lawyers right now and from the survey of our clients I conducted over the holidays, not many lawyers are even aware of it. The bottomline is that I wrote a simple application called Sentinel that greatly reduces the work involved for attorneys in maintaining compliance and my company is (for the time being) donating the service free to the legal community. Here is the article:

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Solving OFAC Compliance for Attorneys

Sentinel provides an elegant solution for a daunting task

By Sean Tierney

In the wake of national crises like 9/11 and Enron, the government introduces legislation and creates regulations to reduce the likelihood of such disasters occurring in the future. Acts like Sarbanes-Oxley and the Patriot Act are implemented, businesses adapt to ensure they meet compliance and life goes on. In October, however, I had my ear to the rail and began hearing the rumblings of a new issue called “OFAC compliance” and the ” SDN list .” This type of compliance apparently was familiar to the financial sector but was a new concern for law firms. Cursory searches of the major search engines yielded no de facto solution for attorneys and with penalties as steep as $10mm in fines per violation, it was clear that this issue demanded attention. I began a rapid research project to gain an understanding of the problem and the potential solutions.

Background on the OFAC

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (”OFAC”) is a branch of the US Department of the Treasury tasked with the responsibility of enforcing sanctions against certain entities deemed to be “enemies of the United States .” It operates by freezing monetary assets in domestic jurisdiction to thwart activities of these entities thereby achieving foreign policy and national security goals. OFAC is the successor to the Office of Foreign Funds Control which was established at the onset of WWII for the purpose of blocking financial transactions that would otherwise have assisted the Axis powers. It functions today by publishing a list of approximately 5000 Specially-Designated Nationals and Blocked Entities (”SDN list”) and levying stiff penalties against anyone who conducts business with these entities. And “stiff” means “seven and eight-figure” stiff… Unknowing acceptance of monies from a entity on the SDN list is punishable by a $1mm fine per instance. Knowingly engaging in a financial transaction with one of these entities can result in a whopping $10mm fine and up to thirty years imprisonment for the individual responsible for the transaction.

Technical Challenges of Meeting Compliance

Okay, they had my attention with the part about the $10mm fines. The trouble now was that nowhere was there a clear definition of what constituted “proper compliance.” From reading the FAQ on their web site it appeared that it was a “don’t get caught” type of attitude. You have to be able to prove that you have taken “reasonable steps” to ensure on a continual basis that you are not dealing with clients who appear on the SDN list. But you could still scrutinize your client list daily and, if you end up accidentally taking on a bad client that happened to be using a pseudonym or spelled his/her name differently, you would have exposure. This challenge of vetting client names against the SDN was further compounded by the fact that most entities on the list were foreign names and had multiple aliases (about twenty each) and different permutations of spellings with odd characters (ever had to type the “schwa” character?). On top of all this, law firms’ client lists were evolving at the same time as the SDN list was changing. The OFAC provides no software searching tools to simplify the process of comparing names. According to their web site, their idea of “automation” for this task consisted of bookmarking their web page in Internet Explorer and monitoring for updates to the list via browser synchronization. To actually compare your client names against the list, OFAC recommends downloading a 1.5MB Adobe PDF file containing all the names and using the built-in “find tool” with each of your clients’ names and business names to scan one-by-one against the document, EACH time the SDN list is updated. The analogy here is that law firms are standing on a moving platform using a bow and arrow to shoot at a moving target and are expected to have laser-precision accuracy. At best, this SDN list review process could be considered cumbersome - more than likely, it could be considered entirely unrealistic and dysfunctional.

The Existing Options

Shunning the advice of the OFAC web site for manually comparing client names against the SDN list, I researched the other automated software solutions in existence. I came across Bridger Insight which is a subsidiary of ChoicePoint (the company that was recently in the news for accidentally selling 150,000 of its clients’ names to criminals). They offer a piece of software which runs on Windows that claims to (among other things) scan a client list against names on the SDN. It sounded promising so I downloaded their demo version and tried it out for myself. I was able to get it working immediately and it did, in fact, offer the ability to search specific names against the SDN from my desktop. Its interface, however, was less-than-intuitive and the steps required to scan a full list of clients against the SDN proved to be a perplexing task even for someone who is adept at using hundreds of different software programs. It ended up being a pretty involved hack that their tech support guided me through over the telephone to get it to scan my contacts. With a hefty price tag and recurring service fees associated with their product, I continued looking to see what other options were out there.

I came across another company called Attus Technology that made a product called ” Watchdog ” which sounded like it might be the answer. Unfortunately, I was never actually able to demo their product. I asked some difficult questions of their sales guy and mentioned that I was considering developing my own solution if I didn’t find one that I liked. I think he viewed me as a potential competitor because I was never given an evaluation version of their software. At any rate, their price tag was comparable to Bridger Insight’s and by this point I was beginning to think that for the features these products offered, they were severely over-priced and that with my programming background I might be able to solve this issue in a manner that lawyers would find more intuitive.

The “Sentinel” Solution

Arthur C. Clark once said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Having written software myself, I share this ideal that good software is the kind that you never notice - it does its job transparently and you simply derive the benefits without having to alter your routine and learn new tricks to make it work. I set about writing an application that would run anywhere and allow any attorney to check his or her client list against the SDN and receive a concise report any potential matches it found. I had the following three goals:

1. The whole process should take no more than one minute from start to finish

2. Steps should be comprehensible to anyone with common sense

3. It should work with any operating system and the “lowest common denominator” format in which most attorneys store their client lists.

I chose the web as a delivery platform instead of creating a desktop application because it offered the advantages of being easier to maintain and averted OS compatibility issues. It’s also an easier sell to a security-conscious Network Administrator for an attorney to view a web page rather than install a downloaded binary executable on their PC. From my experience, nearly all law firms use Outlook for their email, contacts and calendaring. Outlook supports all types of import and export formats making it an attractive “hub” to target for this project (if people didn’t currently store their contacts in Outlook, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to import them). Its pervasiveness and versatility of import formats made it the logical choice for the “common denominator” storage format for contacts.

Under the hood the Sentinel web application runs ColdFusion application server and a souped-up version of the Verity search engine called K2 . The web site that hosts the Sentinel application resides on a php-based opensource content management system called Mambo. I wrote a brief two-minute video tutorial that walks the visitor through the steps of how to check your Outlook contacts against the SDN using Sentinel. Basically, Sentinel grabs a fresh copy of the SDN each night, indexes the list in a database and awaits you to upload your client list. When you upload your clients, Sentinel scans each individual name and company name against its indexed copy of the SDN and reports back with your client list highlighting any potential matches in red. You can then drill down on offending records to get details on the matching records to investigate if it is in fact a true match. Searching is very fast - Sentinel can assimilate and compare a 1000 person client list against every SDN entity and each of its aliases under two seconds. The results page can be printed from the browser with the timestamp and archived for hardcopy proof of “reasonable” steps taken to ensure compliance. Best of all, Sentinel is currently offered free as a service to the legal community by my company, Legal Technology Consulting .

Room For Improvement

This one-minute process is clearly a major improvement over OFAC’s suggested method of screening names, however it still requires manual intervention on the part of the attorney and therefore doesn’t yet meet the “indistinguishable from magic” litmus test for advanced technology. Ideally this scan would occur automatically at a predefined interval and intelligently converse with a centralized billing and conflict management system behind the scenes and alert the appropriate person only when it finds a problem. Depending on the demand for such a tool, my company is prepared to allocate my time towards development of this system and to make it available for a reasonable fee. In the meantime Sentinel is currently offered free of charge on www.SDNCompliance.com . There is a concern I have heard voiced before that I wanted to address here “in order to use Sentinel client information must be transmitted in clear-text over HTTP to our server - isn’t that insecure?” To this objection I would respond by saying that it’s no more insecure than lawyers using unencrypted email to conduct sensitive communications with their clients. Unless you are currently using PGP for all email communications, this would be an unfounded complaint. Using SSL to encrypt the transmission of the client list to our server is certainly an option and one we will implement if the market demands it.

I welcome your feedback on the OFAC compliance process and the Sentinel service in particular and hope you find this free tool useful in your efforts to maintain compliance. To take part in an ongoing discussion of Sentinel-related questions, visit my personal blog at www.ScrollinOnDubs.com .