It only took me ten years and a change of instrument to get beyond the beautifully dense production and uncover the song’s simple but sturdy bones.

I made this recording in one take with my MacBook Pro’s built-in mic using the basic Audio Recorder (which I usually use for “sketching” song ideas). I dropped the resulting recording onto Garage Band to trim, reduce ambient noise, and tidy up a flubbed guitar note in the last measure. I didn’t have a copy of Jacob’s Ladder handy, so I “sampled” myself using a second track in Garage Band.

Tab

And here’s the tab for my arrangement (more for Future Shaun than any other reason):

Verse                     Chorus         Post-chorus       Bridge             

   Em  E/D#m  Am  Bm         A  Amaj7       E  C#m  A                          
e --------------------    e ----------   e ------------    e ------------------
b ---8---7------1---3-    b ----5-----   b ----9-------    b ------------------
G ---9---8------2---4-    G -6--6-----   G ----9----6--    G ------------------
D ---9---8------2---4-    D -7--6-----   D ---------7--    D ------------------
A ---7---7----0---2---    A -7--------   A -7-------7--    A ---------4--------
E -0---0--------------    E -5--5-----   E ----9----5--    E -2-2-5-2---5-2-5--

Track artwork includes a cc’d photo by Tim Duckett.

Enjoy!

There’s been some recent Flickring about mixing Mint with Fluid. Sam reminded me that I still haven’t posted the giant Mint Fluid icon I made to complement the Fever Fluid icon created for the beta testers. Consider it done.

Three years out Mint has established itself as a mature analytics platform. On average ten new people fall in love with Mint every day. Twenty-five percent of all Mint users like it so much they buy additional licenses for themselves, their friends and their clients. And they’re still writing rave reviews about it—both thorough and concise.

As a mature platform, Mint and its users definitely require less hand-holding. Support only consumes about an hour a day, with a bit more on Mondays. Mint only required four maintenance updates this past year with more regular updates and feature additions reserved for the various official Pepper. The past year also saw the introduction of two new official Pepper and a sub-app:

• Visits Diff displays how each of the timeframes displayed by the Visits pane performed over the previous period.
• Directories groups pages and hits by directory.
• Leaves provides device-appropriate views for multiple Mint installations.

Third-party Pepper developers contributed another twelve Pepper and 64 updates to their various offerings.

Off-screen, Mint appeared in a bare-all piece written by Elliot Jay Stocks for .Net magazine and on the chests of about sixty SXSW 2008 attendees, friends and family.

With Mint finally reaching an age where it can entertain itself, there’s more time to work on a new project or two—both of which have generated ideas that will be making their way back into Mint.

More design calisthenics resulting from another restless night. Getcher 1680x1050 here!

The comic site itself highlights another web problem—loads of ‘next’ links, something Omniweb solves with a magical press of the enter key, and I’d love to see implemented in other browsers.

Keen. Until those other browsers implement such a feature I’ve thrown together two simple JavaScript bookmarklets that when invoked (say via the command + [1-9] key command in Safari) go to the url specified by any detected next or previous links.

Prev and Next

I have them mapped to command + 3 and command + 4 respectively in Safari.

The other night while falling asleep my brain was mulling over the different aspects of application development. While I feel quite capable in the individual disciplines, I think the hardest part for me is the process of tying all those aspects together into a cohesive whole.

The next morning I started off the day with some design calisthenics. This series of desktop wallpapers are the result. The archive includes black-on-white and white-on-black versions at 1680x1050.

Download the Widon’t 2.1.1 Wordpress plugin, unzip and upload si-widont.php to /wp-content/plugins/. Activate the plugin from within Wordpress and optionally click on the “Widon’t Options” menu link to input additional tags you want widon’ted.

The States

My sign-up pages usually have three states:

1. The sign-up form
2. The status message for subscribers
3. The unsubscribe message for the dearly departed

All three states are served from the same page. Which state is displayed depends on an optional query string and the presence of a cookie.

The Workhorse

I’ve been using Campaign Monitor ever since Mint’s user base outgrew PHP’s native mail() function. It’s a great service, reliable, easy to use and reasonably priced.

Campaign Monitor provides a simple HTML form that you can copy/paste into your code and allows you to specify urls for custom subscribe and unsubscribe confirmation pages—which conveniently covers all three states. There’s even a Campaign Monitor Subscribers Pepper (created by Mark J. Reeves), which is handy if you’re Minted.

When you grab your form HTML from Campaign Monitor, set your subscribe confirmation page to the url of your sign-up page plus ?subscribed and your unsubscribe confirmation page to the url plus ?unsubscribe (no d).

The Glue

Copy the sample PHP file below, fill with your own wit and beauty (taking care not to disturb the cookie setting and PHP conditionals) and get back to work on that not-so-secret-anymore project we’re all dying to learn more about.

<?php

if (isset($_GET['subscribed']))
{
    setcookie('subscribed', 1, time() +  60 * 60 * 24 * 365);
}
else if (isset($_GET['unsubscribe']))
{
    setcookie('subscribed', '', time() -  60 * 60 * 24 * 365);
}

?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title><!-- TITLE --></title>
<!-- STYLESHEETS, JAVASCRIPT, MINT! -->
</head>
<body>

<!-- HEADER, ETC. -->

<?php if (isset($_GET['unsubscribe'])): ?>

    <!-- UNSUBSCRIBE MESSAGE HERE -->

<?php elseif (isset($_GET['subscribed']) || isset($_COOKIE['subscribed'])):?>

    <!-- STATUS MESSAGE FOR SUBSCRIBERS -->

<?php else:?>

    <!-- SIGN-UP FORM COPY/PASTED FROM CAMPAIGN MONITOR -->

<?php endif;?>

<!-- FOOTER, ETC. -->

</body>
</html>

And since the only song, Home, is so short I’m just going to include it’s lyrics here:

I’m sorry
you’re alone
don’t worry
I’m coming home.

Download Home

Unfortunately this change couldn’t be made on the server-side so if you want this new functionality you will need to grab/create an updated bookmark. To streamline potential future changes to the bookmark the site now uses a cookie to remember your custom command file url.

Kevin Emmott suggests that rather than present a list of available triggers when Shortwave doesn’t recognize a command, that it perform a Google Search with the unrecognized terms. Brilliant idea.

You can now define the special * trigger in your custom command file to do just that. Just copy the command you want to use as the untriggered default and change its trigger to *.

The * trigger is ignored by the Available Commands help page but if the url matches that of another command that command’s row will be highlighted and labeled as the default.

Here’s a bonus tip from the comments of the original Shortwave post. When using a custom command file you also inherit the default commands and their triggers. You can override this behavior and eliminate those defaults (thereby tidying up your help page) by adding the following to your custom command file:

> #kill-defaults

The first improves MobileSafari compatibility with extended characters sets when Shortwave is used from the webclip or from a new page. Before the update g 短波 would have redirected to http://www.google.com/search?q=?? instead of http://www.google.com/search?q=短波 due to a lack of character encoding information. Should work flawlessly now.

The second and third additions go hand in hand: a new replacement token and trigger suggested by Chris Lindsey.

The gs trigger can be used to search the current site with Google. So, if you were to use Shortwave from this page and enter gs mint you would be presented with Google search results for “mint” on shauninman.com.

The new %d replacement token is replaced with the domain of the page Shortwave was invoked from. Check out the default waves.txt to see it in action in the new gs trigger.

As with the previous update, there’s no need to update your Shortwave bookmarks or webclips; unless you’ve defined a custom gs trigger the new functionality is available now.

Just be happy I didn’t revisit the Wave with this idea.

Rotate.

Three tracks. Two of them unreleased. One new. Recommended listening experience: a quiet room, with headphones on and the volume as low as you can take it.

It’s always easier writing about older material—you can fall back on poking fun at youthful naiveté. So quickly, this one is about strong opinions, loosely held. A tired skeptic content to be wrong. Malaise induced by lack of faith. Resigned to an inevitable end.

Like Bird’s Nest and in sharp contrast to Boring Drone (both also on the Lot EP), this one came together rather quickly. Less than 48 hours from conception to compression. I think Twittering may be having an impact on the length and focus of my songwriting.

File under inspired by Iron & Wine and Radiohead.

our lot in life
is just a lot in the ground
for a good turn
another go around

a good dose of faith
eases us towards the grave
but when we go we’re gone
and what we’ve done is done

if I’m wrong, I’m wrong
and I’m not alone
then we’ll sing a song
and carry on

there’s no second tries
or lost redemption found.

Download Lot

Why the delay? The production is, well, different; it is intentionally but potentially uncomfortably sparse. It took me this long to get comfortable with it. From the distorted harmony, to the woodpecker-like percussion, to the guitar-like wailing vocalizations that accompany the piano bridge (with authentic fretboard/finger noise completing the illusion), there’s something off about the whole composition.

A fitting closer to an 8 minute “EP.”

Sitting on the floor
fretting the boring drone that I’ve become
you’ve forgotten all the words
left me here to sing this song alone
and if these walls were yours
nursing a hollow sound that’s come and gone
still looking for a cure
you’ve never steered me wrong enough for long

they’re always telling you that it’s nothing
it’s nothing to worry about like we do

we’ve made mistakes before
but we always—almost always—seem to come around
no one’s keeping score
the machine’s unplugged but the game plays on and on and on

they’re always telling you that it’s nothing
and it’s nothing
it’s nothing to worry about like we do
they’re always telling you that it’s nothing
and it’s nothing
it’s nothing to worry about but I do

I wish I had something in me to share
so full of worry that I’m not even there.

Download Boring Drone