The social experiment: #1 Peter Cales

I’ve been laughed at. My sanity has been questioned. I’ve even been told that the idea was all just a part of Skynet’s plan for world domination. But I can now proudly say that “the experiment” (or The Creepy Twitter Experiment) can be executed successfully without death or even serious injury.  As a refresher: I wrote a script to pick a person completely randomly from people I follow on Twitter.  I wanted to meet those who we mutually follow, but never met.  After the first person not replying to my crazy request I got Peter.

Tuesday night, 6:30pm, I met Peter Cales, a complete stranger in every sense, at Darios in Dundee, Omaha.

I was wondering if it was a sign.  Outside of Darios there was some kind of setup for shooting video of some sort.  Commercial, or movie, or who knows.  But I took a quick photo and passed through it into the restaurant.

I sat down at the bar and saw a Tweet from him that he was on his way. He soon walked through the door. From the distance not looking much different than the 80×80 pixel avatar that I previously only knew him by on Twitter. He sat down next to me at the bar and it was on.

I love the fact that he was #1 of this crazy thing.  He’s a self admitted non-technical person who has a passion for making custom furniture.  But we soon found what we didn’t have in common at the surface people like him and I really do have have here at the core in Omaha.  Him and I both find ourselves right at home among the Omaha (overused term of) Creative Class.  We quickly came to talking about Jeff and Dusty, SPN, Big Omaha.  I told him the story about just moving here and receiving a tweet from Jeff welcoming me and hoping him and I could chat soon.  He told me about his 5 in 5 he did for Silicon Prairie News that I had previously seen, but never put it together that it was him.  I told him about my interview with Danny for Retweet Thursday.  And then trying to explain retweet thursday in a way that doesn’t make it sound stupid.  But it’s totally stupid, so that’s impossible.

We talked of the beer selection. Quite large for an Omaha bar. I was impressed. I’ll be going back. Win.  I found a new place to frequent and tried a new beer.

His friend Rachel came up to us and he introduced me to her.  She courteously asked “so how do you two know each other?”  He looked at me as if to say “that’s absolutely the wrong question to be asking”.  We tried to explain how I selected him randomly among everyone who I follow on Twitter.  But really, there’s no way to discuss that without sounding like complete moron either.  Leaving it at the fact it was our first time hanging out, and we met on the internet is about all you can expect.  I asked Rachel to take the photo of us, and she was on her way.

I learned how he does his work at the Bemis center, downtown.  The bartender, who he knew previously, was interested in stopping down to check out his stuff.  That would be fun, actually.  In my group of friends it’s cool to know someone who really makes something.  Sure, code, and words, and all of that stuff… it’s real, and it has value.  But something tangible and usable is certainly a world that I forget even exists sometimes.  Who designed the couch I’m sitting on now?  Who designed the keyboard I’m typing on?  Well, Johnny Ive did… but you get the idea.

Plenty of other things came up in conversation.  He asked of my job and even though I don’t really like talking about what I do and who I work for generally I’m glad I did.  I explained all the process and procedures that goes on in a day in my position.  He gave a gratifying ”I’m glad I don’t do that” type response.  It’s good to know I’m not crazy :)

As I finished my Hoegaarden we parted ways.  He said we should do it again sometime.  How cool is that, right?

Now that it’s all said and done you’re probably thinking “Huh, cool”, right?  How many people do you know that make fancy custom furniture?

We haven’t picked a time or place, but Maren Hogan is up next.

Oh, and being that it’s Retweet Thursday… you know what to do.

Weekly Song Recommendation: Does it Offend You, Yeah? – Doomed Now

Does it Offend You Yeah?

This week in my attempt to improve your music taste I’m making you listen to the awesome tune “Doomed Now” by the the band “Does it Offend You, Yeah?”

Start by realizing there are few songs better than this one and you’ll be on the right track.

I love this dance-rock tune.  It comes off as a well produced, tightly integrated almost artificial sounding song.  But then you realize it’s a drum kit, some guitars, vocals.  It’s just a rock band.  An awesome one.  Sure there’s some blips and beeps mixed in, but I love that.

Remember last week when I told you more songs need vocoder usage?  Well this song took that advice and went balls out with it.  All of the vocals are vocoded and therefore radified to the max, yo.

Now even though I think this song rocks, it doesn’t compare to the album as a whole.  The album “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into” by this band is honestly one of the best start to finish albums ever.  It mixes dance rock with full on electronic tracks.  You’re doing yourself a grave disservice if you don’t check out this album yesterday.  Someone on Last.FM tagged them as “like robots having sex”.  If you don’t like that, then I don’t want to know you.

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Admiral Ackbar joins Twitter

Per recommendation of @EternalCow I built a bot that puts a much needed appearance of Admiral Ackbar (@AdmiralAckbar_) on Twitter. He’s warning (as he should be) to all who will listen that “It’s a trap!”

This is funny, but the most entertaining part is the fact that people are replying back.

See below for a real time update of responses to “It’s a trap!”

I’ll soon have itsatrap.org up :P

Weekly Song Recommendation: Cut Copy – Feel The Love

#MusicMonday!
This week’s recommendation is Cut Copy’s “Feel the Love” from their 2008 release “In Ghost Colours“.  What makes this recommendation cool is the fact that the album was originally recommended to me by Mr. Frank Payne.  Frank can be thanked for introducing me to so much of the awesome music that I’m into.  Nobody has better music taste than him.  Hands down.

Now onto the song.

This song really has pretty much everything a good track needs.  So take note if you’re in a band or planning on starting one.  These things will make a tune an instant hit.

1) Obscure introduction with ample electronics that breaks into a standard indie rock jam.
2) Lots of padding consisting of heavily reverb’ed “Ohhhh”s or synth pads.
3) A dance chorus that absolutely consists of a double time hi-hat pattern.  You may also replace the acoustic drums at this point with a drum machine if you like.  But bring back the acoustic drums for the verse.
4) A vocoder.  I can’t stress this enough.  Modern music does not use a vocoder nearly as much as it should.  Fine, autotune… but the vocoder is where it’s at.
5) Synth heavy outro to dance to.

With this track having all of these things and more, how could it go wrong?

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A new social experiment

If you remember back I recently had #TweetDinner.  Where people a web site decided who  my “closest friends” were all got together for dinner and hung out.  It was a good time, I consider it a success.  It doesn’t hurt that they were cool people.

So I think it’s time for a new social experiment.

Currently I follow 340 people on Twitter.  Some of them are automated entertainment sources, many of them are out of the area.  So that leaves a good chunk of them as local Omahans.

I’m going to select people, at random, and ask them to hang out.  A drink, dinner, lunch, something.  My guess is many of them will decline, since this is admittedly pretty creepy.  But maybe a few will go along with this crazy idea, and maybe even have a good time.

So some stipulations: If it’s already a close friend of mine I’ll select someone else.  If it’s someone that’s not local I’ll select someone else.  If they decline I’ll select someone else.  If it’s not someone who follows me I’ll select someone else too.  If they don’t know who I am, I doubt they’ll want to hang out.

After each outing, I’ll vaguely blog about the experience here and post a picture or something.

I’ll probably start next week, as I don’t have a system in place to select a completely random Twitter user that I follow yet.  Stay tuned.