Fall 1994 - Hip Clips

You kids may not believe me on this, but in the early to mid 1990s there was an explosion of rich content playing on computers - animated menus, interactive stories, cool video clips on demand, funny animations... But it wasn't on the internet. No, there was a big market for interactive CD-Roms back then. Magazines were putting CDs on their covers. There were CDRom magazines you could subscribe to. Of course Games were on CD, but so were corporate presentations.

And the backbone for a lot of this development was a product called MacroMedia Director. Director has since been wrapped into the thing we all now know as Flash, and is sold by Adobe. But in 1994, if you wanted to be a king of new media, you dropped the $1200 on a license of Director, and you needed a pretty powerful machine to run it - we're talking at LEAST 40mhz CPU, and preferably 8 meg of ram. Yes, that is MHZ not GHZ. And it's MEG not GIG.

By 1999, almost all of this type of content was being delivered by the Web, with Broadband connections growing in popularity. But in 1994, one of the best selling CDRoms was from the San Diego Zoo, a virtual tour with short, tiny, embedded video clips.

Cards on the table: I was not a visionary here. I came along for the ride. All credit goes to Paul Sebastien, who called me up and asked me to help him with a project. Paul spotted the trend and connected some dots: People are making interactive CD Roms. No matter what your content is in there, you are probably going to have a menu or two or three, plus a splash screen. And what says "multimedia experience" better than music? GOOD sounding music?

CDRoms were the breakthrough over Floppies because they offered a crazy 650meg of content - bigger than many hard drives at the time. And games delivered on floppies were limited to 2 meg or so. The music on games and presentations at that point was "Midi Files" - this was basically a musical score that the sound card in your computer would play back. They usually sounded tinny and terrible, and never sounded the same from computer to computer. But storage wise, they were very economical. And the Web of the era was also limited to these Midi files too, and forget about video!

Paul figured with the huge storage size of a CD Rom, people could actually put REAL music on there. But few people in 1994 would have access to high quality license-free music. And at the time, the competition was very high priced "industrial music" companies, who did canned music for corporate films - each track would cost between $10-100. Paul's vision was FIFTY great, loopable pieces of music in 5 different styles for $150 (I think) - $3 a track, in high, medium, and low quality versions for inclusion in your project, license free.

But Paul needed some help: This was still in the days of Psykosonik, and he was having some degree of writer's block on their third album... any music coming from his brain would need to be dedicated to his actual BAND. So he asked me to join him and be "the music guy", and Paul would be the Macromedia Director guy, plus the marketing. That division of labor worked for me: We did some basic numbers modeling, and hopefully this would bring me somewhere around $10,000 in the first few months if all went to plan. The upside could be incredible. Of course there would be no up-front compensation, but I had a day job, so that wasn't that big of a hurdle for me.

For 3 months, I wrote music like a madman, laid it to DAT, and drove to his townhouse in Plymouth to play tracks and see how the project was coming along. The styles were Slow Groove, Midtempo, Upbeat, Ambient, and Hyper. In the end, I think we scaled back from 50 to 40, because I was beginning to burn out a little and the user interface looked good with 8 buttons per style. 40 completely distinct 1 minute pieces of produced music is a bit much for even a maniac like me. And I was obsessed with making each one really sound DIFFERENT, unlike some libraries we had found where it was really only 4 actual compositions, but sliced and diced 5 ways each. So for each track, it was a blank slate: I picked a tempo/style, and started writing.

Paul learned more and more about Director, but the application had mysterious crashes, and despite having a simple interface, would crawl to a halt on many systems. Again, this was new territory - CD Roms were hard to make compatible with every system, and you had to put a lot of "sensing" code in to see exactly what hardware landscape it was to interact with... Things we take for granted in the web world now.

Also recall my writing style during this era: Twirl the knobs, hit record, and move ON. I was still using Performer, and the sounds on this project were heavily weighted to the Jupiter 8, The SY77, The Oberheim OB8, the Juno106, LinnDrum, Simmons SDS7, and TX816 So each of these songs was truly a moment in time captured. There was no easy way to go back and recreate one if we wanted to change it a little... I delivered these "AS-IS", and Paul was very accommodating, really. And sitting with him in his austere, beautiful studio listening to my tracks was a very fun experience, because he wasn't shy about handing out the compliments. I felt very good about this project.

When the CD was finally ready for market, it was months later... and you probably don't need to be told it didn't sell all that well. I think several dozen all told. But it was alone in its genre, so it could actually be said to be the "best selling" of its type, which helped Paul down the road....

This experience was also my first encounter with... astroturfing. Since we didn't have much money, we couldn't take out a full page ad in the back of Mondo2000 magazine. We tried to spread "word of mouth" via various internet bulletin boards and usenet forums. But even back then, there were pretty strict "no selling" policies in these user communities, so Paul and I logged in as "normal people who had bought Hip Clips and really liked it". Of course, how suspicious is it that you have a user just join the forum and the first and last thing he posts is mention of a product he likes? Yeah.

I confess I only did a few of them because I felt guilty about it. But Paul went to town on it - I think he had 3 dozen different AOL accounts at one point, posting accolades for our product. Not that it worked THAT well, but hey, we sold a few.

In the end, I never got any actual cash from the venture: Paul went into debt getting the CDs printed with cases, and he had to pay off the Director software as well. But he did give me one of his pieces of gear as sort of a "sorry this didn't work out" sort of gift, and music junkie that I was, that was actually JUST FINE with me. Plus, I got 40 pieces of music done. I only wish I had thought to make each one a full piece of music, because I really really like these pieces even today, and want them to go longer than 60 seconds. Plus it proved that Paul and I were a pretty good team, which would come in helpful in our ventures in the in the new century... but that's another story.

Spring 1994 - Contracting Hell

I first recounted a version of this tale on my personal blog... but I'm revising it and posting it here, because it is a CLASSIC Tale of the Nineties.

By early 1994, I had done 9 months of good work for my Dad, learning Cobol, and our first release of our software was in the client's hands. Dad took a call from a headhunter friend, and he forwarded the contact on to me. One thing led to another, and I took a programmer job for an outsource code shop. Prior to this, COBOL was something I did with my dad. This was my first chance to take the skill to the street and see if this could be an actual career for me.

As first gigs go, it was pretty low-profile: I was a subcontractor working for a subcontractor, working for a contractor, working for a telephone company in southern Minnesota. I was paid $15/hr, and told to bill 40 hours a week, no matter what I was doing. With 3 subcontracting firms above me, I am guessing that the client must have been paying at least $50/hr for my work, with everyone taking between $5-10/hr off the top.

Still, this was my big entree: I was going to make $30k a year. The recruiter said the gig was for 12 months. I could BANK on that. Of course, I needed to get corporate attire: 3 pairs of slacks, 5 dress shirts, 5 ties, 1 pair of shoes. The old man fitting me for these things commented the pants "look good across the beam" while appraising my tush. Which was a lie, since I was still around 135 lbs and over 6 feet tall. But it takes all kinds.

Also, having lived in the city and having divested myself of my very bad automobiles, I needed some way to get to and from Eden Prairie. So we bought a NEW CAR. A Nissan Altima, Sea Blue, that we named Evenrude. It was a wonderful car.

We were in an office plaza in Eden Prairie, the dress was business formal (shirt, ties, slacks), there were 6 of us in this office. I shared an office with a woman just a little older than I was. In the back were the "mainframe guys" who literally did nothing but play card games on the computer all day. One other guy would stare at lines of code all day. One slept. This was before the world wide web - I can only imagine what THAT would have been like.

For 4 weeks, I was given nothing to do. NOTHING. But bill 40 hours, and say I was doing "Conversion" work. Turns out, this shop was in the SLOW and LABORIOUS process of converting a system from MainFrame to something else... very very very slowly. Bored, I surfed through the code library, trying to make sense of what the system did (boring billing stuff), and see what massive changes were needed. As I said in an earlier post - I'm not so great with reading for reading's sake: I'm goal oriented: What needs doing, and by gum it'll get DONE.

Finally, after 4 weeks, they gave me an assignment: Take this one program, and convert it. It should take 2 weeks, they said. I took this program, and God as my witness, all I could see it needed was ONE LINE of code changed to work properly. So I did it. And my boss said "you're not done, this will take two weeks". Which I took to mean there was something else I needed to do. So i got in there and started to do some additional improvements, I reformatted the output to work on standard printers, I changed some of the input parameters to match PC keyboards better....

And after 2 weeks of puttering, my boss said "it'll take another week". So a week LATER, they sent off the code. And one week AFTER THAT, the top-level contracting firm called up and yelled at me for making all of those changes, what was I STUPID??? So I immediately backed out those changes, just did the one line of code, and shipped it off 10 minutes later.

8 weeks, and only one program modified, and only one LINE of code modified. And I had made almost $5000. And it felt TERRIBLE. I talked to others in the office, and they all said "kid, relax, this is an easy gig - enjoy it! The next one won't be like this and you'll remember this fondly". Really.

The boss called me into his office and said that "the clients wanted me fired, but he talked them into giving me another chance". I said thank you for the opportunity, but I don't think this is right for me. I walked out. Actually I'd like to say I walked out, but I gave two weeks notice, did nothing but show up for 80 more hours, made another grand. Sigh.

It was back to my dad's basement for a few months (and I am forever grateful to him for his employment in that period... since I had a car payment and everything!!!)

Two gigs later, I ran into one of the Mainframe Guys in the shop: He had taken ill and there was some code that NEEDED to get done. I filled in, and the work that was supposed to be 80% done hadn't been started, but that was ok because the two weeks he had said he needed turned out to have been only about 30 minutes of code on my part. I didn't make a big deal out of it... but I did learn some lessons about trusting people: there are a lot of people in this business who are not interested in working very hard, and are not above deception to keep themselves comfortable.

I am not one of those people.