Archive for May, 2008

New projects

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I have really been keeping a low profile on spacedmonkey in the last couple of months, worse the normal but I am a extremely busy man. Having said that, I have tweaked quite a few things on my web sites over the last couple of months. For one, I finally added some stuff on the Tools part of Computing Corner. There are a few pages I had for friends and pieces of work I have done that I have kept me away from coding my own sites lately. This is all going to change over the summer. I have lots of projects in the pipelines and I thought that my faithful readers might be interested.

  1. First, I am currently in talks with to become the a consultant at a small promotional company being setup on by a couple of friends of mine. It should be a really interesting opportunity to show of some of my web design skills. Nothing is confirmed yet but I am hopeful. Watch this space for my news on this.
  2. Spacedmonkey is going to get a couple of new sections. Instead of all blogs and post simply going to the home page, things will be divided up into sections. It has already been redesigned, with lots of little improvements.
  3. ComputingCorner will also change dirrection. It started off a tech blog but I didn’t really add to it, as I think that their are enough blogs out there saying the same things. The blog is going to change into a simple updates to the site blog and the site will focus more on mods and scripts.All the scripts and little bits of code that I have written will be uploaded to ComputingCorner for the great world to use, free of charge.
  4. A new micro reviews page 160 character reviews of tv, films, gigs and music.

There are many new things going to be happening, I have to get through my exams and moving back to London for starters. Watch this space for updates.

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Jonathan Coulton

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Jonathan Coulton is singer, songwriter, new father, and ex software designer, but what makes him interesting compared lots of other artists out there is that he released all of his music for free. His story is an amazing one, in 2005 he left his rubbish day job writing software for a small database company to pursue music full time. He worked out that it was really hard to get signed onto a record label so he decided to try something different. He created a website called Thing a Week and released (for free) a new song every week for a year, which is no mean feat.

He created a A few of those songs became big internet hits, including folky cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back“, a funny video called “Flickr“. My personal favorite song called “Code Monkey“, with the classic line

“Code Monkey think maybe manager oughta write goddamn login page himself !”

This was made all the funnier for me while listening to this song as writing a login page at the time, give it a listen. It is nice to have a nerd writing songs about stuff I can really relate with and even sometimes make me laugh. One song that touched me personally, was a Future Soon, which tells of his problems as a teenage nerd.

The most interesting thing about him is the he makes his money purely from donations and live
performances and manages to make a living out of it. So if you like his music, go donate. If you want to listen to his free music, his podcast can still be downloaded for free. Give it a go!

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