Somehow, over the years, recording a CD of just-me-n-a-guitar has always been the next thing I was thinking about. Despite being the first thing, or the only thing, everyone asks for at gigs and in-between.

Stars are aligning, though, since I'm actually excited to do just that. Studio? Chosen and booked. Mastering and duplication? Priced. Artwork? Who knows; haven't come to that bridge yet. Funding?

Funding. That's where you come in, I hope.

In short: $1 or more is a helpful and appreciated boost. $10 pre-orders a CD, shipped to you and signed, as soon as one exists. $25 gets the same plus early peeks at the tunes. $50 lets you make me squirm, cringe, and bite my tongue as I cover the song of your choice. (you could also pick something I'd enjoy singing, but how's that fun?)

If you're unfamiliar with Kickstarter, where the project is living, it's kinda awesome: you pledge what you want towards my goal. If the goal is hit in time ($1050 by March 31st), you get charged. I don't hit the goal? No charge. All or nothing.

Take a look. Hop over to music.paulroub.com and take a listen. Tell your friends via those nice little Share buttons on the Kickstarter page.

Every little bit helps; and anything you can post on your Walls and your Timelines and your Twitter Streams is hugely appreciated.

I've set a short schedule because I'm stoked; this is going to be good. I'm proud of it in advance.

This is not quite a week old, but I think I've mostly found it now, performance-wise. I think this will age well; finding something new every time I sing it.

I've released IE View 1.4.5.1 for the sole purpose of having a new version number, explicitly marked as Firefox 3.6-compatible both internally and at addons.mozilla.org. It's waiting for approval right now, so in the meantime head to the IE View Home Page to grab the latest.

Eventually, Seesmic will have a fix, but in the meantime:

(Sometimes?) when attempting to view the Twitter profile of someone you don't follow (by clicking on their name in someone else's tweet), you'll see an empty frame, with just the text Seesmic.SWin.Presentation.ProfileViewModel at the top, covering up the right end of your Window. It can't be dismissed, because it never got around to drawing its close button. And it persists, as does all your window state, when you restart Seesmic.

The workaround is to shut down Seesmic, kill off that panel from the saved state, and restart.

Step one - find your saved state. It's buried under some hash-named directories that will vary from system to system, so an Explorer search will help you here.

Ultimately (for the current Seesmic for Windows version), you're looking for %appdatalocal%\Apps\2.0\Data\something\something\swin..tion_853dd26996d3889f_0000.0005_431a1770b2e25031\Data\1.0.0.0\user.config

Having found that file, make a backup copy. Now open it in your favorite text editor and search for:

<IsProfilePanelOpen>true</IsProfilePanelOpen>

Change "true" to "false" - and nothing else - and save. When you re-open Seesmic, the panel will be closed.

So I'm bringing a PA. And some friends. And I'm planning to take over for about an hour, in return for you, me, and your dear friends buying delicious caffeinated beverages and things. We'll see how it goes.

Your friends? Tell them. Please.

Address, etc., at paulroub.com/gigs, as ever.

What's it gonna sound like? Me, pretty much: paulroub.com/audio/

There's a Facebook event page here. Be a fan, sign up, I don't know, I'm not the boss of you.

Anyway.

I noticed that on Twitter, Jeffrey Zeldman is using some sort of self-hosted URL shortener. See, for example, this tweet, wherein http://www.zeldman.com/x/28 is linked to, but you end up at http://www.zeldman.com/x/28.

I assume this is an attempt to fit URLs into Twitter without using third-party URL shorteners, which we all know will end life as we know it.

Since I'd been doing the same thing, I thought I'd share the script.

I'm cheating a bit — rather than build a general-purpose shortener, I'm just linking to blog posts by their internal Movable Type ID. Given a shortish domain name (roub.net), adding even a large integer keeps things plenty short enough that none of my Twitter clients tries to "clean it".

An example: http://roub.net/552 leads to http://roub.net/blahg/archives/2009/06/reminder-aroma.html. 552 is just Movable Type's unique ID for this blog post. A nice detail, from my point of view, is that all of my blogs (personal, work and openmikes.org) are in one database, with unique IDs across all. So one shortener works for all three, given a bit of care.

That care?

select  blog_id, entry_basename, blog_site_url, unix_timestamp(entry_authored_on) as stamp 
from mt_entry, mt_blog 
where entry_blog_id = blog_id and
entry_id = 552

'entry_basename' leads to "reminder-aroma"; 'blog_site_url' gives 'http://roub.net/blahg'; and the '2009/06' is parsed from the authored_on date. There's minor goofiness related to one of my blogs' URLs being formatted differently than others. See the full script for details.

So how does it get called? Via Apache's mod_rewrite. In my case, I stuck it right in the site's Apache config file. But it will work fine in .htaccess, with minor adjustments, assuming per-directory rewrites are enabled on your system. If they're not, complain to your ISP. If they don't know what you're talking about, switch ISPs.

The Apache magic:

RewriteRule     ^/([0-9]+)      /findblog.php?id=$1 [L]

Which translates to "if we see a URL starting with some digits, hand the request to findblog.php, and give it that number we saw." The script takes that, builds SQL as above, and issues a 301 (Permanent) Redirect to the blog URL. If it can't find a match, doesn't see a number, or in any other way gets confused, it returns 404 Not Found.

To make my life easier when publishing, I've also added the "short link" next to the permalinks on this blog.

Who's done this for other blog software?

If you do come out, please say "hi" before; after; during a break; mid-song if you have to.

The details are, as always, on my gigs page. There's also a Facebook event page if you want to RSVP or Share (hint, hint). I created a MySpace event as well, but I don't know why. I think I just didn't want to hurt MySpace's feelings, all alone and graffiti-covered in the corner over there.

A Nerd Musician. But not in the MC Frontalot sense.

Maybe Geek Musician? Nah, "nerd" is the operative word here... in the socially-awkward, or at least socially-hesitant, sense.

If you're one of those, too, this may ring a bell:

I don't like asking people to come to my shows.

Even though I really want them to.

I hate describing what I do.

Even though I like it, and love playing and singing it.

I tend to get really embarrassed and uncomfortable when people compliment me at a show.

Although I love it so very much when that happens.

Online promotion works very well for people like me, at least for anxiety-avoidance. But how do I get someone to look at my site, join the mailing list, in the first place?

By making a personal or musical connection, of course. By, I don't know, inviting someone to come to a show. Personally.

So at the moment I'm sitting at Aroma Cafe, where I'm playing in a couple of weeks. There's a band playing tonight. During the breaks, I'm actually handing out fliers. To real live people. I kinda painted myself into this corner, purposely -- by making flyers that don't really work in piles or tacked somewhere. 'Cause there's a drive full of stuff attached.

Needless to say, way more fun than sticking a pile of paper in the corner, or clearing space on the bulletin board.

If you are one of the recipients of these drives, and you've made it this far, I should tell you this is likely the most-neurotic blog post I've ever written. Normally I hide all this silliness as well as everyone else. And I'm perfectly happy and content onstage. Promise. Look.

See you a week from Wednesday.

Yours in dweeb-ness, Paul

So a little bonus side-effect is that one or both will probably now be pulled out of performance limbo, as I'm all excited about them again. Good chance you'll hear this one on the 1st:

The CD is due out August 21st, and you can and should and must pre-order it now, here.

IE View 1.4.3 isn't available via the standard auto-update channel yet, but you can get it from the IE View download page.

More details and reminders to come, or watch the gig page.

Nothing major, but a Vietnamese translation has been added, and it's marked as Firefox 3.5-compatible (which it already was, just hadn't declared itself).

The latest version is, as ever, available at ieview.mozdev.org