May 28th, 2010
by Derek
Everyone has to reinvent themselves at some point or another. Whether it is over a long period of time or overnight–let’s face it; change happens. For some it is overwhelming and unwelcome, for others like me, I tend to turnover about every 6 months (HA!) with a few exceptions. However, lately, it has been an uphill battle to focus my attention on one thing for any amount of time. Well, I have come to the point where I can say, I need to be disciplined. And what better way to enforce this by creating a blog series? Okay, okay. So that’s not REALLY the way it happened, but kind of. In all actuality, to know why I decided to go off on these crazy interweb adventures is because I LOVE learning new things, but mostly love building things from scratch–my bare hands. These things that I build are mostly computer related, since that is where I spend 10 hours of my day being bored to death with a certain companies Life Insurance business. But I digress.
The whole point of this blog is to trek my adventures in building stuff myself. To give you a bit of track history to give you a platform for my first history you need to know this: I am in a rock and roll band full of geeks; myself included. Anymore almost everyone is computer savvy, but lately we have been trying to get value added material, other than just music, to reach out to the growing generational gap to our target market–teenagers, mostly. But, really I am in a band called After the fall. I play guitar, and one thing that I saw we could use along side our newly released song on Rock Band was our very own iPhone App!
So today, or maybe later this Memorial weekend I will upload what I have already started learning over the last three days. Let me tell you, it has been a lot. As a general overview it has been sort of sporatic, hence, another reason to provide you/me a way to orgainize everything I’ve learned.
About the App: PostDream.net an After the fall application.
My goal with this app is mostly PR for my band, I won’t lie about that. The idea first came from “what app can I make for our band that will give it legitimacy, but have something to do with our costly, newly released album?”. Of course I pondered this for about 24 hours before coming to a brilliant idea. Since our whole album slogan is “You Don’t Have to Sleep to Dream.” I was going to add a sort of “fmylife”/”textsfromlastnight” platform for people to post their dreams, all while hearing our album! Another plus, was it was mostly web driven and I already had a solid platform to jump off of using jMyLife for Joomla.
I began immediately working on downloading the iPhone SDK and doing research, not having any idea what I am getting myself into…
To be continued….
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December 24th, 2009
by Derek
We’re coming to the close of 2009, and I hate to say but it has been an interesting mix of mostly failures, and a few highs. I’m looking out the window over the short cubicules of our first floor flouresent saturated office and all I see is snow blowing sideways. I hate winter. To add to my dispair and further dismay, it looks like I will be closing out my 2009 semester at UNO with a big fat regret in the shape of a capital D. While it feels like the knowlege of financial accounting is all accounted for, I can say that my test performance accurately reflects that. Even further, one of the two hardest classes I’ve taken here at UNO is still pending grade posting. I can only hope I fail it if less than a B. It is better to start with a clean slate apparently than averaging my grades. Thanks lovely UNO college of business. Good luck getting over a 3.5.
On the bright side, After the fall got our first review and got some semi-positive results. They are posted under “Omaha Music Review” if you want to see them, as well as will be on our EPK…unless someone should write a more favorable review, which is likely to happen.
Bottom line, Christmas better get me in better spirits or I’m afraid that this empty feeling in the pit of our stomachs will only get worse. Especially since Intermediate Financial Accouning will be laughing at me in the face all next semester. I miss my friends. Commence medocre life.
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December 14th, 2009
by Derek
The Sick puppies are just that…sick.
This weekend my band, After the Fall, played with them at Sokol Auditorium for the largest crowd of over 700 we have ever played for. Aurasing played extremely well, and it showed from the amounts of people flocking to buy their merchandise. It was amazing and I thank everyone sincerely for coming out to it.
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November 24th, 2009
by Derek
So I haven’t posted publicly on here in a while, but here’s my latest shenanigans and what’s revolving around Derek Stearns’ tiny little world:
The Entrepreneur’s club I’m in seems to be making NO headway whatsoever. Sometimes it seems like hearding the masses toward change–especilly college masses– is a diffcult thing to do. Who knew? I’m really starting to fear that I may not be fit for this whole president thing if it so happens to befall on my shoulders next year. However, After the Fall, has been having huge success! We recently played in Storm Lake Iowa, sold a few shirts and cds, and have got the big release coming up next year for “You Don’t Have to Sleep to Dream” as well as our show with the Sick Puppies. It should be great!
I know I live by the supposed ‘don’t regret anything’ sort of phrase, and I think I may have violated that by signing up with Amway. Alexis is a little upset with me for it and I know it was a bad choice. But for some reason my obligation seems to have no limits; and my school work definately shows.
Last, but not least, I am still working on these web projects and building my portfolio. So far clients have included UNO Maverick radio, our Entrepreneurship club, MagnaProductions.com and some other private projects I’ve been working on.
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July 27th, 2009
by Derek
Common trends in the last 5 years: Hating presidents, downloading apps, and slowing chipping away at any chance some of the best free services like radio might survive the next decade. I say this because, in spite of all the bad that is the internet, downloading, etc, etc, I have finally figured out one of the deep mysteries that is Last.fm.
Some of you may wonder “this guy must have gotten off the train a long time ago if he doesn’t understand last.fm”, but truly, as an artist and a technically savy one at that, I can honestly say that Last.fm’s website is utterly confusing. Perhaps maybe I don’t read enough instructions, I finally came to the realization that it is not the cookie cutter myspace or facebook types, but rather more like a wiki. And in that respect, sucks deeply. Not only are artists not in control of what is claimed as their material, but if there are multiple artists with the same name they must share a page! Talk about confusing.
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July 17th, 2009
by admin
So today marks the momentus occasion. Not only have I set up this web hosting account, but I started this word press blog for not only the purposes of keeping a “journal” of sorts for now and as long as this web domain lasts, but hopefully to provide a mode of record keeping that will put me out in the deeps of the world wide sea. Hell, maybe I can post useless ramblings or opinions and juicy finds for other people to view and take advantage of. Word up, wordpress.
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