Venice

Sitting in the quiet of a shared rental apartment, drinking coffee (not cappuccino) and eating chocolate-filled croissants. This is the first time I've been here in about six years, according to the blog and to my notebook. Certainly I haven't been since G and U stopped going because of their kids, which is five years ago.

Venice sounds like Sunday, no traffic and hardly any voices. The apartment is only about fifty metres away from the main traffic stream between the Stazione and San Marco, yet we hear nothing but occasional voices (in Italian) of residents and the workmen restoring the house at the head of the alleyway. The quiet is very refreshing, almost meditative. It feels a bit like the places we used for our retreats.

Mind you, the busy buzzing world is still out there, only 50m away. There's a supermarket just the other side of the bridge, where we bought groceries last night. (I'm here with members of the meditation group, though we won't be meditating as such. One is here now, two more arrive on Friday.)

I don't see much change in Venice, though of course shops come and go. Perhaps looking for change here is as conceptually wrong as looking for it on the artificial Main Street of Disneyland. It's all about continuity, repetition and predictability. That may be the reason for the phenomenon of tourists travelling huge distances to shop in the same chain stores that are known to them from their home countries. Or perhaps the tourists who do shop there don't have those stores, perhaps they only know them from advertising and fulfill a long-held aspiration by visiting. I've never been in such a chain to see who actually shops there.

Today's forecast is for cloud and storms towards evening, so it'll probably be just a day of local wandering. Biennale tomorrow and Thursday, forecast to be dry and mostly sunny.

Making coffee in the pretty but minimally-equipped rental apartment: ripped-open packet of coffee, spilled grounds in the sink, boiling water in a saucepan, using towel as a potholder. It reminds me of Winnie the Pooh bumping down the stairs on the back of his head, thinking that he might possibly be able to think of a better way to do it, if only he weren't being bumped on the back of his head all the time.

Yes, I did just quote Winnie the Pooh. It's not all Tolstoy all the time.

"Mystifyingly equipped" might be a better description. Dishwasher and washing machine, two fully-equipped bathrooms, wifi and computer and widescreen TV — but no potholders or sharp knives, and only one bar of soap between the two bathrooms. And remind me to tell you about the process of locking and unlocking the door.

I came here by train, overnight via Munich. I slept surprisingly well, the bed was long enough and comfortable. One learns quickly enough to suppress the initial reaction of startled fear when the train tilts into a curve and your head goes down.

My cellmate was a youngish DJ, on his way to a music studio in Treviso to record a new song. It seems a busy and very hard life, he'd been home for one day in the last three weeks before heading off on this trip. I didn't ask for his name or any particular questions about his music (in fairness, we only spoke during the dozen minutes between waking and his disembarking). He probably thought of me as a harmlessly pleasant old guy.

For the first time ever I find myself thinking in terms of what I can and cannot afford. I've truly never thought that before, up to now my income has always been sufficient for what I wanted to do (and its corollary: my wants were always simply and cheaply fulfilled). That has changed during the last few years, and not because of inflationary wanting. I can't really afford to be here now, I have to watch my expenses if I am to get through the week on the handful of cash I brought.

The reason is that my income hasn't kept step with inflation. If I remember rightly, I am earning the same hourly rate now that I was in 2002 when the currency changed. I certainly cannot remember negotiating or being given a raise. Yet costs have doubled, the beer that used to cost four Deutschmarks now costs four Euros.

I'm experiencing a really strong urge to delete this, to censor myself. Fuck that. This will be the truth, or as much of it as I can bear to make public.

Noon. Time to go outside and do stuff.

Micro-career

Hanging about in the office, waiting for a software update to finish.

Let me bring to your attention something quite wonderful, and spin on what I've been thinking about since seeing it. First, the viewing: turn your speakers on and the volume up, and listen to Kutiman's collected works. Do it now, please; it's OK, I'll wait. (If you're in a hurry, numbers 1, 5 and 8 are the must-see's.)

Now have a look at the singer/songwriter featured in the fifth of those, Dadasarah. She's a housewife with a little kid, who happened to study voice in college; she's a woman with a videorecorder, writing and singing her own material for her own satisfaction.

Her twenty videos have been viewed 58,007 times as I'm writing this. Fifty-eight thousand times. Most of her videos get five-star ratings, the rest four-and-a-half.

Kutiman's eight videos have been viewed 1,696,659 times as I'm writing this. Let's say that again nice and slowly: One point seven million times. Most of his videos get five-star ratings, a few four-and-a-half, and one ugly duckling got a mere four stars. He has a fanbase whose size and enthusiasm many "established" artists would envy.

Two quite different people making music — principally for their own amusement — in quite different ways. They have something interesting and very significant in common: They are getting it presented to us, and we are lapping it up.

I think that home-brew distributed on the Internets is the future of music-making.

There is a new kind of career to be had here, which wasn't possible before. In the bad old days when music was a physical object, it was said that there were only two kinds of money that a musician could make: None at all; or More than you would ever believe possible. Getting people's attention, putting the product in their presence, was expensive as all hell. It took a team of a dozen people to bring physical music to the attention of a possible paying audience, which is why the labels took such a large slice of the pie.

Zero-cost bandwidth and immaterial distribution change all that. Kutiman and Dadasarah distribute for free, thanks to youTube; I am bringing them to your attention for free, thanks to Blogger. The only thing missing is a way to turn their talent and our attention into an income stream, but given the size of these viewing figures that is surely only a matter of time.

And when that happens, it will be possible to make a decent living with a micro-career in music. You won't be able to live the rock-star lifestyle — let's be honest though: don't we all know that rock stars trash their hotel rooms because they are lonely, bored and unhappy? — but you will make enough money to continue making music. And for people like Dadasarah and Kutiman, that is what it's all about.

If Apple continues to be as smart as they have been, they will soon let "ordinary people" post music for sale on iTunes. What will happen when Dadasarah and Kutiman get there? Say that Apple gives them half of the dollar that they charge for songs (because there is no record company's share to pay); say for the purposes of argument that they would get fifty cents per song.

If half of the people who love Dadasarah's songs had bought one of them on iTunes, she would have earned around 14.5 thousand dollars. If an eighth of the people who love Kutiman's songs had bought one of them, and if he had then paid out two-thirds of the income as royalties to those whose videos he sampled, he would still have earned around 35 thousand dollars.

This is the future, people. And I for one can't wait for it to get here.

On the short-sightedness of customers

Had a phone call from a new database customer (my own database, for those keeping track) wanting to know how to import her collection of addresses. We couldn't figure out any easy solution (i.e. one that she could apply from her end without more involvement from me than telephonic hand-holding), so I had her send me the data in various formats.

Took a look at her data, figured out how to import it. Figured out a price, too: 2623 records à 0.25 Euros = 655.75 Euros plus tax. Called her to tell her the good news.

"Oh dear, so expensive, I'll have to ask whether we can pay that or whether I will just type them in by hand."

I am shocked and amazed, or rather: I would be had I not heard this nearly every time I've been asked to import data. I am truly amazed to infer how few companies perform any kind of cost/benefit analysis on what their employees do. Most seem to view salaries as a lost expense best ignored: the staff comes, we pay them, end of story: what the employees do is of no importance as long as they are present and awake. Bzzzzzt! Wrong. The salary dollar for a coffee break is of less value to the company than the dollar that went on a phone call that made a sale. The true cost of making a trained, experienced employee spend a day filing reports is not the day's wage, but the lost benefit that the person might have achieved if usefully employed and the filing were done by a temp.

Dear customer, permit me to help you make an informed decision. Retyping addresses that already exist in one electronic form into a second electronic form, is not useful employment. You should be spending your time on things that generate revenue, or at least on things that increase customer happiness.

But if that doesn't convince you (and it probably won't) the numbers might.

Find out your hourly rate, what it costs the company per hour for you to work there. (As a ballpark figure, that's your annual salary plus a third for overheads, divided by 230 days in a year, divided by 6 working hours in a day.) Now divide your hourly rate by the 0.25 Euros I charge per address.

That is the number of addresses you would need to type per hour to be cheaper than my import service. I don't need to know what that number actually is, to be quite certain that you cannot do it.

/me chuckles and waits for her to call back.

[Updated: she didn't call back, so I infer that she is retyping two-and-a-half thousand addresses by hand. /me shakes his head in disbelief.]

To the north

Preparing an early lunch before going to fix a system problem in Hedgehog's gallery before taking the train to Hamburg for a short week (back Friday night).

This last day-and-two-halves has seemed like a week, I feel as though I've run a marathon and fought a pair of tigers and slept about sixteen minutes in total. Can't imagine why.

The possible job in Münster is now a very possible job. My contact must have speaks with his superiors © Peter Sellers, and it's all subject to non-disclosure clauses and contracts etc etc; but it looks pretty good. They don't want me to work in their offices, but are willing to pay an unsupervised hourly rate. Such trust! I really need this job. If it all comes off, the planned three months' work would triple my income for this year. Not that it's particularly well-paid, but because this been such a piss-awful year financially.

Actually, what does "well paid" mean? I'm bidding 20% under what is usual for the profession according to a few colleagues whose advice I asked, but it's still more than twice the rate I'll get in Hamburg this month. One of those colleagues said, "I try to figure out how much money my work will save the client, and that's what I charge them." It's an interesting idea, but doesn't always apply so neatly. The Münsters are happy to pay me a buttload of money because it'll enable them to sell their software in the English-speaking market, which will bring them in N buttloads of money. On the other hand, architects are paid a fixed percentage of the construction cost of the project, no matter now much work they have to do, which leads to the paradox that the extra effort you put into reducing the client's costs also reduces your income. It is not in the architects' interest to build cheaply, and it definitely is in their interests for the client to change his mind often and late because such changes are billable at an hourly rate. The commercial relationship between architect, builder and client guarantees hard feelings all round.

Not a paid review

A heart-warming message arrived this morning on a bulletin board that I read:

Today, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the pharmaceutical monolith that charges nearly $1,000 for a 30 day supply of one of its HIV/AIDS medications, is donating $1 to the National AIDS Fund for each person who simply visits their website and "virtually lights a candle."

My, you think, how noble and generous they are  — as you are intended to think. Well, think again my dears. As of midday CET the message is very different. The website now reads:

Thank you for lighting a candle to support the fight against HIV/AIDS... As a result, we are proud to honour our commitment to donate $100,000 to the National AIDS Fund to continue their vital work with those most impacted by this disease.

Pah. They are donating the annual turnover from eight patients. Well whoop-de-fucking-do.

As of 14:25 CET the count stands at 1,448,381 candles. They are donating 6.9 cents per candle-lighter, not a dollar.

BM-S paid its shareholders 2.18 billion dollars in dividends in 2005. (It's on page 120 of their annual report.) That is 1509 dollars per candle-lighter.

BM-S turned a nett profit of 3 billion dollars last year (page 116). The donation is equal to the profit they earn every 17.5 minutes.

BM-S spent 509 million dollars on advertising in 2005 (page 83). The donation is equal to the amount they spend on advertising every two hours.

I am glad that they are donating money to the National AIDS Fund, and even more so that they are supporting clinics and healthcare centres in Africa and Asia (pages 6-7). I am disappointed that the amount is so trivially small, and offended that they clearly expect me to be awed by their sensitivity and wholesomeness. Pah.