Tim Powers Film - Kickstarter

Some months ago, Arcana Pictures optioned the television and film rights to Tim Powers' World Fantasy Award-winning novel Last Call. Now they want to raise money to film a scene from the book. The purpose is to use the scene to pitch a larger project. They're using Kickstarter to raise the capital so dig into your pockets and the back of your closet and pledge. More details are available via the link.

Tim Powers Update — THE BIBLE REPAIRMAN AND OTHER STORIES

Tim Powers Update — THE BIBLE REPAIRMAN AND OTHER STORIES:

J. K. Potter recently turned in the dust jacket and interior illustrations — one for each tale — for Tim Powers’ upcoming The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. We’ve fully designed and proofed the book. All that remains is for Tim to take a pass through the pages and sign signature sheets. As soon as those two tasks are completed, The Bible Repairman jumps to the head of the production list and heads to the printer.

All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records

The Tower Records story is about a man, his company and the unprecedented economic and cultural impact it had on the music industry and people around the world.   Tower Records begins with the man who created it… Russ Solomon.

From an early age, Solomon had a special love of music, a dynamic personality and the inventiveness of a crafty entrepreneur.  His first job was sweeping floors in his father’s drug store, located in the Tower Theater building, in the sleepy northern California town of Sacramento.  Still a teenager, Solomon had the idea to sell discarded record singles from the counter-top jukeboxes for 5 cents a piece. His father gave him a shelf in the back of the drug store and this became the training ground for Russ Solomon, the young man, who would one day create a Billion dollar a year music empire.

From the opening of the first Tower Records in 1960, Solomon empowered employees at each store to make the decisions necessary to help foster the local music taste.  This leadership style gave each Tower outlet a great sense of individuality and to its employees a great sense of responsibility and pride, not often found within the "corporate" environment.   Tower records helped lay the groundwork for what would become the modern music retail business and in the year 2000 alone, the company did over one billon dollars in business.

From a cultural standpoint, Tower Records had a monumental impact on millions of people, worldwide.   It was “the place” to escape for a few hours; a sanctuary, a haven. Tower Records was a place to meet your friends, your co-workers or a place to meet new friends who shared a common love of music, literature and all things cultural.

Yet, in 2004 the company filed for bankruptcy and by the end of 2006, Russ Solomon's Tower Records had shut the doors to nearly every one of its worldwide outlets.
So here is the “What, Why and How”…
As you can tell, we are looking to finish the production on our documentary film.  So far we have pooled resources and some initial seed money to get the project off the ground.  We are approaching this as a passion project, and as such are dedicated to making this film as cost effective as we can. In other words, we are trying to do this grassroots.

We hope that with a little help from you, and the Kickstarter collective, we will be able to see this project to completion. Your donation will go towards the small nuts and bolts of filmmaking.  These monies will help pay for various production and post production costs; including things like equipment rentals, additional personnel, and travel to locations to conduct interviews.

This will be a long process that will involve lots of time and energy but one that we are very passionate about.  Our goal is for this to be a communal process, so please be a part of it!  And please pass this along to friends and family, post it on your blog, twitter and Facebook pages...help us get the word out!
You can also follow the project on Facebook and Twitter:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tower-Records-Documentary/150978738296041
http://twitter.com/#!/TowerRecordsDoc

Video Photos Courtesy of: Karen Salomon

Video Music Courtesy of: Three Eighty Three's and La Strada
"All Things Must Pass" by George Harrison

Flix Brewhouse coming to Round Rock

Round Rock's version of Alamo Draft House is set to open in the summer 2010, the plan is to have six movie screens and six taps of house brewed beer (32 taps total).

http://flixbrewhouse.com

Create a Free Disposable Web Page with DinkyPage

Create a Free Disposable Web Page with DinkyPage: "

Have you ever had the need to create a free web page quickly to share information with a group of people or even a team member? You have to fire up your editor, make the page and then upload the page to the site, find the URL and pass it around.

Now we have discovered a service that does ALL the hard work for you! It’s called DinkyPage and can be found here.

All you need is content and if you want to use pictures, a place to host them.

When you arrive at the Dinky home page you have one large option and a smaller one below. You can create a new free web page or create a custom page with a custom name. This means your page’s URL will be something like www.DinkyPage.com/Name instead of www.DinkyPage.com/74u…

This is a great way to make the URL easy to remember and it looks better in an email. Create one of the links and move on.

If you choose the custom name for your page you will have to input it before your page is created. Next up you will find yourself looking at a What You See Is What You Get editor (WYSIWYG) – this makes creating the page ultra simple.

Start by naming your page in the page title area. This will show up in the web page’s header. Below that you have a text box to enter anything you want. Type in some text and then highlight it. Click the globe with a paperclip in the toolbar to create a hyperlink. This means when your reader reads this page they can click on this line of text to go somewhere else. The link will appear underlined. Go ahead and try it out.

The dialogue box looks like this:

For a normal link just leave it as is, but if you want to make the link a Mail To: or link to another portion of the page pull down the link type box and choose accordingly:

Now like I said before if you want to add images to your site they need to be hosted elsewhere. You can hotlink to an image by right-clicking on the website it is hosted on and selecting properties. Copy the image’s full URL and paste it into the URL box. The image will appear in the preview box on the right.

Hit OK and your image will appear with your text like so:

So below you can see my page with some text, a hyperlink and an image. I then hit the Publish Changes button in the upper left hand corner and the site is now live on the world wide web. You can see this page here: http://dinkypage.com/74u.

This is what your page looks like online. Not too shabby for a few minutes of work.

And if you used a custom name for your URL it will look something like this:

If you are feeling adventurous you can click on the HTML mode button in the upper right hand corner and edit the real deal HTML of your page. This is awesome for adding other code into the page or pasting in a ready made document.

Partly cloudy, chance of labels

Partly cloudy, chance of labels: "by Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer, Blogger (Krakow, Poland)

In April, we announced that we wanted to hear from you about your wish list for features in Blogger. Many of you said that the label gadget should be more flexible. Today we are rolling out two enhancements to the label gadget.

Label Cloud

Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels—and by far the most requested enhancement was to present the labels as a 'cloud' instead of as a bulleted list. That's now supported in the gadget directly:

Once enabled, the more popular labels appear in a bigger font than the less popular labels:


Selected Labels

If you've been on Blogger for a while, you might have more labels than you know what to do with. Don't want to show all of your labels in the widget? No problem: go to the label gadget settings and choose 'Selected labels.' You will be able to select a subset of labels to be displayed in the widget:


We hope you like it!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

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