I managed to get the Winter Concert chopped up on a per song basis and load the videos up on YouTube.  So if you are following me with any interest in the VCMA – you can go here and view the videos.  More are coming.

The above picture was from the VCMA’s performance of the Christmas tree arrival.  I don’t have a video of that performance, what I do have is a video of the VCMA Concert Band’s performance at Kingston of Vermilion which took place on Dec. 11. 2008.   Enjoy!

The VCMA Community Concert Band is currently looking for a director.   If you know someone in the area of Vermilion, Ohio – or they are willing to drive to Vermilion, Ohio – please have them contact me.  Yes it is a paying position, but it’s only enough to be a supplmental income source.   If you know someone that is interested have them email me at creeva (at) gmail.com.

Picture From Vermilion Ohio News

I originally wrote this for the VCMA website – original story is here.

On December 6th, 2008 the hardiest of the VCMA members were down at Red Clay for the arrival of the Chrismas Tree ship. Temperatures were below freezing, but the band played on. It wasn’t in the vein of the Titanic’s band since luckily the members that showed up did not go down with the ship. The ship made it through the ice and arrived safely to deliver trees to the wonderful citizens of Vermilion.

From this performance the band was featured on the Vermilion Photojournal’s front page and a video on the Sandusky Register’s website.

A friend of Ruth Tanner’s took these following pictures of the band (click through to see larger versions):

Tonight the VCMA is playing at Kingston of Vermilion Nursing & Rehabilitation Services for our final christmas concert.  I’ve charged the camcorder and packed up up the tripod, so I should be able to get some video of the concert.   The last concert footage I’ve posted online was the Alumni Band Festival,  I’m next to positive I still have a VCMA summer concert that I haven’t posted yet, so that may be coming also.

The real reason this is interesting is after this concert I’m taking a break from both community bands I play in.  Because the babies birth should occur around the same time that both bands start up again for the spring season, my priorities for the spring have changed.   I should be back for the summer season of the VCMA, but the Ashland Community Band doesn’t have one, so I won’t be back with them until next fall.

It took alot for me to get back into music and playing with bands.  I’m really hoping that a vacation doesn’t put a lull over me that causes me not to return.  I guess I better return to the VCMA since I am vice president of the organization now.

Now as soon as my kid can hold a cornet, he’ll be learning how to play it.   That’s the plan anyways.  My luck he’ll be a woodwind player.

If you don’t know I’m the one on the left.  Saturday it was in the teens temperature wise, but the VCMA played (sight read) christmas music for the arrival of the Vermilion, OH Christmas Tree Ship.  I’m very glad that I was not clean shaven and have grown out a beard for the winter.   Some more pictures of me to ogle at.

I didn’t get video for everyone (I’m afraid my camera would have broke from the cold) – Here is a link to last year’s event that I did and shot video at though.

]]> http://creeva.com/2008/12/09/suffering-through-the-cold-outdoor-concert/feed/ 0 http://creeva.com/2008/10/31/my-grandmother-hurt-herself-last-week/ http://creeva.com/2008/10/31/my-grandmother-hurt-herself-last-week/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:27:15 +0000 Creeva http://creeva.com/?p=3608

Last week it seems my grandmother fell and cracked her tail bone. No one told me. I’m am very unhappy about that. My sister told me last night at the VCMA practice. I had stopped by my grandparent’s house last night before practice, but no one was home. I then stopped over at one of my sister’s apartments, no one home. Then I went ot another sister’s apartment, no one home. I though it strange, but let it go.

Then practice started, my youngest sister showed up (she plays saxophone in the band), and told me the news. On the drive back to my mother’s to drop her off (I don’t get out of the car), my grandfather called me. I asked if they were going to be awake, he said yes, so I rushed over there.

My grandmother seems fine, that I’m very happy for. My youngest sister has now be given explicit instructions to call me me immediately any time if she hears that something has happened to either of my grandparents. My mother wants to give me a cradle that my great Aunt Doris (pictured below feeding me) bought for me as a baby.  I’ll take it, she can leave it at my grandparent’s house and I will pick it up.   I don’t know how giving my mother is going to be though when she reads the series I’ve written for next month called “A Month With Mom”.   We’ll see.

Yesterday VCMA was featured in The Lorain Morning Journal in their living section.  The article highlights the diversity in the groups membership and musical selctions.   Here are a couple excerpts from the article:

The Vermilion Community Music Association grew from its initial focus on the concert band to include two other performing groups, a mixed chorus and the WindJammer Big Band, which specializes in the swinging dance music, popular songs and jazz of the 1930s and later. No dues are paid, but musicians are asked to bring their own music stands and a sense of humor.

Musicians hail from areas around Vermilion including Sandusky, Elyria, Ashland and Lorain. The earnest Christmas music, with all its promise of peace and redemption, offers a welcome reprieve from the argumentative ad campaigns of another political season and the relentless drumbeat of a plunging stock market.

I missed being quoted in the article since I took an extra day to get back to him.   My 13 year old sister was also going to be interview, but there seem to be a problem with her phone.   Regardless this is a boon for the VCMA and it’s great that we have been noticed.

To read the full article please go here, if you would like to watch the accompanying video it is located here.

I also did a similar write-up for the VCMA’s new blog.

Two years of doing National Novel Writing Month and two years of failure for myself.  This year however it should be cake.  Chocolate cake, not white cake – I dislike white cake it’s like the step-father that no one likes of the cake world.   Now I’m sure one of the first things going through your mind is “How is this slack ass that hasn’t written an orginal article in two weeks going to write a novel”.   Well I’ve been busy what can I say?   I think I can do the novel this year.   It’s only 50k words and I can pop out 5k words in an hour when i put my mind to it.

However when I actually bother to write, I never want my blog(s) to suffer.  What I’m going to attempt ot do this weekend is future write for the whole month of October.  I’m hoping if I sit down and crunch through writing before November hits that most of my writing can be focused on that.   So between my different blogs that means doing about 100 articles in the next 7 days.   Can I do it?  I think I can.  I’ll throw in some slack ass reviews to get through a cheater post here or there.   None of us are super-human, and if I was actually getting paid to do this it would be something completely different.

I also have to start looking at adding a blog section to the VCMA web site.   It seems that we are to be featured in the Sunday edition of the Lorain Morning Journal.   I’m going ot have to get someone to snag me an extra paper of that.   So I thought it would be nice to have a regulary updated news section of the blog.   I’ve many times showed my distaste for doing static pages, a blog format would do wonders for releasing updates on a regular basis.  This reminds me though that I also need to get a new design theme for the VCMA website.

Image from here

You know how your browser tries to guess where you go by what your typing in?  These are the sites that come up as my suggestions (from browsing history) when I go through each letter of the alphabet:

A -Google Analytics

B – The Other Guild

C – Creeva’s World 2.0

D – Digg

E – Gmail

F – Feedburner

G – General Discussion -Vermilion News

H – Slashdot

I – The Other Guild

J – Journey To Get Paid

K – Kwippy

L – My Lifestream

M – VCMA

N – Network Solutions

O – Oh My Yod

P – Ping.fm

Q – Disqus

R – Google Analytics

S – Slashdot

T – Twitter

U – Yahoo Login

V – General Discussion -Vermilion News

W – Statcounter

X – Yahoo Login

Y – Yahoo Login

Z – Dad Hacker

Interesting?  Not really.   I found this post amusing however.

Here is what has been published this week.

Articles:

Blogging For Hire

Movies I Own – Mallrats

Geek Gang Signs

Movies I Own – Clerks

I’ve Read Alot of The Books Palin Wanted to Ban

Website Review Twiggit.org

Can Anyone Name This Movie For Me?

Movies I Own – The Toy

More Web Statistics – Why Are They Going There?

An RFID Enabled Loyalty Card – Big Brother

Movies I Own – American Psycho 2

Movies I Own – Soul Plane

Have You Replied To Your Commenters Today?

I’m Now On The VCMA Board of Directors.

I end up using the above shot of myself quite a bit (it would be a better picture if I had known I would use it so often).   This time though it’s to announce that the VCMA has voted me onto their Board of Directors.   At this moment in time I’m still not sure what is going ot be asked of me or what my duties will require.   Will I be a “junior” member in the sense that I’ve been there for only a year or accepted with equal voice.   Who knows?

I don’t shy away from confrontation, but I don’t seek it out either.  I will state my point and believe in it.   I don’t see any issues however since all the people in the VCMA seem to have a good heart.    My term is from September 1, 2008 through August 31, 2010.  I guess I’ve been a board member for 4 days and wasn’t even aware of it.

Not that it’s important, and not that most of you would care.  I just thought I would share my news with the intrawebs.

I’ve done the community band circuit for a year now and I’ve played with two community bands.  The one thing I have noticed is that the bands don’t really seem to be growing.  When they do grow it’s usually by an older member decides to join in the band.  The youth market seems to be completely disenfranchised.   I can understand part of that, though I declined to the join the VCMA when it was first formed due to not liking the director.   It wasn’t because I didn’t want to play, I still had the yearly Vermilion Alumni Band to play in, then I moved to Oregon.   While there I hardly ever pulled out my trumpet and when I did it was just for a half hour stint every few months.   My lips didn’t have the range or stamina they once did.   After blowing out my lip the last couple years at Alumni after moving back to Ohio, I decided I need to bring more regular playing in my life.  This led me to community band.  Since I am young(er) I have a different perspective on the band.

The first thing is that the music (at least over the summer) is extremely heavily weighted to music written before I was born.   If we play anything done after I was born it was an arrangement of a pre-existing piece.  I hear the director say things like, “we’ll play this piece because everyone will know it”.   Most of the time this is said, I neither know it, nor do I recognize the melody.  I feel attached and not a part of something I can recognize.  This is not to say that I think the old music should be ignored, no matter how much I dislike traditional marches.  I think we should play a wider variety of music that encompasses all eras.  Young people that really aren’t in to band music should have something that is recognizable to them and not just something that there parents kind of remember or their grandparents danced to on their first date.    There needs to be a mixture.   A mixture that should appeal to all those involved.

Rules I would follow to achieve this if I was choosing the music:

1.  Choose at least one movie/television theme song- preferably something recognizable to all ages.   While we are playing Moonriver in the VCMA and I adore, it is not something that the majority of under-forty crowd would recognize.  I think you would have to go to the over fifty crowd to truly appreciate and remember it.  My wife said she would forever be in love and be inspired to work harder at learning an instrument if she hears The Muppet Show Theme Song.  My personal favorite is video game theme music, something as traditional as The Legend of Zelda Theme Song or a number from the Final Fantasy series.   There is a national company that tours and just does live concerts on video game music, it sells out pretty quickly.  These types of concerts have a great deal of appeal to the under forty crowd and that should be taken into consideration.

Some TV themes I would like to hear:

• Batman the Animated Series Theme
• The Muppet Show Theme
• The A-Team Theme
• The Adam’s Family
• The Star Trek Theme
• Farscape Theme
• Benny Hill Theme
• Monty Python’s Circus Theme
• Futurama Theme
• The Incredible Hulk Theme
• Inspector Gadget Theme
• Macgyver Theme
• Mission Impossible Theme
• Quantum Leap Theme
• Bonanza Theme
• Scooby Doo Theme
• Twilight Zone Theme
• X-Files

Movie Themes I would like to hear:

• Anything by John Williams
• Anything by James Horner
• Harry Potter
• Anything large movie made in the last 20 years.

2.  Choose at least one pop arrangement – the VCMA did the Beatles and this would fit into this category.  The real problem with pop music is that so little of it actually sounds good for a concert band.   The fifties and sixties popular songs actually sound the best, though there are a few later pieces that sound quite good also.

3.  Choose one classical piece that easily recognized, so far in neither of my community bands have we tackled any classical music.  We have done some “traditional” pieces, but nothing classical.   Where is the Bach, Beethoven, or Chopin?  There is an abundance of this that has been arranged for concert bands, but the bands I belong to seem to overlook anything pre 1880 and post 1960.  Christmas music doesn’t really fall under “classical”

Out of these 3 areas community bands should be able to play one piece from each of these genre’s through out there year of performing.  I’m not saying it has to follow that one of each of these pieces get played every concert, but out the forty or so pieces I have played in both bands, they should be able to accommodate one of each of these in their play rotation.

There are other rules I would follow also.

4.  No more then 20 percent of your music can come from any decade.  If it was all arranged in the eighties, that’s fine but the melodies and original music was composed according to this guideline.   I’m not going to pick on arrangers for doing a modern arrangement of In the Mood, its swing era song.   With this rule you could also still fit in easily a whole concert and still have music written from before I was born.

5.  No more then 40% from any single genre.  Whether this is marches, swing, classical, theme music, etc., etc. – variety makes more people take notice unless you’re doing a theme concert.

6. Theme concerts (usually X-mas concerts for community bands) – In a theme concert you should play a maximum of 80% of the music that follows the theme.   One or two pieces should be reserved for something unexpected and interesting that doesn’t fit the norm of a particular theme.  Whether this is a Christmas march or a summer playing of Sleigh Ride, the unexpected brings peoples attention by breaking monotony.

7.  While conductors normally choose the music in most circumstances, there should be one or two pieces chosen by the band members themselves to work through and play.   These people are there to have fun, play something they really want to play.

8.  Encourage your members to compose or arrange something for your band to play.  This makes the music all their own and gives your band something special.

That covers my notes from music selection.   So how do you attract new members?   Other then people moving into the community or the rare person finding out about you and showing up, there is little in the means of growth.  Community bands are competing with the Internet, Social Networking, video games, hanging out with friends, going to the bar, or clubbing.   Having lived through my twenties already most of these are more fun at that age then community band.  You need to hook members while they are still young.

I’ve always played for the love of playing.  I really started when I was a sophomore in high school, by my junior year you couldn’t keep me from auditioning or volunteering to play for whatever group was available.  This alone helped me grow into a much better musician.  I used to be able to transpose music from the key of C or the Key of F in my head automatically and play along from that sheet music.   My range and stamina were much better then they are still today.   My technique today is better in a lot of ways, but I feel I was a better player in a larger scope back then.  That was after only a year of playing back then, I have some of that memory still in my head and I’m old enough to have gained wisdom.  My knowledge should have grown.   After my single year of college I stopped playing with any group outside of Alumni band.  It wasn’t out of disinterest as much as effort.   If I didn’t love playing I wouldn’t stay with the community band, there is no one in my peer group and for a large part of it it’s not really “fun”, at least not in the sense it was fun back when I was in high school.

Most players fall off because they are not engaged early enough into the community band cycle.  To give an example what non engagement with playing can do, for alumni band out of the 160 of us that went through 3 years together, only 5 showed up last year to Alumni Band, only two of us regularly play now.  That’s hovering around a 1-2% rate of a player likely to stick with their instrument after school form my personal experience.  Almost all community bands explicitly state that will accept members that are in high school with their band director’s permission.   Now while I would have gladly played with a community band when I was in high school I was not going to go up and have Mr. Henry sign a permission slip or call to ask if I could join the band.   This is a turn off.   What should happen is that community band should be actively engaging the high school and middle school band directors for members every single year.  If community band members are worried about middle schoolers, then they should make a junior community band where the regular band can show up if they so choose and the younger players can show up.

Younger players are looking for people to emulate, to try to sound like.  Having mentoring by accepting is only going to raise their skill level.   Players that show up are not getting school credit, they are not getting paid, and so why have any stipulations.   If the music is too hard for them they are not going to stick around.   If they don’t really enjoy playing and are only in the school for socialization or the fun from that they are not going to show up.   If community bands are there to make its own members better, then the younger the better, they can make the band as a whole be better.  The older players get the benefit of mild teaching and understanding of what they are doing and the younger players gain a mentor.

Once the younger players are hooked they are more likely to stick with music, since they then have a place to play after they graduate.  They will be informed about the community band and will be regular members.   If they are anything like I was they will find a great relief about having some place to play over the summer.  Older members may even make a little bit of side cash by giving lessons, even if they aren’t as good as a true instructor they could still impart wisdom and teach a student to the edge of their abilities, at which point the student could move onto someone else. My high school self could play rings around my present self. I think community bands under estimate the skill levels of these players.

Is there a strong future for community bands?  It depends.   The older generations need to realize that playing in band is not “cool” at least not until your in your thirties, and I still get the occasional snicker about it – I just don’t care.  A community band is considered a tired thing by the younger generation who would prefer most of their live music to contain electric guitars.  The ability to evolve and bring new members in is essential for most community bands to last another twenty years.   Showing players it can be fun by playing music they can identify with and accepting them as peers within their membership.  You could still have a stipulation where the younger members couldn’t vote in elections, I’m sure you wouldn’t want your board run by four sixteen year olds – but having one of them in a position with a voice may give you greater possibilities then someone like me who is already twice that age and out of touch.

I’ve gotten the VCMA website in a stable place.  I can quickly edit it and make changes, so before any radical redesigns I’m now working on moving them over to Google Apps for internal paperwork.  I plan in the near future signing the VCMA up for a Myspace page and a Facebook account.  People in the younger peer group will be able to see it as an organization to identify with.  The older members need to realize why they started a community to begin with, which includes – hanging out with friends, playing for people, becoming better musicians, and having fun.  None of what I have written breaks any of that.  It may take them a little bit out of their comfort zone, but the mantra of business these days is to embrace and extend.   Growth happens once some of these things are followed.  If the bands I play with don’t start embracing this I’m not sure they will last another twenty years and things will get shaky in another ten.   Growth has not continued, but rather it has stagnated, unless there is something done to counter-act this, the downward trend will continue.

In my band I’m still considered just a kid, though my father had his fourth child by my age.   I’m too young to them to be anything but a kid so what do I know.  I’m too old for any of the young people to truly listen to me, plus I’m over thirty so I’m to young to be trusted.  If we go by Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother – they don’t trust anyone over 22.   Somehow I’m stuck in the adult version of the tweens.  So no one will truly pay attention, but that doesn’t mean this shouldn’t be said.

Picture from here

]]> http://creeva.com/2008/08/23/is-there-a-strong-future-for-community-bands/feed/ 7 http://creeva.com/2008/08/22/creevacom-week-in-review-81508-82208/ http://creeva.com/2008/08/22/creevacom-week-in-review-81508-82208/#comments Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:52:13 +0000 Creeva http://creeva.com/?p=3129

This week has been a crazy one. Here is what has been published.

Articles:

Bill Nye The Science Guy is Coming Back – I always enjoyed Bill Nye The Science Guy.

The Second Day of Kindergarten – Heart break and scheming

Week One of My New GTD Strategy is Over – The success rate is a debate

County Fair, after County Fair, after County Fair – Many trips scheduled

Will Social Networks Lead to Political Revenge? – Wondering what happens when the next generation gets into power

Utter Frustration and Writers Block – General rant on not writing

How I Changed The Channel At Grandpa’s House – A child finds a flaw in the system.  As one comment pointed out I hacked my grandfather.

Competitive Training is Not an Excuse for Sending Kids to Public Schools – A rant against someone who thinks everyone should go to public schools to be truly competitive

My Obsession With Capes – A short fun little post

The Time I Thought I Was Related to Spider-Man – Sadly I truly am not

New Look For The Blog – Announcing the new theme

VCMA Concert Tonight

- I need to write the follow up

I Admit it, I Liked Archie Comics Growing Up – I’m weird.  I know.

Twitter Updates:

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-15

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-16

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-18

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-19

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-20

Daily Activity Summaries:

Daily Digest for 2008-08-21 – starting yesterday I’m gonig to be posting a daily post of all my online activity – my lifestream day by day in a post.   I hope you enjoy.

Tonight the VCMA will be having it’s final summer concert at the Lorain County Fair.   It’s been a wonderful summer season and I appreciate everyone that has come out to watch us perform.  I only missed one concert this season (though I did manage to arrive in the middle of the first song at one of our concerts).    The only concerts I have until the winter season are next month.  The first of which is September 16th playing in the Ashland Community Band at the Ashland County Fair.   The second is September 27th at the Vermilion High School Stadium playing with the Vermilion High School Alumni Marching Band at the high school’s annual marching band festival.

Hope to see some of you around.

Picture from here

Traditionally (since I’ve been with Xie) we don’t normally go to county fairs.   Of course there have been brief dabbles, a single visit or so to the Lorain County Fair or visits to the Lane County Fair when we lived in Eugene, but nothing planned ahead of time, more of a whim of the moment.  Somehow this year is different.

Growing up the county fair was a yearly ritual.  We would look forward to it, when we could make it down to Greenville we would go to the Darke County Fair, and visit the other county fairs around us.  It was a family event where we would all do things together.   I was never allowed to ride fair rides because, “They were death traps”.  I still managed to enjoy it anyways, I wasn’t a fan of the animals or plants, but I enjoyed it somehow anyways.

Why did Xie and I never go to the fair?  I don’t know.  It wasn’t cool enough.  It cost too much for what we got out of it.   It wasn’t a high priority of ours.   All of the above.  Whenever we talked about going to the fair it was more of a meh kind of thing.   So if the opportunity came up on a whim, we went.  It was never ever something we planned out and said you know what we should do next month, we should go to the fair.   To be fair (pun not intended) we do most of our stuff on a whim.  I think we planned the Crater Lake trip we took 2-3 days before we went (since we needed reservations).

Last weekend however we managed to make it to the Richland County Fair (man their website sucks goats).   It was the first day, and none of the rides were setup and some other things were still be constructed when we visited.  Being the first day and early afternoon we gave them some slack; that and it was only one dollar per person to get in.  However, it was a Sunday, you would have thought they would have had everything setup the day before.   Must be something in the Ohio water that breeds laziness.   We did manage to eat some fair food, look at all of the animals, vegetables, and crafts.  I can say I have a different eye when looking at photography now, though it’s not the same eye as Xie – other wise we would have to trade through out the today to get anything done.   We also managed to get to see another community band (I missed which one), and listened to some one else play some of the songs that I play with my band.

Next on the agenda is next Thursday, I’ll be playing at the Lorain County Fair with the VCMA.  This will be my first trip back to the Lorain County Fair in at least eight years (maybe longer).   There is a chance I’ll run into my kindergarten teacher, my family always ran into her we went growing up.   Yes she should know who I am, she only taught for one year.  It should at least be interesting and I have free tickets.

On September 16th I’ll be playing with the Ashland Community Band at the Ashland County Fair.   Now I can say that the last time I visited the Ashland County Fair was when I was in college, so that was back in 1994.  It’s been 14 years since I’ve been to this fair, and the first time I’ll be playing with this group in this type of venue.   It should be interesting to say the least.   Band practices start on September 2nd, so we’ll have a whopping two rehearsals before the fair.   We’ll see how it goes.

Picture from here

So I’ve taken over the position of webmaster for the VCMA (Vermilion Community Music Association).  This is going to start a new series as I’m going to use them as guinea pig’s for what I’ve felt non-profits need to do to survive and thrive in the web 2.0 world.   They are not a big organization, and I’m sure I received this position for my background and not my witty personality.

I’ve been working on the site for a couple of weeks and here is what I’ve found so far.   They had a private member’s section on the old site to share files and personal data.  This section was password protected, but the username field was just a front, as long as you nkew the password anything you put in the username field was accepted.  Since I’m a security engineer, this just wasn’t going to work for me.  I’ve ranted before the illusion of security and how illusionary security wasn’t worthwhile at all anyways.  The other problem was that their member page “password protected” section was just a javascript that rewrote the “HTTP GET” to a file named a combination of the requested page plus the password.   So if the page was index.tml and the password was “password” the ending HTTP in the “HTTP GET” command would be indexpassword.html.   Since it was still a plain text file without any encryption on it, in theory it could still be spidered and stored by google, thereby completely undermining any security it was giving them.

I’m working on a better and more secure solution while maintaining the balance of ease of use.   I don’t want to burden them too much on the security side.  I’m sure some of the older members would blink at me with a blank stare if I handed them secureID tokens to access their newsletters.

Picture from here

The next thing I discovered is that code each web page by hand, ugh.  There was no way I was going to maintain each HTML manually and hope for any semblance of style and continuity between pages (an issue they had in the past).   They had been using FrontPage and offered to buy me a copy.  First no, no and no – currently I’m using Linux on my main computer (Ok I dual boot into XP and between WoW and Netflix streaming I don’t get into Ubuntu as much as I should), so Frontpage was out.  They were insistent at first that this is how it was done, I however readjusted things.  I moved them to WordPress which I’m not using as a blog but rather as a CMS (Content Management System).

Picture from here

I manually migrated the data from the old HTML files, I spent hours converting the front page data to be “clean” data that i can migrate and copy paste anywhere.   I was a dumbass though, I should have just copy and pasted the text into notepad or a generic text editor, then I wouldn’t have had all the background crap.  This is my nore to myself to now be stupid next time.  I added images and a javascript navigation menu, but essentially the page was just a cleaned up (easy to maintain now) version of what they already had.

Now the next step is to migrate them to Google Apps for their member related information……

Somehow I always end up volunteering for Vermilion non-profits, now if only I could get one of them to pay me……

If you’ve wanted to see me (or the rest of the VCMA) in concert this weekend is you chance.   You may have missed our previous concerts (I didn’t even write about the one that happened last Thursday), but now you can see us live and in person.

Here is the times and location information:

08-09 Sat 07:00 – 08:00 PM Midway Mall, Elyria
08-10 Sun 07:00 – 08:30 PM Vermilion Gazebo, Vermilion

Picture from here

A couple weeks ago when the VCMA had their concert in Vermilion, OH there were school teachers wandering around the downtown area (the picture above is not my hometown) protesting.   I can’t say I understand completely what they were protesting, but before I go into a rant about the protesting – I’ll give you my understanding from what I got out of it and what others told me.

The contract from the local school district had been changed; previously the school district paid for the retirement of its teachers or supplied a portion of it.  Recently however this had been changed to put the burden on cost to the teachers who will have to pay their own retirement compared to the school district footing the bill.  I don’t even live in the same county as my past hometown, so my diatribe has no bearing other then outside views since my taxes will not be raised, nor will the quality of education my children receive be impacted.

The first thing that comes to mind – welcome to the real world.   I know a ton of people that went into public service or civil servant positions for the retirement.   It didn’t matter what the job was, it just mattered that at the end of the career they received that fat benefits and nice retirement package.   They could be a janitor or they could be a mailman, as long as the benefits were there at the end of the career they would be happy.   I’m so I care about what I do now and though I should be worry, I’m not thinking about the end of my career yet.  No one I know professionally get’s their retirement paid for by their employer anymore, that notion is old and out of date.

If a company in this day and age announced it was going to have an all inclusive retirement package for its employees there are a few things that come to mind.   The first being, what person is going to stay with a company for the 25-30 it takes to qualify for a retirement package – jobs don’t work that way anymore, very few people in this day and age start at a company at 18-20 and retire from that same company.  It’s idiotic and small minded in so many ways, to believe that you will be with the same employer.  The second is how far would a stock drop in a publicly traded company that announced something like this.   In the age of profits and margins an announcement like this would be considered fiscally irresponsible by the share holders.   However our tax money goes out to support all the public servants of our local, state, and federal governments.  Personally I understand the point of unions – but I don’t think anyone should get the guaranteed contracts that union works receive.   It should be dog eat dog and fight for the best value for the dollar instead of bringing down the people at the top and raising those at the bottom.  This is my tax money and the billions that the government could save by not offering automatic benefits are enormous.

There is another reason though I don’t have respect for the protest.  My freshmen year in high school my (then future) band director was up for retirement.   He decided that he wasn’t going to retire and he was going to keep teaching for another 3 years.  The next year was my first in band (other then a brief stint in 5th grade) and David Henry is now the metric I judge all other band directors against.   My senior year was his final year.   In a side conversation with him one day I asked him why doesn’t he just keep going?  He told me and a friend that he lost 15% (these numbers maybe wrong but it’s been 14 years and the intent is still the same) of his pension because he went on and taught the last three years.  He was happy to do it and would have done it again.   However, if he continued for another three years he would lose another 30% of his pension, and that he could not afford to do.

David Henry at the VHS Alumni Band Practice in 2007

Why is this relevant?  Well the teachers I saw protesting were all obviously younger then I am, and I’m not that old at 32 – the most they could be in their career is 10 years and that would still be stretching it.  I’m sure that most of them got into it for the idea of having summers off and the decent retirement package.  Some did it for the pure joy of teaching, and for those I would hope they would have done the job diligently regardless of the benefits at the end of the career.   One of the largest arguments that I’ve heard is that teachers are underpaid.  I won’t argue that, but at the same time almost all of them knew the pay rates before they started.   Feeling bad because they make 30-40k a year is just as bad as feeling sorry that the check out clerk makes minimum wage.  There is no surprises, they knew the scale and the pitfalls going into the game.   They could have done something else if they wanted to make more money.  They should do what they want to do because they enjoy it, not because of the money they make now and in the future.  I don’t see any of the love in teaching in them that I saw in David Henry.

Maybe it’s unfair to compare them to Mr. Henry.  He is one fo the two teachers that influenced me most heavily in my young life, though both of those teachers taught at teh same school district that these teachers are protesting in.   These are just my thoughts, take them to heart or throw them aside as you see fit.