About

About JayceLand's Weekly Rochester Events

Introduction

Occasionally someone works up enough gumption to write to me to ask what this page is all about. My usual response is a quick press of the "Delete" button. It works out very efficient for me. However, the question still remains.

Lately I've been disenfranchised with work and decided to take a few minutes while a ton of files copy and write up a bit of a description. You can see just how important it is to explain myself.

Boring Site Details

I update the site on Wednesday, basically. The way it works is I keep all the events in a FileMaker Pro database and export them all then use the bulk-import of The Events Calendar plug-in to get them all on the site. To keep things working kind of like they used to, each event is assigned a category to it's week from Thursday through the following Wednesday, so for instance, you can go to the category page for JayceLand 2015-Apr-16 and get all of the events that week.

The Events Calendar's days are numbered in my mind, though, since they broke the way I was using the bulk-import feature when they upgraded to version 4.3 in October, 2016. I haven't updated it since, so eventually I expect it will just cease to work one fine WordPress upgrade-day.

Prior to that, I would make a post-dated WordPress post that goes live Thursday morning at midnight. The JayceLand.com home now redirects to the blog.

Before I was using WordPress in full, I would move the current week to the archive and make a new page that took its place. I set up the weekly.jayceland.com domain because it was easier to type in which would just redirect to https://jayceland.com/LunchNStuff/index.html. In the 2003-Feb-13 update I did away with the old home page (well moved it to where the link goes) and set up the JayceLand.com home to go to the weekly update.

On the old pages, I had a little bit of JavaScript code that does two things. First, it would add a link in the upper-right navigation that says "Jump to Today." This updates when you refresh the page and clicking on it will drop you down to the current day. Second, there was a highlight over the current day of the week. The current day of the week got highlighted in cyan from midnight on that day until 2am the next day since that's when the bars close. Two days would get highlighted between midnight and two. If you have JavaScript turned off, that's what you were missing. There was occasionally an additional snippet of JavaScript here and there but mostly nothing.

There used to be JavaScript to for HitsLink.com to assess web traffic but I have since stopped using that service. There's more information on this in the HitsLink question in the FAQ.

When I was building a site in HTML each week, I used an Apple Macintosh G3 iBook. A FileMaker Pro database held all the events which allowed me to put stuff in far in advance and just forget about it. I wrote a script for Unix's "sed" command that tweaks the FileMaker Pro export into HTML (it was once an even more convoluted AppleScript!) There were no style sheets or XML, just straight, table-formatted HTML.

Picking Music

Basically I just post from bars and clubs I once frequented—The Bug Jar and Abilene being consistent picks—or for bands that I actively like, or that I want to try and see.

I used to pick bands based on a loose criteria:

  1. They're really good and I want to see them.
  2. They're pretty good and playing at a decent venue.
  3. I haven't seen the band before but they're playing at a venue that has a history of decent bands.
  4. I haven't seen the band before but they have a cool name.
  5. Someone told me they were good.
  6. They're okay but have promise.
  7. They're friends of mine or just nice folks.
  8. There's nothing better to do.

I'm not necessarily interested in one particular kind of music. I like to see people perform from the heart. I like to see passion. See, when I'm watching a live performance, I want it to be different from listening to a recording. There's a lot of bands out there who are very talented musicians but play with "no soul." To get on a stage, they've really got to be actors — and good ones at that. An all-original band is better than an all-cover band. Covers have their place, but they're the prop-comedy of the music world — an easy way to get a crowd on your side.

What else … professionalism is important too. Nothing is a bigger turn-off for a band than when they complain about the audience. You know … "hey, why aren't you all dancing" or "we're working hard up here — why aren't you?" That sort of thing. As the audience, it's our job to reflect back what we feel. We're not actors and aren't there to make you feel good, but we will reflect what we really feel, so if you're not seeing any energy back, either everybody is pissed off or you're not making us feel energetic.

Although I don't necessarily dislike any particular kind of music, some styles are more favored than others. I'll tend to prefer bands that are higher on the list than lower.

  • (any kind of innovator)
  • synth-pop, especially 1980s-style
  • punk and punk-rock
  • rock-and-roll
  • experimental
  • noise bands
  • ska
  • acoustic
  • blues
  • rockabilly
  • jazz
  • modern rock or "generic alterna-rock"
  • groove rock songs
  • rap
  • country
  • groove rock jams

I added groove rock jams to the bottom of the list. In point of fact, I hate that. In my mind, groove rock is the flowing repetitive kind of music of bands like the Grateful Dead … for each instrument, there's a melody to that repeats but at a different interval than the other instruments, so you get a sliding repetition. The jamming part is when all but one member plays a simple riff and the selected soloist then goes off on some rambling melody and "noodles around" on their instrument. I don't necessarily have anything against that, but if I'm there to be entertained, they'd better be so good that I collapse into orgasm right then and there. In reality, this is never true.

Oh yeah, and experimental music and noise bands. These two things are almost often interchangeable terms. To me, this is the precursor to the bleeding edge of music. It's the research and development labs of the music world. Experimental bands go out and tinker with making noise out of anything and in any way they can. A lot of it sounds really bad, but you'll often see these techniques get incorporated into regular bands sometime down the road. I get a kick out of that.

Some miscellaneous notes on the genre list … I couldn't tell you the difference between rock-and-roll and modern rock other than maybe modern rock copies the styles of popular artists while rock-and-roll is both somewhat more specific and a somewhat more generic category. Country rarely gets me going — I think part of the definition of the genre is a regimented song structure and that you have to sing with a twang.

History

For our regular viewers, they will certainly find most of this description familiar as it comes from a bit I wrote for the 100th issue on December 7, 2000. Well, I decided to put it in reverse-chronological order for quasi-clarity, and as a list so it won't seem so familiar after all.

  • 2015-Apr-16: I wrote a post about the transition from blog-posting a list of events to using The Events Calendar.
  • 2012-Jul-19: Did away with the old HTML-version events list and instead post a blog each week with what's coming up.
  • 2007-Mar-7: Updated this page since Milestones became High Fidelity. Also changed the links to Google Maps.
  • 2005-Nov-3: In the three hundred fifty-sixth edition, I added the Other Projects Page with many of my other Internet-related projects.
  • 2005-Oct-13: In the three hundred fifty-third edition, I stopped linking to IUMA because they advertise using pop-ups, defying the request of users' preferences to not have pop-up ads.
  • 2005-Aug-18: In the three hundred forty-fifth to three hundred forty-eighth edition, I stopped using Maps On Us because they changed something and broke all the old links, so I started migrating to Google Maps instead.
  • 2005-Jan-20: In the three hundred fifteenth edition, I restored the Weekly Polls and started adding them again to the page.
  • 2003-Feb-13: In the two hundred fourteenth edition, I did away with the old home page (well moved it to where the link goes) and set up the JayceLand.com home to go to the weekly update.
  • 2001-Mar-22: As of the one hundred fifteenth edition, I started fading the blue into the current white scheme. By the one hundred twenty-first the transition was complete and I'm not sure that anyone even noticed.
  • 2000-Jun-22: I switched to a blue motif in the seventy-sixth edition.
  • 2000-Feb-24: In the fifty-ninth edition I stopped changing color schemes, keeping a yellow theme.
  • 1999-Aug-26: The thirty-third edition was the first web-based version and basically what you see today.
  • 1999-Jul-17: The twenty-seventh edition was the start of a daily run-down of events going on in town … mostly movies, but some other stuff.
  • 1999-Jan-30: I missed going to O'Bagelo's so I sent out an e-mail to invite my friends to meet there for lunch. This continued weekly for a while.
  • 1998-Dec: I quit my job at West Group which is right across the street from O'Bagelo's (165 State St.)