Thu
Jul
22
Couple months ago I changed stuff on ImprovTeams.com. One of the things I did was some search engine optimization (SEO), i.e. trying to make it so I show up higher in search results. It’s hard. There’s, like, a whole industry dedicated to it.
Long story short, ImprovTeams.com is now on the first page of results when you Google New York improv. With UCB, Magnet, PIT, Improv Everywhere, etc! I’ve been watching it slowly climb up from page 7 to page whatever to the middle of page 2. Fiiiiinally it’s on the first page*. Also, the site’s getting over 1,000 hits per weekday. If it was 1998 and the internet bubble hadn’t burst, I could make money with that kind of traffic. These days you need 100x that or so.
As a long-time computer nerd and web programmer, I’m really proud of the site’s search engine ranking! For a lot of improv teams and even people, if you Google them you’ll find their ImprovTeams page above their Facebook page. If you don’t believe me, Google Shaun Diston. Kapow.
It’s not just due to my mmmmmm-pressive SEO work, it’s mainly because people actually link to their team pages and performer profiles, which makes me way, way happier. I love when people use and enjoy web stuff I made. Like chefs dig it when people dig their food.
Later
*Rankings actually tend to bounce up and down a little, so whenever you’re reading this the site could be at the top of the second page or something. Oh well.
Sun
Jul
11
“At high frequencies, a building’s power wiring behaves like a system of misterminated transmission lines gone berserk, reflecting RF energy back and forth throughout the power wiring until it is eventually absorbed or radiated.
- Reading up on
RF interference to learn how to handle its audio-recording implications, but that sentence is cool and scary in general.
Fri
Jul
9
This Monday I’m auditioning to play Steve Jobs in a TV commercial. If I end up getting the part, my nerd life will have come full circle in the weirdest way possible.
Sun
Jul
4
I wish when I was younger someone had said to me:
Everyone’s advice is based on their own interpretations of their successes and failures, which are produced by luck and chance just as much as methods and intentions. Take advice about how to do X with a grain of salt when it’s coming from someone who has only done X once and is still riding the wave of that success. They think they know how they did it, but they probably don’t. On the other hand if someone does X constantly, listen to everything they say, figure out why it’s true, and imitate or adapt it.
Wed
Jun
30
Today I entered my first ever festival of any kind! I did an extensive re-edit of Rob Stern’s Late Night Interview episode and submitted it to the New York Television Festival’s Independent Pilot Competition. Submissions are due by midnight tonight, and hand-delivery is allowed, so Vero and I dropped it off on 19th street around 7 p.m. The woman who took it was super nice for someone who’s probably really busy right now, and that put us in a great mood.
In addition to re-editing the episode I made a trailer, did some “artist commentary” on behind-the-scenes footage, assembled a press packet with pilot/series/production details, and touched up a couple of still frames for inclusion.
I started working on my submission weeks ago, but as usual I left most of it to the last minute and have spent the last 72 hours losing my mind as I dealt with Final Cut errors, a painfully slow laptop, nerve-wracking editing decisions, and a lot of sleep deprivation. This person:
helped me with every part of the process, including the parts where I was so tired and miserable that I literally cried like a baby at the slightest provocation. Her notes on the written parts of my packet were invaluable and she gave me a hard-but-great note on the trailer which required me to re-edit and re-render pretty late into the process, but which I’m now super glad I took. She was even the one who read over the submission rules carefully enough to discover that I could deliver it by hand, which gave me another 36 hours or so to work on everything.
Also, this week we’ve been together for nine months, which means that if this relationship was a fetus, it would be ready to come out and party and stuff.
I’ve observed that fans are the only thing in the world that go Off, High, Medium, Low instead off Off, Low, Medium, High.
How do I turn this into an Observational Comedy Stand-Up Joke?
Seriously.
