Some improv groups were added to the wiki this week, Great Heights and Twenty Seven and some updates to Whisker Bliss, UCBW and Un-scripted Theater. We also had some updates to some performer pages including Shannon O’Neil, Julie Klausner, Jodi Skeris, and Rachael Mason.

This week I started pages for the New York groups Centralia and Burn Manhattan. I also started a page for Inside Vladimir, a long running Chicago team that featured Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (I added some info to both of their pages also, but they are still a bit sparse). I also added a little information on a team I was on and coached in NYC called Ice-Nine. There is also a fairly new page for the team Leo Callahan and updates on the pages for the Magnet Theater and New York performer Micheal Short.

There are lots of pages that could use some love. I’m trying to get the guys from Vladimir to add more information about the group to their page. I was a bit surprised that there was not a page for The Real Real World, given it’s long run in New York and the many early UCBT improvisors who were a part of that show. There was also a Chicago version that included many performers from Vladimir. I’d also like to get something up for the Living Room. This was a show created by The Family in the 90s at ImprovOlympic (now iO) and also featured Fey and Poehler. It had a very simple format of creating a fake living room on stage where the performers could discuss issues and tell stories and then jump up and do scenework whenever an idea came to mind. The goal of the original run was to make a TV pilot, which did get shot, but wasn’t sold to my knowledge.

If you have information about any of these items that you would like to add, please start an account there and add it.

• Misery is a Butterfly by Blonde Redhead
• Blood Bank by Bon Iver
• He War by Cat Power, also check out “The Greatest” which is also at the same link
• Tomorrow by Ladytron, I like the Great Northern Remix
• Star Witness by Neko Case
• My Rights Versus Yours by The New Pornographers
• Such Great Heights by The Postal Service
• Crazed by Rondo Brothers
• For You by Sharon Van Etten
• The Underdog by Spoon, you might also like “I Turn My Camera On” which was used in a car commercial a few years back.
• The Engine Driver by The Decemberists
• GFC by Albert Hammond Jr.
• My Girls by Animal Collective

This really just scratches the surface of the site. There are lots of other great bands… and of course lots of stuff you won’t like, but who cares? You can listen to it all for free and download whatever songs you like. By the way, here is a video of Crazed by Rondo Brothers:

Every week, the latest episode is available for download free of charge. Also, if you are online, you can listen to their entire back catalog of shows, going back years. Older shows can also be downloaded for 99 cents from itunes.

One of my favorite episodes of recent memory is episode 355, The Giant Pool of Money which was a great dissection of the sub prime mortgage mess, told through individual stories from every link in the chain from home buyers all the way up to Alan Greenspan. This show, made in conjunction with NPR News, spawned another one of my favorite podcasts called Planet Money.

Planet Money is a blog and a podcast, updated several times a week. Sometimes the material from the podcast becomes stories on NPR and sometimes they end up on TAL. They take the time to really explain all kinds of things associated with the great financial clusterf*ck that we find ourselves in. If you want to understand credit default swaps, collateral debt obligations, the difference between a crisis of insolvency and a crisis of liquidity, or just how the Geitner plan really plans to handle those toxic assets, this is the podcast you should be listening to. The nice thing is, even if that all sounds awful to listen to, you will likely understand and enjoy their podcast.

Next on the list for me is Fresh Air, another public radio show, this one is a daily show of mostly interviews of authors, politicians, actors, filmmakers, musicians and policy makers. Terry Gross is an excellent interviewer, often coaxing out particularly interesting angles on the subject matter. The bulk of a show is usually devoted to one interviewee which gives the subject a lot more time to get his or her points across.

Radio Lab is a fairly new addition to my list. It feels a lot like This American Life except that it concentrates mainly on topics in science. Similar to TAL, they pick a particular subject or theme and explore it using various interviews and storytelling techniques.

Last, but not least is the Slate’s Weekly Gabfest. This is a weekly show featuring Slate writers who talk about the weeks bigger political stories. It might sound a bit like the Sunday morning talking head pundit shows, but it’s charm is that it’s much less formal and self important. It much more resembles the kind of private discussion you might be a part of with coworkers or friends.

There have been several improv wiki’s started in the past. Most notably was the wiki over at the Chicago Improv Network. Unfortunately that wiki got swarmed with spam bots and it ultimately had to be taken down. That shouldn’t be the fate of the new Improv Wiki that I’m hosting at the Improv Resource Center. This new wiki uses mediawiki, the same engine that powers Wikipedia, and it has some nice features which should thwart attempts by spam bots.

So what belongs in this new wiki? I’m hoping it will contain information on all things about long form improv of course. Info on theatres, teachers, groups, performers, books, exercises and forms. I also hope that it branch out into other areas and have information on short form, sketch and related info on comedy. We have a great start so far. A great many of the current groups in New York City have been put up in the last week or so. But there is a lot more to do.

I hope you will join me and make the new IRC Improv Wiki a great depository of improv information. It’s not hard to do. Let’s say you wanted to start a page for your improv group named “My Three Puns”. Here is what you would do:

1. Create a new account for yourself at the new wiki.
2. Go to the browser and type in this URL: http://wiki.improvresourcecenter.com/index.php?title=My_Three_Puns. Notice that the spaces in the name have been replaced by underscores.
3. Start adding content about your group.

There is some good help available to explain the formatting for mediawiki, however, don’t worry too much about it. Get the information up there. Someone will eventually come along, yes and you by formatting it to make it fit better into the overall look of the wiki.

When things start going badly, I start hearing from customers that they have lost their stuff. The things you own in Second Life, things you have bought, made or been given, only exist on the Second Life asset servers. You can’t back them up directly to your hard drive. Often you only have a single copy which you cannot even back up in Second Life. So when someone loses something it can be very upsetting. This week I’ve heard from a lot of upset people. It hasn’t been this bad in a long time.

Also, people have cut back on shopping. The week before was nearly a record week for me. This week, my business was cut in half. I don’t know if I’ve ever personally seen a week when my SL income dropped by more than 50% until now.

And then last night when I got home, eager to log in and catch up with my customer service requests, I couldn’t log in. Second Life was officially offline and had been for hours. I went to bed, woke up this morning, and tried to log in again. It appeared that it might be working again, but again I was unable to log in and soon after the same offline message appeared in the top left corner. This could be the beginning of a very serious outage.

This is the scary part of making Second Life your primary income, the knowledge that SL’s infrastructure can crumble at any moment. I suppose this is true with many types of businesses, but Second Life as a platform often still feels like it’s in beta.

When I was in Phoenix, I was attending a book club fairly regularly and struck up a friendship with the facilitator. We met for lunch one day and because she knew I was an improvisor, she brought along a friend who had also done some improv. The friend knew that I had worked at ImprovOlympic in Chicago and for the UCB in New York, but she didn’t want to know those theatres. Instead, the only things both of them wanted to hear about were the missions I had done with ImprovEverywhere.

Now tonight, across the country in Illinois, I’m sitting in a computer programming class at the local community college and the teacher spontaneously brought up ImprovEverywhere. He talked about the Frozen Grand Central mission. He was giggling with delight as he told us about it.

Here I am in the Megastore mission:

I couldn’t wait to open it up.

It’s packaging looks a bit like a book.

Just turn it on, it’s ready to go.

The manual is loaded right onto the device and ready to read. It also had a number of samples already downloaded and ready to read which I had chosen from Amazon.com

The screen is hard to describe. It looks great. The pixels are tiny, it compares well to a printed page of text. And the screen saver images that appear when you shut it off are pretty neat too.

My first impressions are very positive. Two negative things:

1. The faux leather case is embarrassingly bad. It works fine when it’s closed and in transit, but it fits the device more like a flip flop fits a foot then a glove fits a hand.
2. The side buttons are easy to hit on accident.

Both of these problems have been well documented. I’m guessing that future models will address this.

However, so far the rest is great. I love the feel of it. The screen is excellent for reading. and I love not messing with a book binding to read. It rests in my lap and I just press a button to switch pages. Perfect.

I would write about it more, but I’m eager to finish reading the sample pages from Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Not long after this, I begged my mom for an Atari 800 computer. I spent so many hours programming it in my basement. I made all kinds of visual experiments, writing programs which exploited the incredible graphics modes like 160×96 screen pixels and even 320×192 pixels (these modes only allowed for 2 colors at a time). I attended an Atari computer camp in Minnesota the summer of 1983, where I completed my first computer game, a text only ripoff of Risk but with a more geographically accurate map.

Later when I first started playing poker in high school I made a computer program that dealt every possible hand for a 4 card poker game called 442 and analyzed them. It took an entire weekend for the computer program to run. I was so nervous that somehow the computer would lose power before it had finished it’s run. One of my first jobs in high school was creating a series of macros for an early version of Microsoft Works.

And this was all before the internet boom. You would think a kid like me would have looked at the Internet and realized that there was a huge amount of money to be made. I bet I could have been a dot com millionaire. I could have become a computer game innovator or even just fairly successful web designer charging $75 an hour to set up websites. But two things diverted me from what was probably a career that perfectly fit my abilities and aptitude. First, I got involved in film and theatre in college. I was seduced by the thought of being a film director and later an actor. Second, I made what was a serious blunder in judgment. I thought, “Nobody is going to make any money programming for the internet.” Yep, that’s right, I nearly completely missed it.

You see when I first started exploring the web after college, it was all HTML. And HTML was simple, clumsy and easy to learn, especially as used in the first burst of HTML web pages. I looked at those pages and thought, “Sure people are making a lot of money creating web pages now, but it’s just a matter of time before everyone learns HTML. It’s so easy! Once that happens, nobody will make any money doing it.” I knew the web would be big, I just didn’t see much of a role me. And besides I was far too infatuated with improv.

As I devoted myself more and more to my mistress, the theatre, my knowledge of technology began to wane. Sure I would have short periods where I focused my attention on computers again and tried to learn C or PHP or MySQL. Often I would get somewhat proficient doing these things, but I always returned to improv and acting.

But now I’m back living in my hometown in Illinois. It’s not exactly a bubbling cauldron of theatre here. I’ve been forced into a trial separation from improv. So I looked up my high school sweetheart to see if we still have some chemistry. I decided to take a class or two from the local community college. When I went through the catalog, the classes that kept calling out to me were the kinds of classes I should have taken 20 years ago (if they had been available). I signed up for a computer science class and a web design class.

So now I’m learning XHTML and CSS. It’s quite a challenge. While the basics are simple enough, it’s not at all like it was laying out pages with tables 8 years ago. I suppose the CSS revolution was well underway by then, but I barely had seen a <div> tag before and I certainly never coded a page that conformed to any HTML or XHTML standards. So even with my experience coding numerous small websites, a lot of the stuff I’m learning is new. CSS is proving to be a particular challenge. It’s a bit of a black art. You poke a parameter and see what it does on the final page. Most of the time the effects are just what you wanted or close, but often changing one thing on your style sheet can have very bizarre consequences on your page, especially with all the different browsers (Internet Explorer is the worst offender).

I set up this site about a week ago and thought it wouldn’t take long to tweak the style sheet to get a smooth look and feel. Instead it took many days. I would get one element correctly placed on the page only to find another pushed into the wrong spot. Finally I just started from scratch, building up a brand new style sheet one class at a time. What I’m finally left with isn’t bad. I like the general look, but I’m not sure about the colors. I’ll probably tweak it as time goes by, but it’s good enough to start writing entries (if you have any constructive criticism on the blog’s look, please let me know).

So after 20 years in the theatre, I’m back to my first love, computers. It takes me a little longer to figure out the solutions. And I don’t have the focus (or the time) to code for 12 hours straight like I did when I was a kid. But computers still offer me a very specific kind of problem that I enjoy solving.