Ed Colmar's Blog

Certified Permaculture Designer

2014-07-17T11:40:00.003-07:00

I have finally gotten around to taking (and graduating from) a Permaculture Design Course.

After researching permaculture on my own for 15+ years, I did not think that I would get very much out of a PDC. I was so wrong. Every step of the way was filled with different perspectives, additional knowledge, and more details than I had previously acquired.

I am now teaching my own PDC to limited select students.

My permaculture global page is here:

http://www.permacultureglobal.com/users/5199-ed-colmar

Bitcoin Cart - Free Shopping Cart for AppEngine

2013-04-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce the official beta version release of the shopping cart application I have been working on.

I have fallen in love with bitcoin, and wanted to create a new shopping cart option for people looking to sell online using BTC. It is also integrated with google checkout as an alternative.

The suite calculates shipping prices via Fedex, and calculates the smallest size box needed for a given amount of interior boxes.

This software is totally free, and I just ask for a small percentage of your bitcoin sales as a donation.

Bitcoincart deploys to Google's Excellent AppEngine infrastructure. If you are not familiar with Appengine, it is very easy to setup and use... Also it is free for low traffic sites. If you need a hand getting it set up, get in touch! edcolmar@gmail.com

Grab the code here: Bitcoincart on github

Real Estate Business Card Design

2013-02-28T15:53:00.002-08:00

One of my designs was featured in a "design inspiration" blog post showcasing some really really nicely designed business cards.

30 Examples of Real Estate Business Cards

Butterfly mining

2013-02-03T11:26:00.000-08:00

This is a short video that Amna and I just finished.

It is for a competition sponsored by butterfly labs for one of their new ASIC based bitcoin mining devices.

Butterfly Mining from Ed Colmar on Vimeo.

We shot the footage at cherry creek, near Silver City NM.

I composed all of the music in Renoise. This was the first time I composed the music starting with the video footage. As opposed to writing a piece of music and forcing the video to match.

Editing was done in Sony Vegas, with a little bit of help from Illustrator for the type.

2013-01-22T17:29:00.000-08:00

This is a remix I just completed of Jason Snell (Bombardier)'s new techno track "Nemesis".

Signal Peak

2012-12-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

This is a new original track.

This one I suppose I would call hard techno, even though it does not fit the normal "four on the floor" rhythmic style. In fact, the second half of the piece is 6/8. It is 140 BPM. It is hard. Therefore it is hard techno. =)

I had a lot of fun with this one, and it deserves to be played loud.

I also made some ringtones out of some of the components.

Ringtone 1

Ringtone 2

Ringtone 3

From the archives: Complete Sets from Trust Replicate 2002

2012-11-24T11:07:00.000-08:00

My recent experience with the Raspmc media center led me to the mixcloud plugin, which is great!

So, I decided to adopt mixcloud as my official repository for dj sets.

Here is the complete archive from the Trust Replicate 2002 camp out.

The video gives an overview of the event, and complete sets are found on my mixcloud page.

Enjoy!

Encrypted communication over the web with App Engine

2012-11-15T11:31:00.000-08:00

I took on a project for an international environmental and human rights organization recently. They needed a way to communicate over the web using private, anonymous, secure methods.

I decided on the DOMcrypt firefox extension to handle the encryption. Big thanks go out to David Dahl for spearheading the effort, writing the extension, and providing near real time support for questions and bugfixes.

The site uses appengine's ndb for storing public keys, user contact lists, and encrypted messages. https is enabled and required. Users are encouraged to browse using TOR to further enhance security and anonymity.

Users are further encouraged to download the package and run separate isolated instances of the code to completely segregate themselves from a "primary" communication site.

This is being released as an open source project, and I welcome any and all comments and critiques. Please feel free to use it for your own encrypted communication needs.

The demo lives here, and contains links to all source code:

cryptcommnode.appspot.com

Plant Life

2012-08-07T13:07:00.001-07:00

After spending many many hours planning, designing, and implementing my forest garden, I became frustrated with how to properly document it. In forest gardening, there are layers of plants growing essentially on top of each other, which makes the mapping of it more difficult than a typical two dimensional garden.

I started out with a pen and paper, which quickly changed to a pencil. It was a mess of numbers and footnotes with scribbles everywhere. With just a small amount of plant density it was completely useless.

Then I tried building the map in illustrator, which did have some benefits, like layers, and being able to tweak the positions of objects. But functionality wise, it was not useful for actually gaining any information about the plants themselves. It was just a graphic.

I started looking around on the net for a tool to do this properly. And there were a couple “garden planners” that I found, but none addressed all of the functionality I wanted:

The garden overview needed to have:
Layers - toggle on or off garden parts (trees, shrubs, herbs, etc)
Tooltips - hover to show the plant name, and click through to view plant’s details
Sharing - link the garden for others to view.

This did not exist, so I built it. Here it is:

www.plant-life.us

Additional features that I built in are the plant database itself, and grouping so people can join up with others that share similar interests.

I hope you’ll use it for your garden. I’d love to see what you are doing!

Explore the garden layers and see the plants here.

Here is mine, rendered out to a flat image:

High desert forest garden

2012-07-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

Here is what my backyard looked like before.

This is actually the neighbor's yard, but same difference. Everything was dead. The few patches of life would get eaten regularly by roaming packs of deer.

My first priority was to fence off the lot. I used 6' welded wire fencing, with 6.5' metal stakes. Pounding them in was hard work, so I would do 4-5 a day, and eventually it was all done.

Once the fence was up, I explored and observed for about a year, taking note of the systems and changes that took place over time naturally. During this time I was thinking about the objective and overall design strategy for the land.

Goals: food producing trees/perennials, medicinal perennials, food producing annuals, and native flowers/shrubs (in that priority). Human labor should be as minimal as possible. Planting distance is designed to optimize for diversity, not yield, so trees are closer together than would be expected on a high output orchard. Leguminous nitrogen fixing plants are to be utilized as centerpieces in the garden as well as scattered throughout for specific area support.

Once the overall design and site plan was done, I had more manual labor to do: Digging the swale. This was probably the single most important part of the changes I made on this land. Monsoons are harsh, short, high output rain storms that regularly erode and damage soil. This is bad.

A swale is a contour berm, designed to accomplish several things at once. It captures rainwater that otherwise would just run down the surface of the ground. This captured water is then allowed to penetrate into the earth. It also captures mulch, particulates, and nutrients. These are shoveled out yearly and moved upwards to the erosion zones -both increasing soil quality and replacing lost material.

In the summer months, the monsoons and the swale could handle almost all of the irrigation, but the rest of the year, more active irrigation is required.

There are 4 runs of 1/2 inch drip tubing that act as the water arteries. Loops of 1/4 tubing are run off it with drip emitters placed as needed. The entire rig runs off a timer, which can be adjusted or disabled easily.

With the basics handled, the next step was ordering the big trees, seeds and live plants, then starting the process of planting. I ordered pretty much every plant that could survive frost from horizonherbs.com. I ordered a suite of native and localized trees from Lone Mountain Natives. Then I went on several hunts for specific plants that I wanted.

Planting planting planting. Run drip, then more planting.

Two years later, and it looks something like this:

This picture was taken from the bottom of the property looking up. The chickens are right behind, and the vertical walls of green are this year's bean crop. My goal is 20 lbs dried beans this year. I think I'm going to make it based on the swarms of fatty honeybees that are dominating the skies.

This concrete pathway is the border between the annual area (left) and perennial forest garden area (right). Ultimately, I will bring the forest garden area all the way to the bottom, but I want to get the density thick enough above first.

This picture is taken by the steps of the porch looking down. The area close to the house is surrounded by culinary herbs for easy access. The archway in this picture is a vine trellis with 4 species of grape, hops, and a medicinal chinese vine that will eventually take over and make it green. The canopy will fill out much more as the fruit trees mature.

Here is an overview map:

And an interactive map, where you can see what all of the plants are, and enable/disable layers.

An entire ecosystem in my garden.

2012-07-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

I just read this short post by sunstone herb farm speaking about beneficial native pollinators, and how to provide for them.

Like my other post where I talk about the caterpillars, this is a story about something that will never happen in modern commercial agribusiness.

When I first created my backyard garden 2 years ago, my friend, and Silver city local, Tony gave me a ton of help with the area I allocated to annual food production. In fact, I was so busy with setting up my forest garden permaculture, I told him “Do whatever you want down there.”

He showed me his staple crop of parsnips from his garden, which were totally neglected and thriving in the dry New Mexico winter. He spoke a bit about the history of parsnips, and how they were used like potatoes before potatoes were popularized and spread around the world. Due to the almost independent ability of this food source to survive, it was an obvious choice for a garden that focuses on sustainability, and emergency/disaster food supply.

This is the second generation of parsnips in this garden, which have managed to self-propagate into various other areas of my garden. The vast majority of them now have huge yellow flowers, that are completely swarming with insects. I would estimate a minimum of 30 species of insects are on and around these flowers. There are so many bugs that there are carnivorous insects feeding off of the smaller ones. Various predatory wasps, ladybugs, soldier bugs, and beetles are all feasting on the surplus generated by these parsnip (and scattered carrot) flowers.

This abundance of diversity makes me feel like more of a caretaker or provider than a farmer or even a gardener. There are uncountable amounts of life forms that are thriving and reproducing directly because of my actions. I look over my fence at the neighbor’s yard, and it is barren of all life and essentially dead. The birds hang out and nest in my yard. 3 Species of lizards I have seen living here. The soil is vibrant and alive with visible, and microbial life. Bugs of all sorts are everywhere.

These are all changes that happened naturally with just a few design choices, some initial labor, and a tiny amount of hardware cost - mostly drip irrigation and fencing.

If each one of us would see and participate in the incredible joy that is generated by supporting life instead of arbitrarily eliminating it, this world would be in a much much better place.

Something you will never see in modern agribusiness

2012-06-03T10:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a weed that I decided not to pick in the early spring.

It wasn't doing any harm, and looked kind of pretty with its orange flowers. I left many of them undisturbed around my garden. I wish I knew what they were called, but I can’t find any resources that mention it.

Today, I found these black hairy caterpillars devouring them. Covering not just one, but every single orange flower plant I left in the garden. The caterpillars were nowhere to be found on any of my other plants.

There are several interesting points in this image about diversity, and just leaving shit alone.

Without making a single change or expending a calorie of energy, the infrastructure of my garden and the surrounding environment took care of itself. In this story, there is no weed, and there is no pest. There is only a weed and a pest if we take action to remove one or the other. This change forces us to take more action, because the natural stabilization has been disrupted. This then imposes even more big picture changes and consequences.

In modern agribusiness, they would kill the weed with roundup. Now the pest’s preferred food source has been removed, and it is forced to find an alternate. Since there is nothing else growing except nasty ass gmo corn, the pest is forced to eat a desired production crop. Now pesticides must be applied to kill the pest. Perfect. Not only have they killed the weed and the pest, they have killed a wide range of lifeforms in and around the vicinity. The most important of which live (or used to live) in the soil itself.

What happens later in these caterpillar’s lifetimes? I’m not exactly sure... Are the butterflies an important pollinator? Are they a food source for a bird species? They do something, that’s for sure, and arbitrarily eliminating them, or their food source because it’s not what we want to grow right now, is not only short sighted, it is dangerous.

I’ll bring up my neighbor also... The other day I was driving home with Amna and I saw old neighbor lady raking up some pine needles, to show off her “nice” (you guessed it) lawn grass. I stopped and politely asked if she was going to throw the needles away. I told her that I would take them off her hands, and she said in a bitchy, semi-confused way “take it”. I resisted the urge to explain to her how important mulch is to the soil and the general permaculture rule: “exposed soil is damaged soil”. Instead I just said thanks, and grabbed the black bag... As I was leaving she said, “these neighbors, they just leave it laying there. I want to do something, at least”.

Doing something. Hmm. Maybe we should look around once in a while and analyse our actions and how they compare with doing something else, or not doing anything at all.

New studio dj mix

2012-02-27T16:13:00.001-08:00

Ed Colmar - Save Yourself

Dj set from trust sunset - Sep 2011

2011-11-14T18:07:00.000-08:00

This is a dj set I did earlier this year.

Jungle/dubstep

Enjoy.

Ed Colmar at trust sunset Sep 2011

Gamedraft

2011-09-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I was playing World of Warcraft far too much. I was in a raiding guild with some of my real life friends, and some virtual friends. What this means is that we would get 25 people together to accomplish very specific and technical trials in video games.

Now, this presents a lot more challenges than just clicking and pressing keys at the right time. The hardest part of raiding isn't the raid. It is the research, strategizing, and the organization, that is time consuming and difficult. Often in the group you need an exact "class balance" in order to finish objectives. For example, you might need a mage casting a particular spell, with a paladin keeping the mage alive in order to control one aspect of the encounter. This delegation of tasks happens for each player, and making sure that every spot is filled with the right class is critical.

Being web developers, we immediately thought of ways we could use a website to make this easier for us, and Draft was born.

We wanted the site to accomplish a few things:

First, we wanted to have signups be optional. In gaming terminology we were a "soft core" guild. If you could make it to the event that's great. If you couldn't make it... tThat's fine too. You weren't going to get kicked for not showing up. So, we needed a way to track who was available, who signed up, and who didn't.

Then we needed a way to deal with class balance. We needed to be able to see which classes were available, and move them into a group selected to actually perform the raid.

We needed notifications, so lazy guild members would get a message telling them that there is a new event they needed to sign up for, or that they have been picked and are therefore committed to the raid.

Then, after working with it for a few months, we needed a way to track people that did not fulfill their obligations.... Either by leaving early, repeatedly disconnecting, being late, or not showing up at all. These people would get flagged, and the raid leader would give them lower priority for future raids.

This all went great, and the tool evolved a bit with use... But eventually, the guild grew tired, and we all stopped playing WoW. Draft collected dust for a few years, but always was in the back of my mind whenever guild event organization was the issue being addressed - and in the world of MMOs, it frequently was.

Since I have been developing heavily with app engine, I decided to recode Draft, remove the WoW specific elements, and make it useful for other MMO games. It can be used for more than just raids. Pretty much any guild activity can be scheduled and organized.

Now we have google authentication, notifications through google chat, and event transport to google calendar.

If you are an MMO gamer, I'm sure you'll find it useful. Mention it to your guild or raid leader.

It is currently in beta, so I'd love to hear any feedback or comments on it.

Try out the new version of Draft!

How not to set up a backyard garden.

2011-08-31T11:35:00.000-07:00

Alternatively titled: “u r doing it rong”

I just read this (http://www.survivalblog.com/2011/08/experiences_of_a_novice_garden.html) and really wanted to reply, but the site does not allow in line comments, so I am posting my reply here instead.

About a month ago, while I was living in Oakland, I was walking home and I noticed someone had 10 small pots on their balcony. Good for them, I thought. They are growing a little bit of food for themselves. Then I looked closer. They were growing CORN. CORN out of a planter. UMMMM FAIL. The only thing I could think was that they are either stupid or totally inexperienced with the means and process of food production. I’ll go with inexperienced because nearly everyone in our culture has no connection whatsoever with plants. Nor do they have any concept of what happens when plants grow. Conceptually, it is just some industrial process involving tractors, and maybe chickens or something.

I know immediately when people think of farming they think of corn. We have vast fields of corn in the states, so corn must equal farming, right? And therefore, If I want to grow my own food, I have to grow corn. WRONG! The corn we grow in this country is mainly grown for two things. Ethanol, and Livestock feed. Since you are unlikely to be manufacturing ethanol or raising cattle in your apartment, the primary arguments for growing corn are now gone. Also, if you just think about it for 15 seconds you will realize that corn is probably the worst annual crop you could grow in limited space. It requires a large amount of vertical space, and remember that only half of the plant is above ground. It is heavily resource dependent (water and soil nutrients). And, it produces very little edible product for the total amount of mass it creates.

DO NOT grow corn in a backyard garden unless you have plenty of unused space, nutrients and water available on hand.

Similarly, you can extend this example out to most industrialized food products. If it takes a lot of space to grow and you don’t get very much return, DON'T GROW IT AT HOME!

Well what do I grow instead?

If you are growing in planters like my example above, I would suggest perennial culinary herbs. Thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano, etc... They are almost entirely edible. They require very little attention or resources. They are very robust and hard to kill. You can use them almost every day, and they will just grow back. You’ll make great friends with your perennials and they will be with you for many many years. You will develop a meaningful connection with the plants and the food that they enhance. This is a start to the development of a relationship with food, the earth, and your role in it all.

This example can be extended as well. If you focus on perennials, and scale up you end up with a “forest garden”. Basically this means, you have a food producing area that requires no tilling of the soil, no fertilizer, no planting, and very little human intervention - other than harvesting.

Do some research on permaculture, and forest gardening before you go out and start planting seeds in toxic containers, using chemical fertilizers, digging up perfectly good soil for no sensible reason, and generally wasting time and effort. Trial and error is good and all, but research, trial and success is better!

Agribusines and Organics

2011-08-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

This planet used to be a place of vast vast diversity. Different species of plants and animals were everywhere. So many species that we could not even classify them all. Now we are removing this diversity at an astounding rate. The human race is systematically converting the planet instead into a farm. A farm that breeds one thing - more humans.

Diversity of plant life is destroyed in favor of the most productive crops. Diversity of animal life is destroyed in favor of more farmland. Ocean life, well that's a topic for a whole other rant regarding growth.

This planet is a farm, and you are the livestock.

If you believe that increasing productivity in farming is a good thing, you have been deceived by the agribusiness industry. The marketing and spin has clouded you into thinking that the way of life we have gotten accustomed to over the past 50-75 years is not only acceptable, but it is right, and it is the best! Worst of all it has you believing that it can continue.

Take a look around you. Go down to the sugar plantations and tell me about the quality of life changes there. Go visit the quinoa farms where land that was lovingly cared for by a family for countless generations, is now owned by international mega corporations. Do a little research on Bananas. There is a reason for the term "Banana Republic".

Lets talk about sustainability for a minute.

For every calorie of energy in food consumed in the developed world, it requires 10 calories of petrochemical energy to produce it. This energy is used in almost every facet of the production and distribution of the food: fuel for tractors, fertilizer (derived from natural gas), transport, and plastic packaging, to name a few.

In case you don't know, Oil and natural gas are a FINITE resource. We are either at the peak of production, or past it already, which means that there will be less and less petrochemical fuel available in the future. This, by definition, is not sustainable.

If you want examples of sustainable farming practices, there are many. None of them are dependent on fuel for tractors, artificial fertilizers, or pesticide/herbicides. It is a simple idea, actually, to derive the energy inputs you need, grow and produce food, and consume it all in the same place, with very little (if any) external input. It requires some forethought and planning, but not a massive industrialized infrastructure.

Mostly, I have been talking about agribusiness in general. Now let me touch on gmos, pesticides, herbicides, and the evil that is monsanto.

Most of Monsanto's genetically modified "products" are designed so you can use MORE herbicide on the field - not less. Of course, Monsanto makes this herbicide - glyphosate. You know it as "Roundup". Naturally they want to sell more of their product, as any good manufacturer of a product in a capitalist society would.

As an herbicide, it has to be applied in a limited amount, otherwise you risk damaging or killing the food crop you are looking to protect. The "Roundup Ready" GMO products are designed to be more resistant to this chemical, and now are completely dependent on the herbicide. This (alongside the emergence of glyphosate resistant weeds) has resulted in a 15 fold increase in the use of Roundup. GoGo capitalism!

When you objectively look at a monocrop (A huge field full of exactly the same genetics), it is obviously highly susceptible to damage. This damage can come from "weeds" or "pests". The common assumption is that these things are bad, and in standard human reasoning, must be killed with extreme prejudice. Never is the premise questioned: "Oh look, we created a completely fragile system. Of course it is going to be attacked by more robust lifeforms".

Here is a personal example from my organic (and sustainable thank you very much) garden: One day I was looking at my Amaranth. I had 15-20 amaranth plants growing alongside a wide diversity of other plants. Three of them had an infestation of aphids. What is the reaction? "kill, destroy, eliminate the bugs with the most vile poison I can find?" Of course not. I don't want that crap anywhere near my food. I'd rather let the bugs feed on the weak plants. Two days later, I see a small flock of birds - quite lovely actually - mounted on the amaranth, happily devouring the aphids.

Complex dynamic systems are quite capable of adapting to change all by themselves.

Make Space - new Drum & Bass Studio Mix

2011-06-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

Some of the music I've been listening to over the past week here in NM.

And yes, I would like to play at your lovely weekend campout. =)

Ed Colmar - Make Space

Footage from trust CoR 2009

2011-06-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

Just found this video hiding on the vcrux site.

Complete Vcrux listing

New soundcloud profile

2011-06-01T15:31:00.000-07:00

I finally gave in and made a soundcloud account.

I'll be posting more tracks later. For now here are the most recent 3 from my blog.

http://soundcloud.com/edcolmar

App Engine Bulkloader - Troubleshooting

2011-05-25T13:55:00.000-07:00

Amna and I were working on an app engine hosted website for her job, and it required an import of data from a comma delimited database file. An initial search returned official google documentation, and a few posts with some trivial seeming issues.

In practice, getting the bulkloader to function was a lot of work, and the documentation was not helpful. Google, please include more examples!

So, I'm posting this in case anyone else wants to do a bulkloader import.

One huge gotcha that took us hours to figure out was that the High replication datastore requires a different application name than the master/slave datastore. if you are using the high replication datastore, you must use the flag --application=~s[your app name] Without the ~s, app engine will error out and tell you that you don't have permission to access the datastore.

We then searched for a long time to try to find correct examples on how to do import transforms on different data types. The default data type on import is a string. Unless you specify a different type, it will get imported to the db as a string.

We also had problems finding the correct format for the column titles.

Here is our final bulkloader.yaml

###################################

python_preamble:
- import: base64
- import: re
- import: google.appengine.ext.bulkload.transform
- import: google.appengine.ext.bulkload.bulkloader_wizard
- import: google.appengine.ext.db
- import: google.appengine.api.datastore
- import: google.appengine.api.users

transformers:

- kind: Franchise
connector: csv
connector_options:
column_list: [franchise_title, franchise_added_on, franchise_description, franchise_description_two, franchise_tfu_c, franchise_tcou_c, franchise_tu_c, franchise_tfu_vp, franchise_tcou_vp, franchise_tu_vp, franchise_tfu_vp_percentage, franchise_tcou_vp_percentage, franchise_tu_percentage, franchise_management_employees, franchise_veteran_management_employees, franchise_management_percentage, franchise_wfnetwork_listing, franchise_wfnetwork_url, franchise_class, franchise_logo_profile, franchise_validated, franchise_summary, franchise_logo_rotate, franchise_of_the_week]
# TODO: Add connector options here--these are specific to each connector.

property_map:
- property: franchise_title
external_name: franchise_title
# Type: Key Stats: 119 properties of this type in this kind.
#import_transform: transform.create_foreign_key('TODO: fill in Kind name')
#export_transform: transform.key_id_or_name_as_string

- property: franchise_description
external_name: franchise_description
import_transform: db.Text

- property: franchise_description_two
external_name: franchise_description_two
import_transform: db.Text

- property: franchise_tfu_c
external_name: franchise_tfu_c
import_transform: transform.none_if_empty(int)

- property: franchise_tcou_c
external_name: franchise_tcou_c
import_transform: transform.none_if_empty(int)

- property: franchise_tu_c
external_name: franchise_tu_c
import_transform: transform.none_if_empty(int)

- property: franchise_tfu_vp
external_name: franchise_tfu_vp
import_transform: transform.none_if_empty(int)

- property: franchise_tcou_vp
external_name: franchise_tcou_vp
import_transform: transform.none_if_empty(int)

- property: franchise_tu_vp
external_name: franchise_tu_vp
import_transform: transform.none_if_empty(int)

- property: franchise_tfu_vp_percentage
external_name: franchise_tfu_vp_percentage
import_transform: float

- property: franchise_tcou_vp_percentage
external_name: franchise_tcou_vp_percentage
import_transform: float

- property: franchise_tu_percentage
external_name: franchise_tu_percentage
import_transform: float

- property: franchise_management_employees
external_name: franchise_management_employees
import_transform: transform.none_if_empty(int)

- property: franchise_veteran_management_employees
external_name: franchise_veteran_management_employees
import_transform: transform.none_if_empty(int)

- property: franchise_management_percentage
external_name: franchise_management_percentage
import_transform: float

- property: franchise_wfnetwork_listing
external_name: franchise_wfnetwork_listing
import_transform: bool

- property: franchise_wfnetwork_url
external_name: franchise_wfnetwork_url

- property: franchise_class
external_name: franchise_class

- property: franchise_logo_profile
external_name: franchise_logo_profile

- property: franchise_validated
external_name: franchise_validated
import_transform: bool

- property: franchise_summary
external_name: franchise_summary
import_transform: db.Text

- property: franchise_logo_rotate
external_name: franchise_logo_rotate

- property: franchise_of_the_week
external_name: franchise_of_the_week
import_transform: bool

##############

And here is the command we used to send the data up to app engine:

appcfg.py upload_data --config_file=bulkloader.yaml --filename=../F4V.txt --kind=Franchise --url=http://franchises4vets.appspot.com/_ah/remote_api --application=s~franchises4vets .

Hope this helps!

Dj sets from TECHNICAL STORMS

2010-10-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

I played two short sets on Oct 2nd.

This was at the same place that I produced "Audition Tape" to try to get a show. The Buffalo Bar.

It was really a great show. I had to put away most of the music that I pulled for it, because people just weren't digging on the softer stuff.

Set 1
Set 2

Enjoy!

New Original Track - Improvised Cardboard

2010-08-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

This one is kinda hard to classify... 180 BPM with some jungle feel, though mostly disguised as hard noise.

Ed Colmar - Improvised Cardboard

Play loud for best results.

Original Track - Bowfry

2010-08-03T14:57:00.000-07:00

Another recently finished track that needs to get out.

IDM style.

Ed Colmar - Bowfry

Lochae - New Original Track

2010-08-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

Here is a new track that does not have a home as far as an official release. It is IDM flavor with a dash of dubstep.

Ed Colmar - Lochae

Enjoy!