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Erik Thomas
M O N D A Y,
M A Y 2 1 2 0 0 7
Announcing Jim Nunally's
Latest CD Release: Gloria's Waltz
My long-time good friend and awesome acoustic guitarist Jim Nunally has just
released his latest bluegrass/folk solo project that he named for his mom Gloria Nunally.
This is a great work that includes many excellent musicians, including
John Reischman, Trisha Gagnon, Nick Hornbuckle, Greg Spatz, David Grisman,
Keith Little, Sam Grisman, Chad Manning, Bill Evans, Cindy
Browne, Tashina Clarridge, Rob Ickes, Joe Craven, Dix Bruce, Judy Forrest,
Rob Nunally, Leah Whitcomb-Nunally, and Buddy Williford.
While I have played with some really great bluegrass guitarists in my
life, Jim is perhaps the best of all. His rhythm and
timing is absolutely flawless and it has been such a pleasure performing
with him in Due West and other ensembles over the past 20 years that when he asked me to help him with this project I was of course thrilled.
In case you don't know Jim, he has been a bluegrass guitar icon for
many years, playing with many top musicians and teaching at various music
camps. An in-demand teacher, Jim has more recently been touring with the David Grisman
Bluegrass Experience and continues to tour with John Reischman and the Jaybirds. Both of these bands
are at the top of the bluegrass/folk genre, and include some of the best
acoustic musicians alive today.
To order Gloria's Waltz on CD and have it delivered to you,
click here. I highly recommend it!
Or, better yet, you can order a signed
copy of the CD from Jim himself. Jim told me that he makes a little
more on the CD if you order it directly from him, and hey, I know how hard
it is to make a living in bluegrass and Jim works very hard. Show him how
much you appreciate his talents and efforts, and order one direct from
him—in fact, order a dozen and give them to all your friends! :o)
To download individual MP3 tracks from Gloria's Waltz (99¢
each), or to download the entire project ($9.99),
click here.
To listen to samples of Erik's playing and singing on Gloria's Waltz,
click here.
Happy listening!
Erik
T U E S D A Y,
D E C E M B E R 2 6 2 0 0 6
Erik J. Thomas
For those of you who don't know Erik, he is probably best known as the mandolin player and lead singer for
Due West, the innovative bluegrass band from
northern California. Erik also played for a number of years with the
Bluegrass/Vocal Gospel band FaultLine
out of northern California.
Erik is an experienced software engineer, and is pleased to be a
member of the
QuickBooks team at Intuit, Inc.
Erik is active at his church (New
Day Church in Boulder, Colorado) as the worship leader and sound
director.
Musical background
A California
native who has recently moved to the Rocky Mountains near Boulder, Colorado, Erik's mixed musical
heritage begins with the genes and influence of his world renowned mom,
the famous classical violin soloist Camilla Wicks (check
out her newest CD,
The Art of Camilla Wicks, and other links about her
here), and his trumpet playing
dad, Bob Thomas, who worked with the Dorsey Brothers and other famous big
bands.
Erik got his
first guitar in his early teens and studied classical as well as
blues/rock styles off-and-on until discovering bluegrass at age 20.
Erik has worked
with an eclectic mix of well-known artists, including
Mickey Gilley,
Elvin Bishop,
David Grisman,
Rob Ickes,
Tony Trischka, and
Darol Anger.
An accomplished
contest player, Erik has twice won the Western Open Mandolin and Flatpicking
Guitar Championships.
Erik's singing
can also be heard on the multi-million selling sound track of the computer game
sensation The Sims™. |
L I N K S
Musical
Background
Audio Samples
Software
Background
Erik performing in the San
Francisco bay area with FaultLine
Erik exclusively plays
Michael Lewis
mandolins |
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Audio samples
Following are mp3 samples of Erik's most recent studio work. |
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These Boots (Due West)
 Mexicali Moonshine - This
instrumental was written by Erik and recorded with Due West on their
recent album These Boots. It features
the members of Due West, including
Bill Evans, Jim Nunally,
Chad Manning, and
Cindy Browne.
Traveling The Highway
Home - Erik first heard this great gospel song on a live radio show
recording of Ralph Stanley with the late great
Keith Whitley singing lead
and just had to sing it on These Boots.
Does My Ring
Burn Your Finger - A great—but very dark—song written by
Julie and Buddy Miller (Tinkie
Tunes/Martha Road Music admin by Bug, ASCAP), Erik sings lead on this one.
The Heart That You Own - A fine ballad written by
Dwight Yoakam (BMI)
that Erik has been singing for years, and really wanted to record with Due
West. |
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Old Gnarly Oak (Chad Manning)
Roanoke
- Erik recorded this song with Chad
Manning on his latest CD project called
Old Gnarly Oak which
also features David
Grisman, Rob Ickes,
Bill Evans,
Scott Nygaard,
Ivan Rosenberg and
Cindy Browne. At the beginning of the
sample, Erik plays harmony to David's lead, and following the banjo solo,
David and Erik split the solo. Can you guess who is playing which half of
the mandolin solo?
Mouse's
Lullaby - Erik plays harmony mandolin to both Chad's and David's solos
on this very beautiful song of Chad's. |
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The Magic Hour (Rick Jamison)
Time For Goodbye - Erik
recorded this song with Rick Jamison
on his latest all-original project called
The Magic Hour (check out these
reviews)
which features some great musicians including
Megan Lynch,
Rob Ickes,
Dave Richardson and
Cindy Browne. Rick is a talented song writer and
terrific guitarist. Erik sang this duet with Megan Lynch, a 6-time
national champion fiddler.
In From The Cold - Another
cut from The Magic Hour, Erik
sings lead on this one and gets to do some mando pickin' too. |
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Gloria's
Waltz (Jim Nunally) - Spring 2007
Revenuer's Gun - Erik sings tenor
and plays mandolin on this Jim's original barn-burner duet. Due West backs
him up so listen for some awesome banjo pickin' by Bill Evans!
Your Tone of the Blues
- Erik sings tenor and plays mandolin on this one too. It's another Jim
Nunally original recorded with Due West.
Arms Full of Empty - Erik
sings tenor and plays mandolin on this fun (but sad) Buck Owens song that
Jim also recorded with Due West. |
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W E D N E S D
A Y, J A N U A R Y 3 1 2 0 0 7
Software development background
Erik has been working for 22 months with Intuit, Inc., the leading
maker of personal and small business accounting software, including
Quicken and QuickBooks. He is currently working with a team that is
designing and creating next generation versions of Intuit software based
on the latest Web and Desktop technologies.
Erik's current technical skills include proficiency in C++, Java, and C#,
and he has been working for more than a year with the exciting new user
interface (UI) technology called Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
WPF is a radical new way of programming UI with integrated
animation and 3D rendering for Microsoft's Vista operating system which
has just been released.
Erik's background in software engineering begins in 1975 when he took a
summer course in BASIC programming on a mainframe computer at the
University of Nevada, Reno (UNR).
Incidentally, just to help dispel the widely believed notion that Bill
Gates invented the BASIC language, it was actually first developed at
Dartmouth College in 1964. Bill Gates did however, help Paul Allen create
yet another BASIC interpreter specifically for the Altair personal
computer in the 70s, and later for the IBM PC. (source)
But while in the BASIC course, Erik hooked up with the class lab
instructor and together they created their own version of the computer
game "Star Wars" that was modeled after the [then] very popular "Star
Trek" computer game that was also written in BASIC and ran on timeshare
mainframes. We used 100 Baud teletype machines (remember those in old
science fiction movies and Telegram offices in the 60s?) to interface with
the game. It was surprisingly fun to play despite such a crude display: just keyboard characters that printed out on the teletype
to look
vaguely like space ships, quadrants and proton torpedo and laser cannon
shots.
Shortly after this experience Erik enlisted in the U.S. Army and served 3
years on active duty, spending 2 of those as a computer operator working
on the Department of Defense manpower management system. By this time he
knew he wanted to make a career in the computer sciences.
At the end of his Army stint, Erik had learned one extremely valuable lesson, and
that was the importance of a college degree in our society today if you ever
wanted to have some say in what you did for a living. So he came home and
enrolled at the University of Nevada
at Reno—which had a top-notch business department and a new Computer
Information Systems curriculum—and earned a Bachelor of Science
degree with Distinction (top 10% of class; 3.82 GPA).
Of course, Erik kept his music career going throughout college, earning
most of his spending money by performing.
During the summer following graduation, while looking for an intro level
programming job, Erik was romanced by Electronic Data Systems (EDS)—headed by
Ross Perot at the time—and because they sought him out and offered
a higher salary than other prospects, Erik accepted that job and launched what has
now become a 20 year career in application development (well, if you
count his first programming contract while a sophomore and Junior at UNR, he's been
at this game for 23 years now) on platforms ranging from mainframes, mini
computers, Unix workstations, and PCs, in languages ranging from Cobol and
dBase II and III, to Clipper, FoxPro, C, AWK, C++, Java, and now C# (.NET).
Erik has worked for a number of different companies, including the Washoe
Tribe - Bureau
of Indian Affairs (while a student at UNR), Electronic Data Systems (EDS), System
Integrators, Inc., Applied Materials, Bertelsmann Industry Services,
Scientific Software, Inc., TRAKWare, Inc., Kaiser Permanente, EMC|Documentum,
Inc., and most recently, Intuit, Inc.
And of course, Erik never stopped developing his music as a member of
various bands, a hobby that has helped him stay sane throughout the years!
During the big offshoring craze that hit in 2001 when hundreds of
thousands of American
software engineering jobs were lost to India and other countries, Erik
somehow managed to keep his head above water and stay employed, despite
frequent layoffs and salary freezes (while CEO and executive level
compensation tripled, I might add).
Now that the offshoring benefit has become less attractive
to companies due to predictable economic adjustments in the world market, Erik has a greater sense of job
security and a more attractive future in this industry than he's had in several years. |
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PRtrak, a short story
Probably the most interesting aspect of Erik's career in software
development was when he formed TRAKware, Inc. with his PR Professional
sister Angie Jeffrey and her PR Professional husband Mitch Jeffrey, and
created an application for measuring Public Relations media coverage. Erik
quit his job and worked for nearly 18 months to
produce PRtrak by
himself, an application that was being used by more than 120 companies by
the time the three of them sold the company about 5 years later.
PRtrak, which is currently
owned by VMS, Inc. and
still going strong today—almost 6 years later—is one of the leading
publicity measurement tools used by the PR industry today! This is a
tremendous testimony to the hard work Angie Jeffrey did to single-handedly
pioneer add-value equivalency as a respected methodology in an industry
that was very unfriendly to the concept. Angie currently works at VMS, continuing to evangelize add-value equivalency
to the PR industry as it slowly embraces this means of measuring the
value of publicity.
Erik created PRtrak using C++ with the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)
and Objective Grid libraries. Erik used an underlying Access database with
Jet drivers, and was fully multi-user, supporting both peer-to-peer and
client-server topologies with up to 25 simultaneous users. Erik also used
MFC internet classes to access a server across the internet that
calculated ad value equivalency from a huge database containing all of
Nielsen's survey data (TV), Arbitron's survey data (Radio), and ad cost
data for nearly all the newspapers and magazines throughout the U.S.
Angie was able to broker exclusive agreements for this data—an unheard of
accomplishment for a 3-person company—from Nielsen, Arbitron, SRDS, etc.,
and Erik wrote programs that read 9-track magnetic tape (yeah, like you
see in Time Tunnel and other ancient science fiction programs), and
coerced the data into tables for calculating the value of a given PR news
story (whether it appeared on TV, Radio, Newspaper, or Magazine) in terms
of what it would have cost in advertising based on placement, duration (TV
and Radio), or column inches (Newspaper and Magazine). It also provided
the means to use several qualitative measurements in the calculations.
Erik also wrote the PRtrak user guide and was the entire technical
support department, handling all support calls by himself. He supported
approximately 200 users across 120 companies by the time the company was
sold. This was quite a testament to the quality of his software since the
support call load averaged 1 support incident per day, and the most
frequent root cause was company firewall settings that prevented internet
access to the data server.
Prologue
Sadly, Erik's code is no longer in use. The acquiring company jumped on
the web bandwagon and rewrote it as a web application. But Erik took some
pleasure in the knowledge that it took them longer to copy
his desktop application than it took Erik to design and implement it from
scratch, and they had a much larger team and greater investment capital.
If you are a PR professional, PRtrak is still the market leader for
affordably helping PR professionals like you determine the value of your
work. If this is you, check out the current version of
PRtrak and give
Erik's sister a call:
The Leader in Integrated
Media Intelligence Solutions |
Angela Jeffrey
APR Vice President Editorial Research
Member, IPR Commission on PR Measurement & Evaluation 1500 Broadway,
6th Floor New York, NY 10036
ajeffrey@vmsinfo.com
(212) 329-5257
(212) 329-5292 (fax)
www.vmsinfo.com |
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visitors since Dec 29 2006
Copyright
©
1998-2007, Erik Thomas |
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