We made it home! We say this with such excitement because it's been a while since we went out and didn't have something go horribly wrong. So we're all sick, but whatever. If the piggy flu was what we all had, don't believe the hype. It was kind of like a not really all that bad cold.
Sunday sunday sunday - Man are we glad that this was the last show. It left us all feeling really good about ourselves (our fragile egos are so easily damaged), heck it made us forget being sick. Really nice town, good venue, good people (imagine a place where if you want a cup of coffee you have to make some if the pot is empty), good crowd. Wonderful crowd in fact. We're finding ourselves meeting fans that we don't know yet from places that we wouldn't expect. Not that that's out of the ordinary in the grand scheme of things, but we like to know who our fans are, where they're from, how many pets they have and so on. For Science and stuff.

A note to folks who come to our shows:

Please do introduce yourselves at shows, even if we've met already. It's tough for us to tell who's there to see us, and we don't always spot people we've seen before. We're actually very approachable, somewhat shy, quite forgetful, a little deaf, and totally dedicated to performing various scientific experiments on you.

Thank you's to all the fans that made this tour worthwhile! Other thank you's to Downtown Brown, Super 8 Bit Brothers, Screaming Mechanical Brain, and all the other bands we played with for making it all happen.
To SMB, glad that was painless, and good luck to you in the future.

In the days since we got home (and slept and did not update the site) our new website popped up on the Habari communities radar, and we were lucky enough to attract a couple comments from Michael C. Harris and Andy C, members of the Habari community. This is a wonderful thing because we really want to make this web site do all kinds of cool things, and Dave's gonna need all the help he can get. He just got all giddy about the comments and is courageous enough now to start posting questions on the Habari forum and user group.

Until Next time!

Most of us succeeded in shaking off all our piggy flu in Bloomington superthanks to Dave's family in Indianapolis. They came out to the show, and had chicken soup ready for all of us when we got there. Hooboy was that good. Phil had 4 bowls. Thanks Beth and Mike and Dustin and Shannon and Blake and Keanen!

Mark had a toothache at something like 5am and had to run out to get some anesthetic. He seems to be doing ok now. We'll see if he sings like someone who just stepped out of the oral surgeons office.

Tonight we hit the stage at Peabody's in Cleveland. We can't wait to see our friends here again. Just getting settled in here, someone asked Phil if we were going to be on our best behavior. Hah! We're such a bunch of troublemakers. We'll try not to break anything, gotta leave things for the 8 Bit Brothers to break!

Yay! We're hitting the next show in this run out, and we're all pretty much dying from whatever it is we all caught. No, no, it's not herpes, get your mind out of the gutter. You can't die from herpes. But it might be syphilis. We had to make a quick cookie tossing stop for Chris (he got it bad), and we're spending way too much money on Kleenex.

The Lil' Reds show went well, nice place. It was a pleasure to meet Technology Vs. Horse, they were hilarious. The Hamilton Collective show... It was kind of in a barn with dirt on the floor. Not a dirt floor, the dirt was actually hauled into the building for a previous event. But despite appearances, we played to an enthusiastic crowd.

Special thanks to Meg for the cookies and a place to crash. Also to James and Brittney for the spaghetti and the hospitality. Nothing better then a place to sleep after a show that isn't the back of a van.

So it appears that Ideamen has not yet gone bankrupt and will be hitting the road again Wednesday morning. Juuust kidding - the first few shows were fantastic, superthanks to all the friends and fans that made it a success!
Friday was a blast, Beat Kitchen was full and we were very happy to see so many familiar faces. Special thanks to Gwennie, Mike (McMike), Mike (Understitch Mike), Dans brother and sister, Sgt. Pepper, Carrie, Mark and Rich of Het Digital, Lisa and Father Bob, David, Barry and Mitchell, Metallica Doug and Chris. Also a warm thanks to Ron from Rotten Records for making all this CD releasing possible.
Saturday - long ride into Minnesota (that's a really beautiful drive actually), but miraculously we made it there something like 10 minutes early, which was somewhat unsettling. Gave us the Halloween creepies. Good to get back into The Garage again, two years is a long time. We had a heck of a lot of fun, saw some people we met two years ago, did some shadowboxing at the screen they put up between sets, made fun of Super 8-Bit Brothers (oh you know we love you). Stayed the night with Turff from SMB (thanks guys), and got to see the scenery all the way back through Wisconsin. Oh, and we said "hi" to Minnesota for Carrie.
By Sunday we were all pretty bushed, fortunately for us The Annex was a really spiffy venue. We arrived sufficiently early to gather ourselves and take in all that they had to offer (half price pizza, free beer. Man it takes a lot to get people away from their computers these days). There was a band called "Lords Of Trident" - absolutely hilarious. They poked fun at champion metal, dressed as a Roman soldier, a Peasant Woman, Ghengis Kahn, and... I think that was Judas Priest.

Tomorrow we're off to Kentucky. We'll see you there!

Yup. With no fanfare, drama, previews or even a hint that we had something up our sleeves, we give you the new official Ideamen website. We just loaded it up with the store items, tossed in a few show dates, and with this entry, it will have a "News" category. That stuff is available in the main menu. Each member of Ideamen will have a profile, and will be able to make posts to tell you stuff like they went shopping today and saw some jogger wearing these hideous yellow sweatpants with a giant hole in the backside - we can't wait!

A word from Dave:

We're using a new blogging platform called Habari. It's been a blast to work with so far, and I'm happy to not only finally catch up with the times on the intertubes - but to be ahead of it a bit using this shiny new toy that's not even at a 1.0 release yet. Habari is kind of like a playground, except that instead of having things to play on it has parts and pieces and you can make whatever toys you want. The parts all look rather foreign to me, and I've had my share of poking square pegs into orange colored holes resulting in cute pink error messages.
It's been an interesting journey, as I'd only had a cursory brush with PHP, and have never fiddled with any blog platforms. I started by installing a handful of Content Management Systems (a fancier word for blog platforms) on my host and promptly breaking them in the quest to make an Ideamen web site. I liked Textpattern, the theme system seemed pretty intuitive at first, but had a couple bits that kind of bugged me, and read on a wiki that the original creator up and disappeared... So much for a maintained product. I really hated Joomla. I don't want to talk about it. I actually didn't bother with WordPress. I stumbled upon some reviews of a newish platform called Habari, and i hesitated. It was so new, so untested and kind of unorganized (i still have trouble making heads or tails of their documentation, wiki and forums). However it looked so darn promising. As a fledgling programmer, the purported flexibility, power and elegance of Habari won me over. That and it appears that the community is friendly and helpful, which is a plus. I took a moment to figure out what the heck an IRC was and popped in to ask a question and got a quick and immediately useful response.
Soooo.... here we are. New website. Unlimited possibilities. Comments allowed, nay, encouraged. We'll be able to hear from you and respond to you all in one place. Got some really cool features in the works. This will be fun.

We'll see you on the road!!
--Ideamen