I’ve committed some updates to the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store:

• thumbnails (in case you want to sell photos/artwork with it)
• fixed the “continue shopping” link
• stopped paypal from opening in a new window or tab (transactions should all happen within one now)
• added some totals to the admin page

Here it is on Google Code.

Question on Ask Metafilter: Why do people prefer music from their teenage years? A lot of great, thoughtful replies. I’ve thought about this a lot before, but this one was sort of new to me (though it’s obvious now that I think about it):

So when you’re a young adult and your mind really opens up to the musical experience, you get to hear all these things in different combinations for the first time. You might never learn intellectually what a chord progression or a key change or syncopation are, or various other bits of music theory and song-construction, but your mind is absorbing them and learning about them intuitively. So when you hit your thirties you don’t have the vocabulary to describe exactly why a new single the kids love doesn’t excite you (e.g. “Oh, that’s a I-IV-I-V chord progression and a key change one whole tone higher for the last chorus”). But subconsciously your brain recognizes that it’s heard that combination of building blocks several times before, only with someone else singing and different effects on the guitars.

I assume the phenomenon has to do with new experiences + hormones + independence.

The double CD ccMixter Brad Sucks remix compilation is finally out! Links: CD 1, CD 2.

ccMixter is a website where artists can upload source files under Creative Commons licenses so that other artists can remix them free of legal worries. Their community has been very kind to me.

Like everything I seem to do, this compilation took way too long to put together but it has somehow struggled its way into daylight.

Thanks of course to all the talented remixers, Magnatune, ccMixter, Victor Stone in particular for his help and Katie Sekelsky for the awesome album art.

This isn’t the first remix album for I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, but it’ll be the last I work on. Other I Don’t Know What I’m Doing remix albums that I know of:

• I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Remixed
• I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Either (MC Jack in the Box vs. Brad Sucks)

I know there are a few other full-album remix projects out there in various states of completion so let me know if I’m missing anything.

Thanks to Scott Lamb of DeathBoy for pointing out that the MP3s of I Don’t Know What I’m Doing for oh I don’t know, forever, had little glitches at the end of most of the files. They’re all fixed now but that was a pretty lame oversight on my part.

I’m trying to find a way to spice up my t-shirt selection. I’ve got a bunch of ideas chicken-scratched out but I’m no artist. I thought it would be nice to find people who could turn those into viable designs. I looked on Spreadshirt and Threadless but came up empty.

Mr. Coulton recently had a post about a collaborative t-shirt design site. Which would be sweet but is obviously a pretty rough thing to set up dealing with paying out royalties all the time.

I’d be satisfied if there was simply a site with talented t-shirt artists I could buy designs off of easily.

Here is a chronicling of some items I purchased recently:

ALLSOP Mouse pad - For many years I’ve been using a mouse pad with a wrist-rest on it. In fact it’s been the same one, so it’s nasty and gross and needs replacing. The new one has a feature called “memory foam”. This is code for “if you use the wrist-rest for more than half an hour, it squashes down under your wrist and no longer provides enough support”. Awful.

Belkin WaveRest Keyboard Wrist Support - I wanted to replace my rusty roller-based wrist-wrest and the only one they had in Staples that wasn’t some retarded hot/cold gel pack was this one. It’s not high enough, my wrists sink down into the gel, it doesn’t fit on my (admittedly a little weird) IKEA Jerker desk the way my old one did. Awful.

APC 650VA - After 11 days of rain and thunderstorms and power brownouts, I finally invested in a UPS / battery backup for the Linux box in the basement. It seems to work great and the forecast is coincidentally showing sunny weather for the rest of the week. Great!

I just pulled a few false positives out of my spam filter but I’m not sure I got them all. If you haven’t gotten a reply from me, please try again.

1,500 plus CPDRC inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines at practice! This is not the final routine, and definitely not a punishment! just a teaser.

Miro - formerly Democracy now 1.0 and renamed. Very nice open source internet tv / video player.

This CNN article goes over the recent sales of a lot of older/classic albums which is pretty interesting. Here are the sales numbers they mention for 2006:

My conclusion from this data: Back in Black is a very popular album.