Here’s some in-the-wild proof of what you get when you send in a tip, bad penmanship and all:

Thanks Scott!

Everything around here’s breaking. The first channel on my Presonus Bluetube magically broke during the night. As you can see, the first channel input is pegged to the max even though there’s nothing plugged into channel 1:

And for the past couple of months I’ve been aware the phantom power light on my Behringer Eurorack UB1204-PRO is always on regardless of the switch setting on the back:

(It’s the red light beside the blue one. Spooky!)

I guess I’ll open up the BlueTube and see if there’s anything obviously wrong inside. Wait, first I’ll shake it.

Update: shaking did nothing. I opened it up and there was nothing broken looking. Poked around a bit and tugged on wires and things, powered it back on and now it works again. La-di-da.

I’ve open-sourced my little Google Maps email signup gizmo that I use on my live page and when visitors sign up for things (blogged about it here and here.)

You can grab the script here:

Brad’s Mappy Email Signup (google code project)

It’s another quick and dirty project from Brad Labs, cleaned up a bit from my implementation of it. But it’s been working very nicely and I’m super happy to have the data for live show planning purposes instead of relying on Eventful as a middle-man.

A long time ago I put out a call for album art for the new record and got a lot of great submissions in the forum thread. A few complications arose that I hadn’t realized — mainly that for printing I need a super high-res version. Plus a cover isn’t enough for a CD, you also need the back, the inside and the disc face, etc, etc. I’d love to put the submitted covers in a gallery so people can use them as the cover art if they want.

Here are some of my favorites:

(credits: Douchegordijn, Ash, Forsten, onemorechris — thanks to everyone who submitted!)

I also had a difficult time deciding what really fit with the album. I take that kind of stuff maybe too seriously and felt lost. When I was whining about my lack of direction a friend reminded me that the best way to find a focus is to go personal, find something meaningful to me. Without an anchor in reality I just float around.

ANSI art was a big part of my life during my isolated nerdy teenage years. That time was largely defined by dropping out of high school, hanging out on BBS’s, having no friends, playing video games, rarely going outside and antidepressants. The songs on Out of It are all about those sorts of feelings, so I felt a strong connection. I’m not sure it’s one many people will pick up on at first glance, but it’s important to me that it’s there.

And now I’m gonna go play some video games. Life is so different now!

Here’s what my next CD will look like:

The entire design is in ANSI art by Fredrik Olsson.

Since I’ve been going geo-crazy lately, here are some data pictures (wheee!!):

subscriber locations

Red markers for anyone who subscribed and entered their location in the past couple of days.

album sale locations

Blue markers for a couple years of album sale data.

subscribers and album sale locations

Not shown: Antarctica — not big fans of mine apparently.

If you want to stand up and be counted, you can sign up on the Live page.

Finally got around to making a muxtape and here it is. It’s more or less the contents of my iPod Shuffle distilled down to 12 tracks.

If you’ve got a muxtape, please to be posting in the comments so I may check them out.

Now, if you would like to, you can mark down your location on the Brad Sucks Live page so I can hassle you if I happen to be playing in your area (scroll down to the map).

It’s something I’ve been wanting to build for a while — a replacement/alternative for Eventful.com and it was pretty easy with Google Maps.

Eventful’s nice and I’ll continue to use it, but since it doesn’t give the artists access to their subscriber’s email addresses it’s a lock-in bullshit proposition and I can’t fully trust it.

I’m now also asking new mailing list subscribers to mark down their location and will be doing so for new BFF members as soon as I get around to it. It’s all optional of course — I know giving out locations creeps some people out, but think about how traveling to another city and nobody coming to my show creeps me out.

I’m in love with The Hype Machine. Specifically Hype Machine Radio.

Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator — indexing the songs and bands written about and linked to on popular music blogs. Hype Machine radio is “a non-stop stream of popular and recent tracks posted by music blogs.”

I’ve tried a lot of different audio streams over the years with no luck. I would rarely (if ever) find new songs and artists I wanted to listen to but The Hype Machine’s been delivering that on a regular basis. That’s pretty exciting for a music curmudgeon such as myself.

The aggregated aspect is very interesting as well — I find even if I don’t like a song that’s playing, it’s interesting to me that it’s noteworthy enough to have been blogged. So I find I’m a bit more patient and tolerant with the music compared to regular ol’ corporate radio.

I had given up on radio but now I need to figure out how to feed this into my living room.

In preparation for the new album release I’ve re-vamped all the music/store sections on the site. I’ll spare you the boring tech details but it was A LOT OF WORK. Here’s some of the new stuff:

• Affected pages are music, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Remixed, Outside the Inbox and the store.
• I tried to roll buying and listening together in a non-obnoxious way. Anywhere you can listen to the albums you can also buy them and vice versa.
• Combined physical and digital buying instead of having two separate stores.
• Every album has a flash player on it now for quick listening.
• Variable prices for I Don’t Know What I’m Doing. MP3s go for any price including. CDs have a $5 minimum.
• Paid downloads come off the ultra-reliable Amazon S3 servers and free downloads come off my clunky junkbox.
• Buying a CD gets you instant access to digital downloads of that album.
• OGG format is gone, bye bye, hardly anyone bought you!
• Lossless FLAC format is gone (but might come back?) It was more popular than OGG but not by tons and the bandwidth considerations make it rough to give away for free.

There are probably plenty of bugs (please let me know) but good lord am I glad that’s over with. Did Prince have to write his own storefronts?