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Welp, Michael Jackson died. What can you even say about that? Like many, he was a hero of mine and then he was kind of a monster. It was probably a good learning experience to have to reconcile those two things at a young age. It’s hard for me to feel sad that he died since the guy was clearly in nearly constant emotional pain. Also he maybe molested children.

Anyway, here’s me in March 1985 dressed up as him:

That’s me in my Michael Jackson Thriller jacket (in black – though I wanted the red and black one), a glitter glove (in red, I wanted white like Michael had), a Michael Jackson microphone that I can’t find the name of (“Mr. Microphone”?) – it transmitted your voice to an FM radio station so your voice would come out of the stereo.

And I can’t tell from the crappy quality of the photo if those are my sparkly Michael Jackson socks. Once I wore them ice skating and my feet went numb as the glitter material cut off my circulation. I remember sitting in an arena penalty box, crying as an older kid helped me pry off my skates, revealing my sparkly white Michael Jackson socks. She wasn’t impressed.

June demo: This Meeting [4 MB].

I’ve been rearranging my office/studio place here with one of the goals being to achieve better quality recordings and mixes. Unfortunately I’m only half done so it’s actually worse in here right now. Gotta get me some acoustic foam.

So I failed at finishing a demo for May and I resolved to find an embarrassing enough apology cover to do. Here’s a rough cover of Heart and Soul by Huey Lewis and the News (but originally by Exile) to show you I’m sorry. Thanks to Ben for help with the guitars and bass.

Heart and Soul (cover) [6.3 MB]

I actually recorded it at the same BPM as the original so it was supposed to sync with the Huey Lewis video. But I can’t get it to work and I’m sick of it.

Update: I can’t embed it due to “a copyright claim by EMI” but here’s the video synced with my cover.

Update #2:

Reaper 3 came out a little while ago and I’ve mentioned that I’m experimenting with switching to it from Cubase. So far I can’t imagine going back to Cubase. Some of the things I like:

• It’s fast and small. While the 4.4MB installer file size is great, it’s the responsiveness and quick loading time that are truly awesome. Cubase feels bloated and slow after using Reaper, as do most DAWs.
• Powerful. The amount of features in it are ridiculous. You may have to hunt for the options, but 99% of the time it’s there.
• I haven’t had it crash on me yet.
• It’s fully customizable. I feel like I can trick it out as much as I want. From themes to keyboard shortcuts to actions, you can make it your own.
• Frequent useful updates. Unlike Cubase’s usual “launch buggy, gradually patch those bugs and save any useful new features for the next version you have to pay for” you actually get an amazing amount of updates and improvements.
• An active community and approachable developers. Reasonable or good ideas get implemented quickly, developers are responsive in the forums, lots of people were helpful when I was flailing around in “I’m used to Cubase!” land.
• It plays nice with dual monitors. HOORAY.
• Quick search of VST plugins.
• I don’t feel locked in. Project files are in plain text, you can export your stuff easily. You can move your preferences around easily.

Some things I don’t like so much:

• There are so many options that new (and/or less tech-savvy) users will likely feel overwhelmed hunting down the right checkboxes to get the behavior they expect. It’s awesome that it’s so customizable, but I’d love to see them pick some more universal up-front options and move a lot of the tweaks to a Firefox about:config style interface or just an .ini file.
• A lot of the comping/audio behavior doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The logic behind which items play and which don’t when they overlay each other on the same track still confuses me, so I try and avoid it. Comping generally works but lacks the precision of Cubase or Logic.
• Unlike versions 1 and 2, Reaper 3 doesn’t have my song Making Me Nervous as the default project. :( :(

Anyway, it’s been good and I recommend trying it out. There’s an un-crippled evaluation version so you’ve got nothing to lose.

Here is a nerdy data complaint:

Earlier this year the Ottawa Police announced they would be publishing daily crime data via CrimeReports.com, it’s a nice searchable interface using Google Maps. I loved the idea and thought it was fantastic that citizens had an easy way to search and view this data.

Fast-forward a few months and I had some ideas I wanted to try with the public crime data. I hunted around for a way to access the data in a usable format or at least an RSS feed, but there were none that I could find. I looked into scraping the data from CrimeReports.com and that was non-trivial. CrimeReports.com offers emailed crime reports (blegh) and here’s what their Frequently Asked Questions page says on the matter:

How can users access crime information for their areas of interest?
CrimeReports.com is a community-facing Web application, and as such, emphasizes the user experience. A CrimeReports.com user simply enters an address of interest (home, office, school, etc.) and clicks on "Get Report" to see criminal activity in a given area on an easy-to-use map interface. The CrimeReports.com Web application also integrates data from multiple agencies into a single interface and offers automated, location-based alerting services.

Which to me is code for “CrimeReports.com would rather lock-in the data, and as such, not help potential competitors.”

Finally, I contacted the Ottawa Police and asked if there’s a way for regular folks to access the daily data they’re providing to CrimeReports.com. They pointed me to the weekly reports (which look like this, and would be usable with some parsing). Only problem: these have been discontinued in 2009 in favor of sending all the data to CrimeReports.com. They said there’s no public feed for that data and that I’d need to make a Freedom of Information request.

So we have a situation here where the Ottawa crime data has been moved to a site that’s easier for 99% of citizens to access and understand, but the data is locked up in a third-party website and inaccessible to anyone who wants to do some serious work with it. Which to me is a huge step backwards.

Looks like I’m gonna fail on getting a demo out this month. The new web design kinda ate up my Brad Sucks time, but that’s no excuse. I’ll have to think of an appropriately humiliating punishment.

I’ve been so-so about the Wolfram|Alpha hype, but it finally launched and it’s definitely neat. Comparing it to Google is semi-ridiculous as Google uses structured data and “facts” only as an afterthought.

The servers are taking a beating right now, but here are some queries that were interesting to me:

• Brad – 1 in 3000 Americans may be Brads. Compare the names Brad and Aaron and you can see who the hip underdog from the streets is.
• 440 hz – It gives interesting data on any frequency, plus you can play it (even oddball frequencies like 1337 hz). 440 hz is middle A, which is approximately 1.9 x the frequency of a honeybee’s wings.
• PST – It’s annoyed me for a while that Google won’t give me the current time in other time zones. Time in Hong Kong.
• death – Approximately 104.6 people die per minute (1.744 per second).
• compare deaths and births
• compare lord of the rings box office to star wars box office

A lot of data I encountered is old-ish – a lot is from 2004 — which I think says more about the crappy state of authoritative structured data than Wolfram|Alpha itself.

I think the most exciting thing about Wolfram|Alpha is that it’s intriguing and useful enough that it may encourage more organizations and individuals to make their current data available and keep it up to date. Which would be a huge benefit to everyone.

I’m at this weird point in my music “career” where doing it all myself is getting hard to maintain. I’m naturally cagey about involving anyone else in my stuff but it’s probably time to delegate some of the things I’m not good at (booking, promotion, talking to other human beings).

I’ve been attending workshops put on by Live 88.5, a local radio station, and it’s been helpful – mostly in that it’s shown me what I don’t want.

Not to bag on the panelists because it was very informative and they’re all successful, but I felt like a big dumb outsider. Things I heard: “What the fuck is a twitter”, “I get my son to show me how to work Facebook”. The preferred strategy was generally:

• Tour endlessly
• Lose money/go into debt
• Chase radio play
• Wait for it to eventually become profitable

This obviously can work and that’s cool, though the scale seems impractical to me.

I’m not unique in having put together a modest fanbase and income from music, and that strategy feels like a tremendous step backwards. And for what? All I can think of is the promise of fame, but sustainability’s always been more attractive to me.

Last night I asked a long rambling question focusing on the Internet, but I think the larger question is: where do I find people who can help me grow from where I am, not re-start my career in some traditional way?

Someone suggested I submit my stuff to JamLegend, which is a browser-based Rock Band kind of thing, so I did that.

Now Dirtbag is online there.

The most recent comment right now says: “vry easy song and boring”. I got 96% accuracy on my first run.

Update: Making Me Nervous is also online.

Hey, it’s my new website! That was a hell of a lot of work and a rough transition today but it seems to mostly be online and working. Tweaks are forthcoming.

While I was happy with most navigation aspects of the old site, I wanted something a bit sexier. I hired Rob Palmer from Branded07.com to do the design and after months of hacking on it, I’m very happy. I could bore you all with the design goals but blaghhh does anyone really care? I say no, nobody cares.

Anyway it behaves much like the old one but with an emphasis on music playing and search and looking sweet. If there are any folks out there who want the job of porting the design to my forums and maybe my MySpace, please get in touch.

Now I will go drink of a beer.