Well, our first full set went pretty all right I think. Stumbly here and there, but no major disasters. We opened for The Eric Eggleston band and they were really cool to us and great musicians -- thanks to them for allowing the use of their PA and very hot lights. Now I will hopefully spend the rest of the holidays drunk. Merry Christmas everyone!
The finals for Tech Rocks 2005 are this Friday (December 9th). It's at Barrymore's in Ottawa. Doors open at 7:30pm and we're on first, doing a three song set (Borderline, Look and Feel Years Younger and Dirtbag.) This'll only be our second live performance together, so the fact that we're even getting to play somewhere that real bands play is pretty cool. Also I should mention that it's all for charity:
Proceeds from the event are targeted to support human resource development through projects and programs from kindergarten to the post graduate level and will support the development and expansion of Ottawa's technology talent pool.
Hooray for human resources!
I drove by this the other day:
It says "Loving God..." over the exit and "...Loving people." over the entrance. I didn't go inside.
And now the source for my song Fixing My Brain (78mb). Only two more to go.
Here's a video history of the Amen break. It's an interesting story and then it turns into an anti-copyright rant at the end which I'm not feeling. I'm not sure how The Winstons all quitting music and getting nothing while countless artists and companies get rich using their recording is supposed to be some happy ending that everyone trying to make a living in music should be shooting for. "Hey kids, give up the copyright on your music and you too can bust out of the music business and wind up with a PHD in political science!"
Without some sort of success story for The Winstons I think all the example does is serve as a musician horror story: how you can make something that impacts millions of lives and still not be able to support yourself. Spooky!
My little game and interesting links site In4mador! is three years old today. That's older than many humans. Still needs some cleaning up though.
Upgrading to WordPress 1.5 looks like it'll be more work than I thought and maybe it'd be easier to do just re-do the whole damn thing. If you're a web designer, please drop me a line at brad@bradsucks.net.
Here's a pretty rough exchange between Fightmaster Jr. (one administer of Songfight!) and an editor at Wikipedia as Fightmaster tries to get some inaccuracies fixed in the weird Songfight entry. The editor's rant is indented. I can understand the editor's perspective and the difficulties inherent in an open editing environment, but can't understand the seriously nasty attitude. The current Songfight entry weirdly fixates on the number of fight entries -- which has never been that big of a deal -- and ignores a lot of other good Songfight info. Which is fair enough, but it's kind of insane that hissy fits get thrown when the best authority on the item in question offers some revisions.
So with Sick as a Dog, I'm half done releasing the source for my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing. I've gotten a lot of remixes and I want to release a compilation album of my favorites so far to show off a lot of the great work that's been done. This would hopefully be followed later by a second part with remixes of the rest of the songs if remixer interest keeps up. The plan is to offer the remix album for free download on the net and I'll also burn and mail copies to those who want them for $5 including shipping like I've done with Outside the Inbox and my album.
There's still time to get your mixes in if you're interested in being on this thing. Send them to me. I can tell you now that I'm probably not going to pick too many songs that stick closely to the original songs' structures. I want this album to be significantly different than mine.
Over the next while I'll start sorting through the mixes and getting in touch with the remixers to make sure they're cool with being on the compilation. Also thinking of a catchy title is of top priority as well.
Gaim is an open source instant messenger, which is compatible with AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ and more. A few months ago Steven Garrity told me they were looking for new event sounds and asked if I'd be interested in contributing something.
It sounded like a fun challenge and the work of Steven (and associates) helping with the design of Mozilla Firefox has been real intriguing to me. I like the idea of getting artists involved in the open source design process because the interface often gets neglected which drives away the users who don't care how awesome it is under the hood.
Steven and I agreed on the requirements for good instant messenger sounds, and they're fairly demanding: the sounds must be communicative, attention-grabbing and at the same time can't get annoying after the user has heard them a thousand times. Tricky!
For a week or so I came up with sound ideas and Steven gave me a lot of helpful feedback. I'd tweak the sounds, throw a bunch out, and we'd go through them again. It was actually a lot more work than you'd expect for some tiny bleeps and boops. Here's the sound pack we came up with: bradsucks-gaimsounds.zip
I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. It was my first attempt at any sort of UI sound design and I think they balance sexiness and functionality pretty well -- they get your attention but are mellow enough to keep from getting annoying too quickly.
A couple of weeks ago I wound up in the Gaim IRC channel and was told that the sounds have been committed to the Gaim 2.0 CVS, which means they should be the new default sounds for Gaim 2.0 whenever it's released. So I'm pretty happy about that and thanks a lot to Steven for getting me involved in this project in the first place.
Also: by being included with Gaim the sounds are now under the GPL, I believe. So if you're an open source developer and need some sounds, feel free to use them.
Update: Steven has posted a before and after of the Gaim sounds for y'all here.
What that circus clown music is called - I always wondered this. Also, best transcription ever: "doot-doot-doodle-oodle oot doot do do".
After extensive hunting years ago, I came to own an IKEA Jerker desk. To this day it's the most useful, awesome and affordable desk I have ever seen. And to top it all off, its name is Jerker. I always thought it was only my friends and I who loved these desks, but apparently not: BEHOLD! THE SHRINE TO THE IKEA JERKER DESK! which includes a lot of Jerker links and pictures.
I'm liking this here Japanese Death Poetry.
Look And Feel Years Younger (2004 Mix) is a remix I did of Look And Feel Years Younger. All my attempts at making a super crazy remix failed so I was left with just making little changes. Like I hyped up the drums, mixed up the verses a bit, dropped the solo and changed the ending. Then a few other things here and there that I can't remember.
Well, that is now in the bag. It was a pretty good experience in that I learned an awful lot since I had 100% no clue about live sound. I got some real helpful advice and a better idea of what the hell the deal is with playing live. Didn't really make me feel like a flawless rock god, but that I guess is what the booze is for.
Matt points out a funny blog phenomenon with the replies to this Overhaulin' post, where people are acting as though the author of the blog is actually somehow related to the TV show. I don't have anything as cool as that, but I've been meaning to point out that, judging by the comments, my blog seems to have become the #1 resource for disgruntled OfficeMax customers and employees due to this rant I posted back in January.
What's weird is seeing a Google ad show up when you search for "brad sucks" on Google.
Some random emails from the weekend have gone missing. You may want to re-send. Did the interview chat thing on halfliferadio.com last week. It was fun and also interesting.
Got my MPD-16 drum pad thing on Friday and it didn't come with a USB cable. I will be exchanging it later this week for a unit that actually comes with all its parts.
My dog of the last 10+ years (named Penny) was put down today due to cancer and general sufferin'. It is a drag but it is also okay.
This study claims that music sharing isn't negatively effecting CD sales. Here's a big clip for those of you too lazy to read the article:
For the study, released Monday, researchers at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina tracked music downloads over 17 weeks in 2002, matching data on file transfers with actual market performance of the songs and albums being downloaded. Even high levels of file-swapping seemed to translate into an effect on album sales that was "statistically indistinguishable from zero," they wrote.
"We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales," the study's authors wrote. "While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing."
Unlikely that this is the final word on the subject, but still interesting.