I don't normally “web log” my feelings but I'm actually pretty nervous about this whole CD release. I was all “beh whatever dudes we'll see how it goes, just another day on the grind you know dog” until a couple hours ago when I became like "!!!! HOLY LORD". It feels like my future "as an artist" sort of hinges on it but then I feel that way about everything.

Honestly, I think the neurotic anxiety has been getting to me for a couple weeks but I've had tasks to keep me busy. Two weeks ago I was sleeping away peacefully and then I guess I tore at my forehead with my retarded talons. As you can see from the picture up there I managed to put a two inch scratch in my dome. That ain't relaxed behavior.

The CD release party is tomorrow night. It's sort of a drag though, you folks who read my blog and have been with me for a long time are not generally in my town so you won't be there. So that part breaks my heart kinda because I love you guys okay now the vodka's talking catch you later.

So the dark, paralyzing fear of having a new album coming out shortly is that maybe nobody will listen to it! So I pose you this question:

If you were (or are) an independent musician with a very limited budget and a new alternative/rock-style album scheduled for release in a few weeks, where and how would you promote it?

I'm mostly looking for places/people to send/pitch it to, but I'll appreciate more elaborate or imaginative suggestions.

The new version of social bookmarking site Delicious launched last week and overall I'm impressed. Search is snappier, the design is slicker and they didn't ruin it by taking out nerdy features like tag intersections. Delicious and Wikipedia are the only two sites that give Google a run for their money for search for me so I'm happy to see it treated well.

That being said, there were a few UI decisions I didn't care for and have created a Greasemonkey script to fix. Here's the before:

And here's Delicious with my tweaks:

My changes are:

• I bolded the link titles. I found them too hard to skim, which is largely what I do on Delicious.
• I turned the link URLs a light grey. For some reason the URLs were the easiest part to read for me and also just about the least important information.
• I coloured visited links purple. At least to my eyes, visited links on the new Delicious are only the slightest bit fainter than the regular colour. This makes it hard to know at a glance which links you've already visited, which is a pain especially when you're searching.

There are a few other changes I'd love to make, but my Greasemonkey skills are not the strongest:

• Tags should be moved to the left. They're the third most useful information to me (after titles and a description – which often isn't there), but your eye has to travel to the right to see them.
• Make the link counts easier to skim. The shades of blue they use for say, numbers 17 and 794 are barely different from each other. When I'm searching, I want to quickly know what the most popular links are.

I may get used to these issues, I'm a pretty fussy dude. But it's been a few days and I still find they slow me down. Anyway, it's still a good redesign and congratulations to the team for transitioning to it smoothly. There was no downtime that I noticed and the new site hasn't lost any functionality that I enjoyed before. Good stuff!

A friend of mine's been doing great weekly dance mixes at Lowpass – DJ. He's got a podcast feed now. It makes me look forward to exercising.

You can buy I Don't Know What I'm Doing in FLAC format again (click 'more buying options'). Out of It will be available in FLAC as well when it's released.

Haven't gotten too many submissions for the Fake It cliche video yet, but this one from Einar is awesome:

Yours doesn't have to be as professional looking of course, the more amateur the funnier.

I love Gmail. Conversation views, labels, keyboard macros and super fast search – it makes my life easier. One thing I also love are the email contact groups. It's like tagging for humans and I love to categorize the people who email me (podcaster, blogger, fan, booker, musician, artist, family, mortal enemy, etc). But it's not as easy to group people as it should be. Here's my easy to read prototype that I'd appreciate you forward to anyone you know at Google:

Instead of having to mouse over a contact name, get that card to show up, click More, click Contact Details, click Groups and select the group, instead I propose that all that be right in that popup. Amazing idea! I'm a genius!

Anyway, I'm sorry for the tone of voice. It's mostly due to the hour I just wasted trying to get Greasemonkey to do exactly this. I love you Gmail, I could never stay mad at you.

David points to this Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable on Amazon. The tags are wonderful. A small sampling:

snake oil (383)
ripoff (338)
waste of money (314)
throwing your money away (287)
unconscionable (267)
stupid (231)
immoral (204)
pure garbage (202)
cheat (191)
denon (50)
harry potter (47)
astronomically dumb (5)
tax on the stupid (5)
as effective as using dog hair (4)
fraud (4)
nonsense (4)
rofl (4)
time space (4)
wizards_made_th is (4)
a fine product indeed (3)
cable (3)
ftl (3)
how do they get through the door with ba... (3)
pt barnum (3)
shameful (3)
wtf (3)
59 inches (2)
audiofool hardware (2)
bogus (2)
corporate taxation of the uneducated (2)
cures cancer (2)
ecstacy godlike troll-killing superwmd u... (2)
eternal life (2)
ether-licious (2)

I've had a hate-on for “high-end” cables for a long time so this is wonderful to me. [via Joho]

(Made with the I Don't Know What I'm Doing lyrics and wordle)

Having now seen Indiana Jones 4 I am finally free from looking forward to anything by George Lucas, hooray! Indy 4 was terrible and at least as bad as The Phantom Menace. I'm not sure how it's managed a score of 78% on Rotten Tomatoes as I write this, but I have to assume that will be lowered by time and careful reflection.

Here's my ranty spoiler-filled list of things I can remember disliking:

• Indy being a bumbly moron
• Indy following around Dudey McMumbles for the whole movie going "what? what are you doing? what's going on?"
• Whipping out the Crystal Skull every other minute.
• Indy surviving a nuclear event in a refrigerator?
• The plot made no sense.
• Indy throwing a big ridiculous sissy-fit over the snake in the quicksand. "Say grab the rope"?
• No sense of urgency or danger. None of the characters took the danger very seriously so I didn't.
• Endless, tiresome exposition. Please, TELL ME MORE.
• The one-liners were so weak. "I like Ike"?
• Shia Tarzan
• Indy dramatically picking up his hat like eight million times.
• Why do the commies act exactly like Nazis?
• Commie chick is psychic I guess? But she can't read Indy's mind? And also not Huxley's? And also not Marion's? And also can't make a connection with the crystal skull? And also does nothing with her power throughout the entire movie?
• Why did the evil commies break into a US government top secret storage facility to get an alien body? They just poked at it and went "oh we have several other of these".
• Triple agent Mack, tricking Indy any ol' time he feels like it.
• Indy trying to save Mack after he gets betrayed again?
• Why did Indy get promoted to Dean?
• Why did Indy and Marion get married?
• Why are there karate ninjas hiding in every long-deserted ruin?
• "[Their] word for gold translates as treasure. But their treasure wasn't gold, it was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure." THANKS FOR CLEARING THAT UP. TWICE.

I guess it might be easier to list the stuff I liked:

• Intro stuff with Indy was nice to see. Him teaching, reference to Marcus & his dad. :(..
• Shia as Mutt was good actually and managed to have an occasional bit of chemistry with Indy.
• I liked the big UFO ending, but it was set up so poorly and at the end of a really bad movie.

3/10

My friend Allen is working on a tasteful and mysterious series called "Fat Dinosaurs". I drew this to win his respect:

We'll see if it works!

Tonight Hit the Bong With Me [MP3], music written by Lee David in 1926. Sometimes you have to destroy a song to learn its secrets.

The borrowed PA in the practice garage went away so I reached into the vast (vast!) Brad Sucks war chest and bought two 270 watt Peavey PR10PN Powered Loudspeakers. Despite forgetting my mixer at home they did a nice job at rehearsal last night. Very clear and full sound, plus I have them up on stands now which I think helps them stand out from the murky low frequencies.

I knew nothing about monitors or live sound before. I did a lot of reading and here uh are some... knowledge:

• People on live sound forums are kind of annoying, possibly worse than recording forums. God forbid you not want to outfit your garage with multiple $1500 JBL's.
• Powered speakers are now a viable alternative to a powered mixer + passive speakers and offer more flexibility. But they're newer so they're hard to find used.
• The Peaveys have optional brackets to position them as floor-wedge monitors.
• The Peaveys actually have three inputs on each speaker. Two quarter inch and one 1/4"/XLR combo. All have level control, which is impressive.
• With powered monitors you can use a regular passive/unpowered mixer, which are cheap and plentiful.

The other point of this was to make it easier to integrate the laptop into the full band, which so far has been a huge struggle technology-wise.

I want a Twitter-style service for freeform, taggable, time-stamped data. My intended purpose would be to log real-world items. Like I'd IM/text/email the Data Twitter service with:

bike ride tags: bike, ride, exercise

writing a blog post tags: status, writing

phone call from annoying dude tags: annoying dude, phone

basketball tags: basketball, sports, exercise

These would all be time-stamped as I add them. A duration may also be useful.

The data could then be queried, searched, accessed via API from other web sites & apps, read via RSS and imported into spreadsheets.

Potential applications:

• import specific tags (like 'exercise') for a certain time period into a spreadsheet for analysis
• power cross-site social widgets from the data feed (most recently listened to songs, task completion, current status)
• use as a remote control for triggering events in software monitoring the feeds (bittorrent clients, server administration)

It's super nerdy, by nature deals with private instead of social data and likely wouldn't scale, but I still want it.

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.

Update 2: It broke again after a couple days of working fine. Presonus says $65 + shipping to repair. Blergh.

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!

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.

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.