Graphs of Billboard's 2008 Hot 100 and Pitchfork's Best 100 Tracks of 2008. 

I like the disparate song lengths. Maximum song length on Billboard: 5:21. Pitchfork: 17:03.

Also are we not ready, as a people, to combine the post-grunge and hard rock genres? [via waxy]

Radio Aporee is geo-located field recordings. I have no idea what use this is, but I like it.

I've been tagged twice now in this Seven Things meme, first by Rob Campbell and second by Dan James. I resist this stuff because I'm boring but I've found reading other people's lists fascinating, so here we go:

The rules:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they've been tagged. (you'll just have to trust me)

My seven things:

• Jobs I have wanted in chronological order: Dickie Dee man, baseball player, Sierra On-Line adventure game designer, computer programmer, writer and musician.
• People I have written fan mail to: Mr. T and Michael Jackson. Neither replied. In my letter to Michael I lied and told him I lost my copy of Thriller and could he send me another one (signed please).
• When I was 17 and a desperate aspiring writer, I emailed Terry Pratchett to see if he'd answer my questions about writing. He graciously said "Sure, as long as they're not too dopey". I then asked him what he kept his margins set at in his word processing program. I still regularly think about how stupid that question was.
• The first concert I went to was Corey Hart (opened by Katrina and the Waves) during his Boy in the Box tour. I had backstage passes but Corey had already left when we tried to go up. (I lied and told all my friends I met him anyway.)
• A few years ago I was diagnosed with vitiligo, which is the disease that allegedly turned Michael Jackson white. I'm a pale guy so other than it turning a lot of my hair white it's not very visible unless I tan.
• When I was four or five I had a habit of peeing on my neighbor's steps. I can still remember my dad hosing them off.
• Me: “I need a seventh fact about me.”
  Her: "Why don't you say that you try to get angry at animals when they run out in front of the car so that you don't feel as bad if you kill them?"
  Me: ”Did I say that?”
  Her: ”That's what you told me to do.”

I am tagging Aaron Walker, Courtney Summers, Jesse Dangerously, David Weinberger, William Gibson, Hannah Aviva and Justin Dykhouse.

Crayon Physics Deluxe is out. Not only is it an amazing game, it has a remix of one of my songs in it:

My pal Future Boy sends word of a complete remix album he did of Out of It:

This is my take on the album Out Of It by Brad Sucks. These aren't so much remixes as they are what might have happened if Brad had approached me with his songs and asked me to produce his album. The vocal tracks are mostly intact and the song structures have not been messed with all that much. Nevertheless, these mixes are wildly different in character from the original tracks. The album was mastered by Ben Phenix.

So far I'm really enjoying it, the production is more experimental and makes the songs interesting to me again.

Adopted this Catahoula/Beagle mix today:

She is super cute. Not traumatized too bad by us so far. Some quick introductory photos here.

Got any name suggestions?

I'm working on getting someone to redesign this website. It needs to be wider, more attractive, blah blah. I'm pretty happy with the general layout and usability, but it could use a little lipstick and an eyebrow wax at least. I spent some time going through all sorts of famous musician websites today. It's pretty amazing how most of them are super cluttered and do not have music sections.

I mean I get that not everyone wants to give all their music away, but jesus, throw a dog a bone. If I get more music going to your MySpace page than I do your official website, something's wrong.

Anyway, the most startling thing is that out of all the websites I visited, one of the best was Britney Spears':

What it's got going for it:

• Simple design
• It's not Flash
• Straightforward navigation (home/blog/videos/music/photos/tour)
• RSS feed
• Hey, there's a music section! (though it's just music blog posts – cop-out)
• Some actual content (from a team of Britney bloggers)
• Britney's Twitter status up top

I can't say it's the greatest but compared to most musician websites it's amazingly restrained, simple and informative. Also it has inspired me to create a Brad Sucks fragrance.

What other musician websites are decent? Who should I steal from?

I don't normally listen to podcasts, but on this last bit of travel I tried out a bunch that were suggested to me via Twitter. Here are some reviews: Quirks and Quarks

This is a great science radio show but I'm not sure it was engaging enough to focus on completely. It put me to sleep several times on the airplane which was nice of it.

Real Time with Bill Maher

I like a lot of Bill Maher's stuff even though he's the whitest man in the world. This podcast is just the audio from his HBO TV show, which seemed like itd'd be all right, but the crowd cheers and laughter were so loud compared to the speaking I had to keep dialing the volume up and down to keep it from blowing my ears out. I gave up part way through the first episode. Next time I may run them through a compressor first.

You Look Nice Today

I wasn't sure I'd like this hyper-literate ultra-nerdy sorta hipster comedy talk-show, but it worked for me and I wish I'd brought more.

The Ongoing History of New Music

I was excited to see this show on iTunes as I love it and looked forward to catching up, but it only feeds one minute previews! What the hell!

Ugh, so busy. I didn't even blog about Halloween. Here are some shots:

We were kind of busy (and lazy) this year so we didn't really get up to a lot of the ideas we had. But I got to play with my jigsaw and made this witch and cat:

 

The resulting shadow was pretty good, though the cat didn't show up very well:

My costume turned out nicely. This flash photo doesn't really do it justice:

I'm really not much for scaring kids so what I would do instead of jumping at them or anything was stand completely still. The kids would see me and know something wasn't quite right and they'd stare and stare. And I'd stare back at them and they'd just be completely unnerved, thinking something was going to happen I guess. And it seems I'm okay with doing that to children as I feel no remorse.

One of the best tech things I saw at Zap Your PRAM was this TinEye Music app for the iPhone. You take a photo of album art with the iPhone and TinEye identifies the album and looks it up in iTunes. I was totally skeptical so we tried it out on my CD, taking this fairly crappy photo:

And bam:

I was impressed. Image search/recognition tech usually works great inside a pre-defined catalog of images but tends to fail in the wild.

Later on I got a demo of the newest version of the iPhone app and it worked just as well but also had Allmusic, Youtube and Wikipedia links for me. Crazy neat. Thanks to Suzanne for showing it to me!

State Shirt has a new album called This is Old and it's available for pre-order now.

I managed to get my store dealy running for him but mercy it was a rough ride. I had hoped to open source all my latest additions (variable pricing, wordpress integration, etc) but I don't think I have the time to put into it. If anyone wants to take the lead on that feel free to get in touch.

I'm off to the Zap Your PRAM conference this weekend. It should be some awesome nerdy maritime fun and I'm really looking forward to it. Regular conferences have a little too much desperation going on and this one feels like it'll be more of a bunch of like-minded (but not too like-minded) folks hanging out.

Matt Haughey from Metafilter was supposed to be going but I guess he's not now which makes me sad. At least now I won't have to drunkenly confess about how many ideas I've stolen from him. So I can tell that to Daniel Burka (Digg designer), and Cal Henderson (Flickr architect) instead.

I'm giving a presentation on Friday I'm maybe calling “A Brief History of a Song” where I tell the story of one of my songs -- from the initial idea to its recording and release and to some of the crazy adventures it gets up to when it's out of my hands. It's been something that's been on my mind for a while so I'm looking forward to getting it out. of my system.

One of the nice things about finishing the new album is that I can indulge my useless creative impulses again without feeling quite as guilty. Last couple of days have been a flurry of making a tagging (aka non-hierarchical – delicious/flickr style) audio sample organizer. I mentioned it earlier here and here.

With a lot of obsessive struggling and swears, all the main functionality is there (in “sloppy learning-windows-programming-as-i-go” style):

It indexes a directory and all its subdirectories for .WAV files, saving them to a local database. You can select folders in the tree on the upper left and you can select files on the right side and they'll play. If you right-click on files on the right side, you can enter tags (also known as labels and keywords). The tags are saved and displayed in the lower left panel. You can then click those tags to display the files tagged with them. This way a sample doesn't have to belong to only one directory.

Also drag and drop to most audio apps I've tried works fine, preferences are saved via XML. The buttons at the top are just for easy testing and the search does nothing.

Welp, after my last post on the subject and emails to the author of Sample Tagger, I broke down and whipped out the C#. After a bunch of hours, I have this:

It indexes a directory tree on the left, shows any .WAV files that are in it on the right when selected. Selecting a WAV file plays it (or you can hit the play button). And you can drag and drop the files into any audio application I've tried (Ableton Live & Sound Forge). Next is library saving and tagging I guess.

Can I also say how freaking annoying it is searching for Microsoft development related documentation and tips and examples on the web? Let's see, first there's the difficult-to-search-for terms: C#, .NET, ADO.NET, etc. Then there's all this other crap that gets in the way like ASP.NET, .NET being available in a billion different languages (C++, C#, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual Basic, J#, etc, etc) so even if you do find what you want, it's probably not in the right language or platform. Frustrating.

Seventeen years ago today Nirvana's Nevermind was released. I'm re-watching the Classic Albums Nevermind episode:

It's real interesting and worth a watch if you're a recording nerd or a music fan.

Personally I don't think the production on Nevermind holds up as well over the years as In Utero, but that's me.

Sample Tagger is exactly what I want for sample organization. Only problem? Loading and saving doesn't work (works on some files, not on others). I'm frustratedly staring at C# tutorials now and thinking about all the time I could waste making my own. Ugh.

Okay I haven't figured out much of a bandwidth solution so let's just party. All the source for Out of It is now on ccMixter here. Also there are acappellas on ccMixter separate from the source if you only want those. Here are the source files direct from me. I pray to the lord my server will survive this:

• Dropping out of School [33mb]
• Certain Death [24mb]
• Fake It [20mb]
• Bad Sign [31mb]
• There's Something Wrong [24mb]
• Gasoline [27mb]
• Total Breakdown [14mb]
• Understood by Your Dad [18mb]
• Out of It [22mb]
• You're not Going Anywhere [22mb]

You should upload anything you make to ccMixter and I'll list it on the song pages and like… you'll be part of song HISTORY!

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!