I am trying like heck to put a song together for Songfight this week, which is due Wednesday morning. The title is "Bad Attraction" and I am dumb and lazy and got a late start on it last night. I have the music written but I need to record some screamin and yellin tomorrow morning. We'll see.

Well, I thought I was going to be really hard-up for songs for Outside the Inbox but at the last moment lots of submissions came in and they are so awesome. A few people have asked for some more time so if you thought your dreams of being on the compilation was lost forever, hurry up and it can still be a reality.

Radiohead Loop Remix Contest:

Digitallandfill.co.uk will contain in total 82 short audio loops. Download them, and use them to make your own audio track, add as much of your own sound as you like, as long as you respsect copyright laws (see the legal bit below). You may mess around with the loops themselves too as much as you like. Be inventive and interesting. Go nuts. But don't just slap them on top of your demo tape, that's not going to impress anyone.

I'm not really sure how these guys are affiliated with Radiohead but I guess I don't really care either.

Remember Outside the Inbox? Remember how it was a compilation of indie musicians writing songs titled after spam subjects? Remember how the submissions were due August 1st? Well... like... they still are. If you're working on a track but think you might need a bit of extra time, please email me and let me know. Thanks to everybody who has already submitted tracks!

Went to the Physiotherapist. Looks like at my worst I had both tennis elbow and golfer's elbow (the difference is whether the issue is on the inside or outside of the elbow). Cortisone cured the tennis elbow but the golfer's elbow is still happening. I was treated with ultrasound and electric stimulation today and now have a brace on my right arm to take the strain off the tendon when I use it. I also have stretches to do and I have to ice the arm often. All in all, it went pretty well and I am excited about the idea of being fully operational again. I will continue however to play no tennis or golf.

I am giving mixing the finger. BLOOP. Spent a bunch of time working on mixing tracks for my album thingy today, they're getting close to being done and I am getting close to going crazy. What can I say other than that the manipulation of sound is stupid and needs a punch in the neck when it's not paying any attention.

Tomorrow I hit my first physiotherapy session to fix my gimp arm.

A Modest Proposal To The RIAA. Kevin Aylward writes that casual music swappers could be persuaded to run a piece of software that certified their computer as free of copyright violations if given free music by the music industry. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not really sure how such a piece of software would work. How could you keep it from being cracked wide open and abused?

The end of the Pet Rock Star^S Blogathon. You can check out the two songs that were recorded in 24 hours, raising $1,120 for the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation. All pretty awesome, congratulations Shannon and Scott!

Scott and Shannon have finished their first song. It's been pretty awesome watching it all unfold and also having Shannon's mom call me a bitch. Rock on!

Blogathon 2003 is a-go and I'm finding it pretty cool. I posted this thread to Metafilter to find out what other Blogathons people are watching and to get the word out about my favorite at the moment, Pet Rock Star^S. From Metafilter I have found out about Crushing Krisis, who is, apparently the original song blogger.

If I have the stones, I may try this myself one day. I'm not sure I could condense all my retarded artist angst into a 24 hour period however.

Robert X. Cringely has come up with a pretty interesting shit-disturbing music industry scheme he calls Son of Napster. It's a lengthy article with a lot of stock talk I don't understand, but the general idea seems to be: someone starts a public company and buys all the CDs on the market. Then Brad comes along and buys one share in the company for $20, making me part owner of all of the CDs currently on the market. Under Fair Use, allegedly I should be legally entitled to copies of all of those CDs.

Clever idea. I'm not sure how possible it is, but I'd really like to see someone try it.

Everyone should be paying attention to Scott Andrew and Shannon Campbell's Pet Rock Star^S blogathon project:

For 24 straight hours on July 26, Shannon Campbell and Scott Andrew will be co-writing songs online as part of Blogathon 2003, to raise funds for the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation.

Shannon and Scott will be posting every step of the songwriting process here on this site — lyrics, melodies, rough mix MP3s, everything.

Very cool project for a noble cause. I'm real interested to see how it goes and have made my small pledge. Good luck Scott and Shannon!

I begin physiotherapy for my arm next week on Tuesday and Thursday. I'm pretty jazzed to hopefully get this retarded arm juiced back up to full nerding and rocking capacity. I am also getting dangerously close to finishing the compilation of my music, which I will call 'my album'. I'll be glad when that's over with.

Assuming I would be crucified for making a song that sounds, well, like it does, I posted Making Me Nervous to Somesongs. To my surprise it's not being bashed as quickly as I assumed it would. You can check it out here. As of this posting it's rated 9.29 with 7 votes and some nice comments. I assume as more people check it out the rating will go down (there's always a 'bad' vote in there somewhere to ruin the day). But that's still far better than I expected it to do.

DM2 to MIDI adds the delicious power of MIDI to the previously almost useless Mixman DM2 turntable controller. I secretly wanted one of these last Christmas, but after I found out it had no MIDI support I blew it off.

Making Me NervousGenre: Dance/Rock Length: 2:26 Date: 07/23/03 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

Well, this is what happens when everyone tells me that I should make more rock songs. I go off and make a dance track. I was actually just playing around with synths and sequencers and it all just kinda happened.

I go to doctor. Doctor say "surgery or physiotherapy". I say "physiotherapy". Now I make appointment, hope insurance cover it. Also I got my electric guitar back and it is way better now.

After I saw Saturday Looks Good To Me on Saturday, I was shamed by Fred Thomas's guitar work. The neck on my electric guitar has been warping, screwing up the action and my dumbass arm is still in pretty much constant pain. So I took my guitar to the guitar doctor today and tomorrow I'm going to the body doctor to get my arm looked at again. Woo woo.

This was a post about how good Saturday Looks Good To Me was when I saw them live, until some blogging software overwrote it. I explained that Saturday Looks Good To Me kicked ass but that the albums I bought at the show don't really do them justice. I went on to suggest that you too should see them live if they happen to be visiting your area. I posted a link to the tour dates, which are here. But of course all of that too was overwritten by some blogging software.

I've been using a piece of software called GT-Manager to manage the patches on my Boss GT-6. Following is the story about how I tried to buy a copy of it and it has all (so far) gone retardedly wrong. The other night the software stops working, the evaluation period expired. During the evaluation period I couldn't save, once it was up I couldn't even trigger patches from it anymore. This happened in the middle of recording and was a hassle and I decided that I should register the program finally and get it over with.

I head over to the website and I find out that it's $30 US to register. No problem. I order it through Kagi. At the end of the process it says it's going to forward me to another page where I can generate a key to register my software. Apparently it was supposed to open in another window and my popup blocker ate it. I viewed the source, tried to get at the page manually but that didn't work. I tried to reload the page, but then I guess because it was a secure connection, it had expired and was gone forever.

So there I am $30 poorer and with no registration key for GT-Manager. I immediately send an email to the company explaining what had happened and gave them my product ID number (the number that your unlock code corresponds to).

No response comes right away. In the meanwhile I am frustrated by not being able to use GT-Manager when I need it, especially since I just put money down for it. I remove the program from my system, registry keys and all and reinstall, which puts me back in evaluation mode so at least I can trigger patches from it again.

Days pass with no reply. I finally am wondering if maybe the author has died and I should see about getting my money back. I send an email to Kagi and the author saying that I hadn't received my registration key from the company and wasn't sure what to do.

Right away the author of the program wrote back, apologized saying he was out of town on business for the past couple of days and gave me my unlock code. I punch it in and it doesn't work.

Turns out that the product ID changed when I reinstalled the evaluation version. So now I am an idiot and need a second unlock code. I write back to the author explaining my situation and give him the new product ID. It's been a day now and I'm wondering if I'll get a reply at all. Seems likely he'd think I'm trying to rip him off and get two unlock codes for the price of one. And I have no way to prove otherwise.

It's a very stupid situation. I should have disabled my popup blocker (I generally do when ordering things), and I should have known that the product ID was in the registry and thought about it before I got impatient and started fussing around. I think I assumed it was machine specific instead of installation specific, if I thought about it at all.

All in all, a pretty weak experience. The idea has occurred to me to try to set my product ID number back to what it was so that I can use the key I was given, but I really don't want to screw around with it anymore until I hear back in case I screw up the ID again. If he's kind enough to give me a second key I really don't think I'd be able to find the nerve within myself to ask for a third.