A few people have requested it, so I've made an RSS Feed for my songs. So if you just want to hit the new stuff in your favorite aggregator, there you go. As a side issue: people don't like to sign up for my little new song notification list over there on the right sidebar. About 1 in 10 people that send me email saying they like my music or buy an album sign up for it. I guess they're afraid of getting spammed or don't notice it or don't really care about each individual song.

RSS is nice because it makes it easy to monitor sporadic things like new song updates without having to visit a site every day or give your email address out. But from a webmaster/artist's perspective it makes it harder to figure out how many people actually specifically care when you have something new to announce. But anything that helps get the word out is fine by me.

Brad Sucks ally and talented musician Scott Andrew has released Where I've Been. The info:

Here's the cool stuff (and the reason why it took so long): this record is an Enhanced CD, containing the entire record in MP3 format. I also threw The Sandalwood Sessions on there too, plus a few extra MP3s, including a brand new song entitled "The Weight." So it's like 2-½ records in one, all released under a Creative Commons license. Plus there's artwork, lyrics, photos and some DIY production notes.

Like my album it's only five American dollars including shipping (what a deal!), but he totally outdid me on nerd cred by donating anything people send in over $5 to the P2P Legal Defense fund at www.downhillbattle.org. Very cool, Scott!

Basically there is straight up nothing I like about web design. I'm running out of space on this stupid blog to jam all the things I want to jam on it. I can see why most artists resort to big shiny useless Flash websites because those are practically like kicking web design in the nuts and I have to say they do have a very fair and balanced point with which I am compelled to totally and completely agree.

After a few days of trying to come up with a new weblog design I like, I just want to embed WAV files, put all my content in PDFs, break all web standards I can, not support anything but IE, put UNDER CONSTRUCTION animated gifs everywhere and throw broken keyboards at people when they complain.

Wow, Matt from Metafilter wrote some very nice things about my album today on his blog:

It sat around for a few weeks until one day I decided to rip the disc into iTunes and toss it into the random work mix. It spun for a week and it wasn't until I looked for the songs today that I realized what I've been enjoying all week. I have a few John Vanderslice and Folk Implosion albums in my library and I assumed the songs I heard and liked were one of those bands, but it was all Brad. "Making Me Nervous" is my current favorite song on earth. It sounds like the best of Folk Implosion and the rest of the Brad Sucks disc is really good too.

This has brightened my week. Also thank you to the nice people who have come in from there and bought the CD or sent me nice emails or signed up for the notification list thing. All of those things are totally wickedly great.

This has been a tremendously awful week. Staggering proportions of suck. The Outside the Inbox master will be mailed to Cafe Press tomorrow providing I don't die on the way to the post office.

We're Not FriendsGenre: Rock Length: 3:20 Date: 09/25/03

Recorded in a day, tried to do a sort of bouncy rock song. I could probably stand to obsess over it a bit more to fix various issues, but I'm kinda sick of hearing it so maybe I'll do it later.

I'm mailing the Outside the Inbox mix off to Cafe Press next Tuesday. Hooray!

After having the system lock up again today, I sadly and desperately typed "athlonxp 2600+ random lockups in Google and this site was the first result. Oh yes.

This is a funny article about Frank Black (of the Pixies) taking part in an online discussion board.

The 128k mp3s for Brad Sucks - I Don't Know What I'm Doing are now online on that page. So if five dollars including worldwide shipping was too steep for you, you can now just download 128k mp3s of the whole thing. I'll be taking older versions offline sometime soon as I previously mentioned.

One sudden out-of-nowhere crash last night on the new computer after well over 24 hours of perfect operation. But it's been fine ever since I rebooted. :L <-- A concerned and weary frowny face.

Maybe success! After a lot of testing yesterday I determined that it was my modem and my Darla24 that weren't getting along. I found a Unimodem Audio Device that was installed along with the modem and disabled it and have had no crashes since. I let Cubase run in a loop while downloading last night and it hadn't crashed after 8 hours of play. Also I reinstalled all my keyboard and mouse drivers and haven't had any problems with them since as well.

So it's looking real promising that both random lockups have been solved. My heart still jumps any time there's a delay though because I'm afraid it has crashed. I would like that to stop.

What fifth graders think of Radiohead:

Unlikely. Returning to Hail to the Thief for the grand finale, Mitsi's announcement that "Sail to the Moon" will be our last song earns a chorus of "Yessss" and several robust fist-pumps. Thom has made few fans.

There are also drawings. Amusing article.

Installing the manual fan control knocked the noise down a bit, for which I am thankful. It's probably still not quiet enough but at least it's not at making-me-want-to-die levels anymore. CPU temperature is around 45C and the fan is around 2900 RPM. The following problems remain:

Random lockups. There are two occurring, one more mysterious than the other.

Lockup #1 (not so mysterious): the Darla24 with the high pitched EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE sound lockup is still in full effect. I moved it to another slot today and it ran perfectly for four hours (!!) and then suddenly crashed for no apparent reason. The Echo website gave me no real pointers other than to tell me that my motherboard's chipset is apparently compatible with their products. Hooray I guess.

Lockup #2 (mysterious): Twice now and seemingly randomly, my keyboard and mouse just stopped responding. The system was running fine but I couldn't do anything with it. I'm just using a PS2 Microsoft mouse and a PS2/USB Microsoft keyboard. Never had any problems on the last system.

The first one I'm still thinking is par for the course and that it can eventually be made to work. I've had a lot crazier things happen with that sound card and made out okay in the end. The keyboard and mouse thing I just have no idea about.

I bought the new computer junk and spent most of yesterday setting it up. It all went relatively smoothly except for various panicked moments of anxiety and stress + anger * stupidity. So far the 2600 and the new memory seems to be a nice speed increase over the 1600. Not tremendously different as far as the desktop goes, but I'm anticipating more dramatic changes once I get some actually demanding applications on here. Right now there are two problems. One is the noise of the fan (the Thermaltake Volcano 11). It's just stupid how loud it is, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. I can't believe anyone could tolerate this noise level. I have a few options here, such as installing the manual fan control dial and seeing how slow I can run the fan without the chip exploding. A fan also came with the chip which I may take a shot at. And then if that doesn't work I can try my Zalman flower cooler in non-quiet mode (as I've been told quiet mode will not be enough to cool this processor). If none of those options pan out, then I guess I have to blow more money on something like a chump. I have no idea what it would be, but we'll see.

The other problem is my Echo Darla24 which is just a complete jackass of a sound card. I installed it and everything was working fine. I was all impressed and happy and listening to mp3s right away. Except it seems about once every half hour the system would lock and the sound goes EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE in a high pitched whine.

I've experienced similar stuff with the Darla before so I'm hoping through a series of strategic yet random beatings to it I can get it to work with some stability again.

So now I'm sitting here installing programs with the Darla uninstalled listening to this new computer howl to verify if it is in fact the sound card causing these problems. This right here is rock and roll, baby.

Just thought I should mention that sometime soonish I'm going to be reorganizing the MP3s that I have online, probably replacing them with the album versions. So if there's anything that you want to keep, I'd grab it now before it's gone.

So I'm almost 100% sure I'm going to upgrade my main computer this weekend. The only reason I can find to upgrade these days is audio. On my AthlonXP 1600+ with 512MB there's almost nothing I do that taxes the system other than when I get all hardcore with music. My maybe new system: AthlonXP 2600+ CPU, Abit NF7 Nforce 2 Motherboard, a gig of DDR400 PC3200 RAM and a Thermaltake Volcano 11 CPU fan. This will cost me $635 Canadian before tax. Factor in an additional $100-$130 for another power supply if I decide I want to get this 1600 back up and running again as a secondary audio machine.

This upgrade has, as usual, spiraled stupidly out of control. It started out as "hey, I should buy a new motherboard and processor. that'd be nice". Then it didn't seem worth it if I didn't also upgrade to newer faster RAM. That doubled the price. Then I wondered if my Zalman Quiet CPU Cooler CNPS3100-Plus (which I love) would work with this new chip. I wrote to QuietPC and they told me it wouldn't work in quiet mode on it. So I'm buying what looks like a new quiet fan but I may wind up getting hosed on that as well.

The big question right now is how badly do I want this 1600 back up and running right away. It may be useful as a secondary audio machine which I could use to play soft synths off of. But one of the things I'm hoping for with the upgrade is that Cubase will be better able to do all of this stuff inside it rather than having to dick around with other devices and software and computers. Ho hum.

Dicer is an exciting new VST plugin from ConcreteFX:

Dicer is a PC VSTi beatslicer which can load in samples and then splits it into slices, each slice has it's own audio properties and can be triggered separately. Dicer can do everything from simple tempo alteration to complex phrase synthesis

I've played around with the demo a little bit and it's a lot of fun. I'm pretty intrigued by the possibilities it opens inside Cubase. I had looked around for a plugin that did this a while back but only found Phatmatik Pro which I found to be buggy and kind of a pain to deal with.

Author Orson Scott Card wrote this column about copyright. If you're like me, you have a real short attention span, so probably the best summary came from the Slashdot thread:

Maybe you pirate one of his e-books and you like it enough to buy the print version for the "feel."

Maybe you don't buy that one in print, but buy others either in paper or electronically because you like his writing.

Or maybe you decide he sucks as an author and never read anything of his again.

In any of these cases, what has he lost? Nothing. You weren't going to plop down $7 for his paperback anyhow.

The only way he loses is if you decide he is a great author, so you pirate all his books.

Even then he doesnt, technically, lose, he just doesnt gain, it's as if you never read his first book to find out how good he was.

I think it's difficult for most people to make the switch to this way of thinking but I'm pretty sure it's where things are going.

Brad Sucks patriot Kaddar did some Brad Sucks shirt designs which you can now get on Cafe Shops:

Click the images to take a closer look. Thanks Kaddar!