Because I am apparently 'blowing up large' as they say, I decided to invest in my indie musician future by buying a laser printer. It's a Brother HL-1435 and so far I'm pretty happy with it. An old school musician may have blown that $300 on drugs and girls. The musician of the future spends it on office equipment. I really didn't have much use for a laser printer before I started making albums. Since then I have been a consistent laser and toner mooch on local friends and businesses that foolishly allow me in their homes and offices. Now I have the ability to print labels right here! Hooray!

So if the guilt of making me impose myself on my friends and employers was holding you back from ordering my album: IT'S ALL CLEAR NOW BABY.

I think I've decided that Outside the Inbox is going to be out this weekend. If Cafe Press doesn't work out by then I'll just offer the $5 US home burned version for now. I'm getting the impression nobody really cares about the packaging if the price is low enough and I'd really like to get this thing out. THE GUILT OF DELAY IS TEARING ME UP INSIDE.

I just thought I'd post another update about the status of Outside the Inbox. It was mailed off to Cafe Press almost two weeks ago and I haven't heard from them yet. I'm all ready to go and am hoping it gets processed soon so I can get this in the bag.

Here's the new Brad Sucks design. My goals were to make it brighter, make the text bigger and to give me more sidebar space. I had a lot of ambition to try and make a really gorgeous looking weblog design but in the end had to settle for fairly generic. I'm still finishing various pages up, so it may be a bit before it's fully done. If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it.

Milli Vanilli and the Scapegoating of the Inauthentic (via Anil Dash):

To classify some qualities as 'talents' and others as 'superficial' may work for judging friends, but they have nothing to do with the play of images that makes up the art of mass culture.

It's an article that says some interesting things but also goes off into weirdness in other parts. Possibly I am too drunk process it at the moment, but it seems to go off on a rant about how Milli Vanilli were taken down because they seemed gay.

Being a studio musician guy, I'm often puzzled by people demanding authenticity in music and entertainment. It's like people demanding that all paintings be accurate portraits of real things. That would be boring. Usually people want entertainment to be jazzed up versions of reality. I don't see anything wrong with that.

Despite any studio trickery I may try to engage in, I would like to state for the record that I am 100% legit.

I'm trying to take it as a complement and a nod to the growing popularity of this site that I'm having to fend off comment spam at an alarming rate. Ah the internet.

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.