Star Wars Guitars - Available in Stormtrooper, Boba Fett and Darth Vader flavors. And don't forget the Star Wars Guitar Case.

Giant Electric Guitar Rug - "Our rug resembles a 6-string electric guitar and is contoured like the real thing." (via J-Walk)

The best cover songs ever - The Telegraph's music critics select the 50 best cover versions ever recorded. (via kottke)

Japanese Build-Your-Own Gramophone Kit - blog entry on building one, complete with video. (via boingboing)

Gaim is an open source instant messenger, which is compatible with AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ and more. A few months ago Steven Garrity told me they were looking for new event sounds and asked if I'd be interested in contributing something. It sounded like a fun challenge and the work of Steven (and associates) helping with the design of Mozilla Firefox has been real intriguing to me. I like the idea of getting artists involved in the open source design process because the interface often gets neglected which drives away the users who don't care how awesome it is under the hood.

Steven and I agreed on the requirements for good instant messenger sounds, and they're fairly demanding: the sounds must be communicative, attention-grabbing and at the same time can't get annoying after the user has heard them a thousand times. Tricky!

For a week or so I came up with sound ideas and Steven gave me a lot of helpful feedback. I'd tweak the sounds, throw a bunch out, and we'd go through them again. It was actually a lot more work than you'd expect for some tiny bleeps and boops. Here's the sound pack we came up with: bradsucks-gaimsounds.zip

I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. It was my first attempt at any sort of UI sound design and I think they balance sexiness and functionality pretty well -- they get your attention but are mellow enough to keep from getting annoying too quickly.

A couple of weeks ago I wound up in the Gaim IRC channel and was told that the sounds have been committed to the Gaim 2.0 CVS, which means they should be the new default sounds for Gaim 2.0 whenever it's released. So I'm pretty happy about that and thanks a lot to Steven for getting me involved in this project in the first place.

Also: by being included with Gaim the sounds are now under the GPL, I believe. So if you're an open source developer and need some sounds, feel free to use them.

Update: Steven has posted a before and after of the Gaim sounds for y'all here.

This morning I woke up to a locked up computer. I rebooted and got a "Primary Slave Drive Fail" error on my boot screen. I shut the computer down to let it have a moment to think about what it had just done and powered it back on and it booted fine. I then headed over to my second drive where I like to keep things I had been meaning to back up onto DVD-R for the past six months, like say hundreds of song fragments and the source to several finished demos. I started copying everything I care about over to my main drive when I could hear the drive making a high pitched pinging sound, then the machine locked up.

I shut it down, waited and rebooted again, now pretty sure I was going to get fully boned out of all my awesome data. When I rebooted the BIOS didn't even list that drive as being installed. Super!

So as I made a mental list of all the things I'd lost that I needed to take the time to be upset about individually I took the drive out of my computer and stuck it in another one. The drive worked fine and I was able to copy all my data off.

I ran a checkdisk on it and found 4 bad sectors. I've now burned all my almost lost files to a DVD-R. Moral of the story: don't bother backing up, you always get a second chance.

DJ-D2 T-Shirt - coolest urban R2D2 t-shirt I've seen all week. (via SnarkySpot)

Little Fretty - billed as a "warm-up and practice hand or play exerciser" it seems more like a sex toy. (via Music Thing)

SongMeanings - Site where you can post your interpretations of popular songs and read what others think. (via Metafilter)

GuitarBike - motorcycle shaped like an electric guitar. And don't forget about AcoustiCar! (via Look At This...)

CC Mixter is a site for material under Creative Commons sampling licenses. It allows artists to post their samples for collaboration and use in remixes/mash-ups. They've got some samples on there from the Creative Commons licensed songs included in Wired Magazine's November 2004 issue. I uploaded a highly compressed version of the sample set for Making Me Nervous and I'll probably do more when I get some time.

Nanoloop - a step sequencer and synthesis package for the Gameboy Advance.

What that circus clown music is called - I always wondered this. Also, best transcription ever: "doot-doot-doodle-oodle oot doot do do".

Still Hungry - Twisted Sister has re-recorded Stay Hungry, the first album I ever bought on my own.

Jesusonic CrusFX 1000 - a pretty awesome looking and sounding programmable effects processor by Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp. (via Music Thing)

When Entourages Attack - The Slate guide to managing your posse. Funny article on entourages. (via /usr/bin/girl)

The Brad Sucks Bad Attraction Remixfight is now online. Head on over there and vote. (Review thread is here.)

Turns out that Mike Essl, one of the guys on the VH1 Totally Obsessed Mr. T episode that my song was licensed for use in, has posted the segment on his weblog. My song kicks in as soon as he ralphs and I'm pretty sure this makes us share some sort of deep VH1 party bond. Funny segment, glad to be a part of it.

It is my birthday today. I am old now. In other news, I bought a new sound card last week (M-Audio Delta 66) which will hopefully kick my recording setup into action again. I started reorganizing everything over two months ago and got sidetracked and have been kinda stuck. Hopefully that's behind me now, like so many years of my life.

Here are some podcasts that wrote to let me know they're going to play my stuff: Hardcore Insomnia Radio, Game on the Street, and I should be in the Indiefeed Alternative/Modern Rock channel sometime soon. You are all awesome and I salute you.

Update: Also being played on Michele's Freeminding. Cool stuff.

The Brad Sucks Bad Attraction Remixfight! deadline is November 15th, which is just around the corner. You still have a couple days to get your entry in if you hustle. I'm told there's gonna be a pretty good turn-out, which is super cool. And here are some new mixes:

• Look And Feel Years Younger (MC Jack in the Box mix)
• Bad Attraction (Colvig's Guitar Madness mix)
• Look And Feel Years Younger (Colvig's Space Girl mix)

Thanks!