I'm back! Some people asked where the hell I went on vacation. The story is this: my girlfriend and I won extremely cheap tickets to anywhere in Canada or the US in a silent charity auction, so we decided to try a 10-day low-expense trip to Hawaii. Here are a few snapshots:

This is what the view was like from the balcony of the Aston Coconut Plaza when we checked in. I have lots of beautiful shots of Hawaii, but they don't do it much justice. You really have to stand in it to realize how incredibly beautiful Hawaii is.

Hawaiians really, really love Spam (as in the meat). Any time I was in a grocery store I had to check out their Spam section and this was one of the better ones. Multiple shelves and varieties. Stunning.

Here's what my foot looked like after I got stung by a box jellyfish. When you get stung by a jellyfish everyone tries to pee on it. I negotiated down to pouring vinegar on it in a grocery store parking lot. (The two blisters near my ankle are sandal wounds and unrelated to jellyfish.)

This is a blurry shot of our rented Subaru Forrester after somebody broke into it, smashing the driver's and rear windows while it sat in the Aston Maui Lu parking lot. Everyone we talked to about it blamed it on a rising Crystal Meth problem.

It was surprisingly hard to find Internet access in Hawaii. The craziest place we used was this computer inside of an old chipwagon on the north shore of Oahu. I should have taken a picture of the outside, but I lost my sense of humor somewhere around this point and became scared for my life.

This is a Turkeyfish at the Waikiki aquarium. I'm thankful it did not sting me or break into my car.

All in all, I had a great time -- though the crime outside heavy tourist areas like Waikiki sucked. We witnessed one car break-in on Oahu (in broad daylight, one car away from us) on our second day there and then two days after that it happened to us on Maui. No fun.

But the weather was awesome and most people we met (in and outside the tourist areas) were extremely friendly and we got to see a ton of Oahu and Maui without spending too much money. My knees are sunburnt and I have a lot of email to deal with.

So I'm out of here on my first vacation ever. Then I will return penniless and then I will be moving. Things may be barren here for a bit. Please watch the Internet for me while I'm gone.

The professionally manufactured CD of my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now available for orders. It's ten bucks plus shipping. I made enough money giving my music away for free -- through licenses and digital sales and donations -- that it was possible to press up some sexy CDs.

For a long time people have asked me to sell a "professional" copy of the album and I'm happy to finally be able to provide one. Thanks to everyone who helped make it possible.

Justin Frankel (the creator of Winamp) has a new project called Ninjam. He announced it here today and it's extremely cool. Ninjam allows two or more people to jam through the net with real audio (no MIDI goofiness like past internet jamming software). It's like Skype for musicians, though the music is delayed a few measures to keep everything in sync. You plug your instruments in, the software provides a beat. Then you find out what a crappy guitar player you are.

I had a chance to play around on Ninjam with Justin last night and it worked great. No masterpieces were made -- though I got to lay down my brand new crappy guitar tapping skills -- but the potential is amazing. And while we we were messing around with guitar and bass, I assume there's no reason you can't feed any audio source into there. So it could be keyboards, could be vocals, or it could be copies of Ableton Live jamming together.

I'm told a GUI is being worked on and a release is coming soon. I can't wait.

Intro to Guitar Tapping - after years of not knowing how to do it and being too ashamed to ask, this Quicktime video taught me how to do the most wanky and weedly of guitar tricks. [via]

Last night I had a dream someone attacked me with a knife and I killed them defending myself. I was so worried that nobody would believe it was self-defense that I ground their body up in a blender and somehow managed to stuff it all into an iPod shuffle. I spent the rest of the dream going to Hawaiian beaches looking for the best part of the ocean to bury it so that it would never be found. At some point I realized I should have picked a less popular MP3 player like a Lyra or a Muvo because people would be less likely to fish it out of the water if they saw it.

Steven's first entry of The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption is on music formats and he does a great job of explaining how I feel about OGG format audio as well. It's a great format, but it's a pain in the neck to support a format most people can't play or use.

It would be nice if this MP3 license fee business would become public knowledge so everyone would understand how much nicer it would be if we used an open format. But that seems to be a ways off.

WhiteHouseTapes.org - "The secret White House tapes and recordings of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower." I assume these are all in the public domain and legal to sample.

According to Wired, music is muffled in Star Wars Galaxies due to LucasArts concerns over players potentially violating copyrights:

Players can play Wookiees or bounty hunters and even musicians -- like those in the cantina band from the original Star Wars.

But musicians are not permitted to actually make music -- except a handful of canned tunes -- because of copyright violation fears.

Seems like it's an area the ringtone barons should get into. $2 to play a 30 second clip of some polyphonic Star Wars themed music.

shufflehacks - "dedicated to hacking, modding, and pimping the hoo-ha out of the iPod shuffle."

Total Eclipse of the Heart video - featuring a stove and some partially bare butts.

Nine Inch Nails awarded $2.95M in suit - everything I've read about this case makes it seem like Trent just signed a bad deal. I guess you can just sue yourself out of that stuff.

Gallery of the Absurd - I really like this artwork inspired by celebrity gossip. [via]

Morbid & Macabre & Suicide Songs - a blog entry and comments suggesting songs about death and dying.

I've been reading a lot about Findory's Adsense targeting. Some are alternately impressed and upset that they can't feed their own keywords into Google Adsense ads. (See here and here.) A few weeks ago I discovered a way to accomplish this sort of thing without having a premium Adsense account. I ran it by Google and they've OK'd it so now I feel compelled to share. Let me take you on a magical journey of nerdiness...

Better targeting

Google may not let regular publishers feed the Adsense ads specific keywords, but there's a neat technique I noticed a few weeks ago on the new Feedtagger.com (a very slick aggregator). I've checked with Google and been told this method isn't a violation of the terms of service, so hopefully the webmaster of Feedtagger won't mind me pointing his clever implementation out.

I noticed when clicking around on the the popular tags list on the left side of Feedtagger.com that a) the ads were refreshing without a page reload and b) the ads were eerily targeted to the keyword you clicked on. Try clicking "politics" or "food" for good examples. Pretty amazing targeting for such a noisy page. Any webmaster who's struggled with Adsense relevancy would be intrigued.

How it works

Curious, I looked through the source and found that the Google ad itself was in an IFRAME that's dynamically refreshed with Javascript. The default URL displayed in the IFRAME is:

http://www.feedtagger.com/search.php?search=null

Which displays a blank page with "null" in the title. When you click on, say the "food" tag, however, it refreshes that IFRAME to:

http://www.feedtagger.com/search.php?search=food

Which puts the word 'food' in the title and a Google ad on an otherwise blank page. The ad is then perfectly targeted to the word in the title. Replace the word "food" in the URL with any keyword and you'll see relevant ads (as long as relevant ads exist).

This is pretty cool. And obviously, extending this out, if you wanted to clone Findory's behavior you could dynamically load personalized keywords into the title tags of the IFRAME as the user clicks around the site so that the ads would be customized to the user's profile. I have no idea how Google would feel about that, though.

Warning

As I said, I did ask Google about this technique of forcing the relevancy of Adsense ads and they said it was "not a violation of any program policies". But they added:

However, please keep in mind that AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on pages that include the use of excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords in the content or code of their pages.

I assume they're fine with FeedTagger's usage because it's very good about only using this technique to increase the relevancy of the ads rather than trying to hit high value keywords or other shady practices. Using this to scam your way into more money will probably get you kicked out.

Working for the Weekend - some guy's very entertaining homemade video for Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend"

Improv Everywhere does U2 - another great Improv Everywhere prank, they do a rooftop gig as U2 across from Madison Square Garden.

Story of the Sex Pistols - a Flickr photoset of an old comic book from 1984.

So until Scoble posted about a boycott I had no idea that the issue of excerpts versus full text in feeds was so huge. I've been using RSS aggregators for a couple of years now and have always preferred headings and decent excerpts. I've unsubscribed from more feeds for having too much text than I have too little. I don't really want to switch my main feeds for that reason, but I've made a full text feed here for the people who want it:

http://www.bradsucks.net/rss2/fulltext/

I have no plans to add RSS ads because I think they're dumb and gross.

Also for any Wordpress hackers out there looking to do this on their own blogs, I've described what I did to make this work here.

So allegedly there's a Yahoo! Music hack that lets you get DRM-free songs. I've been wondering how long it was going to be until there was some sort of issue like this. I thought it might take the form of sales misreporting from digital download services, but this one would work too.

So is Yahoo! liable for damages to musicians if there's a security hole and their songs get downloaded without DRM?