So I'll be doing my first ever live thing later on this evening. It's only a three song set but I'm pretty nervous as I don't like change, trying new things or danger. Wish me luck!

So you want to contact Brian Eno? - a funny write-up on contacting Brian Eno. The first quoted message from Eno is a really insightful comment on maintaining distance between fans and artists and how attention can be paralyzing.

American Idol Underground Legal Stuff - there's some outrage over this American Idol Underground service. CD Baby suggested it, I can't remember if I signed up.

Remixes:

• Bad Attraction (Mind Gears mix)
• Look and Feel Years Younger (narf mix)
• Making Me Nervous (electro glorious mix)
• Making Me Nervous (gov crunchy apple mix)
• Overreacting (5 Easy Steps To Building A Better Birdhouse mix)
• Overreacting (justdave mix)
• Sick as a Dog (Pizt 2 Fast mix)

A bunch more have been added over on my ccMixter page.

• John Bintz has done a short film called Reginald Smith: The Cookie Meltdown. I'm told there's a remix of my song Dropping Out of School in there about a third of the way through.
• Simon David put Making Me Nervous in a video diary for the feature film he's producing.

As far as podcast play, I've kinda lost track because I'm disorganized. My Podsafe page tells me I've been played on Unsigned podcast, Tower of Song, RSM Robert Smoove Music, Radio Free Cruze and IT Conversations lately. Thanks!

The Google Base rumors are interesting but it seems to fall short of what I was hoping they'd do: let blogs and forum software (and other web apps) drop their data straight into Google and then offer webmasters a free Google search in exchange. This'd get Google a ton of data that's difficult to index and organize (particularly forums) and provide a much needed service to the web community. Looks like they're looking for specific sorts of data though. We'll see once it launches.

I'm being forced to start playing World of Warcraft. If you never hear from me again, that is why. Please pass the word along to my family.

I was on the show CTRL-ALT-ROCK on GameSHOUT radio yesterday. There's supposed to be a Podcast of it around but I can't find it in the podcast listing. They played a lot my songs and were quite nice and I managed to keep the lid on my nearly decade and a half obsession with Ultima 7.

<futureboy> wow, pirate rap on SF<futureboy> i smell a new genre <brad> planksta rap <futureboy> LOL <bjam> heh <mkilly> don't encourage him <futureboy> oh man, blog that shit

Rob took this pretty awesome panorama photo of the Brad Sucks rehearsal last night. Table saws, empties, recycling bins. I don't know how much more legit a band could possibly be.

A belated happy Canadian thanksgiving to everyone. I ate too much and need to lie down forever now.

Interesting musicians who weblog - cool Metafilter thread listing blogs by musicians. Also nicwolff scored Brad Sucks a first post, sweet! Now for best answer...

Paul Pena has died - you should watch Genghis Blues if you haven't already.

Hey look, it's the Brad Sucks Online Collaboration Contest, brought to you by KillYourFM Magazine and MyVirtualBand.com. Here's how to participate.

MyVirtualBand.com is a site I think I've talked about before. Its main goal is to hook up potential musical collaborators and get them working on songs together. For this competition thing, I've provided the source to my song Dirtbag. People can now collaborate with it or re-record everything or do whatever the like with it. Entries will be judged and so on. Here's how to participate.

Donate $100, get a call from Brian Wilson - Brian Wilson will apparently call you on the phone if you donate $100 or more towards Katrina relief efforts.

People are still downloading the hell out of the remix album and my album source, which is fantastic. Thanks to everyone who's been spreading it! Here's some remixed cover art that the original I Don't Know What I'm Doing album artist Allen Henderson did:

In retrospect I probably should have asked him to draw that before I beat him so badly in Scrabble.

And here's an I Don't Know What I'm Doing cover remix that Michael Brewer did:

Thanks Michael! If you've got a remixed cover, send it on in.

Kid Beyond on Ableton Live - Quicktime movie of a beatboxer and how he uses Ableton Live. Pretty awesome. [via]

After a few people told me to do it, my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is "Podsafe" now. You can find it here. Complaint #1: there seems to be basically an unlimited number of sites for musicians to upload their music to and they rarely, if ever, allow you to specify URLs. You have to upload each song individually off your hard drive like a chump. I'd like a meta-submitting/uploading service. Like an automated street team. Or sites should make it less annoying. I have MP3s on my fast website with neatly labeled ID3 tags. Please take advantage of that.

My other complaint is that these sites all have blogging services with no option to syndicate your own blog from somewhere else. I'm not going to start blogging on Myspace or Podsafe or whatever. There's no way. But if you were to syndicate my RSS feed, you'd have the illusion that I was participating and I would possibly build readers on your service (tying me to it, which is what you want) rather than just having a big empty blog there.

The Magnatune article I was interviewed for is in the current issue of the Economist (which is subscription only, but you can read it in Magnatune's press section.) It's some great press for Magnatune and there's also a real nice plug for me in the second paragraph:

You can legally listen, free of charge and with high sound quality, to full albums by any of the 200 or so artists who have signed to the label. (Your correspondent was immediately hooked by a song called "Making Me Nervous" by a one-man electro-pop band from Ottawa called Brad Sucks.)

Sweet! Can't get in SPIN, but the Economist likes me. Hello bankers!

The article also goes on to say Magnatune's goal is to focus on second-tier genres, which makes business sense as really, who wants to compete with the majors? But it's kind of a downer for little old me in the Rock genre.

Hello to everyone coming in from Boing Boing. My server exploded under the weight of everyone trying to download my source files and remix album at once, but things seem better now. I've had to take the remix album MP3 files offline temporarily and I'm trying running everything else through Coral.

If you can, please use Bittorrent to grab the remix album and source:

Here's the I Don't Know What I'm Doing Remixed torrent. (96 megs)

And here's the I Don't Know What I'm Doing Source torrent. (560+ megs)

Thanks!

I went out amp shopping today as my amp is a tiny hilarious thing and some Brad Sucks live stuff is fast approaching. I tried out a bunch and I think I'm basically sold on this sucker:

It's the Peavey Delta Blues 210. I'm an amp novice so I wasn't sure what I was listening for, but it impressed me when I tried it, it sounded so much better than any amp sim garbage I've been using. Then I came back and looked it up on Harmony Central and it has a 9.4 overall review. So I uh... want it.