Shock & Awe (Banned Cover Art) - a fat ton of controversial album cover art. I particularly like the Born in the U.S.A. interpretation, I had never thought of that.
Well, our first full set went pretty all right I think. Stumbly here and there, but no major disasters. We opened for The Eric Eggleston band and they were really cool to us and great musicians -- thanks to them for allowing the use of their PA and very hot lights. Now I will hopefully spend the rest of the holidays drunk. Merry Christmas everyone!
Justin Frankel (Winamp & Ninjam creator, fellow Aqua Teen Hunger Force fan) has a new multitrack recording software coming out tomorrow: REAPER. I played around with an early beta and it was looking pretty good. His focus is on keeping lightweight and easy to use, which sounds great to me.
I had a chance to play with Wordpress 2.0 RC3 today. It's not tremendously different from 1.5.2 but the improvements are fantastic. The main thing I love is the new posting page, which adds WYSIWYG support, easy image uploading and the quick addition of new categories. Rumor is 2.0 final will be out on the 26th. Here's a list of the new features. Looking forward to it.
How to Apply Corpsepaint - "Remember, you want to look like a corpse, not a clown!" Handy.
Sean from the Gaim team dropped a line to let me know that Gaim 2.0.0b1 has been released. This is the first release to include the sounds I contributed for it. In case you don't know, Gaim is an open source instant messenger that can communicate with all the major instant messengers (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc). It's a cool project and you should check it out.
Brad Sucks is opening for the Eric Eggleston Band this Thursday (the 22nd) at the Greenfields Xmas Bash. Tickets are $8 advance and $10 at the door. Doors open at 9pm and apparently there are also prizes. This is our first full set (40 minutes or so), so if you wouldn't mind getting really drunk so you can't remember anything the next day, I'd appreciate it.
Google Music Search - it's all right I guess. It has my album in there. But it's not knocking my socks off or anything.
LucasArts Soundtracks - the introduction to The Secret of Monkey Island is one of my all-time favorite songs.
I'm behind on blogging. There's an article on me in the new issue of Kill Your FM. They also did up a big graphic layout of my gear setup, which is pretty nifty.
A winner has been chosen for the Brad Sucks Online Collaboration contest, you can check out all the entries here. It doesn't say on the page right now, but the Morphine Mix won. I like the Crystal Beat Mix.
Well we played valiantly I think and we did not win, thereby retaining our indie cred. It was pretty awesome to play at Barrymore's and I had a good time. Not a bad second live performance at all. Thanks to everyone who came out!
The finals for Tech Rocks 2005 are this Friday (December 9th). It's at Barrymore's in Ottawa. Doors open at 7:30pm and we're on first, doing a three song set (Borderline, Look and Feel Years Younger and Dirtbag.) This'll only be our second live performance together, so the fact that we're even getting to play somewhere that real bands play is pretty cool. Also I should mention that it's all for charity:
Proceeds from the event are targeted to support human resource development through projects and programs from kindergarten to the post graduate level and will support the development and expansion of Ottawa's technology talent pool.
Hooray for human resources!
The Music Thing Xmas Gift Guide - lots of neat items on the Music Thing Xmas gift guide.
When it comes to Linux, I was a pretty big SuSE advocate. It was user friendly and easy to use. But ever since I upgraded to SuSE 9.3 it's been a roller-coaster ride of instability. I thought we had finally come to agreement as the past few months were relatively peaceful, but on Thursday it wouldn't download anything. I tried to SSH in and it hung after I entered a username, so I rebooted and discovered it had taken out the entire 200 gig hard drive in that computer somehow. Whether this is SuSE's fault or a hardware issue, I'm not sure, though the hard drive seems to be physically fine. So now I'm on to trying Debian. If anything suspicious happens I'm throwing that computer out the window.
Check out this awesome performance of various Super Mario Brothers songs played on the marimba. It's a special kind of crowd that goes nuts for the Mario water theme.
The del.icio.us folks have released playtagger an easy Javascript/Flash mp3 player. It's pretty slick and cool. If I could host it locally and strip out the tagging push I'd be all over it. But it's probably intended more for blogs than musicians. Very neat.
The Boy Who Heard Music - Pete Townshend's blog apparently.
Playing around with the recently launched Google Base, I managed to jam my album in there. In the future I think musicians will no longer tour, instead they'll spend all their time traveling from website to website submitting their albums and songs to various services.