Mashistory Vol 1: Stairway to Gilligan - A good writeup on that Stairway to Gilligan's Island mashup performance. [via]

I was looking through the oddmusic.com musical instrument gallery, there's a lot of really great stuff in there. My favorite so far is the nano guitar. The write-up:

The world's smallest guitar is 10 micrometers long -- about the size of a single cell -- with six strings each about 50 nanometers, or 100 atoms, wide. Made by Cornell University researchers from crystalline silicon, it demonstrates a new technology for a new generation of electromechanical devices.

The guitar has six strings, each string about 50 nanometers wide, the width of about 100 atoms. If plucked -- by an atomic force microscope, for example -- the strings would resonate, but at inaudible frequencies. The entire structure is about 10 micrometers long, about the size of a single human blood cell.

And I can't help but notice that in the picture the nano guitar looks left handed. Rock!

A few people have asked me about how World of Warcraft is going. Well, I quit playing it. I got about three or four weeks of nicely addicted fun out of it where I needed to play it every chance I possibly could, but then it wore me out and I never logged back in. I didn't make a decision about it, there was no particular angry quitting moment. I just got tired. Here's my boring story: Let me tell you something about World of Warcraft: there's too much running. Seriously, there should be an in-game counter of the sheer number of hours you put in jogging from one destination to another like a chump, it would be startling. I start a quest and it's all "hey, run down the coast for 30 minutes" and then I get there and someone gives me a quest saying "hey, run on back up to where you started". Even sitting on my ass at my desk it made me tired.

I also understand that most of the fun of the game comes from having a good group of people to play with, but I couldn't keep up with the majority of players I met. They were willing to put many, many hours a day into the game whereas I had about two maximum, so it was a little hard to keep in sync.

So I made it up to around level 26, but my isolation combined with my hatred for retardedly jogging around a virtual world has bored and annoyed me out of it. There were certainly a lot of neat things in there and fun was definitely had, but as I ran around I felt the game designers were purposefully rubbing my face in the fact that I was wasting my life and money by playing this game. At least try to conceal that from me, guys. It's really all I ask from a video game.

Holophonic sound [mp3] - a demonstration of holophonic sound from this site. Listen to it with headphones, it's pretty impressive.

Cochlear implant audio examples - Hear what it sounds like to have a cochlear implant.

Finally (after months of delay) I think the source to every song on I Don't Know What I'm Doing as well as separate acapellas is now on ccMixter here. And now I'm happy to move on to new things to put off for months, like trying to integrate the ccMixter list of remixes onto my site somehow.

Ryan sent me a link to this ZEN BMP-100 after my SD card MP3 player ponderings (1, 2) which is pretty much the ultimate dream of what I want. But like most other dreams worth having, it's Korean and probably illegal in North America. Check out the iPod clone, SD card using sexy bootleg MP3 player though. (Some more shots here.) Nice.

Yahoo! acquires WebJay - congrats to Lucas. Link goes to a short interview with him.

I've put the del.icio.us playtagger on most pages on this site that have MP3s. Like the music page and the remix album as well as the other albums. So if you have Flash installed you should see a little play icon next to the MP3 links that will let you stream the song. I think it's too handy to not use when it's so easy to implement. My complaints: 1. I have to include a script off of the del.icio.us server. So if they go down (which they've been prone to lately), my playing goes down. Hopefully it won't freeze and choke my site during the Javascript include.

2. I have no control over the look of the play button. Not that I'm artistically gifted enough to do much with it, but it'd be nice.

3. It's messier than it needs to be when you hit play because it rams a "tag this" link in there. I understand there's no reason for del.icio.us to provide this app if they're not getting something out of it, but it's ugly and probably just confusing to any non-nerd visitors I might have. Also it tends to make the page jump around when it expands and contracts.

4. It may create a bandwidth apocalypse. Streaming and direct linking and so on is scary business. I like that people can bookmark my songs and stream them off del.icio.us, but the bandwidth implications frighten me. But I guess we'll see what happens.

So while it's a pretty cool tool, I'd jump ship to a version I could host and customize a bit better in a hot second.

Following up on the Bonzai USB 2.0 Card Reader, Marcus sent me a link to this Mach Speed TRIO MP3 Player & 128MB SD Card which is basically what I want:

This incredibly small Mach Speed MP3 player is the perfect musical entertainment device to take with you everywhere you go! Slip it into any pocket and get ready to enjoy your favorite tunes any time, anywhere! The tiny but powerful MP3 player supports 16mb, 32mb, 64mb, 128mb, 256mb, 512mb and 1GB SD/MMC flash memory cards and offers 7 to 8 hours playback of superior sound.

It's $57.99 at the link above, but it's only $29.99 on Amazon. But all the reviews there seem to be trashing the thing. So I'd like one that works.

I saw this Bonzai USB 2.0 Card Reader over on Cool Tools. It's a little $7.50 device that you plug Secure Digital RAM (the type that a lot of digital cameras use) into so you can swap cards, upgrade it, etc. I'd love an MP3 player like this. That way you could upgrade the storage as the price on memory goes down, you could keep multiple cards around to swap in and out with different music on them and it'd still be usable as a regular thumbdrive.

Top 50 Music Videos Of 2005 - lots of cool music videos from 2005.

When I moved into this semi-detached house six months ago I was a little worried about making too much noise and pissing off the neighbors on the other side of the adjoining wall with my recording. It's actually been holding me back a bit as I've been crippled with Canadian politeness. Then today the neighbor just dropped by to ask if we're okay with him practicing his bagpipes after dinner. So I guess I'm in the clear for a little guitar action.

ScanJet Music - how to play music on a scanner. Check out the video. [via]

playtagger - I know I already blogged playtagger, but I totally missed the coolest part of it. Try using it as a browser button (info at the bottom of the page), it'll put play icons beside any mp3s that are linked on a page, letting you stream them right in your browser.

KVRwiki - the great KVRAudio site has launched a wiki for audio info.

After extensive help from RedChina and MarkJaquith on the #wordpress channel, I think my Wordpress 2.0 install is now fully functional. I have to say upgrading was not very pleasant. There's some some serious weirdness involving url rewriting. I don't even want to think about it anymore. The only real side effect should be that the full text RSS feed URL has changed. You can now get that here. There's a redirect in place so hopefully it won't be a big deal to folks who are already subscribed.

We're well into the new year now but I'm still technically on vacation. I'm trying to get caught up on email and a lot of things I've been putting off forever. Also my Wordpress 2.0 upgrade is still breaking in places (such as the full text RSS feed). 2005 was a pretty big one for me, a lot more action-packed than usual. A lot of life developments as well as a remix album as well as starting to play live (which has gone nicely so far thanks to the help of Bruce, Richard and Rob.)

I'm not generally into New Years resolutions, but I have a few music-related goals this year:

1. Finish my next album. I've been a bit paralyzed by even the minor expectations that it not completely blow. When I started doing music I was totally alone and there was little to no risk. Now there's a bit more and I guess I'm a huge baby who can't handle anything. Anyhow, this year I'll try to plow ahead regardless. And when people tell me my old stuff was better I'll become a Scientologist.

2. Blog better. I was blogging a lot about the music industry (particularly the online aspect) but in the past year I've become completely exhausted by it. I find most anti-RIAA and anti-DRM rants depressing these days and any time I go to blog one I eventually wind up quitting half way through. I'll try to find something else to fill the void but it may all be about Katamari Damacy.

3. Try to make some actual money. Through being a scaredy-cat and doing everything on my own and maybe some decent planning along the way, I'm not in the hole like a lot of my musician friends, but trying to justify spending the amount of time I do on this is getting more and more hilarious. In 2006 I would like Brad Sucks to be bought by Google or Yahoo! or even Ask Jeeves as the first ever Search Engine House Band. Which would be the true start of Music Industry 2.0.

Anyway, hope you all have a great 2006.

I checked out the Christopher Pratt exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada yesterday and it was excellent. I wasn't allowed to take pictures and the examples on the web don't do his work any sort of justice so you'll just have to trust me that it was great. His work is all of fairly ordinary things; buildings, streets, rooms, ships. But he uses color in such a way that elements of the paintings take on a 3D quality and seem to jump right out at you. Very cool and worth checking out if you get the chance.

I was reading through some Improv Everywhere missions (this Suicide Jumper one has some great photos). The Mp3 Experiment 2.0 is a lot of fun to read about though isn't so much a prank but a little bit of tech performance art.