I read this Lifehacker article about becoming a Gmail power user and it really appealed to me so I decided to try making the switch. I'd been using Outlook 2003 Professional for years and it's slow and bloated and awful. Two weeks ago I redirected all my email to Gmail and now I mean to report my findings. First here's the good stuff:

• It's of course great to be able to get my email from any location. Especially handy now that I roll with the laptop.
• The search is much faster and more intuitive than Outlook.
• I don't have to run Outlook anymore!!
• I like the way Gmail groups my mail into conversations. I find it easy to keep track of ongoing conversations without even using the search.
• Labels are great and handy.
• UI is infinitely quicker and more responsive than Outlook.
• Keyboard shortcuts are great.
• I like how simple the contact groups are. I never figured that out in Outlook.
• It was easy to import my contacts from Outlook.

And now here are my damn complaints:

• All the wonderful Greasemonkey scripts that Lifehacker talked about are indeed wonderful. Except that when Greasemonkey's enabled it crashes my Firefox about 25% of the time when loading Gmail, which is a serious bummer. Still looking into whether there's a fix for this...
• The Greasemonkey scripts like Label Colors and Gmail Macros make me annoyed that Google doesn't include these features in the service. They're great, add them! Especially the popup label macro. I'm having a hard time living without that one.
• The spam filter is decent but not perfect. For the first week and a half it seemed like anything with MicroCap or SmallCap or Stocks in the title breezed on through the spam filter no matter how many I marked as spam (and I marked a LOT as spam.) I made a filter to move those to a junk label and after a while longer of marking them spam, Gmail is taking care of them. Now about 10 to 20 Russian and Japanese spam get through a day and I have no idea how to stop those. If there were a way to junk all the emails that come to me in a language I can't read that'd solve it. I'm trying to collect all those emails in a folder to find some commonality to filter on but it's a hassle.
• The contact manager does the job but it's cumbersome to add people to your contact list and group them which is a habit I picked up last year that's been helpful. You have to click "More options" , "Add sender to Contacts list", click "Contacts", search for the person you just added, click beside their name, use the "add to group" pulldown.
• I want to import my old email archives from Outlook so I can search them easily but there's no official way to do it. There's Gmail Loader and gExodus, but neither of them work for me and it looks like there's no way to preserve your original message dates. Lame.
• I also use Google Talk and I'm annoyed at the lack of integration. I wish there was a way to send emails quickly from Google Talk without launching a browser. Picasa has this ability for emailing pictures. Seems like it'd be trivial to add and it would be drastically faster than having to load up Firefox, log in, hit C, etc for quick mails. The "email" button in chat windows only seems to work for Gmail users.
• It's kinda creepy having all my info on Google's servers. But luckily I'm boring.

Despite my complaints, I'm fairly happy with Gmail and I'll probably stick with it. There's no way I'm going back to Outlook, that's for sure. Though I can imagine a service that threw a few more bones to the power users. Of course that'd be taken care of by Greasemonkey if it weren't for the Firefox crashing issue.

Devo - Live on "Fridays" Girl U Want & Gates of Steel - A Devo TV performance from 1980. Rad.

There's a big wave of video remixing services rolling in. Jumpcut is one I checked out today and it's pretty nifty with an online video editor and so on. I only checked out a couple of the videos on there. White Wedding (some dudes with distorted faces lip-synching to Billy Idol) and Things on Kittens (which is mostly just pictures from the awesome stuffonmycat.com.) If you do anything with my music on there, let me know -- I'd love to check it out.

Oh yeah I quietly put some forums back online a month or so ago. Then I didn't realize I had to check back and approve all the people who applied for membership. Anyway, it's all fixed now and there are upwards of ten posts in there. I'm using Vanilla as it has Atom feeds so I don't have to remember to keep looking every day but yet can keep a hawk-like eye on all the activity. I think I'm going to start posting demos in there, probably in a super secret private section like Scott Andrew's Demo Club or something rather than clutter the main site with my unfinished crap.

My music gets compared to Beck a fair amount. Sometimes it's kind of a drag because everybody wants to be original of course. Anyway this Seattle Times article doesn't call me the "poor man's Beck", it literally says I'm more affordable to license than Beck:

If your neighbor's daughter's garage band isn't quite the sound you were seeking, you can explore rights-cleared music on sites like Magnatune (magnatune.com), which offers speedy commercial licensing for music in a variety of genres. You may not be able to afford the Beck tune you were hoping for, but you might find a serviceable "ironic electro-pop" substitute in a one-man band called "Brad Sucks" for a significantly reduced cost (depending on the type and scope of the project, this could be as low as 50 bucks).

Guess I'll add that to the ol' press kit: "A serviceable [Beck] substitute" - The Seattle Times

How to feel miserable as an artist - a helpful guide if you're having trouble. [via]

BitTorrent + Donations = Viva la revolution? is an interesting question on Ask Metafilter about providing a service that makes it easy to share music and donate to the artists (which I was actually just talking to someone about the other day.) Metafilter user scarabic suggested that the Internet doesn't need any help with the trading but to stick to the  facilitating donations aspect. Which made my wheels turn and I posted this:

The idea is decent but I think scarabic might be right. Why not find a way to hook donations into all the trading activity that's going on right now?

It would be interesting if someone would build a verified directory of where to donate money to artists. Have an open API so torrent trackers and other music trading sites could implement it as a feel-good gesture.

That way if someone's on some torrent tracker and is grabbing my album they could have a little link that says "Hey, like the album? Click here to donate to the artist."

I think that'd be neat and have the potential to catch on and also potentially put a nice spin on all the trading that's going on if it were to actually work in artists' benefit.

Not sure if it's actually doable though. If a big paypal directory's not possible, you could turn yourself into a collection agency, hold and distribute the money or something. (Then turn evil and crook all the musicians out of their cash of course.)

I haven't thought much about the technical aspects of it but I think it's an interesting idea.

I've been wanting a nicer design for this site for a while. I'm okay with the navigation and coding, but I'm basically colorblind and have little time to fight with it anymore. So I'm trying out another pay-for-design contest. I've posted a $100 contest for a new blog header incorporating my new logo and some sort of sexier color scheme on Sitepoint. The contest runs until April 7th.

Sitepoint's contests work differently than Worth1000. You pay $10 to post a contest and then it's kinda free-form. You're encouraged to give feedback and request changes as entries are posted (in fact I think they close your contest if you don't post anything.)

Also I don't think you have to choose a winner if you don't like anything that was entered. So it seems like a good deal. They have logo contests as well which might be of interest to you guys.

Anyway, if you're a into design feel free to enter or contact me privately or something. And in the meantime I will not be looking at color wheels or trying to determine what the sexiest shade of grey is.

Just got this in the mailbox:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased Audio CDs by Nine Inch Nails, you might like to know that Every Day Is Exactly The Same will be released on April 4, 2006. For the next few days, you can pre-order your copy at a savings of 0% by following the link below.

What could be better than 0% savings? Besides anything I mean. On the bright side this email finally motivated me to turn off Amazon's mailings.

What Happened To Dynamic Range is an article that's been making the rounds lately. Bob doesn't give any examples of modern bands or recordings that he's talking about so it's hard to make much of his opinions. And it's hard not to blow off the entire article after this statement:

The music available today isn't musical at all.  It's best described as anti-music.  It's anti-music because the life is being squashed out of it through over compression during the tracking, mixing, and mastering stages.  It's simply, non musical. It's no wonder that consumers don't want to pay for the CDs being produced today.

Beep beep cranky old man alert. The music you kids listen to isn't music. There are certainly a lot of styles these days that leave me cold (such as the alterna boy-rock super compressed pitch-corrected and computer harmonised stuff), but I'm also heading into being a cranky old man myself.

I was going to pass this article by and not mention it at all except that I've been listening to a lot of albums from the 70s lately and almost across the board I wish they were mixed and mastered more aggressively. Led Zeppelin sounds kind of weak when it should be knocking my head off when it rocks out. I'm listening to Dancing Days here right now and want to run the whole thing through iZotope Ozone and crank it to the max. In particular, the re-master of Fun House kicks so much more ass than the original.

I spent the weekend painting my office (which I guess you could call a studio if you wanted to be romantic). It was a kids' room before I got here and the colors were pretty nuts. My main functional goal was to stop having my guitars lying around and instead mount them on the walls. This mission has proved a success:

You can see some progress shots here. Once I get my desk put back together I'll get some pictures of that online as well. I have further tricked out my Jerker desk with an additional shelf that they now sell at IKEA.

I did an email interview with Teo Zilla a while back and the article is online now: Brad Sucks, harbinger of a dark-age? Mom always said I'd be a harbinger of a dark age. (Part 2 is here.)

REAPER has added Acid-style time-stretching (alt+drag to stretch.) I already raved about it before but it just got even better. Also a media explorer and a bunch of other great stuff. It's hard to even keep up with the rate of development on this thing. Well worth checking out.

I tried out the sound on my Inspiron 6400 for softsynth playing. Can't get the latency low enough to make it not suck. I think my plan now is to get the laptop sound good enough for live playing and then (maybe later) replace my current desktop recording rig with some sort of Firewire deal (leaning towards the Presonus Firebox, still not sure though.) That way I can use the laptop for live playing without having to dismantle my desktop audio setup every time I need to add some blorp sounds to my live songs. But I still have the option of yanking the Firewire device out of my desktop and taking it with me to record on the laptop. Trying to cheap out of buying a better low-latency soundcard for my laptop led me to ASIO4ALL last night which is an attempt to provide low-latency audio drivers for even the most craptacular of audio cards. It didn't work, but I sent off a debug report to the author so maybe something will come of it before I cave and blow another hundred dollars on something retarded.

Anyone out there know if it's worth caring about the quality of PCI Firewire adapter I put in my desktop? They range from $11 to $108 or so. The expensive ones have a lot of bonus features like USB ports and Firewire 800. But I feel a little dirty buying an $11 card to attach my expensive sound interface to. Though it occurs to me I never think about the quality of my USB adapter.

No Revolution: Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose - a lot of this rant rang true to me, especially the label-as-VC idea which I've been thinking about for a while. [via]

Fossil Ivory Guitar Pick - Pure Alaskan fossil ivory guitar pick. $25 for it. $50 more if you want it scrimshawed. [via]

Got my new laptop today. I forgot to blog about it but a better deal actually went on the day after I ordered my Inspiron 6000 so I upgraded to the Inspiron 6400 (which is duo-core, twice as much memory, 20gb more drive space) instead. I got it today, opened the box and this was staring at me from the bag the laptop was in:

Still trying to decide on a Firewire audio interface. The Presonus Firepod would be great but seems like overkill for what I need. The Firebox might be more my style. This MOTU Ultralite is very nice looking but pricey and I'm laptop-poor now. But then I think about how M-Audio has been so good for drivers compared to my horrifying Echo experiences in the past. Then I think maybe it'd be cool to put this bag over my head.

New CD Baby digital distribution agreement - Major changes: 1) now specifically non-exclusive and 2) ringtones. Go buy 10 second clips of my songs for $5, dogs.

Had a chance to play with REAPER yesterday. That thing is impressive as hell. It's still beta and lacks MIDI capability, but even without that it's very over the top. In a less than 1 meg install (700k without the sample project included) it offers a lightweight, rock-solid multitracker with:

• multiple takes per event
• group tracks
• ASIO support
• sends
• track automation
• punch-in recording
• cross-fading
• direct-x/vst/jesusonic plugin support
• effect chaining (as well as rearranging on the fly)
• ability to export all tracks

And a lot more. Interface-wise if you're familiar with Sonic Foundry's Vegas or Acid, you'll find it easy to jump into. I think once MIDI's in there, I'll be giving it a shot for a full project. It's extremely competitive with software that costs hundreds of dollars.