Behind the Song: Eye of the Tiger - Jim Peterik's description of writing and recording Eye of the Tiger. A good example of why I hate talking about songwriting: because it's boring and lame.
GypsyMIDI Motion capture MIDI controller - control MIDI via your arms. I can't decide if this is really cool or goofy as hell. Probably depends on the wearer.
How to Build a Guitar Clock - awesome photoset on Flickr of a guy building a clock out of an electric guitar.
If you're looking for Brad Sucks tabs, liam and I have cooked up a few over here in the forums.
If you're a blogger and a Firefox user, Performancing for Firefox is worth checking out. It's a nice little blogging extension. You hit F8 in Firefox when you're on a page and it splits the screen into the page you're viewing and a blog editor. So far I'm impressed with it and I've stayed with it for longer than any other blogging tool (three posts now!) We'll see.
It was Google Press Day yesterday. I'm looking forward to Google Notebook launching next week as I don't have time develop cluebacca. I've been trying other notebook solutions (SEO Note, Evernote) to replace Keynote but they don't behave the way I want them to. And the only simple web-based note app I've found is Simpy which is dead slow most of the time. I got the new Google Desktop with "gadgets" (aka widgets) and quickly took a stab at writing a gadget, which is a little widget you can float around your desktop or dock to your Google sidebar. As much as I envy the sexiness of Macs, I'm still unclear on how these things are supposed to be useful in any way. How many floating clocks and plants does a person need?
Keith Richards' brain is OK - probably one of my favorite headlines. In fact I would like status reports on the brains of all the Rolling Stones members.
Evolution of Dance - awesome six minute sketch by Judson Laipply going through the history of dance.
Web Shit - anyone who develops or thinks about developing websites should read this comic.
I've been getting annoyed at del.icio.us ever since it was bought by Yahoo! My reasons are nerdy. Tag intersections don't work well anymore which constantly bones me when I'm looking for something, it's slow as hell and the number one thing I've found having used it for a while and racked up around 550 bookmarks in there: I often forget I bookmarked things. For a while I've wished my bookmarks were more in my face. That I'd get reminded of what I had seen before when I was looking for something. Which leads me to tonight when I was playing around with Google Bookmarks. At some point I realized the absolute killer feature would be having my tagged and annotated bookmarks integrated with regular Google search results. When's the best time to remind me what I bookmarked? When I'm searching for stuff on Google. I did a search for something I had bookmarked and HOLY CRAP:
It shows my tags and annotation underneath the link in the regular search results. That's awesome! So now when I'm searching Google for things I can instantly see what I've bookmarked before. I used Your Web to import all my del.icio.us bookmarks and grabbed the Google Bookmarks Button extension for Firefox.
Google Bookmarks has a seriously primitive interface, no social sharing (I'd like my bookmarks to be public), the Firefox Google toolbar doesn't support it yet and Google seems to barely acknowledge its existence, but this search results integration alone combined with knowing their servers will be nice and responsive I think has sold me on it.
Update: okay so the interface for Google Bookmarks REALLY BLOWS. I can't type in the tag I want to jump to anywhere, so I have to click on my tags. I have a billion of them of course so that means scrolling up and down the screen like an idiot. Now I'm thinking about some way to sync Google Bookmarks and del.icio.us together...
I was checking out the new Jack White Coke commercial which is neat. I don't have a "sellout" opinion on it which everybody seems to. Interestingly though I watched the video which has a neat time-lapse effect going on:
And amid the sellout comments somebody pointed to this earlier Japanese video by Yuki called Sentimental Journey that uses the same sort of effect:
I like Yuki's, I think it uses the effect really nicely.
Frontalot's been a busy guy. He's got a tour going on. Did I mention his recent Nerdcore Rising album before? I got a copy and am very happy with it. He's also the subject of an upcoming documentary. There's a preview of it that I'm hosting a torrent for as a link from Penny Arcade has the ability to crush even the most ample servers these days.
That interview I did with the ladies at on10.net is online here. I did an interview with the Lodebearing podcast where we talked about some things. I got Skype working for this interview but then they couldn't record it. So now I have a Skype account with like three people in it who are never online. Welcome to the future.
The fella who started with one red paperclip with the goal of trading it eventually for a house just traded a year's rent in a duplex for an afternoon with Alice Cooper. Wonder if that'll be worth a house...
This site's been getting overloaded with spam bots lately, to the point it's creating some intense load on the server. I've installed Bad Behavior which will hopefully redirect some of the worst offenders. If you find yourself being blocked even though you're not a dirty spammer, feel free to email me and I'll whitelist you. I'm looking into other alternatives that hopefully won't lock anyone out.
I recently gathered the balls together to start calling bars around here and trying to book some small gigs. Apparently I have no end of opportunities in places where I am far away from like California and Germany, but shows in my city aren't exactly raining out of the sky. One thing that I guess I didn't anticipate when picking the name "Brad Sucks" years ago was how much fun this would make my phone conversations with bookers one day.
THEM: What's the name of your band?
ME: Oh it's "Brad Sucks"
THEM: ...Brad Sucks?
ME: Yep.
THEM: And your name's Brad?
ME: Yeah.
THEM: So you suck.
ME: Yeah I'm not very good.
THEM: ...
ME: ...
THEM: ...
ME: So are we in?
Winner of the "most unexpected award I've been given this year": Brad Sucks was the Small Business Blog of the Day over at Pajama Market the other day and there's a nice little write-up. Crazy stuff. Update: I answered some follow-up questions that are now posted here.
Here's a surprise: a new song demo from me. So I like getting feedback but increased (mostly positive) attention on my unfinished music drove me a little bonkers with anxiety for a year or so there. To keep myself from spazzing out and also from being too lonely while working on my next album I'm going to try posting new song demos to my forums. Whether I send out the mailing list or post about it here will depend on how I'm feeling at the time.
Anyway, just a heads up in case you're wondering what's going on. I should have some more demos up there in the coming weeks unless I freak out.
The Beatles - Hey Jude (1968 rehearsal video) - a great video of the Beatles jamming on Hey Jude.