Our show at Pier 21 went well, the sound was probably the best we've had thanks to our friend and sound tech Jamie. Words such as "tight" and "hardly drunk" were used to describe us. If only there had been more witnesses. We've got another show this Saturday night at Marshy's in Nepean (117 Centrepoint Drive), going on around 10:15-10:30. It's a charity thing for "Team Diabetes" so I'll try not to eat ice cream on the stage as I'm fond of doing.

A Series of Tubes - Finally, a remix of Ted Stevens' retarded net neutrality speech. [via]

Here's Elvis totally high and boning up a performance:

A few things about Amazon. First of all: for some reason for the past few months my cover art image is blank. Check it out. It was there before, now it's gone. Dunno, man. Trying to fix that. Also am I hallucinating or is someone selling my album for $39.99 here? What in the hell.

Update: The image is back. I'm going to start whining about every little thing that bothers me on here, it seems to get results.

Looks like we're playing Pier 21 this Tuesday (July 11th). We go on around 9:30-10pm and will deliver 40 consecutive minutes of rock (with a break in there somewhere). Unfortunately my blue guitar will not be ready by then.

Since we last met, I had tiny little cracks in my primer and was freaked out about it. Since then a lot of things have happened and I don't have pictures of all of that because I was too annoyed. Anyway, here's a quick summary:

• Discovered little hairline cracks in the primer. Researched this, found no info.
• Decided to fill the dents and those cracks with Bondo auto body filler.
• Kinda coated the whole guitar in Bondo, which was a total mistake. That stuff is nasty.
• Around this time my friend Aaron told me that the cracks were because I didn't sand the sanding sealer down. The surface was too smooth and the primer didn't stick to it well enough.
• Tried to sand the Bondo down, but it was lumpy and annoying not to mention it smelled like cancer.
• I took the sander to the guitar and took it all down to the sealer level again.

Then I put primer on it again. This time it turned out a lot better:

There were a lot of small little bumps in the paint surface, but I read that's normal. I sanded them down with 600 grit sandpaper and the surface was pretty smooth. There are a few places where the grain is showing through a little where I probably sanded the sealer down too much and the occasional small paint run. But laziness defeated my perfectionism this day so I went ahead and painted it blue:

Bam. True blue. I've put on three coats at this point and it's looking nicely covered. I don't think I have the ambition to paint my logo on it, god forbid I might have to sand it all down and start over again. I'm going to get some clear coat next and start laying that on and then we should be just about done.

Other parts in this series: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

At first I thought The Garden State effect was going to be a ranty anti-mainstream essay -- and while it is indeed that, it turns into more of a self-examination near the end which made it worth reading.

There’s a sizeable portion of the population that listens to the music they listen to because it’s there and they don’t know any better—a reality that actually predicates the existence of mainstream music. Here’s what I mean: nobody thinks long and hard about music and what it means to them and then ultimately decides to listen to Toby Keith.

The main problem I have with this attitude is that it dismisses the opinions and tastes of anyone who isn't an insular Pitchfork-reading hipster. That seems more than a little self-important to me, but I have a hard time giving middle class twenty-somethings credit for anything.

A related story: I was at an Apples in Stereo show a couple years ago and afterwards I stood behind some young girls to talk to Robert Schneider. When they were done, I moved up and went on about how much their album Tone Soul Evolution meant to me in my middle class twenty-something way. My eyes might have gotten a little misty as I tried to put my intangible feelings for that album into words.

While we talked, he told me that the girls before me were disappointed that the Apples didn't play their song from the Powerpuff Girls Movie soundtrack. Robert said they "don't play that shit" but said he was disappointed they didn't play more songs off of Tone Soul Evolution for me.

I guess I should have felt like a true fan, that my interest in them was "pure" and that he and I shared some sort of special musical connection. But mostly I wished the Apples in Stereo had more teenage girl fans so they could have played a better venue with decent sound.

Vanilla 1 has been released (Vanilla is what I use for my forums) and I'm a big fan. I'll probably try upgrading this week sometime.

Metafilter Music is online. It's a place for members of the Metafilter community to post their songs and of course anyone can listen in. There's all the usual Metafilter goodness we've come to expect: tagging, commenting, favorites and RSS feeds as well as additional features like playlists and podcast feeds. I really like the playlisting feature, it makes it easy to navigate the music on the site and fun to explore in a Flickr-like way. If the community remains enthusiastic about it, I think it'll be something special.

I think hearing the phrase "high-grade Canadian Marijuana" on CNN today will make this Saturday's Canada Day even sweeter.

Iron Maiden Frontman: 'This Whole New Album Feels Effortless':

"It's like driving a big, gas-guzzling motor car. You just put your foot down and there's limitless power under the bonnet."

Bonnet. Heh heh.

The long-rumored Google Checkout was released today. Though nearly everyone said it would be a direct Paypal competitor, it lacks any user-to-user "bank account" transaction functionality and is basically a shopping cart service, but one with some compelling features. (Watch the flash tour here.) The most interesting aspect of Google Checkout is how it integrates with Google Adwords (their several billion dollar a year ad program), giving merchants an easy way to manage transactions as well as letting Google keep merchants honest and add an extra level of trustworthiness to Google Adwords. When you see a green shopping cart icon in an Adwords ad you'll know that Google is handling the transactions for that seller and that you're protected. Rather than create its own shopping portal, Google is trying to integrate the shopping process directly into its search results.

Here's the page for sellers. You can sign up without buying Google Adwords, but the incentive is strong:

Process sales for free. For every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 in sales for free. For sales that exceed this amount or if you don't use AdWords, you can process them at a low 2% and $0.20 per transaction.

So on a $10 CD sale Google Checkout would charge me 40 cents and Paypal would charge me 59 cents. But if I spend a dollar on Google Adwords, Google Checkout charges me nothing for that transaction. That's a big incentive as I'd be thinking about giving Adwords a whirl and know that I'm getting something in return even if the Adwords results in nothing.

Would I sign up for Google Checkout? I think so, but of course sellers currently have to be residents of the United States so I'm out of luck. Hopefully they'll expand that soon.

I quite enjoyed Superman Returns, it made me a little emotional. I just did a Google News search for "You'll believe that a man can cry" and found nothing. My crappy pun headlines are way ahead of mainstream journalism.

This is where it all gets ugly. I was happy with the four coats of sanding sealer I put on. The wood was looking great:

And I thought I had it in the bag. The surface seemed smooth and shiny so what could go wrong? Let's slap some primer on this sucker and get it painted!

Bam. Looks pretty good -- but wait! Zoom in close here and there's trouble on the surface of paradise:

Oh no!

What the-

Oh god in heaven no. The surface of my guitar looks like the rocky uninhabitable surface of Mars. Tons of little paint cracks all over the freaking place. I try to sand it down a little but it's taking off all my primer and doesn't seem to be helping much.

I've received conflicting advice such as "just paint over it, it'll be fine", "fill it with bondo", and "sand it completely down and start over". I'm not quite sure what to do next. Perhaps I'll cry.

Update: my friend Aaron tells me that the little awful looking cracks are most likely because the sanding sealer surface was too smooth and the paint didn't bond to it properly. I needed to sand the sealer more so that the paint would stick to it.

Other parts in this series: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Stevie rips it up for kids in the 70s:

Daaamn.

The 3.0 update of popular social tech news site Digg went online today. I've been reading Digg for a while now and have gradually been drawn into actually participating -- mostly in the form of burying stupid comments -- which is saying something as I normally like to lurk. The big news with Digg 3.0 is that they've branched out from tech and added more categories: Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming each with sub-categories of their own. Given that Digg has proven itself to be a huge force for promoting stories and sending traffic, I'm hoping with its music sub-category it'll be able to draw the sort of attention to new artists that it draws to technology stories.

If you're one of those people who are always asking me "Brad, why is your music not in more documentaries about pot?" You need wait no longer. (via Ryan)

Live-Radio.net - listen to radio stations from all over the world. Because if you're like me, you wonder what they're listening to in their cars in Liechtenstein. [via]

Cringely has an interesting article on how ISPs may actually suffer with the loss of net neutrality:

The result of ending Net Neutrality under this scenario, then, is that the ISPs make money from tiered services but with higher overhead costs and lower priority service levels than one might expect. The ISPs then might try banning BitTorrent to keep it from messing with their tiered services, but we've already establish this can't practically be done on a technical level because torrent encryption can always get around the ban. The only way, in fact, to limit BitTorrent traffic would be to have it made illegal and now we're back again to the clueless Congress that started this whole mess.

I've been doing my best to stay on top of net neutrality lately because I love the internet, but it's difficult to understand what exactly the ISPs really want to do -- probably because even they don't know, short of 'charge more'.

There was an article floating around a week ago (Indie-rock revolution, fueled by net neutrality) spelling doom for independent musicians that raises some interesting points. But I have a hard time buying that because of tiered pricing internet service may degrade to the point where independent musicians like myself can no longer host and sell their own music files at reasonable speeds. If that becomes impossible then just about everything cool on the internet is done as well. So long podcasting, bye-bye online gaming, adios pornography.

100 Awesome Music Videos - I spent so much time watching videos the other day I forgot to blog about it.