Okay maybe a Bollywood version of Michael Jackson's Thriller video is the greatest thing ever:
I just don't know anymore.
It's the second year in this house and I guess we've relaxed enough about bills and renovations to think about doing some hardcore Halloween decorating. This year we're going to damage some kids' minds.
Here's the coffin we built:
That took about three hours and $15. And this is the body of the scarecrow -- we still need the head and to dress it up a bunch, but it's off to a good start:
I'm predicting all time lows in candy giving. But there's still a lot of work to go.
Due to, uh, the Chinese, I've had to put a little thang in place to block multiple mp3 downloads from the same IP. For some reason certain IPs (and most of them Chinese) would suddenly swamp my server for no reason grabbing every mp3 at the same time, ruining everything for everyone.
So anyway, if you have trouble with the limits please let me know.
Hey, the Zune (Microsoft's maybe-maybe iPod killer) gets released on November 14th, which is my birthday. I guess I should want one but I still barely leave my house.
The Zune-to-Zune wireless stuff is intriguing but as I have no friends I don't know what I'd use it for. I'm kind of wondering if the wireless would be good for anything else, like checking my email while I'm on the couch and if the screen would be good for reading books. That's kinda how I roll: boringly.
When I read this post by Jay it got me thinking. He posted an audio ad for his own podcast and asked anyone to include it in their podcast and that he'd reciprocate by playing their ad in his podcast.
Which made me Google around a bit and now I'm asking: is there a site for ad-trading like that? Seems like it'd be a nice thing to have especially for the more hobby-level podcasts. You could organize straight-up paid advertising but then also simple ad trades between podcasts.
I met Jay Moonah in Toronto when I was on the Blogrolling panel at Canadian Music Week. He's an excellent speaker, podcast-enthusiast and all-round smart guy. He's got a new podcast called Online Music Marketing if you're into that sort of thing.
I read the other day that the guy who wrote and played saxophone in the song Tequila and the fellow who wrote Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini had both passed away. What's more I read that the Polka Dot Bikini guy had lost the rights to his famous song and received nothing from the huge hit.
Today the story got way weirder:
On Tuesday, The Associated Press reported on the death of a 68-year-old man named Paul Van Valkenburgh of Ormond Beach, Fla., who claimed to have written the song under the name Paul Vance. The story cited the man's wife as the source for that claim.
But the music industry's real Paul Vance, a 76-year-old man from Coral Springs, Fla., is alive and well, and says the other Paul Vance appears to have made the whole thing up.
The Paul Vance who wrote the songs  and provided proof with royalty payments he is still receiving for the hit  said he has been inundated with calls from people who think he died.
What's more, the dead impostor's dead man's wife said she was "surprised" and "kind of devastated" at the news. Here's what I'm kind of devastated by:
The living Paul Vance estimated he has made several million dollars from the song, which was recorded by 16-year-old teen idol Brian Hyland, surged to No. 1 on the Billboard charts in August 1960 and has been pop culture staple ever since.
...
"It's a money machine," Vance said.
In other news: the Tequila guy is still dead.
WFMU has an awesome overview (with mp3s) of Atari Music -- "quickie albums released to cash in on the booming video game craze" during the Eighties.
Been too busy to mouth off around here. I've been meaning to say that when I upgraded my computer I was (as usual) unhappy with the noise level of the stock CPU fan. I saw something about this Cool n' Quiet mode on my processor and switched it on. Holy cow. It is indeed both cool AND quiet. My processor temperature is 32C right now and it's ridiculously quiet. Very happy with it and it's looking like I won't have to buy myself a $100 specialty fan -- woo, a savings!
Hey there's a Brad Sucks show tonight at the Rainbow starting at 9:30. Jacquie in the Kitchen are opening for us and they're totally sweet.
I put up ceiling drywall in our rehearsal space (aka my parents' garage) all weekend so I think I might just lie down on the floor real still with for the whole show. Requests will be honored for any massage therapists or acupuncturists in the audience.
The other day I tried to watch Jonathan Coulton's Second Life performance. It was way too much for my computer to handle and it nearly exploded. Anyway I decided to ignore being totally broke and go upgrade my computer, hooray.
Athlon64 X2 4200+, fancy new motherboard, gig of ram and a brand new SATA drive. Seems like everything should be instant now but it's still not quite. There's significantly less churning going on though and the onboard 3D graphics are better than my previous card.
Back to reinstalling all my crud...
Not sure why, but Magnatune's been down for a day or two.
I mused about concerts in Second Life and it looks like my arch-nemesis Jonathan Coulton beat me to it. He's going to be playing on the 14th at 8pm EST at Menorca (I think). I'm gonna try and be there.
I went out there to take a few snaps of the venue as my alter-ego "Brad Susenko":
Looks pretty swanky. I've always wanted to play in half a dome.
Here's the view from the stage.
Various clickable posters around. Here's one of a Creative Commons license.
And here's one of the Creative Commons front page.
Very neat. I still need a better computer or video card to run this thing on, but I'll be interested to see how well the audio works.
Things I learned from the show last night:
- Jägermeister tastes like cough medicine and I don't understand why people drink it
- You can't bribe an audience to dance with Canadian Tire money for any respectable length of time
Anyway it was an all right show for a Monday night. Thanks to Dave Norris, De'Mos and Jacquie in the Kitchen for keeping it real and also thanks to everyone who came out to have confusing yelly bar conversations with me. Those are the conversations I treasure the most.
"The winner of Air Guitar World Championships 2006 Ochi "Dainoji" Yosuke from Japan playing at the finals in Oulu, Finland Sept 8th 2006. More info at: www.airguitarworldchampionships.com"
Hey, we're at Zaphod Beeblebrox's tomorrow night. Dave Norris, De'Mos and Jacquie in the Kitchen are playing and then we're on at 10:30pm. Hopefully no amps will be destroyed.
So I'm doing some audio collaboration. My pal Rob is helping me out with the production of my new album and I was looking for a way for us to pass hundreds of megs of audio back and forth without having to upload and download the entire project again. To send only the changes to each other.
Seemed like a task that would be simple enough. This sort of thing must happen all the time in this crazy mixed-up world, right? I searched and asked around and couldn't find any simple Windows solutions. So I had to head into Unix-land.
I now have a share set up on the Linux server in my basement which will hold the master audio files. Rob and I each have directories on our hard drives to mirror those files. We then use cwRsync to synchronize the directories to or from the server, depending on what we want to do.
It'll still require coordination on our part. If we both make changes and upload our changes, we'll overwrite the changes of the other person. But it should hopefully beat using an FTP site and uploading hundreds of megs every time we want to exchange projects.
Hopefully this will not all end in flames.
I'm just about ready to give up reading Digg and it's not due to the latest "democracy" controversy. It's because I'm totally tired of reading stories about Digg. So tired. Also I've moved bradsucks.net to a new server. Hopefully this one won't crash all the time.