Benny Davis performs a whole bunch of pop songs using the same four chords.

MC Frontalot and I attempted to kick out something approximating the jams this week for Songfight. Go check it out:

I think it turned out decent for like a two day thang.

Many years ago my family used to smuggle fireworks into Canada from the US. It was wonderful and maybe a federal crime, like all family memories I treasure.

Then we went without fireworks for a long time but recently we've been blowing a lot of money on grocery and hardware store fireworks that just suck.

For my birthday my girlfriend got me this:

That's a hundred dollars worth of fireworks from Kaboom.com. After the last sad display at Canada day I found this place on the web and had meant to order the next time fireworks were required. Turns out it's me turning 30. We're setting them off tonight and if I die, just know that it was awesome.

Update: I survived, but it was still awesome. They were excellent, A+++, will buy again.

Neil Gaiman linked to my copy of Babble yesterday, interesting:

I'm just reading the introduction to Fragile Things, and I'm intrigued by your mention of a computer program called Babble that you used in the writing of "Diseasemaker's Croup". I'm really curious about what the program is and how it works, but I'm not able to find other references to it online. What can you tell me about Babble, and how can I get a copy?

A quick Google found me a copy of Babble up on http://www.bradsucks.net/archives/2003/07/08/lyric-generators/
It's strange that no-one's updated or reinvented it in the last 15 years, isn't it? It can make some wonderful things.

Neil Gaiman is old school. And seriously -- what is the deal with there being no good modern version of Babble? It's like a mixing desk for language, what art nerd would not want that?

Been reading about the Zune launch today. Here's what intelligence I've gathered:

• it's brown
• the controls aren't as good as the iPod
• what's with the brown
• ganked wi-fi is lame
• the brown looks better up close than it does in pictures
• kind of awkward turning the thing over to view videos and things
• brown, eh
• not that sturdy of a design
• brown
• it's brown

Oh there are other colors, sure. But the brown is getting all the attention.

Here's a service that someone with more time than me should make: a personal aggregator that combines all your feeds from various services together into a timeline view. I first saw this here and I made my own here.

Things that mine doesn't do that would be great:

• Archive everything that rolls in off the feeds so you can go back in time further
• Import old entries
• Search within the article and page text
• Alternative views, timeline, group by topic, tag, etc.
• Spit out a combined RSS feed
• Let visitors filter sources (say I just want to see your blog and delicious)
• Let users easily add feeds to their own pages. Mine's pure hackery.
• Widgets and so on so embed this stuff in your blog, myspace, etc.

Of course this heavily leans towards the nerdy as hell demographic so I don't know how you'd make your millions. But it would be nice.

Tomorrow (the 14th) I turn 30 years old. I must be slowing down in my old age because I was totally tricked by a surprise party on Friday night. My cat-like reflexes failed me and I'm just lucky I didn't break a hip.

I've been thinking about music videos a lot, mainly inexpensive but effective music videos. One of my ideas for the first single off the next album was to film myself playing and singing in front of a green screen and then put that online for people to remix (a la The Colbert Report's green screen challenge.)

Today I read that The Decemberists beat me to it. My hat's off to you, you damn, damn Decemberists.

I think this bank-themed version of U2's One may be the most painful thing I've watched all day:

I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep tonight.

Update: original video disappeared, updated with crappy youtube one.

I'm having a hard time getting excited about Windows Vista, but this almost does it.

I'm not sure it's a good sign for Coke's marketing department when I have to hit the Wikipedia page to figure out what the hell their low-calorie least-nasty tasting cola product is.

I'm trying Coca-Cola Zero now (the zero is for zero sugar and zero calories) and trying to ignore the high price and slightly medicinal flavor. Pepsi's new low calorie offering is Pepsi Max (the max is for the MAXIMUM in low calories) so maybe I'll try that one if this doesn't pan out.

One thing I didn't know is that Pepsi was originally called "Brad's drink". I think this is pretty important information.

Finally got around to putting more photos online from the gigs we've been doing. I'm using FAlbum now to load the photos directly from Flickr so hopefully I'll be better about updating it.

Whoah, I just happened into my Wordpress comment moderation queue and there were 500 and some messages in there, 60 of which were legit. I've now approved them, but that's lame. My apologies to anyone I lazily silenced. Bad Wordpress!

As I mentioned, we decided to go totally overboard for Halloween this year and it was a success! The final tally isn't in yet on how many kids we had, but almost our entire candy stash was depleted:

You can check out my photo album, but here are a few shots:

Not captured of course is the seriously spooky soundtrack that was being pumped out at the kids, which really helped amp it up.

It was a lot of work but well worth it. We started about a month and a half ago and still ran out of time. Kids and parents seemed to really dig it. Some kids had their parents take their picture with the scarecrow and that was pretty awesome. I am very tired and full of Cheetos.

I haven't tried the Linux music player Amarok, but they just added Magnatune to it as a music store (I'm on Magnatune). Pretty cool:

Amarok continues to blast ahead with release 1.4.4. We're thrilled to be able to take our long association with Magnatune to new heights with the addition of an integrated DRM-free music store with full-length mp3 previews. Magnatune's "we are not evil" attitude guarantees that you can purchase awesome tunes and the artist receives half of the purchase price.

Also I should probably say I'm totally loving Ubuntu. I can't imagine using it on my main desktop, but it's been wonderful to me after some disasters at the hands of SuSE and plain ol' Debian. The default brown theme needs to go though.

Man, after seeng this video from Todbot I kind of want an Arduino:

I've also read that the MIDIsense board is good but it's like $50 and doesn't come assembled. I'm not sure if I'm willing to bet $50 on my ability to assemble an entire circuit board just yet. My shoddy guitar wiring kept crapping out during our Halloween show on Sunday.

I really like this prototype crucifix MP3 player:

Very tired up in here. Been doing a bunch of shows and a lot of other crud, no time to blog. The live band, I believe, is pretty tight, in case you were wondering. We're rocking pretty consistently now and many XP points have been gained. I believe we'll level up soon and then move on to some bigger quests instead of killing rats in the dungeon for gold. I need to put some more pictures online.

My throat's hurting me after the show last night, not sure if that's due to too many bar hamburgers or singing too much or a cold, but it's lame. I'm thinking that a successful local band strategy would be to hire dance ringers. Preferably some skinny blonde girls who will act drunk and dance for the band, thereby making dudes hang around the club and buy drinks, thereby making you the most successful live band in town. I'll get the Excel charts to you tomorrow.

Notorious Russian online music store AllOfMP3.com has lost its Visa account.

Meaning that people can no longer buy DRM free albums for pennies over there anymore. I'm pretty down with file sharing, but the idea of paying a third party to provide MP3s always rubbed me the wrong way. Though I don't think my album was ever on there, so maybe that makes me even more angry now that I think of it.

We've also got a Halloween show coming up on the 29th where I am totally dressing up.