After the huge success that was my 30th birthday fireworks, my family decided to all pitch in and get an even bigger box of fireworks. I guess we're celebrating Canada Day on July 4th but due to scheduling issues this is the only weekend we could all get together so they're going off tonight. Anyway I decided on Kaboom Man's Hero Box:

A closer view:

The table of contents:

3 - Super Sonic Boom
2 - Ultra Sonic Boom
2 - Fireball Classic - 10
1 - Strobes
1 - Sonic Boom
1 - Jumbo Gold Comet
1 - Tornado Warning
1 - Psycho-Delic Fountain
1 - Crazy Aces
1 - Double Doozie
1 - Top Dog
1 - Crackling Satellites
1 - Killer Bee Candle
1 - Magic Dragons
1 - Party in Paris
1 - Flying Piranha
1 - Matrix
1 - Eye Of The Storm
1 - KABOOM Man
1 - Attack From Mars
1 - Pirate King
1 - 36 Shot Comet
1 - Ground Whizzer

We also got a free Psycho-Delic Fountain (which claims to last for two whole minutes), an additional Fireball Classic and a pair of crazy fireworks glasses for every $40 we spent.

I'm pretty excited about it. Everyone says that firework "cakes" are super cool but I have no idea what they are. This kit apparently has all the best ones that they sell.

Oh and we also got a whole bunch of giant sparklers so the kids can run around and burn each other. Hooray!

So for around two years there I had some awesomely crippling writer's block where I thought I'd never write a song again. It was very melodramatic and retarded and embarrassing to talk about but anti-depressants seem to have fixed me up. Now that my mental health is relatively in check I can start releasing all the crap I decided wasn't good enough during that period without having a heart attack. Here's Tell Me Something I Don't Know from 2004.

There are some things I like about the song, some I don't. The drugs tell me that's OK. :|

Reactee - I like the idea behind these Reactee t-shirts, though you have to really eye up the wearers' nipples to see the SMS info.

I'm hoping someone can point me towards what to buy to solve this problem.

For the longest time I've been using a mixing board as gain control and a headphone switch for my monitors. Here's the rough layout:

I've been aware using a mixing board for this small task is stupid (and a waste of desk space) for a while but I didn't know what to replace it with. The board's slowly dying now though so I need to figure out what to replace it with. Here's what I've thought so far:

• I could plug the Delta 66 sound card directly into the monitors, but then how do I switch to the headphones? I hate dicking around in software to change volume and settings every time I want to do something.
• I thought a headphone amp like the Behringer HA400 might be what I was looking for but I'd have to feed my sound card output into one of those headphone inputs and that seems sorta gross. Also I don't need the two extra outputs and would like a mute switch for the monitors.

Aaaand that's about it. Digging through Behringer's product list hasn't helped much. Basically I need two 1/4" or XLR inputs & outputs, two volume dials and a mute button in a wee little package.

LiveAPI is an open-source third-party Ableton Live API, so Ableton Live is now hackable via Python. Create Digital Music has a write-up -- very cool.

Here's my idea: let your audience control cowbell levels of your set via text message. Make millions off of cowbell volume fights. Retire.

Terminator Gene Ban Suggested in Canada - as someone in the comments puts it: "DRM for seeds". Amazing times we live in.

There are a couple upcoming Brad Sucks shows that I encourage you to attend, one's next Friday night! Look here.

Also I'm looking into the cost/demand of doing shows outside of Ottawa. If you're interested in a live show in your area, you can demand some Brad Sucks on Eventful here:

I'm being called out in the comments for being a Sellaband slacker. It's interesting, I've been on lots of musician services and social networks but I've never been ragged on for not hassling everyone more to listen to my junk. What's up with that?

My impression is basically you need to spam the shit out of everyone to get anywhere on Sellaband. I really hate doing that sort of stuff. But if I was going to resort to brute-force hassling I might as well do it on my terms, with the proceeds going directly to me on a website permanently in my control.

Also as much of a capitalist I am, the phrase "maximize your believer potential" kinda turns my stomach.

Guitartabs.com suspends under legal pressure:

Today I received a certified letter from Moses & Singer LLP, a law firm in New York City which asserts that they are acting as counsel for the National Music Publishers Association and The Music Publishers Association of America. They have stated that guitar tablature hosted on my site violates the copyrights of several of their clients.

Guitar tabs have been under attack for a long while so it's not a big surprise, but it's disappointing. I taught myself how to play my favorite songs way back with guitar tabs off of Gopher.

What's the perfect song for air guitaring? - a lot of interesting suggestions I never would have considered.

Middio - I'm kind of digging this site, basically just a front-end for all the music videos on Youtube.

I'm not sure what's going on with my photo in the Brad Sucks Wikipedia entry. I've been alerted it keeps appearing and disappearing. And I don't want to edit it on my own because I'll also want to talk about what big muscles I have and how irresistible to the ladies I am.

As a follow-up to my recent Where your music money goes post: it now costs $7.29 for me to ship a CD to the UK. Dear god.

My friend Puce asked me to do a guest-chorus on his Songfight Sidefight entry. And that I did. Here's State of Emergency (mp3).

Windows Live Writer Beta 2 - New version of Windows Live Writer, my favorite blogging tool. Overall a very nice update. Page editing and category adding aren't working for me though. [via Scoble]

Last.fm bought by CBS - $280m, congratulations to Last.fm. I assume the site will stagnate and slowly die now like just about every other Web 2.0 site that's been bought.

If you're logged in as a Best Friend Forever, you now get a 10% discount on anything in my Digital Download Store. Hooray!

A few weeks ago our old rotted deck developed a giant gaping hole. There were many other points of decay on this thing so we decided to tear it out and replace it. Here's the old one:

We decided to make it bigger and get rid of a lot of the useless raised part. Here's the finished new one:

In the winter I'll put the barbecue up on the landing for sub-zero degree barbecuing. But right now I'm gonna try not drilling or lifting anything for a while. Should be awesome. More pictures here if you want them.

Here are some photos I have been sent lately:

Gia models her Brad Sucks button and a hand-written note from me.

 

Steve's motorcycle, now with an advertisement for this here website. I'm gonna rake in the hits... from the ladies!

You can now sign up to be my Best Friend Forever. I don't like the sound of fan club or anything else I could think of, so I figured we could just straight up be BFF via you filling out a simple form. (Note: if you already had a forums account, that's now your BFF account.)

It's free of course. And right now it gets you extra music, access to the forums and a super-badass Brad Sucks BFF identification number. I'm hoping to add automatic discounts for CDs and digital downloads in the next couple of weeks.

For a long time I've been wanting to put more experimental stuff online -- stuff that I don't think would make a great first-impression for the majority of visitors, but maybe some people would like. This should give me a place to put that stuff.