It's allergy season so I am a stoned zombie wandering around walking into things and sleeping for twelve hours a night. I sat here staring at the computer today and I think maybe I did absolutely nothing.

Work continues on the album however. There are some great potential album covers in the forum thread with some other sweet ones on the way. I'm trying to think of a way to use the album covers I don't pick for "the one".

Did I mention I'm having recurring nightmares of putting the album out and then nobody buys it and then I get chased by bees? Uhh...

Thinking about selling my guitar amp and switching to running my Boss GT-6 into a keyboard amp (or two). Right now the Behringer K3000FX or the Roland KC350 are the  leading contenders. Sorta leaning towards the Roland because a) I don't know why I'd need 300 watts of guitar and b) I know Behringer stuff will eventually turn to dust in my hands.

I went to IKEA today thinking I might pick up a few things to improve my office: HANNES - I wanted this as a side-table/keyboard stand so I could put my 50 key MIDI keyboard on the pull-out shelf and my little Axiom 25 on the top with room for junk on the side. In person the HANNES was flimsy and ugly and too deep. I would have had to modify it a lot to work for me and the particleboard was so thin I think it'd disintegrate if I took a saw to it. Pass.

DAVE - On the website this looked like a good general use laptop/side-work table. In person it's real wobbly so I didn't get it. I may go back for it, I think the equivalent non-wobbly version from somewhere else would cost at least three times the price. Pass.

BRÄDA - This was pretty much exactly as advertised. Cheap little laptop lap table. Hard on top, cushiony underneath. Also I enjoy the name. Bought.

Also I forgot to look around for a FARTYG.

Time to take stock of my social networking participation.

Twitter - Still updating on Twitter against all odds. Being able to monitor and update it via IM is really all it's got going for it. I've had to start ignoring certain people though because the noise level got too high.

Pownce - I'm really not sure what to do with Pownce. It's nice, but the lack of IM makes me lazy about it. I really like the reply-to-posts feature. I've started experimenting with uploading songs I've been listening to, which is fun but would be way more fun if everyone I knew had access to it.

MySpace - I still log in and add friends who request it and try to reply to messages in there. Spam has reduced from a few months ago so MySpace doesn't bother me much anymore.

Facebook - Even though I only have around 70 friends on there and don't whore it out like MySpace it's rapidly becoming the most annoying social network. Check out what I'm met with when I log on:

Hey Facebook, I've got 1 leave me the fuck alone request for you. Oh and a fortune friend request.

Thanks to everyone for coming out to the Rainbow tonight for the gig. It was a small crowd but there was rock and a girl fell down which is about all I can ask for. Also thank you to the mystery dancing blonde girl. I will always remember the yelled conversation we shared:

"Play another song!"

"Another one? Do you see how sweaty I am?"

"I know, you're disgusting! Play another one!"

(We played another one.) Over and out.

Top 10 Incredible Recordings - exorcisms, Jonestown, first recorded Pope, castratos, first recording of human voices and "the sounds of hell", what more could you ask for?

Because I like money, I was real excited about Amazon's Flexible Payments Service, the new Paypal competitor from Amazon. I was looking forward to adding it to my digital download store, but much like Google Checkout it doesn't support Canadian merchants. Lame.

DIY $10 Ableton Footcontroller (no soldering required) - how to build a foot controller out of a QWERTY keyboard. Pretty simple but neat.

I'm looking to build a two (or three) shelved keyboard stand. Right now I have a keyboard on an X-stand that I often use as a table and I have a small 25 key keyboard that sits in a box because I have nowhere to put it.

Buying a dedicated keyboard stand is way more expensive than you'd think and as it's not moving I don't need to be lightweight and foldable. I thought the Internet would be full of DIY keyboard stands but so far I've only found two:

• A Keyboard Stand on the Cheap - this one's on the right track. I may just extend this out a bit for my purposes.
• $5 Keyboard Stand - keyboard stand out of PVC pipe. I think I'd rather go wood for extra sturdiness and expandability.

Any others out there?

I've committed some updates to the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store:

• thumbnails (in case you want to sell photos/artwork with it)
• fixed the "continue shopping" link
• stopped paypal from opening in a new window or tab (transactions should all happen within one now)
• added some totals to the admin page

Here it is on Google Code.

Question on Ask Metafilter: Why do people prefer music from their teenage years? A lot of great, thoughtful replies. I've thought about this a lot before, but this one was sort of new to me (though it's obvious now that I think about it):

So when you're a young adult and your mind really opens up to the musical experience, you get to hear all these things in different combinations for the first time. You might never learn intellectually what a chord progression or a key change or syncopation are, or various other bits of music theory and song-construction, but your mind is absorbing them and learning about them intuitively. So when you hit your thirties you don't have the vocabulary to describe exactly why a new single the kids love doesn't excite you (e.g. "Oh, that's a I-IV-I-V chord progression and a key change one whole tone higher for the last chorus"). But subconsciously your brain recognizes that it's heard that combination of building blocks several times before, only with someone else singing and different effects on the guitars.

I assume the phenomenon has to do with new experiences + hormones + independence.

The double CD ccMixter Brad Sucks remix compilation is finally out! Links: CD 1, CD 2.

ccMixter is a website where artists can upload source files under Creative Commons licenses so that other artists can remix them free of legal worries. Their community has been very kind to me.

Like everything I seem to do, this compilation took way too long to put together but it has somehow struggled its way into daylight.

Thanks of course to all the talented remixers, Magnatune, ccMixter, Victor Stone in particular for his help and Katie Sekelsky for the awesome album art.

This isn't the first remix album for I Don't Know What I'm Doing, but it'll be the last I work on. Other I Don't Know What I'm Doing remix albums that I know of:

• I Don't Know What I'm Doing Remixed
• I Don't Know What I'm Doing Either (MC Jack in the Box vs. Brad Sucks)

I know there are a few other full-album remix projects out there in various states of completion so let me know if I'm missing anything.

Thanks to Scott Lamb of DeathBoy for pointing out that the MP3s of I Don't Know What I'm Doing for oh I don't know, forever, had little glitches at the end of most of the files. They're all fixed now but that was a pretty lame oversight on my part.

I'm trying to find a way to spice up my t-shirt selection. I've got a bunch of ideas chicken-scratched out but I'm no artist. I thought it would be nice to find people who could turn those into viable designs. I looked on Spreadshirt and Threadless but came up empty.

Mr. Coulton recently had a post about a collaborative t-shirt design site. Which would be sweet but is obviously a pretty rough thing to set up dealing with paying out royalties all the time.

I'd be satisfied if there was simply a site with talented t-shirt artists I could buy designs off of easily.

Here is a chronicling of some items I purchased recently:

ALLSOP Mouse pad - For many years I've been using a mouse pad with a wrist-rest on it. In fact it's been the same one, so it's nasty and gross and needs replacing. The new one has a feature called "memory foam". This is code for "if you use the wrist-rest for more than half an hour, it squashes down under your wrist and no longer provides enough support". Awful.

Belkin WaveRest Keyboard Wrist Support - I wanted to replace my rusty roller-based wrist-wrest and the only one they had in Staples that wasn't some retarded hot/cold gel pack was this one. It's not high enough, my wrists sink down into the gel, it doesn't fit on my (admittedly a little weird) IKEA Jerker desk the way my old one did. Awful.

APC 650VA - After 11 days of rain and thunderstorms and power brownouts, I finally invested in a UPS / battery backup for the Linux box in the basement. It seems to work great and the forecast is coincidentally showing sunny weather for the rest of the week. Great!

I just pulled a few false positives out of my spam filter but I'm not sure I got them all. If you haven't gotten a reply from me, please try again.

1,500 plus CPDRC inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines at practice! This is not the final routine, and definitely not a punishment! just a teaser.

Miro - formerly Democracy now 1.0 and renamed. Very nice open source internet tv / video player.

This CNN article goes over the recent sales of a lot of older/classic albums which is pretty interesting. Here are the sales numbers they mention for 2006:

Back in Black (AC/DC)	440,000
Cross Road (Bon Jovi)	324,000
Christmas Eve and Other Stories (The Trans-Siberian Orchestra)	289,000
Metallica (Metallica)	275,000
Number Ones (Michael Jackson)	162,000
Nevermind (Nirvana)	143,000
Appetite for Destruction (Guns N' Roses)	113,000
OK Computer (Radiohead)	94,000
The Soft Bulletin (The Flaming Lips)	38,000
Paul's Boutique (Beastie Boys)	22,000
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Public Enemy)	15,000
Millennium (The Backstreet Boys)	9,000
Mariah Carey (Mariah Carey)	5,000
1982 (Asia)	5,000

My conclusion from this data: Back in Black is a very popular album.

Ronald Jenkees, YouTube star, keyboard wizard and all-round nice guy has a new album out. He's using my Digital Download Store and that is awesome. Helping artists earn money is pretty satisfying. 

I fixed a few store bugs and installation glitches in the process of helping him set it up so I'll update it soon. Very cool to see people using it.

Did an interview with Amber MacArthur for CityTV and her show Webnation. She's super nice though the interview was marred by my crappy webcam, power brown-outs due to thunderstorm and general internet retardation. Regardless it'll be on tonight around 8:20 or something, hopefully they can cobble something together from my stammering.

Update: the piece is here, thanks Amber!