Had to get one last week-long sickness out of my system before the album release. Ahhh much better.

The pre-orders are all ready to go and will be in the mail this week! Thanks to everyone who's ordered one, it slightly counter-balances the release dread I feel.

Also: everything seems to be happening according to schedule. Crazy!

Welp, my Fake It cliche video project is officially a success. Oh we still don't have enough videos, no no. But this was created:

And by any measure it is now a success.

(But I would very much still like more entries. )

So the dark, paralyzing fear of having a new album coming out shortly is that maybe nobody will listen to it! So I pose you this question:

If you were (or are) an independent musician with a very limited budget and a new alternative/rock-style album scheduled for release in a few weeks, where and how would you promote it?

I'm mostly looking for places/people to send/pitch it to, but I'll appreciate more elaborate or imaginative suggestions.

A long time ago I was interviewed for a book called the Indie Band Survival Guide by some nice fellas. It's published and available to buy now. I didn't know what to expect, but I got a copy in the mail the other day and am impressed.

It's real thorough and just the Internet stuff alone would be valuable to any musician trying to wrap their head around this web thing. Plus I run my big mouth off in it.

Well, there were some real good last-minute submissions for the Fake It cliche video project (thank you!). But I think we need more to make a truly cliche video so I'm going to extend the deadline out for another month (September 15th). And I'll try to dream up some way to force more people to submit with my mind powers.

It's been a big couple of days here at Brad Sucks HQ (aka my house). Besides picking up the Out of It CDs (which look SWEET), my songs have been in a condom ad:

Someone sent me this Barack Obama / Work Out Fine mashup which actually works pretty good:

http://www.nevilo.com/content/listen.html (third song down)

I don't like to get involved in American politics really but VOTE FOR OBAMA. VOTE. FOR. OBAMA. VOTEFOROBAMA.

And the hottest new iPhone/iPod Touch app called Simplify Media which allows you to stream your media (and your friends' media) to your iPhone/iPod Touch has my stuff all over its promotional materials:

I don't have an iPhone or iPod Touch but this makes me want one.

This is the stuff I can't really explain to people when they ask me how to promote themselves on the Internet. “Uh, be all slutty with your music and then weird shit will happen?” HOW WILL YOU MONETIZE IT BRAD. “I don't know?”

The CD Release Party for Out of It is booked and officially on September 5^th at Cafe Dekcuf in the city of Ottawa. Times and bands are still TBD, though I am practically guaranteed to be there and drinking heavily. But you are super invited and hey, you could pick up a copy of the CD three days before the release date! What a coincidence that is! This will also likely be the last show as a regular old three piece rock band. It's been super fun, but I can't resist putting a computer in the live show and electronifying things and making us prone to tech problems. Anyway, I hope to see you there.

Holy cow, there's only a week left until the submission deadline for “the most cliche video ever” video for Fake It. So far there are only TWO submissions! Set sail for failure!

I'm not sure if it's apathy or shyness or what. So… I guess we'll see how this last week goes. And maybe I'll try to find my rocker wig.

The new version of social bookmarking site Delicious launched last week and overall I'm impressed. Search is snappier, the design is slicker and they didn't ruin it by taking out nerdy features like tag intersections. Delicious and Wikipedia are the only two sites that give Google a run for their money for search for me so I'm happy to see it treated well.

That being said, there were a few UI decisions I didn't care for and have created a Greasemonkey script to fix. Here's the before:

And here's Delicious with my tweaks:

My changes are:

• I bolded the link titles. I found them too hard to skim, which is largely what I do on Delicious.
• I turned the link URLs a light grey. For some reason the URLs were the easiest part to read for me and also just about the least important information.
• I coloured visited links purple. At least to my eyes, visited links on the new Delicious are only the slightest bit fainter than the regular colour. This makes it hard to know at a glance which links you've already visited, which is a pain especially when you're searching.

There are a few other changes I'd love to make, but my Greasemonkey skills are not the strongest:

• Tags should be moved to the left. They're the third most useful information to me (after titles and a description – which often isn't there), but your eye has to travel to the right to see them.
• Make the link counts easier to skim. The shades of blue they use for say, numbers 17 and 794 are barely different from each other. When I'm searching, I want to quickly know what the most popular links are.

I may get used to these issues, I'm a pretty fussy dude. But it's been a few days and I still find they slow me down. Anyway, it's still a good redesign and congratulations to the team for transitioning to it smoothly. There was no downtime that I noticed and the new site hasn't lost any functionality that I enjoyed before. Good stuff!

Well, that was a huge amount of stress about audio junk 99% of humans will never notice or care about. What a world.

The master for Out of It is as done as I can make it be and will be heading into manufacturing tomorrow. After this all I can do is regret. Party time!

A friend of mine's been doing great weekly dance mixes at Lowpass – DJ. He's got a podcast feed now. It makes me look forward to exercising.

You can buy I Don't Know What I'm Doing in FLAC format again (click 'more buying options'). Out of It will be available in FLAC as well when it's released.

Finished up all the Out of It mixes yesterday, moving on to mastering now. Actually I wouldn't say “finished” I'd say more “gave up and decided to move on with my life”. Here's hoping that's close enough.

Album artwork is submitted to the manufacturer, deposit placed on weary credit card. Found out Digipaks take 4-5 weeks instead of 2-3 as I originally thought, though luckily I scheduled out the timeline with a few weeks to spare.

Thanks to everyone who's been pre-ordering, it's nice to know this isn't all for nothing.

Haven't gotten too many submissions for the Fake It cliche video yet, but this one from Einar is awesome:

Yours doesn't have to be as professional looking of course, the more amateur the funnier.

Here's a pre-release single off Out of It: Fake It [MP3]

Also: I'm looking for help making the most cliché music video ever for it. Help!

I love Gmail. Conversation views, labels, keyboard macros and super fast search – it makes my life easier. One thing I also love are the email contact groups. It's like tagging for humans and I love to categorize the people who email me (podcaster, blogger, fan, booker, musician, artist, family, mortal enemy, etc). But it's not as easy to group people as it should be. Here's my easy to read prototype that I'd appreciate you forward to anyone you know at Google:

Instead of having to mouse over a contact name, get that card to show up, click More, click Contact Details, click Groups and select the group, instead I propose that all that be right in that popup. Amazing idea! I'm a genius!

Anyway, I'm sorry for the tone of voice. It's mostly due to the hour I just wasted trying to get Greasemonkey to do exactly this. I love you Gmail, I could never stay mad at you.

Barring act of god, the second Brad Sucks album -- Out of It -- will be released Monday September 8th, 2008. And then I will explode into dust. It's available for pre-ordering now. There's also a preview with clips from the songs you might want to check out. That's all on the Out of It album page.

I'm pretty nervous about this release. Rather than the long production time solidifying my choices and decisions I think it's made me even less secure than usual. I hope people like it -- OR ELSE I'M DOOMED.

David points to this Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable on Amazon. The tags are wonderful. A small sampling:

snake oil (383)
ripoff (338)
waste of money (314)
throwing your money away (287)
unconscionable (267)
stupid (231)
immoral (204)
pure garbage (202)
cheat (191)
denon (50)
harry potter (47)
astronomically dumb (5)
tax on the stupid (5)
as effective as using dog hair (4)
fraud (4)
nonsense (4)
rofl (4)
time space (4)
wizards_made_th is (4)
a fine product indeed (3)
cable (3)
ftl (3)
how do they get through the door with ba... (3)
pt barnum (3)
shameful (3)
wtf (3)
59 inches (2)
audiofool hardware (2)
bogus (2)
corporate taxation of the uneducated (2)
cures cancer (2)
ecstacy godlike troll-killing superwmd u... (2)
eternal life (2)
ether-licious (2)

I've had a hate-on for “high-end” cables for a long time so this is wonderful to me. [via Joho]

(Made with the I Don't Know What I'm Doing lyrics and wordle)

Years after I probably should have released them, here are all the instrumentals from I Don't Know What I'm Doing: [60mb ZIP]

I've been getting a lot of requests lately (even though the full source is available) so I finally rendered them all out.

Update: Fixed the link (I'm a dummy).