Hey, we did that show in Toronto a while ago and it was good I think. I lost my jacket and gloves, I remember that part. Since then I've been reading about and practicing cognitive behavioral therapy (my favorite cognitive distortions: magnification and jumping to conclusions). I've been working at jobs for money and also working on music and recording and looking for fun new projects. Some of what I've been up to:

1) I have about 18 Brad Sucks demos I'm working on. Not sure what'll happen to them just yet. Post them online? New album? Singles? I don't know what the right thing to do is in this crazy new future.

2) I helped record a live performance of Chef Bruce and The Burning Sensations at his cool place called The Branch in my home town. On Saturday I saw Jim Bryson there and his lyrics and songs made me cry a little. Uggghhh emotions, why do they exist, what are they even for.

3) I helped my friend c.layne do the Dodged a Bullet Songfight which is apparently still in progress. c wrote and did all the hard work on the song, I just gussied it up a bit.

4) Today I'm wrapping up a quick last-minute song for Astroloco -- an upcoming adventure game about space trains (trains in space!!) that you can vote for on Steam Greenlight here. I was really into adventure games as a kid, particularly the funny ones like Space Quest and Monkey Island, so it's fun to be involved in that even only slightly at the very end.

That's all I can remember. Catch you later.

Anyone using the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store (BSDDS) should probably upgrade to the new 0.50 release. I haven't been working on it at all but thanks to the power of open source I've been receiving some contributions. These ones are thanks to Geoff Kassel (geoff at kassel dot id dot au):

• made the store easier to customize - including currency settings, messages, and available payment methods
• the store is now in standards-compliant HTML 4.01
• added support for new file formats so that the store can sell e-books
• preliminary support for per-product shipping pricing
• debug code can now be toggled
• logging output can now be customized and toggled
• the admin login page now redirects automatically to the main admin page on a successful login
• the button and logo for a payment method is displayed only if that method is enabled
• improved security
• improved code documentation
• consistently formatted code

Thanks again Geoff.

I've mentioned here before that I'm working on a poppy concept album called Guess Who's a Mess. I'm releasing the demos as I go along like I did on my first record, but I'm going a step further and releasing the instrumentals and vocals as well. They're all on the album page now.

You're welcome to mess around with them however you want. Please send me a link to anything you do - when I'm done the demos I'll be looking to see if there's anything I want to include on the finished record and then I'll be in touch (so including a working email address would be a bonus.)

Been hacking around trying to get some nifty synced visualization stuff going. Best (and cheapest) visualization seems to be Milkdrop in Winamp, so I got it responding to MIDI signals sent from Ableton Live on another machine. Here's a quick demo:

I'd like to be able to trigger video clips next, then I'm not sure about combining them all onto one display and swapping between them.

Finally got around to adding a radial email address finder to my Mappy Email Signup app. Mappy Email lets visitors/fans select their locations on a map and save their email addresses. So you can contact them only when you're in the area (which is more polite). It's basically an open source Eventful.com that doesn't hang all your contacts up in a third party.

The new version finally has a page (/admin/) where you can specify a radius (in kilometers), click the map and see all the email addresses that are within that area. So you can paste them into whatever mailing list app you're using.

Previously, on Twitter:

Neighbor agreed to give me the Vindicators arcade cabinet on his front porch "as long as I don't tell his kids". Kekeke.

And now this is in my driveway:

 

Kekeke.

I just uploaded v0.20 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Some small changes and one big one. It now supports Amazon's Flexible Payments Service:

Of course I can't actually offer it on my website as Amazon doesn't offer the service in Canada. So that's pretty weak. But for all you Americans: go nuts.

Update: I've pushed out v0.22 of the BSDDS, fixing a batch of bugs.

Minor update to Gimme Some Money, the object donation script. Just a formatting issue with the Javascript widget that should make installation less annoying.

For the past year I've been thinking a lot about solo guitar interfaces. One of the challenges with being a guitarist and playing solo is that both hands are almost constantly busy with the guitar and your feet are usually busy with pedals. Doesn't leave a lot of other options.

I've thought up a lot of ways the guitar as an interface could be improved or augmented and the simplest idea seems like it would be to put a bunch of easily accessible buttons in the guitar and have those buttons simulate keystrokes on my laptop. How hard could that be? Let's see.

Step one:

I ordered some Seimitsu PS-14 arcade buttons. A lot of the buttons I found were wayyyy too deep (such as these) but these ones looked like they might not go all the way through my guitar and halfway into my torso while playing.

I also impulse bought an Arduino. The Arduino is awesome but turning button presses into keyboard strokes isn't really its main deal. So I ordered an I-PAC VE which is dedicated entirely to simulating keyboard controls.

 

Step two:

Months later when the I-PAC finally arrived, I wired up the buttons and the board and it all worked on the first try. I made a little cardboard stand for testing:

But it doesn't look like there's much testing to do, it's pretty brain dead easy. I had it entering keystrokes on the computer and triggering clips in Ableton Live within minutes. Windows XP even recognized the I-PAC without any additional drivers, very nice.

Step three:

Where should the buttons go on the guitar? I put some cut-out circles on it to see where they'd fit and be most useful:

This is the layout I'm thinking of right now. There's a lot to take into consideration, such as:

1. Ease of access while playing (the upper right ones seem close enough I'd be able to hit them with only a brief pause in playing)
2. Staying away from locations where accidental hits are likely (the right side is where my arm is while playing)
3. Making sure I don't interfere with any of the guitar's guts
4. Keeping them far enough away from the edge that I don't weaken and collapse it

Right now I'm wondering if I should try to house the circuit board inside the guitar and run a USB cable from the guitar to my laptop or should I run the wires from the buttons to the external I-PAC which would be by the laptop? I do not know.

I've open-sourced my little Google Maps email signup gizmo that I use on my live page and when visitors sign up for things (blogged about it here and here.) You can grab the script here:

Brad's Mappy Email Signup (google code project)

It's another quick and dirty project from Brad Labs, cleaned up a bit from my implementation of it. But it's been working very nicely and I'm super happy to have the data for live show planning purposes instead of relying on Eventful as a middle-man.

That wasn't too miserable. v0.06 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store is up with a pretty big overhaul:

• bsdds has its own shopping cart now instead of using paypal's -- should allow alternate payment methods
• zero dollar downloads
• buyer/downloader is now redirected to the download page post-transfer if PDT is turned on in paypal preferences)

The shopping cart needs some CSS love but that'll have to wait as I got things to do.

Just uploaded a new version of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Two big changes:

• No longer requires Amazon S3. Your store files can be local and links will expire after your given duration (mod_rewrite required).
• Variable prices via text input. Previously variable prices could only be selected via a pre-defined list in the drop down. Now buyers can specify whatever they want as long as it's more than zero.

Next stuff I'll be adding:

• Integrate a shopping cart I wrote so that other payment options are possible (Google Checkout/VISA/etc).
• Handle zero dollar downloads.

Hooray for work!

Last Halloween was our first time trying to go all out on the decorations. This year we extended it out a bunch and improved a lot of little things. Some photos:

Everything went over real good. The black light where we gave out the candy was a big hit. We wound up dragging a big mirror out so that kids could see themselves glowing and they really dug that. You can see more pictures here if you're interested.