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.

Joystiq has a collection of videos of people playing the Monkey Island theme song. I don't think any live up to how awesome the actual song is, but it's nice to see it getting respect.

Other notable classic game themes I can think of are Star Control 2 and Ultima 7.

I guess I can see why Youtube is worth 1.65 billion dollars.

• Google Reader
  The new Google Reader redesign is totally sweet. I switched from Bloglines and doubt I'll be going back. (Things they should add: make it quicker to categorize feeds, integrate Google bookmarks.)
• Windows Live Writer
  This is the best blogging client I've used. I can't get the style detection working properly, but even without that I'm real happy.
• MIDI-OX
  I've been setting up my MIDI keyboard for live use and MIDI-OX is indeed "the world's greatest all-purpose MIDI utility". Great for MIDI diagnostic, filtering and mapping.

Rob Hampton from A Guitar Teacher's Lesson Notebook posted some great advice on how to make a living teaching guitar. Surprisingly most of his advice focuses on using the internet.

Splice is a web-based audio-remixer. Basically a light-weight sequencer that lets you remix other people's tracks and import Creative Commons licensed audio clips. Also has lots of social network love as well. It's pretty cool -- the sequencer is sort of annoying for me to use but that's probably due to years of Cubase usage.

Any show that's preceded by me locking my keys in my car (while it's running, even) is dead to me. The locksmith showed up in about ten minutes though so that was all right. $53 later and half an hour later I made it there in time for sound check. Other than that, we had a pretty good show last night, though I was in a bad mood about my dumbness.

Okay maybe a Bollywood version of Michael Jackson's Thriller video is the greatest thing ever:

I just don't know anymore.

It's the second year in this house and I guess we've relaxed enough about bills and renovations to think about doing some hardcore Halloween decorating. This year we're going to damage some kids' minds.

Here's the coffin we built:

That took about three hours and $15. And this is the body of the scarecrow -- we still need the head and to dress it up a bunch, but it's off to a good start:

I'm predicting all time lows in candy giving. But there's still a lot of work to go.

Due to, uh, the Chinese, I've had to put a little thang in place to block multiple mp3 downloads from the same IP. For some reason certain IPs (and most of them Chinese) would suddenly swamp my server for no reason grabbing every mp3 at the same time, ruining everything for everyone.

So anyway, if you have trouble with the limits please let me know.