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!

Apple's little problem with ripping off artists - A list of Apple's marketing rip-off offenses. I'm not sure why they don't get more heat for this as Apple is loved by the artsy types.

The White Glove Tracking project is done. I did a few frames a few months ago:

On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively.

There are already some visualizations, very neat stuff.

Quiltsrÿche - Metal quilts. "Bangover" is my favorite.

As a follow-up to my hard drive terror I guess I'm now in a full-blown Windows apocalypse. I was fairly sure it was the power supply crapping out on me and it was only crashing during the night, so I was waiting till this week to get a new one. Then yesterday it rebooted in the middle of doing something. Then would only give me an "lsass.exe - System Error Object Name not found" error and reboot when I hit OK. Much research and fiddling hasn't righted things so I think my Windows is just toast.

Anyway if I'm extra slow to answer your emails that is why.

Canada Day celebration on Parliament Hill was good, packed full of people and the fireworks were fantastic. Most of the entertainment was a little too American Idol for me but Feist was great. Too bad she was only allowed three songs.

Hey happy Canada Day everyone, even if you don't happen to be of the Canadian persuasion. I'll be down around Parliament Hill today gathering data for Operation Don't Get a Hangover. I will report my findings.

June 29, 1888: Handel Oratorio Becomes First Musical Recording - it was called Israel in Egypt and Biblelicious.

Scott has some great ideas for Music 2.0 services. I've been meaning to write up mine for a while as I've learned I'm too busy to launch any new sites.

My big idea lately is one I've been meaning to pitch to Magnatune:

Independent record labels should provide hook-ups to their artists for services such as graphic design, manufacturing, merchandise, booking, bio-writing, press kits, photography, advertising, PR and more. These are all things artists will pay for but it's hard to weed through the scams and overpriced poor quality services out there.

The record label would find quality professionals to perform these services at a reasonable price. Record label makes itself valuable to the artists by simplifying their lives, record label takes a cut or referral fee from each service transaction, artist has access to quality resources to improve their career, sells more music, everybody's happy.

Woke up this morning to my desktop machine frozen on the Windows boot-up screen. I hit a key and it rebooted. What the. Let it go through, it froze again. Tried safe mode, froze again. And a second time. Uh oh.

Tried some rescue LiveCD rescue stuff, maybe my Windows install was just barfed. My hard drive seemed to be gone. I fearfully checked the state of my backups -- was pleasantly surprised to see they were intact. Also Gmail meant my email still worked and Google Browser Sync meant I had all my bookmarks and cookies on my laptop. Sweet.

I started going through the motions of getting a replacement hard drive, rebooted the desktop again for kicks and everything worked fine. "Windows has recovered from a serious error." I'll say.

Hard drive on the way out? Power supply dying? Heat? I don't know but that was a dumb way to kill a couple hours.

And the award for "most annoying music loop used in a Flash product demo" goes to Creative for the Zen Stone Plus! Way to go guys! You've driven me insane!

Seriously though, you make audio products. Let's show some hustle.