This past Friday was the occasion of my birth. I am now old enough that I wasn’t sure what age I’d be turning. Thanks for all the kind wishes.

I am in “crunch mode” for the Denver show on Thursday. I am also “nervous”. This’ll be only my third solo show but it’ll also be the first one where I’m not doing my own sound.  So maybe that will be good? Maybe I have nothing to worry about?

Very much enjoyed this video for Dropping out of School that Brian Ross just sent me:

Clowns++

Ugh, so busy. I didn’t even blog about Halloween. Here are some shots:

We were kind of busy (and lazy) this year so we didn’t really get up to a lot of the ideas we had. But I got to play with my jigsaw and made this witch and cat:

The resulting shadow was pretty good, though the cat didn’t show up very well:

My costume turned out nicely. This flash photo doesn’t really do it justice:

I’m really not much for scaring kids so what I would do instead of jumping at them or anything was stand completely still. The kids would see me and know something wasn’t quite right and they’d stare and stare. And I’d stare back at them and they’d just be completely unnerved, thinking something was going to happen I guess. And it seems I’m okay with doing that to children as I feel no remorse.

There are some upcoming Brad Sucks shows:

November 7th & 8th: Playing two nights at Kelly’s Welcome in Manotick, ON. Full band.

November 20th: The Bluebird Theater in Denver, Colorado. Solo.

There’s a pretty good possibility I’ll be doing some touring in the new year, so be sure to put yourself down on the map on my live page.

Hey, Out of It is now in the iTunes Music Store! (thanks Jesse)

Why it’s $9.90 instead of $9.99 is a mystery to me, but whatever.

Also I noticed this censored auto-complete hilarity when I searched for it:

Oh Apple.

One of the best tech things I saw at Zap Your PRAM was this TinEye Music app for the iPhone. You take a photo of album art with the iPhone and TinEye identifies the album and looks it up in iTunes.

I was totally skeptical so we tried it out on my CD, taking this fairly crappy photo:

And bam:

I was impressed. Image search/recognition tech usually works great inside a pre-defined catalog of images but tends to fail in the wild.

Later on I got a demo of the newest version of the iPhone app and it worked just as well but also had Allmusic, Youtube and Wikipedia links for me. Crazy neat. Thanks to Suzanne for showing it to me!

State Shirt has a new album called This is Old and it’s available for pre-order now.

I managed to get my store dealy running for him but mercy it was a rough ride. I had hoped to open source all my latest additions (variable pricing, wordpress integration, etc) but I don’t think I have the time to put into it. If anyone wants to take the lead on that feel free to get in touch.

Holy cow, Zap Your PRAM was great. It would take some sort of endless series of biographical novels to explain it all.

Basically it was roughly 50 super interesting people (and me) in a beautiful historical Prince Edward Island cottage slash hotel. All passionate, all thoughtful, all interesting, no shills. Even (maybe especially) when I didn’t think their fields of expertise were things I was interested in, I wound up being fascinated.

Thanks to the adorable silverorange team for all the hospitality and amazing dessert per day ratio. I don’t know that there’s a nicer group of people to have yell “bum sex” at you on the street.

I was nervous about giving my first ever talk/presentation but it seemed to go well and lots of people said nice things about it. It was both awesome and intimidating to be talking to such a knowledgeable crowd. Seems like it’d be easier to talk to dumbasses, but the feedback wouldn’t be as rewarding.

For a general list of what went on, Stephen DesRoches has an excellent write-up and some beautiful photos.

My camera actually died as I sat in the Ottawa airport getting ready to go. So all I have is a crappy cell phone picture of the metal cow in the Charlottetown airport. Which is above.

I’m off to the Zap Your PRAM conference this weekend. It should be some awesome nerdy maritime fun and I’m really looking forward to it. Regular conferences have a little too much desperation going on and this one feels like it’ll be more of a bunch of like-minded (but not too like-minded) folks hanging out.

Matt Haughey from Metafilter was supposed to be going but I guess he’s not now which makes me sad. At least now I won’t have to drunkenly confess about how many ideas I’ve stolen from him. So I can tell that to Daniel Burka (Digg designer), and Cal Henderson (Flickr architect) instead.

I’m giving a presentation on Friday I’m maybe calling “A Brief History of a Song” where I tell the story of one of my songs — from the initial idea to its recording and release and to some of the crazy adventures it gets up to when it’s out of my hands. It’s been something that’s been on my mind for a while so I’m looking forward to getting it out. of my system.

Out of It’s travelling around out there, which rules! A brief recap:

• I’m a Featured Commoner on the Creative Commons blog.
• There’s a Jamendo feature.
• There’s a Q&A with me over on ccMixter.
• I did an interview for the Command Line podcast.
• Wil Wheaton likes it!

Remixes and stuff:

• There are a good number of remixes going on over at ccMixter. Still going through them to find the gems – finding listening to my voice difficult.
• This partial-Flash video for Certain Death makes me happy.
• Athene (best paladin in the world) is using the new songs!
• I’m behind in updating the music info page but will get on that soon.

Extra places you can get it:

• Out of It is now on Amazon.com. It’s out of stock right now but I shipped off some more a week ago so it should be up soon.
• It’s on Magnatune now.
• It’s on Jamendo.
• It’s been delivered to Napster, Rhapsody, Amie Street, Apple iTunes and eMusic (and a few other I’ve never heard of) but when they put it online is up to them. Let me know if you spot it.
• Out of stock at CD Baby but should be back in soon.
• A bunch of the new tracks are on iLike, if you’re into adding stuff to Facebook and so on.
• The whole album’s up on Last.fm as well.
• My MySpace page has been updated with new songs also.

There are a lot of things I’m missing, but this will have to do for now.