Rock Band Drumming Blisters

My buddy Jeff has PS3, and recently bought Rock Band. I had heard of the game, but had never before seen it nor played it. Since I own a drumset (it's a crappy piece of crappy crap drumset, but it's a drumset), I thought it would be fun to try my meager skills with Rock Band.

It's not just "fun," it's musical videogaming heroin.

I played three or four songs on the "easy" level at Jeff's house, then turned the Rock Band drumset over to our friend Jerry. He's an accomplished drummer, and it was a blast seeing him knocking out song after song on the "hard" level.

Jeff was going away for a few days, so he let me bring it home to play with my younger son Joe. Yesterday morning at about 10:00 Joe picked up the guitar and I ensconced myself behind the drumset. We played for hours and hours.

I have a fresh blister on my right thumb. Apparently I grip the sticks differently when I'm playing the Rock Band drumset than when I play a real kit. Those previously calloused areas on my fingers either didn't bother me at all, or they weren't used.

By 4:00 yesterday afternoon Joe was playing the "hard" level guitar in the high 80% range, and I was scoring 95%+ on the "medium" drums. I tried "hard" on a couple of songs, but was embarrassingly tired by the time I felt competent enough with the songs. Now I really can understand why even the world's greatest drummers never play rock and roll for six hours straight. I was soaking wet, my back was killing me, and I was having a hard time holding onto the sticks during fast sections.

This morning I saw a story on G4's Attack of the Show, entitled "Are Rock Band Drums Like Real World Drums?" Based solely on the title, I thought there was no way it's accurate. Well, well, well. Imagine my surprise when the host, "who regularly gets 98 to 99 percent on expert drums in Coheed and Cambria’s Welcome Home, put that theory to the test... He met with Coheed and Cambria and substituted for the real drummer!"

The host knocked the song out of the park. I wonder if I could convince Aerosmith to let me sit in for Joey Kramer on "Train Kept a Rollin'?"

Disclaimer: No, this is not me playing. To see how hard this gets, fast forward to around the 3:40 mark. I can play this poorly on the "hard" level (around 83%), but this guy is playing nearly perfectly on "expert" level.

Stevie Ray Vaughan Little Wing

This is a short post, tossed up impulsively. The greatest song of all time is "Little Wing" by Steve Ray Vaughan. End of discussion.

The Tiresome Motorcycle Debate - Perception Versus Quality

"In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." -- Alfred Lord Tennyson

Love of once again riding the motorcycle! Today marks the beginning of spring, and so I offer this lighthearted take on the advent of the next seven months of motorcycling.

There are only two classifications in the motorcycling world: You ride, or you don't. That being said, there are very passionate and hotly debated stereotypes in the motorcycling community. Harley riders are "cool," BMW riders are well educated elitist purists, and Honda riders are misguided idiots that want to put one foot in each camp.

I ride a Honda Valkyrie. I don't just want to put in each camp, I know that I have the best of both worlds. My bike has six cylinders, six independent carbs, a shaft drive, a seat more comfortable than my office chair, the power to beat all but the most high performance cars on the road, the nimbleness to tear through hairpin curves with ease, and unbeatable dependability. Oh, and yes, it sounds throaty and intimidating -- but that's not why I ride.

As stated previously on "the old blog," I don't care what you ride. You ride, therefore you have my respect. At the two or three charity rides in which I participate each year there are bikes that look like they cost $75,000 and bikes that are barely road worthy. If you saddle up and twist the throttle, great. From my experiences at these gatherings (sometimes of a thousand bikes and more), people are very interested and appreciative of my Valkyrie. Forget performance on the road -- it just looks big and mean. Harley guys give their respect and say it must be awesome to ride, but they just can't get beyond their devotion to the Harley brand, even though unbiased journalists and riders all agree it's a better product.

Kind of sounds like me talking about my passion for the Apple Macintosh? Sorry ... that was off topic.

My buddy Jeff forwarded a funny PowerPoint show which had a picture of a Harley and a Valkyrie. There were buttons to elicit the sound of a Harley (a rumbling engine rev) and a Valkyrie (the opening sequence to the infamous "crazy frog" ding a ding ding tune). I laughed good naturally. It was creative, so I give credit where credit is due.

Although it took me ten minutes, I diligently copied and pasted every e-mail address from the dozens of people in the forward trail ... and sent a retort. Below is a fair representation of the PPT file I sent in response, entitled "The REAL Harley Versus Honda Sounds."

You can see it here. Please forgive the amateurish PowerPoint presentation, but I merely replaced the sound files.

Gorgeous Architectural Decomposition

As I've mentioned many times on this blog and "the old one," I am fascinated by places off the beaten path. With an unlimited budget I'd visit obscure islands, remote parts of the globe, and abandoned sites. Recently I hit the motherlode for abandoned sites. I've spent hours living vicariously trotting the globe thanks to "Motts," Opacity's creator.

Opacity is incredible. Forget about the crappy sites you might have seen on Tripod or other equally antiquated Internet locations. His passion for exploring abandoned sites, and the effort he puts into providing you with at least a little bit of history of his explorations, is alone worth a perusal of the site. But if you appreciate truly amazing photography, then prepare to have an unparalleled experience.

The TSA thought a MacBook Air was suspicious

This morning's CNET Macintosh Download Dispatch featured an interesting story of a businessman who, traveling with his MacBook Air, was detained by the TSA. The reason? TSA agents are trained to look for a hard drive when viewing laptops under x-ray.

The MacBook Air can be configured with a 64GB solid-state drive. No traditional hard disk. TSA presumed it was a suspicious piece of equipment (perhaps a bomb?) and the businessman was eventually released, but missed his flight.

I'm standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me. "There's no drive," one says. "And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be," she continues.

You can read his first person account here.

Cool Wiki Page

I've always enjoyed reading about places which are far off the beaten path. The farther off the path, the better. On "the old blog" I wrote about obscure little islands, abandoned buildings, and a ghost town or two.

Today I discovered a page on Wikipedia adeptly entitled "Extreme points of the United States."

If I had a zillion dollars, my kids were grown and gone, and my wife would either come with me or allow me to do it, I would absolutely love to organize the ultimate travel adventure: visit all four of the most extreme points of the United States.

Cool Flash Game

Uphill Rush is one of the best Flash games to which I've been introduced in a long time.