Rorschach.net

The TED foundation (Technolgy, Entertaiment, Design) brings together prominent speakers from all walks of life to provide 15 minute presentations on their ideas. The majority of those talks are available for download through iTunes or directly from ted.com. For every inane video you download from YouTube and it’s ilk you owe it to yourself to watch one of these presentations.

I was drawn to it because Will Wright was talking about software toys and his latest game Spore, but since that first video I’ve watched talks on science, weather, art, Africa, culture, etc. etc. It’s a beatuiful use of the Internet and I find a lot of inspiration and thought starters in areas outside of technology.

I highly recommend browsing the site and grabbing some videos. For myself I’ve signed up on iTunes and get new presentations downloaded to my iPod every week.

I spent the majority of last week in class studying to retake my certification test this upcoming Sunday. I had a nice weekend. I finally got past the synth solo in Rock Band on “The Hand that Feeds” on hard difficulty for guitar by finger tapping on the solo frets with both hands. I played some ET:Quake Wars with my brothers and finished the single player in Crysis. It was a good weekend for games.

Sunday I went into work for a few hours to provide support for a big go-live. It was uneventful from our end which was good. I was able to get home in time to hang out with the wife and brother-in-law to see the Chargers lose their football game.

This week is about catching up at work and getting some studying in for the big test on Sunday.

Second time was the charm. My second Rock Band Stratocaster works very well. I’ve begun a solo tour on Hard difficulty for guitar but I can’t get past the “solo” in The Hand That Feeds. I’ve dropped into practice mode and can get up to 80% speed, but 90% and full speed still results in a bucket of fail.

I’ve already completed a solo tour on vocals at Medium difficulty, so now I’m going for Expert. I forsee a problem though since you need to hit the note pretty straight on so any inflections could be mis-interpreted as wrong pitch. Which means you have to sing pretty boring. I’ll complete the mode, but probably play Hard difficulty when I’m in a band.

I also need to get into the extra songs. Even though they’re not well known I’m sure they’re fun. I’ve also got plenty of downloaded songs to go through… some much rocking to so and so little time…

For those of you who’ve been wondering at what point the strange califronia lifestyle will start to corrupt our hardy midwestern roots, the event horizon may be in sight.

Sunday morning bright and early Paul zipped himself into a full body wet suit and headed off with friend Scott to have his first surfing lesson. Alas, the weather did not cooporate and the waves were deemed unsuitable for a beginner. The rest of the day was spent playing rock band instead so the day was not a total loss.

Sunday will be “take two” and I think I might go along to see what all the fuss is about. First, I am inspired by my husband bravely stepping out to try something new and since everyone around here seems to think it’s the greatest thing in life to go surfing, I guess we can’t knock it until we try it.

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but when I built a new computer I decided to put Vista on it. I really haven’t had many problems with it. I found a little instability from a memory management problem with Simcity Societies which was fixed with a driver update, but other than that no real complaints. As a security guy I really don’t mind having to click and extra time to confirm admin privs for a program or click to confirm a change to my setup.

But I figure in for a penny… Right now my machine is completing the install of Vista Service Pack 1, Release Candidate 1.  So if I don’t post for a while you know it’s because I kersploded with new non-fully-tested operating system update.

I really prefer the Rock Band Stratocaster fret buttons to the other Guitar Hero guitars that have come before. It’s much easier to slide my fingers up and down the neck when I’m playing on hard difficulty to hit that fifth button. I also prefer the Strat strum bar although it is a little mushy and difficult to tell at what exact point you’re registering the button press.

Unfortunately the guitar I got with the original game is pretty broken. It’s tough to enable overdrive by tiliting it up and some strums are not being registered. No matter, the publisher has a very handy online process to get you a new guitar in less than a week. So I signed up and last night I got my new guitar. The strum works very well but the tilt sensor doesn’t work at all.

So now I’ve got two broken guitars with a third on the way. I do have to send back the broken guitars for free or I get a hefty credit card charge. Here’s hoping that the third guitar actually works.

OTOH, the drums are working fine even after some heavy beating by many people.

Thanks everyone for the responses about GNO. If you’ve got any online friends that aren’t dicks feel free to invite them. I’ve got some friends here locally interested and there’s the brothers that will be in on it as well so we’re looking at a decent sized group of about 10 total right now. I’m not hearing any complaints about 6-8ish PST (8-10ish CST) on Tuesday nights for the schedule so we’ll start with that.

No official gaming tonight, although I’ll probably be online if you want to send a game invite (Xfire, Steam, Gtalk, or Skype if I’m on the PC). I’m looking at starting maybe two weeks from now on the 22nd. There’s some PC or X360 exclusive people interested so we’ll probably alternate systems and games depending on requests and individual schedules. I’m thinking we might kick off with something easy and social like UNO or Texas Hold ‘Em on the X360. Let me know your preferences and i’ll try to post a schedule ahead of time so y’all can plan accordingly.

We had a pretty good thing going last year where my two brothers, Matt, and I would conference call on Skype on a weekday evening and then proceed to play a PC game for a few hours. Ususally we played SotS. It was kind of like a poker night, with video games, and online. Okay maybe it wasn’t like a poker night, but it was fun. Things fell apart at the end of the year with one brother getting married and the other working out of a suitcase on a big project.

So here in 2008, I’d like to restart Game Night (Online) and see if we can expand our roster of participants and games. I know most of you are Central timezone so I’ve always been willing to start things early from my perspective. Last year it was Tuesdays from 8pm to 10pm Central time (6-8 for the left coast) but that can be changed. We’d usually play some sort of co-op online game but not against a little fragging and trash talking. If the game doesn’t support voice we all get on a Skype conference call. I think this year we can also break away from the PC and get some X360 gaming in as well. (Welcome to the dark side Matt!)

So if you’re interested drop me a line or comment and we’ll get something together in the next few weeks. I’ve put up a list of PC and X360 games after the break that work pretty well for this kind of gaming. I’m always willing to try out new favorite games so feel free to suggest one or more if you’d like to join up.

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With all the travel over Christmas we had a nice relaxing new year at home. We watched Live Free or Die Hard on pay-per-view and fell asleep right around midnight. The next day I made a big batch of yellow curry and we initiated the tour of our Rock Band group “Nothing Special” with Jett on drums, Spike on guitar and Dio singing. It was a lot of fun. The game is a great tool for music appreciation as you see each part of the wide variety of songs broken out over the four parts. We played Radiohead, Nirvana, Weezer, Rolling Stones, and Red Hot Chili Peppers to name a few. I look forward to the next night of rocking out.