Ty’s Weblog

We picked up Rock Band today, and it is awesome!  Kate, Xander and I all had a great time playing.  Kate was on vocals, Xander played guitar, and I tried my hand on drums.  We all had a really good time and we are looking forward to playing a lot more in the future!

I finally managed to get 5 stars on all the songs for Guitar Hero 3 on Medium.  Knight of Cydonia and Raining Blood were the two that took me a lot of practice before I could do them.  That’s done now and I’ve moved on to playing through career on Hard.  I made it through the first stage already, but boy is my hand tired.  Not all 5 stars of course, at this point, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to manage that.  I guess it’s just a matter of practice though.

I went back down a level to finish Guitar Hero on Easy to get the achievements involved.  I finished that on the 16th and finished them all with 5 stars a couple days later.  Now I’m trying to get all the songs with 5 stars on Medium before I make a serious effort on trying Hard, which in my experiments has been an ego crushing experience.  Hopefully I’ll get better with practice.  Xander is starting up trying the Medium difficulty today.

In other Guitar Hero related news, today the Halo Theme was released for free on Xbox Live.  A very nice surprise for those of us that are fans of both games.  It’s a lot of fun to be able to play.

Just finished Guitar Hero 3 on medium.  It was a ton of fun.  I’ve still got to try to get 5 stars on all the songs, which is easier said than done.  Then I’ve got to ramp up for Hard.  I might go ahead and play Easy first just to get it out of the way for the achievement.

I broke down and picked up Guitar Hero 3 yesterday (for the 360, of course).  I had a ton of fun with it last night.  The only down side of it is that my left wrist and fingers are a little bit sore today from all the playing I did last night.  It is a tough game, and I’m only playing on the Medium settings so far, which uses 4 of the 5 frets on the guitar.  When I finally decide to go to Hard, that’s going to be a huge adjustment.  The game is a lot of fun though, and the kids are enjoying it quite a bit as well.  I’ll likely let Xander give it a try this weekend, and see if he likes it.

Speaking of Halo 3! A music video called Halo Nights is out on the net, which I thought was pretty funny.

The first thing you have to do is go watch this music videoo by Laurie Berkner that plays on Noggin.

Xander, loves this song (and her other songs as well).

So today during his quiet time, while he was playing with his cars, he made up a new song. I leave it to you to fit it to the music.

I was singing in the audience.
When I saw some cars vroom by.
They said their names were
Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Michael Waltrip, Matt Kensith, Carl Edwards, Jeff Green and Jeff Burton and they said
Vroom vroom vroom vroom
vroom vroom vroom vroom
vroom vroom vroom vroom
vroom vroom vroom vroom
vroom vroom vroom vroom
vroom vroom vroom vroom
Vroomy cars, can’t you see,
it’s just you and me
a one, two
a million and three!

I have my shiny new iPod sitting next to me charging at the moment. I’ve only synced the music on my desktop at this point, which is a small portion of what I’ve got ripped. Most of it is on my laptop at the moment. I’ve used it for a bit though, and it is quite wonderful.

Kate and I have been planning to get one for a while, and today just ended up being the right day for it. I was home from work on a vacation day, so we ran out and picked it up while Xander was in school.

It really is a nice little piece of hardware. I’m looking forward to getting a lot of good use out of it. Now I just have to restrain myself in the iTunes store.

Slashdot has a link to a story on Wired about people briefly sharing iPods as they encounter each other out in the world.

This is one of the neatest things I’ve heard of in quite a while. It makes me want an iPod even more. Not that you actually have to have an iPod to do this, that just seems to be the community that’s started doing it. Anything that has a headphone jack would work just fine.

Yep, I’ve gotta start saving up for that iPod.

Square Enix and AOL announced today that music from Final Fantasy VII - XI are avaliable on Radio@AOL and Radio@Netscape from now until April 2004.

So now we know what I’ll be listening to for the next few months. Sorry iTunes. I’ll be back to you later.

I love iTunes. I really didn’t think I would. It’s easy to use. The cost is reasonable. Even the DRM isn’t too bad. I’ve very happy with it so far. I’ve only bought 3 songs so far, but I expect that number to climb fairly rapidly. I gave Kate a demo of it, and she thought it was great also. I expect in the near future our CD buying will drop off sharply. I also suspect it will lead to us buying at least one iPod in the near future.

My only complaint is that a fair amount of the music which I like to listen to isn’t avaliable in their store, but that’s a problem that can fix itself with time.