waider

"For those of you who've never heard Glasvegas, imagine a Glaswegian band who can turn "You Are My Sunshine" into a thing that makes you want to cry bitter, painful tears of abandonment and endless bleak lovelessness.

In my pants."

I'm not sure the "In my pants" was strictly necessary, but it wouldn't be Ellis without it.

Got a short-notice invite to a friend's place last week, where after the initial social activity had been dealt with we had a few rounds of Guitar Hero II on his PS3. After an initially promising start, I basically sucked rocks - got booed off the stage on the first attempt and possibly second or subsequent attempts, and when I finally did make it through a song I had something like an 80% hit rate. Given that I play an actual guitar I was pondering why it was that I found this game so tricky, and I think it's a combination of three things:

1. My sense of timing is a bit slack, which doesn't matter so much when you're playing on your own, but really sucks when you're trying to play this video game;
2. There's no concept of recovering a bum note or almost getting the right timing, which is particularly galling when the note you missed is a long one and you basically have to stand there like a spare tool waiting for the next note to arrive;
3. The guitar itself is more like one of those keyboard-worn-as-guitar (keytar?) things so beloved of 80s musicians, in as much as the "notes" you're playing are fret-wide buttons. On the other hand, you do "strum" it, so it winds up being an odd sort of hybrid and I'm not sure my brain quite understood how to deal with it.

I thought it might be interesting to hack a bunch of extra strumming buttons onto one of the guitars so you could effectively finger-pick - useful for fast runs, I suspect. I would also be interested in seeing a more realistic controller; I played around with a fully electronic guitar at some point years ago, which had real strings (slack, heavy nylon) as actuators and used pressure sensors on the fretboard to figure out where you'd put your fingers, and on the whole was pretty much exactly like playing a real guitar - albeit lacking the facility for things like pick scrapes and harmonics.

I also had a few rounds of the original Wipeout, the soundtrack to which I've owned since it came out (I'd never seen the game before this particular evening, though!) and the high point was finishing third in a race, but mainly I was happy with any race in which I didn't finish last.

updated to add: I've been looking for the video clip that was floating around a while back of a guy playing pretty much every instrument in a studio, followed by 30 seconds of him swearing in frustration at either Rock Band or Guitar Hero. While looking for (and failing to find) the clip, I discovered that there's a lot of people out there who really get on a soapbox about how these gamers should, like, go out and buy a real instrument. I'd like to stress that I'm in no way in this camp.

One of the tracks on heavy rotation down at the gym is "Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy". There's a bunch of clips of this on Youtube, so you can go dig it out yourself if you don't know it, but damn it there's a catchy banjo line in it. Evidently I have some sort of Country Music hook in my head that I wasn't previously aware of. Listening to the track right now, it sounds pretty much like Country Rock, but I've a vague notion that the version at the gym has a more dance-music feel to it (probably just amped-up bass). Certainly makes me wonder what a Country/Techno crossover would sound like...

I did some digging around and found the problem. Firstly, some weeks ago I tweaked the configuration of my webserver such that the WPAD URL - viz. http://wpad/wpad.dat - no longer worked. This is the URL Windows clients use when you tell them to automatically detect proxy settings, and by extension I tend to stuff it into anything that claims to support proxy autoconfiguration but doesn't actually support fully automatic detection. I didn't notice I'd broken it, as everything using it decided that a 404 on this URL simply meant to abandon any attempts to proxy. It appears that some combination of the 10.5.3 update and iTunes 7.6.2 now causes iTunes to fail at network access unless the proxy autoconfig URL resolves to something useful. Having fixed this, iTunes is once more happy. I'd update my iTunes bug report except that, er, iTunes' feedback system doesn't allow me to refer to my previous bug reports, apparently.

Today I picked up a couple of CDs in the second-hand store to backfill some music I'd borrowed off others and liked sufficiently to merit a purchase. For both CDs, iTunes informed me that importing them would clash with some existing music; would I care to replace the clashing titles? Indeed I would, this being sort of the point of the exercise.

iTunes then proceeded to populate the relevant directory with a full duplicate of the CDs ripped.

Apparently it means "replace the iTunes listing for" as opposed to "overwrite the existing file".

If you plug in your iPod while the screen is locked, upon unlocking the screen you can see the dialog box that tells you your iPod is corrupted. Ejecting and replugging cures the alleged corruptedness.

In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger. (link)

And a lovely quote, too.

I believe he's playing some sort of stringed pipe.

I haven't done this in a while, but: I caught a snippet of a song on something on TV, probably an episode of Scrubs, and rather liking the music I hit up Google and iTunes to see if I could find it. Behold, Dashboard Confessional's Stolen from the Dusk and Summer album. A quick check on RIAA Radar revealed them to be non-RIAA, so I picked up the album on Amazon - unknowningly picking up the extended version which includes a song from the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack titled Vindicated. Which is what's stuck in my head, mainly for the way the verse gives way to the chorus.

( Lyrics reproduced without permission )

Oh yeah. Stolen is pretty good, too, but not sticking in my head quite so much.

Listening to someone's mix MP3 this evening I stumbled across Frank Stallone's "Far From Over" which apparently showed up on the Stayin' Alive soundtrack; I've no idea where I first came across it, but it has the most awesomely over-the-top instrumental solo. If you can dig up a copy it's worth a listen for that alone.