i finally managed to find a copy of guitar hero II AND the guitar controller. there’s a number of places around town that will sell the game but no guitar go figure.

anyway, while playing again, i noticed that do really well on some tunes and not so well on others. not because the other tunes are any harder, but because i think the songs suck dead bunnies. for example, i can almost get through flawlessy wolfmother’s “woman”. but i still have a problem with the foo fighters tune (monkey wrench i think). basically the song sucks, and i lose interest in it right away.

the real challenge for me with the game is going to be getting through the tunes that suck…

“When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday”

and with that i closed the first volume of ‘the lord of the rings’ and never bothered to read it. i was 12 or 13 years old and that line made it seem to me the book was meant for a 6 or 7 year old.

i was into science-fiction and that line turned me off fantasy for a long time.

so i’ve not read the encyclopedic works of robert jordon, modesti, terry brooks, goodkind, donaldson, et al.

but just recently (actually saw the series at a book store in whistler) i started the Malazan books by steven erickson. i wasn’t sure i’d like it, but it’s not bad at all. like i need another 10 books to add to my immediate ‘to read’ list which is around 100 or so books

a friend had project consisting of a number video files originally created by someone else. he passed them on to me for some further work.

i had them for a few weeks before i finally got the time to look at them.

realmedia.

i really wish the realmedia folks would give it up. from what i read nobody likes the format.

and now that i’m using a mac the format is even more useless. i am able to use realmedia on a mac.

i’m using ultra rm converter under crossover for mac. i use quite of few of aone’s products. their software is rock solid and works great.

and crossover is nice too. i use it under linux also. i found that most windows software seems to run under it ok. when i started using the mac one of the first things i looked for was a good editor. found macvim right away, but the few editors i’ve tried pretty much sucked. i’ll take another shot at it in the mean time i can use the editor i’ve been using since ‘91 in it’s various incarnations. boxer 13. there’s a few quirks running it under crossover on the mac, but i’m proficient with it and i’m going to have to find a mac based editor that’s a lot better before i’m going to switch.

last weekend we had earthhour. the local news reported that the city i live in saved 3% in energy usage.

3%

i’ll go out on a limb and say that’s about the same percentage of people who actually cared about earthhour.

personally i think the idea of saving the planet is a good one. but we have to be smart about it. here are some of the dumb things that are being done.

“earth saver” light bulbs. the first type were 52 watt incandescent replacements for the standard 60 watts. only problem was they didn’t last very long, so that meant more they were adopted by the general public the more ended up in landfill. i wonder tho the edison wannabe was that came up with that one.

now we have those curly tube fluorescent bulbs. these aren’t saving the earth either. first off they don’t last as long as those 60 watters did. AND they have mercury in the ballast. the inventor of this particular gem was even dimmer than the the previous guy.

and they keep pushing these stupid things in commercials.

the worse part is that you can’t even rely on regular 60 watt lightbulbs anymore. they seem to have a lifespan under regular use between 3 and 6 month.

earthhour once year isn’t going to help. make it once a week and it might make a difference…especially if you start adding up all he ose 3% savings.