McWilliams’ World

Just posted a ton of new photos of our Christmas Tree, Tracy snowblowing, some pictures from the kid’s Christmas concert, some funny pictures of myself, and a few others. Check them out!

A few days ago Tracy told be about a Guitar Hero contest that a local bar, The Bar, was running. It had cash prized and two skill levels, $5 to enter. I thought about it and decided to give it a go.

Sign up started at 6pm, contest at 7pm. As I was parking my car I realized; I’m 34 years old, I’ll probably be the oldest guy playing. I kind of rolled my eyes and walked in. I signed up and noticed there weren’t too many signed up.

All in all 9 entries (including Parker-Jon) were in the “expert” group.

The idea was to do pro-face off against each other, with the winner advancing to the next round. Someone would call a coin toss and then roll a die to determine the song, from the top 6 in the set list. We started on Hard difficulty - I was happy about that.

The first two guys started to play and all of a sudden one guy is complaining about the guitar not hitting the notes and being all funky. I’m thinking “typical… you suck and you blame the guitar”. They try another guitar and give it another go.  Still no good so they end up just doing single player but still score against score. I’m thinking, “great… now this is going to take twice as long!”

My turns up, I win the coin toss and roll the die and get Slow Ride. LAME! The big screen TV’s positioned near the ceiling so you had to crank your neck to see what was going on; plus since we’re playing on a PS2 (blech! no HD) the screen looked like rhino dung. I was nervous as hell but I did pretty well. Now my opponent’s turn, he actually failed about 20% in. Not sure why. Slow Ride isn’t that hard of a song at all. I think he just gave up. So I sail through to the next round.

Parker has a shot but looses playing Story of My Life (wow…what a dud of a song!). He also lost in the second chance bracket. Must have been nerves. It’s a shame because I consider Parker to be almost on par with me in skill. I was watching him play the other night at home and my jaw dropped as he breezed through some solo sections of songs that I was sure to flub on. He’s got skillz!

A few more guys play and you instantly know who’s good and who isn’t.

My next round was against a 13 or 14 year old playing Sunshine of your Love (another song I could do without). I’m second so I get to see what I’m up against. He managed to score very well. I was worried. I started to play and before I missed a note I had over a 200 note streak going. I won by a few thousand points. The kid did great and I shook his hand.

They started a loser’s bracket so everyone got a second chance. This time on GH2. Parker played Killing In the Name Of but lost. But when we got done playing the whole bar was screaming and shouting and hollering’. I twas cool. Parker was probably the youngest player there and certainly the youngest in the Expert group. He did great and had a fun time!

The final two from the looser bracket and the final two from the expert bracket formed the final four. We played GH2 on Expert and started on the fifth and sixth tiers. The lower two went first and played John the Fisherman. My set, I called and rolled the die and ended up with YYZ. I shook my head. No way am I going to get this, the guy I’m against is too good. So I did my best but it wasn’t good enough.

We then had a face off for second place between myself and the third guy. Anther roll and we get Misirlou. A beast of a song. Tons of super fast strumming. The other guy goes and does pretty well. I know that I’m not going to beat him. I try my best and fell short - again, but hey! still managed to secure third place. I went around and shoot a few hands, said thanks for playing. I wound up winning my money back $10 (between Parker and I).

The guy running the contest stated that they’ll have more of these and may even have Rock Band in the future. A good time was had by all.

[update: Had to fix Parker's side of the story, he actually lost both rounds he was in... sad because he's extremely talented and sometimes can best me!]

I posted before about buying a Pintech electronic drum kit and promising to post pictures.

Here they are.

Heh heh! I said “dump”!

It’s been a literal eon since I dumped any photos into my Flickr account. I’ve dumped stuff from short trips, Halloween, my new drum kit, etc… It’s all there. Check ‘em out if you want.

We had some time Sunday between going to the Memorial Day parade and going to the In-Laws for a cook-out, so the boys begged me to take them to the skate park. We had a pretty good time. No one was there so it was even better.

Other images posted on my Flickr site.

Okay, it wasn’t on purpose! We took the family to The Wilderness Waterpark in Wisconsin Dells, WI for 3 days of fun. This was made possible by a wonderfully generous Christmas gift from Tracy’s folks. So we packed up and went and had a great time. I can’t tell you how many steps I climbed to get on these tube rides; some 3 or 4 stories high.

We managed to squeak another $50 into our budget buy taking a timeshare tour on our second day. Basically had to listen and say no at the end and the kids got 40 tokens for the arcade and we got $50 in Wilderness Cash to spend. That took care of a second night out to eat.

We had a blast. You can check out some of our photos if you want to see the amount of fun we had.

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I took a few shots this morning after I shoveled about 1500lbs of snow off of our flat roof above our bedroom. I think most of them are pretty cool. Check them out.

What a weekend! We had one of Parker-Jon’s friends overnight and luckily he has Guitar Hero. So we asked if he’d bring it along. We played non-stop from about 5pm till about 11:30pm and a few more hours in the morning till they left. What a blast! I can’t wait to get this on the 360.

Tracy even got into it mostly playing “I Love Rock-n-Roll” and “Smoke on the Water”. I think she even tried “Iron Man” and a few others. It was quite comical, but she did okay once she go the hang of it.

I loved playing “Cowboys from Hell”, “More than a Feeling” (really good on that one on medium difficulty), “Thunderkiss 65″, and a slew of others.

The kids played just about everything.

I will say this…it’s all in the attitude!