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Archive for the 'Whatever' Category

Drum Kit Re-Born

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

I spent most of the day putting my drum kit back together. It’s been a loooong time since I did something like this. With my acoustic kit I made setup and tear down into a science. But now with the eDrums it’s a bit different. When I first got the set, I didn’t put much effort into placement and positioning. It was functional but not optimal. This time, I thought it through and came up with a pretty good configuration that feels really comfortable.

I took pictures as I was working so you can see the progress.

Here’s the end result. Check out the rest on my Flickr site.

Putting the kit together 7

Idle hands

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

In about 20min, I’m heading out for 2.5 days of vacation. I’m getting a little fried staring at my monitors and coding, taking calls, etc… so I’m taking a short break. But what to do with that time?

Fart around with my drums

My drum kit’s disassembled since I took it to play at a outdoor church service this last weekend. When I bought the kit , it came with it’s Gibraltar rack with a curved from crossbar and two built in cymbal boom arms. Although it’s functional, I’m not thrilled with it and may just use my the rack from my acoustic kit. I also saw someone’s video on YouTube where he had his drum module mounted on the right, after his last tom. I though it looked cool and out-of-the-way – so I may experiment with that setup. One main problem with eKits is the amount of cables hanging around and I hope to see if I can’t find a good solution to that. I have have some cable ties so I can bundle them with the rack and with having the module on the right, will get the spider web of cables out of direct sight.

An maybe I’ll experiment with some video’s or some recording. Not sure why I’d record myself playing, but it’d be fun to sample off the new kits I bought.

Play Xbox

Well, that goes without saying. As I mentioned before, I’m playing though Ninja Gaiden 2. One main reason is trying to find these 30 crystal skulls that are scattered throughout the 14 levels. I have 29 of them so far, no now it’s like finding a needle in a hay stack. I’d rather not  cheat and get a location list off the web – so I’m trying to take my time and dig around when I’m not lopping off heads and limbs and leaving bloody chunks of meat everywhere.

If you’re on my friends list and you see me online feel free to shoot me an invite to play something. I wouldn’t mind doing some co-op Halo 3, GOW, Burnout Paradise, etc…

Misc

I have to mow the lawn, maybe replace out bathroom ceiling fan (not very good with electricity). Just some other domestic stuff, but I’ll try to keep that to a minimum ;) .

Where I’ve been – or – My excuse for not posting in nearly a month

Monday, July 21st, 2008

I’m still alive. I’m still here.

So what have I been up to?

Ninja Gaiden 2

I’m on my third run through on Ninja Gaiden 2. I played my first two runs on the acolyte (normal) difficulty. Now I’m about half way through on warrior (hard). I’m just having a blast (albeit somewhat frustrating at times) blasting through enemy after enemy. Plus after finding the rod of trials – there are extra challenges throughout the levels where you clear out an area as wave after wave of powerful enemy keep coming at you still they’re all gone or your dead. I enjoy the challenge I’m also addicted to he achievements. It’s not one of those games that you get achievements for doing crazy outlandish things (okay playing the game through with only one weapon for 5 points is a little crazy) but they’re doled out fairly evenly. I have a ton of other game that on a general play though only doles out about 200 points and then you have to really work for the other 800 points. It’s just not worth it in some cases; especially if the game isn’t all that great.

Rockband

After getting my snapped-in-half Rockband kick pedal replaced (thankfully to EA’s newly extended open warranty); the family has been having fun rocking out together. My 6 (nearly 7) year old daughter is even getting into the act singing on easy. She can’t read the words that well (or that fast) but she holds her own. My eldest son, Jonah (11), has bumped himself up to hard, playing the drums, and doing great at it. Parker and I continue to bring the noise playing guitar and bass. I have also bought a ton of songs and we’re stoked to know that our investment will carry over to Rockband 2 come September.

Drum kit is expanding

I’ve been slowly improving my electric drum kit. I got a great deal steal on a Roland FD-8 hi-hat control pedal from a guy off of the vdrums.com forums. I’ve been on the hunt for a new hi-hat pad and have been trying to wrangle in a Roland CY-5. I’ve been watching eBay and the vdrums forums but refuse to pay more that $50 (since they go for $85 new). So I’m hanging tough on that.

I also purchased a bunch of new kit sounds from www.vExpressionsLTD.com for my Roland TD-6 (Hot Picks/Collective Combo). They’re not really new sounds, but finely tuned kits modeled after famous drummers or branded kits. There are about 65 kits that all sound great and can be customized further to suit your needs. I use a program called VDrumLib to make custom kits and transfer them back to my module – makes editing kits real easy.

The only thing I wish they had was a way to play the sounds/kits on the module via MIDI from the computer; otherwise you need to know which instruments you want to copy before you edit. So I typically play through some of the kits, and if I find a snare or tom sound I like, I have to make a note of it, go to the computer, find the instrument in the list, copy it to the custom kit and transfer it back to the module. Being able to play the sounds remotely would save the back and forth. If there’s a way to do that via some other method, let me know.

Aside from parts and sounds, I had an idea of maybe painting my cymbals gold. Right now, they come in black only. They’re made of a type of high impact plastic and I know paining plastic can be difficult but I think it’d look pretty slick to have more realistic looking cymbals. I found some ideas on the vdrums forums and I have some practice cymbals (non-triggered) I could test – so maybe I’ll try painting one and see how it goes. The trick would be masking off the trigger and striking pad.

Maybe I’ll get some gumption and do a video of me playing and post it. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Back-up. Are. Good.

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Backing stuff up. It’s a good thing; if you do it.

Case-in-point: My work laptop died Monday morning – with several projects that I was working on. None of which I backed up. Why? I’m stupid. You’d think the fact that my laptop is nearly 7 years old and was continuing to be a major pain to work on, I’d have an inkling that something may go wrong at some point. Yep. It did.  Funny thing is that I actually thought about backing up to a thumb-drive but decided not to.

On top of that, I find out that my requested replacement, that was approved nearly 2 weeks prior, was never ordered. Plus our vender had the wrong specks for my new machine and apparently never saw the request. My question is, how can you order something without knowing what is wanted or needed?! So I corrected that and it was ordered. Too little too late. I’m now working from a spare that is almost as old as my dead box.

Our local IT person is attempting to get at my data on the dead hard drive but I’m not holding my breath.

The headache I’m running into is the fact that my Flash development is sitting on that dead hard drive and all I have to work from is the compiled SWF files. I managed to reverse-engineer them, but it wasn’t fun – I’ll explain in another post.

So, am I going to be more pro-active with my backups? Heck yeah!

Well, it’s been a while

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Where the hell have I been?! I’ve neglected my blog for nearly a month. Thing have been crazy busy and I just haven’t had the gumption to put my fingers on the keyboard and bang out a post.

So what’s been up?

As mentioned before, I had to buy a new computer system and bought a pretty nice Dell system. It’s my first retail system. Prior – I built all my systems. This time the cost vs. value of building a system finally caught up to me. I’m no longer keeping track of the computer component market so for me to up an replace a motherboard, CPU and memory would be too time consuming. I just want something that works, comes from the same place and is covered by a warranty.

I getting to love Vista – although I hear Service Pack 1 (due in March) should improve on some of the underpinnings. One annoyance I have is that my mouse is very imprecise. The pointer never quite activates a button as you think it should. I’m not sure if it’s my mouse or what – I’ll have to swap it out and see if that makes a difference – but it sure is annoying.

I totally love my Samsung 22" Windscreen monitor. Looks great and takes up 1/10th of the space my old CRT 19" monitor did – not to mention weighs a ton less too!

Freebies: The wait continues

I haven’t done too much in the way of freebies. I’m still waiting of a combined $2000 in gift cards that I completed between Aug – Sept ’07. They should be shipping soon I hear.

I recently received 4000 Xbox Live Points from YourFree360Games.com. I downloaded a ton of Rock Band tracks and some other stuff. Came in real handy. Not in the mood at the moment to jump back into a freebie blitz but maybe mid year.

Drum Kit is Rockin’

My electronic drum kit is rockin’ now that I replaced a part of the hi-hat controller. Pintec uses a "foam chunk" to activate the hi-hat trigger and since I bought the kit used, the original chunk just gave out; it was cracked and no longer activating the trigger. So I ordered a new one from Pintec and it works great now. I also have been having a blast customizing my kits. It seems like every time I sit down to jam I end up tweaking something; finding the perfect kick and snare, experimenting with settings, etc… My bud and former band make, Brian, has some tunes he wants to track so we’ll be able to digitally record on my PC and have all kinds of fun. My sister also may have me do some drumming for her songs she’s working on.

Crackdown has my attention

I’ve been playing Crackdown just about every time I sit down and play Xbox. It’s just an extremely fun game. Great explosions, tons of action, huge explosions and the amount of freedom and activities your given make this a must-have in my book. I picked it up used from GameStop over Christmas vacation for under $20 and haven’t put it down yet. Anyone want to do some co-op?

Speaking of Xbox

My wife asked me why I’m not playing on-line. I responded, "Because I don’t like playing with idiots." It’s true. I can’t stand all the smack talk and especially being target practice for the 15yr olds that have nothing better to do than sit and play for 12hr a day. It’s a bit intimidating. The sad thing is I have a ton of great multi-player games such as GRAW (1 & 2), Halo 3, COD (2, 3, 4), Rainbow Six: Vegas, Gears, and they just sit there. I’d really like to do some co-op or play multi-player with some buds but time is always an issue. So if you see me online (gt: Captain Betty) shoot me an invite if you promise to let me win.

Photos Added

I uploaded a fresh batch of images on my Flickr account.

PC died; bought my first retail computer

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Man this sucks… My computer died on Friday. The screen would just go black. A reboot usually got it back up, but at some point it stopped booting. No beeps, no nothing.

Thinking it was my video card, I ran around trying to find an AGP based video card. Landing at a local PC shop I plopped down $70 and ran home to slap it in.  Nothing. I got the same results. The box turns on, the fans whir up but that’s it. Bubkis. I tried everything; re-seat the CPU, pull the memory, un hook everything… nothing.

My only thought was that it was either the motherboard or CPU. Digging around NewEgg.com, I discover that if I upgrade either one… I’m screwed. I’d need new memory, video card, etc… No point in blowing $300 for a band-aid.

I’ve built my own computer for nearly 15 years. I’ve never purchased a retail system. I’ve sold them and even had a very small custom PC business. It’s not that I didn’t like retail systems… I just liked getting my hands dirty. I like custom building stuff. But this time, I think the state of the industry caught up to me. It’s fine if you just need to swap out a component but when you’re dealing with the motherboard or processor, that’s major.

So I broke down and found a fairly decent Dell. We don’t game on it (that’s why we have 2 Xbox 360′s), but mainly web, email, music, video – pretty standard stuff). I splurged on a 22″ Widescreen Samsung LCD monitor (just like I did for my Mom when she bought her’s recently); something I was going to buy anyways once I got my $2000 in gift cards (whenever that  happens). I compared a few other configurations and this was probably the best of both worlds. I ended up blowing about $760.

So about a week or so I’ll have a band spanking new system. Money that I really didn’t want to spend – but life works like that… here’s hoping my tax return is hefty.

Misc Post: Grab bag

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

Well it’s been a while since my last post and need to get a few “happenings” on the site.

Happy Thanksgiving: Here’s your car repair bill

For while now my car’s a/c fan has only worked on high. Wasn’t that big of a deal during summer and fall, but now that winter is on us it’s become a pain. Lately it hasn’t even been working; blowing or producing heat. If first made a call to my extended car warranty company, but low an behold, it’s expired. Great! So I made a call to my local Chrysler shop to get it in for an estimate; Aside from the issue I gave them they noticed cracked belts, leaking transmission fluid, and low coolant (a reason I wasn’t getting heat). I said let’s do it all. They managed to finish by Monday night which was good since I needed it to go back to work Tuesday. The bill? Over $1000. Yeah. Merry Christmas! There goes my bonus and part of our flexible spending. Grrr!

Mass Effect in the house!

Just received Mass Effect from yourfree360games.com. I’ve only played through one mission so far. I’ll be able to dive into it more over Christmas vacation that starts Dec 19th. I just love the presentation. As most reviews point out, the menu/inventory system take a bit to get used to and figure out. I also love the film grain effect they applied; makes it more movie-like. Most people don’t appear to like the effect though – it’s nice that you can turn it off or on.

Halo 3 Legendary from Jake Ludington

I received my Halo 3 Legendary package from Jake Ludington over vacation and it’s too cool. I didn’t know the helmet was that large. I’ll look great in my office once I get some shelves up. The best part is that we now have 2 copies of Halo 3 (just like Halo 2) and the boys and I can can play co-op between our two boxes.

Boys Xbox down and out – again

Grrrr! This is just frustrating. Over the weekend the boys Xbox started to show corrupted colors (mostly a yellow hue) across everything. I tried three different AV cables (between standard and high-def) and between two TVs with no change. So I call into MS and they’re shipping a coffin (aka pre-paid shipping box) to have it repaired. The boys aren’t too happy about being without a box but it’s not that bad. This is repair/replacement number 2 on their box.

Speaking of repairs

One of my 360 game controllers is dead as well. But here’s the hitch; in order for me to get it repaired, I need to write into Microsoft to have them move my two year extended warranty from my original Xbox 360 to my replacement. I thought that’d be automatic if your box was replaced, but apparently not. What puzzles me is that you can’t do this over the phone.  Oh sure, you can call and purchase the warranty, but you can transfer it. Stupid. Good thing I have 4 controllers.

This post contains “web developer blasphemy”

Friday, September 14th, 2007

<blasphemy>

Mozilla/FireFox is stupid. I hate making sure my CSS works on it.

</blasphemy>

Yeah, I’ll go to Hell for saying FireFox is retarded.

I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary. Standard stuff CSS based layout and such, but for some reason my code works beautifully in IE but when I check my work in FireFox = annoying crap.

HTML:

<div id=”main”>
<div id=”content”>
<h1>some text here</h1>
<!– … more stuff … –>
</div>
</div>

CSS:

body{
margin : 0;
padding : 0;
text-align : center;
font-family : Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
background : #fff;
}

#main {
height : 600px;
background : #000 url(../images/body-bkg.jpg) 50% 100% no-repeat;
}

#content {
text-align : left;
width : 700px;
margin : 20px auto;
}

#content h1 {
background : url(../images/cosmicgroove.gif) 50% 0 no-repeat;
height : 90px;
color : white;
font-size : 3em;
width : 100%;
}
#content h1 span {
display : none;
}

Results

As expected, IE looks fine. The #main div remains flush with the window, the #content div is pushed down 20px from the top and all is well in my world.

In FireFox what happens? FireFox decides to push #main and everything else down 20px revealing a white border (the body’s background color).

The fix?

Mozilla obviously doesn’t like the top margin setting on the #content div or the H1 which is somehow forcing everything down. I had to remove the top margins and replace it with top padding. This also goes for the H1 – no top margin as well. Stupid.

So the CSS of the #content and H1 now looks like:

#content {
text-align : left;
width : 700px;
margin : 0 auto;
padding : 20px 0 0;
}
#content h1 {
background : url(../images/cosmicgroove.gif) 50% 0 no-repeat;
height : 90px;
color : white;
font-size : 3em;
width : 100%;
margin : 0 0 20px;
}

Sometimes I wonder. I have no problem making things work between browsers (I have to, it’s my job) but it sure is a pain when things seem very plain and simple but don’t pan out that way. Good thing 95% of our web visitors use IE.

Certain “web standards” always bugged me.

Take for example the “box model issue“. IE defines how a “box” works one way while others handle it another way.

IE’s way (and the way I think) works like this. You have a box, you may have a border around the box and padding around the stuff inside that box. You now set a dimension on that box – oh let’s say 400px wide. From edge to edge, border to border, content and all, IE and myself says that the box should be 400px. End of story. It is a box – right?

Not so with the “web standard” crowd. They say the 400px width assignment defines the “content” of the box and does not include the border or padding (whoever heard of putting padding on the outside of a box?). So if I have defined a 400px wide box, apply a 2px border and 10px worth of padding, my “box” is technically 24px wider because of the padding and border (left + right = extra width). Retarded – I know.

So now every time you deal with setting dimensions on a container you have have to either avoid using “width” or “padding” or “border” or use funky math or some other hack to make sure you “box” remains the size you want across most browsers. But that’s why they pay me the big bucks (not really).