Kicking Off March

I'm so lazy with my posting these days. I used to update multiple times a day. Now it's a minor miracle if I post multiple times in a month.

I'd like to redo the look of the blog a bit, but I can't get all that motivated to do it.

Games
I’ve been re-playing MODERN WARFARE 2 quite a bit. (This time on the 360.) I breezed through single-player on regular. Now I’m doing the challenge maps. (That sniper level drives me up the wall.) At some point I’ll go through SP again in hard mode to unlock those achievements.

I’ve kinda had an itch to replay FINAL FANTASY XII lately. I suppose it’d give me an excuse to use my PS3, which I don't even have hooked up to the TV at the moment.

Poker
March is off to a rough start. Lost just under a buy-in in the first session of the month. I was up by a nice amount before I got it in vs a player who kept min 3betting me pre and then shoving the flop or turn. I decided to call him with TPGK (top pair being Kings in this case) and he showed AA. Figures. Just goes to show, they're not bluffing as often as you might think and sometimes it's better to just say, "if he's bluffing, good for him" and let them have it. But maybe that's just being too results oriented, I don't know.

I think I might have ADD, since sometimes I have a hell of time paying attention to coaching videos. I take notes, but I find my mind wandering during some of the power-point style videos. I prefer live play videos where the best method of learning is pausing and trying to predict what the coach will do and seeing if your thought process is close to theirs.

Music
I recently dug out and re-ripped all of my Alice In Chains CDs (remember CDs?) to MP3. I ripped the stuff I liked best a few years ago, but 160 bitrate MP3s sort of suck compared to nice VBR files. I skipped all the duplicate tracks in MUSIC BANK since I did all of the albums and EPs already. One of my favorite bands, but I sort of forgot about them (and didn’t warm to their newest album with the replacement singer). Rediscovered them when I stumbled across a downloaded bootleg of the Dirt demos.

TV
I was going to write about (or more accurately, complain about) some TV shows that I watch. Then I realized it's sort of dumb to watch shows that I don't quite enjoy and probably even dumber to then write about them. That's not to say that I won't stick to being dumb enough to watch shows with concepts I like that fall short that I keep hoping will get better (V, NO ORDINARY FAMILY) or that used to be among my favorites that have gone downhill (CHUCK, THE OFFICE). It just means I'm too lazy to write about them.

This NSFW Song Is Awesome

Not my normal genre of music, but I stumbled across this song on a poker blog and fell in love with it...

R.I.P. Dio

Metal legend Ronnie James Dio dead at 67

Useless Stuff I Do When Bored

I was bored today, and decided to play guitar for a little while. Just for laughs I wanted to see exactly how fast I can alternate pick. Personally, I rarely just pick every note these days. I prefer to mix in other techniques with picked notes like like legato, economy picking, sweeping, and tapping. Which means that when I want to play fast, I can go even faster than my results here.

The calculation for notes per second is: ((Notes per beat) x (beats per minute)) / 60 = notes per second

My criteria for this test was strict alternate picking, each note clearly articulated. (No full arm spastic arm vibration picking, or slopping over notes.)

Playing 4 notes per string, I was able to accurately alternate pick 32nd notes (16 per beat) at 130 bpm (beats per minutes), so according to that formula, I can pick about 17.3 notes per second. When I switched to something that was 3 notes per string, I played sextuplets (6 per beat) at 150 bpm, for around 15 nps. Really, my comfort zone is around 14nps. I can pretty much play stuff at that speed with less effort and it sounds just as fast. So I guess 16 would be the average, but honestly 15 feels like it's more correct.

How does that stack up against other players? Well Guitar World printed a handy chart awhile ago...

I find it a bit hard to believe that I'm as fast a picker as guys like Paul Gilbert, Yngwie (who's more of an economy picker), Steve Vai, and Michael Angelo. I hear those guys, and I still think they blow me away technically. I'm just a hobbiest, occasionally playing for my own amusement with zero band ambitions whatsoever. To be fair, I practiced obsessively as a teenager when I still harbored delusions of rock stardom. In fact, given how little I play these days, I'm surprised I retained any chops at all. I wonder how fast I would be if I actually still practiced, instead of just picking up the guitar every once in awhile when I've got an itch in my fingers? (Not that speed equates with good playing, mind you.)

The Girl At The Video Game Store

I've always like Nerf Herder. I love Olivia Munn. I love video games. So a video by the former singer from Nerf Herder singing about video game stores featuring Olivia Munn pretty much was a home run in my book.

Video Game - E3 2009 - Attack of the Show

(Not that I've bought a game at an actual brick and mortar store in a long time. It's online orders for me baby.)

Faith No More - Poker Face

Faith No More covering Lady Gaga's (dumb name) "Poker Face". (Looking at pictures of that Lady Gaga chick, a more appropriate title might've been Butter Face. Yuck.)

Thanks to Echo over at no maps for posting this before me.

One Of Those My Mundane Life Posts

I was sitting at my computer listening to music and writing a post when I noticed the monitor that shows the core temps on my processor was hitting around 40C. Considering that I'm sitting in an air-conditioned room, that's awfully high. (Normally, that's just about the max temperature it hits when I've been playing games for awhile. I wasn't doing anything like that, so seeing the temperature that high worried me a bit.) So I opened up the side of my case and noticed that the fans and vents were a little dusty. I didn't have any compressed air handy, and it's the middle of the night, so I just turned the computer off and cleaned the vents with a rag and the fans with some Q-Tips. Then I pulled the front of my case off and the vent beneath the front facade was the most clogged. Cleaned that off, put all of the case covering bits back on, and I'm back to idling between 26-29C.

So now I don't have to worry about my computer exploding.

After that I straightened up the computer desk a bit. I kept the essentials handy though. A sharpie, one of my USB thumb drives, a screwdriver, my iPod, 2 DVD-R spindles (one of blanks and one for recently burned discs), and of course, a big bottle of aspirin.

I also took the 3 foot tall tower of DVDs from the top of my computer case and put them in my bedroom. I've got enough DVDs piled up in there to build a fortress or castle out of the cases. One day I'll go back to organizing them all instead of stacking them on shelves or putting them in cardboard boxes.

I've been listening to the new Extreme album (Amazon link). Nuno Bettencourt is one of my all-time favorite guitarists. He has been since I discovered the band back when I was 13 or 14. I even went to his first ever guitar clinic back in 1990, right before the second album came out. One of the guitars that I own was autographed by him, which is why I bought it. So I was obviously interested to see what sort of album and band that hasn't put an album out in nearly 14 years would come out with. I'm not sure how much I like or dislike the new album. It'll probably take awhile to grow on me (if it ever does) like "Waiting For The Punchline" did. Still, they're a great live band, if you can get past the singer doing all of the goofy Freddie Mercury wannabe shit.

Next on my agenda is trying to get through some of this week's comics and catch up on TV shows that I've missed (two weeks of VENTURE BROS and this week's MAD MEN).

What I've Been Up To - Mostly Watching TV

Wondering what I've been up to all week while I've been holed up in my bunker? I watched things.

Pretty much the only new thing of note that I've watched in the last few days is this week's DOCTOR WHO. Unlike the last few years, I haven't been bothering to write about each individual episode of this series (season). I broke my plan to not watch this year though. So much for my giving up on the show. I did, however, skip a few episodes. (I didn't bother with the Agatha Christie one since it didn't look interesting to me. I never got around to the one with the clone girl who calls herself the Doctor's daughter either. FInally, I never got around to the one with the Doctor on the commercial space flight or whatever it is. I think that's the next one that's supposed to air here in the US. Skimming through those episodes, they all seemed like ones I could miss without missing anything important.) After next week's finale, I'll probably write a summary of my thoughts on the season. (Essentially, it's been mostly hit or miss and Catherine Tate was much much much better than I expected.)

Everything else has been older stuff.

HBO has been re-running all of George Carlin's comedy specials. So I've been re-watching one or two of those a day. I think he got much much funnier when he got older and more angry. The 70s stuff doesn't make me laugh anywhere near as much as his late 80s-current stuff.

The other night I re-watched HIGH TENSION. A really decent horror suspense movie marred by a "twist ending" that doesn't work that well. I may have to download the fan edit of the movie, which eliminates the twist. Speaking of which, I've recently discovered Fanedit.org, which has tons of re-edited movies. I've know about fan edits for awhile and for whatever reason it never clicked in my head that there might be a site for that sort of thing.

Last weekend I started checking out the first season of PSYCH. Not a bad show. The show has a nice little premise. In a nutshell, it's about a guy with great detective skills who pretends to be a psychic while working for the police department solving mysteries. The show is a little formulaic, and probably works best in smaller doses of one or two episodes a week rather than watching several back to back. In fact, I got a bit bored watching them back to back, which is why I stopped for a few days. I'm still on the fence about whether or not it's worth buying on DVD.

Instead I wound up watching the first three series of THE BRITTAS EMPIRE. I mainly grabbed these because its star, Chris Barrie, was in one of my all-time favorite shows, RED DWARF. At first I wasn't too interested in BRITTAS, but it grew on me the more that I watched. There's another four series of it out there, I just don't know if or when I'll get around to seeing them.

I also watched the TV version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, which is sort of what you'd expect a version of THE HAPPENING made in the 80s minus the Shyamalan suck. Not terrible, not amazing. Given a re-watch in the future I imagine that I'd probably enjoy it even more. (Sometimes I don't get into things until I've seen them again.)

Currently in my "to watch" pile I've got about sixty movies and about ten TV shows (some multiple seasons). A lot of it, particularly the movies, has been piling up a for a long time. Part of the reason things pile up is that I wind up re-watching things I've already seen.

Somewhere in there I beat METAL GEAR SOLID 4. I didn't bother watching the ending though because I was sick of cut scenes by that point. (Plus I downloaded that half hour graveyard scene off of YouTube back before the game came out.)

The other day I had the riff to "Cold Gin" by KISS stuck in my head. So I picked up my acoustic* and played it. I wonder if Gene Simmons is going to want a few bucks for that.

* I play so infrequently these days, that hooking up all of the stuff to play one of my electrics hardly seemed worth the effort. I've pretty much reached the point where I'll probably just sell all of that junk off.