tbradshaw.net

It’s been almost five years that I’ve been using Gentoo almost exclusively as my primary desktop distribution and my preferred server distribution. And not without reason, Gentoo has a lot of things going for it. The detailed and “manual” installation process taught me tons about Linux, I really like portage, and I’ve always appreciated the attention given to the console environment in Gentoo.

You never really use a GUI to configure anything in Gentoo, but with the souped up bash completion and great vim highlighting support and snazzy colored output, you never really need to either. While it seems counter-intuitive, I really think that Gentoo is still the best distribution for learning Linux. There’s nothing hidden from you, but you get great documentation.

However, as time as gone by, the draw of Ubuntu kept getting stronger. For all of the benefits of Gentoo as a distribution, they no longer seem to have any leadership or vision. Nothing interesting or new has happened in Gentoo for a very long time. In contrast, Ubuntu is certainly the “new hotness” with innovative ideas and processes coming out all the time. It’s much more “hold your hand” and “easier” to use, but it’s still Linux and you can still do anything you want if you’re willing to get under the hood. Here at work, we’ve been looking for an alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and it looks like Ubuntu Server LTS might be the answer we’re looking for.

Of course there’s been a lot if things done “differently”, but after the initial unfamiliarity was over, none of the differences are poorly thought out or arbitrary, just different. My first reaction in general to installing and configuring Ubuntu as been “dreamy”. Configuring has been a snap; the GUI tools that are available are both optional and effective.

I think I might be here to stay for a while.

Each year, I picture myself writing this epic post-QuakeCon wrap up that somehow manages to adequately express my appreciation for all of the people I work with there for another amazing year. Each year, I never really get around to writing it.

So, in strong respect for the “something is better than nothing” principle, I thought I would at least throw up a short blurb. It was another amazing QuakeCon with it’s own set of unique challenges and accomplishments. It’s awe inspiring the quality of the team that has been created by the event, and I’m honored to have had the opportunity to work with them.

A notable change from this year was the inclusion of Lindsay on the volunteer team. She assisted Casey ‘Spicey’ Hysell with entertainment, serving as an assistant to several of the on-stage contests and providing support labor for tasks like rolling t-shirts. Not only was it great to have Lindsay contributing to an event that has been such a large part of my life, but it was just phenomenal how warmly she was welcomed and how well she fit in. I think that experience is equal parts high-quality friends from QuakeCon and Lindsay fantastic, personable personality. Word on the street is that she’s even been offered a staff position next year on Spicey’s team.

Otherwise, the event held many highs and lows, just as all truly worthy challenges do. There was a strong likelihood that this would be my last QuakeCon, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised with just how much effort the organization is willing to exert to keep me on the executive board. If anything is markedly different post-QuakeCon this year compared to any other year, it’s how much effort there is to try and make QuakeCon a continuous, year-round effort, rather than a quickly assembled event as it sometimes tends to be.

This is especially true for the software development team. We’ve already started building a new project management framework to start development nearly immediately. I look forward to the foundational improvements that we will be making for the event–and for ourselves–as the custom software starts development for next year’s QuakeCon. If this pace can be maintained, 2009 will certainly be the greatest QuakeCon ever.

I got the wild hair to change my desktop background today, and my favorite desktops are always those that span both monitors with a cohesive look. Here are some archives that I found that I liked:

• http://www.dualmonitorbackgrounds.com/
• http://mandolux.com/
• http://www.dualscreenwallpaper.com/

This Saturday The Bunker served as host to some of the most epic Rock Band I have ever had the pleasure of participating in. Jesse “jonypawks” Printz, Nathan Printz, Travis “maber” Mehlinger, and I tackled the Endless Setlist with everyone on Expert difficulty. The effort was tremendous.

The session has been a long time coming. We’ve been wanting to do the Endless Setlist for ages, but the immense time commitment (over 5 hours) has made it difficult to schedule. This was compounded by the challenge of finding a suitable fourth player for the power trio of Mehlinger, Printz, and myself. We’ve had great fun playing with Kuffs and Duncan both, but neither are quite as obsessed enthusiastic about the game as us three.

However, the stars aligned themselves this weekend, when Nathan–Jesse’s brother–came to visit for the weekend. Just that easy, on Friday afternoon during a delicious Fourth of July luncheon, we committed the four of us to tackling the most epic challenge in Rock Band.

We started at 11:00am on Saturday, after I returned from the grocery store with a twelve-pack of bottled water and some Rockstar energy drink. The Endless Setlist contains every single song on the Rock Band disk, all 58 of them, in order of difficulty, for a total of over four and a half hours without breaks. We wouldn’t be playing without breaks, however. In fact, to make the experience more enjoyable, we would be breaking the Endless Setlist up into a series of smaller sets while swapping instruments throughout.

We prepped a setlist in advance and scheduled our equipment changes. We also took the time to record our accomplishments in statistical glory.

For the first set, we warm up quickly with a seven song start. Nathan played bass, maber played drums, I started on vocals, and jonypawks lit up the guitar.

Song	Bass	Drums	Vocals	Guitar	Stars	Score
29 Fingers	97%	97%	91%	93%		597,335
Say It Ain’t So	99%	97%	95%	98%		837,942
In Bloom	98%	95%	97%	96%		899,311
I Think I’m Paranoid	98%	98%	97%	98%		622,464
The Time We Had	95%	92%	93%	98%		604,472
Mississippi Queen	99%	97%	84%	97%		505,711
Here It Goes Again	100%	98%	95%	99%		924,669

Notably, Nathan put the first 100% onto the scoreboard with his bass work on Here It Goes Again and Say It Ain’t So was (sort of surprisingly) our only Gold Stars from the set. Generally speaking, we attributed it waking up and starting to play so “early”. For a lot of us, it was the first thing we did this morning.

For the next set of six songs, jonypawks took over vocals, I moved to my only small set on drums, Nathan slide over to guitar, while maber held down the bass.

Song	Bass	Drums	Vocals	Guitar	Stars	Score
Creep	100%	90%	91%	95%		509,622
Bloody Doll	99%	92%	57%	95%		336,561
Wave of Mutilation	96%	80%	95%	98%		254,785
Should I Stay or Should I Go	98%	88%	84%	98%		437,467
Maps	99%	88%	85%	99%		363,099
Gimme Shelter	97%	92%	60%	97%		579,455

Well, this set was a bit of a disappointment. No one expected to go straight “fours” on only the second set, but it was easy to diagnose. Warming up to expert vocals is difficult, and jonypawks was coming in cold. While Bloody Doll is a bonus track that he had never sang before (and only rarely heard), Gimme Shelter is just really hard on vocals. Unfortunately, added with my lack-luster drum performance, it was just too much to overcome to get any 5 stars out of the deal. This is also the set where our “golden” drum set (the one of three that can do rolls on the snare fast enough to succeed on Run to the Hills) started to give. I definitely gave a 98% performance on Gimme Shelter, but dropped yellows kept me much much lower. Of note, though, maber did put up a four stringed 100% on Creep.

We decided to give it one more set before we broke for lunch. For the next session I moved to bass, Nathan took over on the skins, and maber moved to guitar while jonypawks held the mic stand up.

Song	Bass	Drums	Vocals	Guitar	Stars	Score
Brainpower	87%	92%	73%	81%		224,893
Sabotage	94%	97%	77%	96%		577,797
Blitzkrieg Bop	98%	97%	94%	97%		556,528
Celebrity Skin	99%	96%	89%	99%		722,118
I’m So Sick	97%	98%	74%	97%		517,902
When We Were Young	99%	98%	88%	98%		926,813
Black Hole Sun	99%	97%	88%	96%		842,229

This set went much better. I was on the “wrong guitar” for the Brainpower and put up a disappointing 87%. (Considering I’m supposed to be our “star” guitarist, 87% is embarrassingly low.) After swapping guitars things went nicer, although I was very disappointed to not get a single 100% on the board. I thought this was going to be my best (and probably last) chance to put up a 100% during our endless setlist, and I was already jealous of both Nathan and maber’s flawless runs.

It was Goodcents time. I printed off a copy of our stats thus-far and we chatted about it over lunch before heading back to The Bunker to finish out our epic journey.

The next set begins a massive two session odyssey with me on vocals. Of our four part band, only two of us have the pipes to handle expert vocals, and we were saving jonypawks for the last couple tiers of songs while I did git-fiddle duty. While I’m on vox, jonypawks takes a turn beating drums while Nathan plays six strings and maber plays four.

Song	Bass	Drums	Vocals	Guitar	Stars	Score
Wanted Dead or Alive	97%	94%	91%	92%		627,351
Learn to Fly	98%	95%	95%	98%		834,451
Seven	99%	98%	76%	96%		1,046,032
Orange Crush	97%	88%	99%	98%		575,675
Main Offender	98%	98%	86%	93%		501,304
The Hand That Feeds	99%	83%	91%	98%		611,259
Day Late Dollar Short	96%	90%	85%	96%		630,171
Epic	97%	94%	87%	89%		819,278
Suffragette City	99%	97%	87%	95%		707,104
Ballroom Blitz	97%	94%	93%	91%		1,109,287
Dead on Arrival	94%	85%	90%	93%		482,387
Pleasure (Pleasure)	97%	96%	97%	88%		748,847
Train Kept A’Rollin’	97%	94%	92%	89%		724,929

It was a long run to the end of this session, but it was a good one. Vocals continued to be our lowest scoring member of the band, with unfamiliar songs and talky parts alike putting some punishment onto me. Drums also took some hard times as the drum set that was annoying me became unbearable for jonypawks about halfway through this session. After some fiddling, maber ended up forking over the cash to buy a replacement set so we could continue rocking. We all languished about how much we wanted Rock Band 2 to arrive such that we could buy more reliable instruments.

The set ended up a particularly strong point when it was time for Dead on Arrival, Pleasure (Pleasure), and Train Kept A’Rollin’. Each of these songs have very difficult sections for drums, guitar, and guitar (respectively). It was a great band unity moment for us as we banded together to use our overdrive power to save and support the team member that was going to struggle. We passed all three, first try, and felt like more of a “band” for it.

The next session I continued my reign of terror on vocals while jonypawks moved his steady hands to bass, Nathan took a seat on the throne, and maber put on the fast fingerwork.

Song	Bass	Drums	Vocals	Guitar	Stars	Score
Are You Gonna Be My Girl?	93%	95%	95%	95%		931,327
Paranoid	98%	98%	100%	95%		800,317
Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld	90%	95%	80%	77%		228,817
Welcome Home	97%	99%	95%	97%		1,630,254
Go With the Flow	97%	98%	99%	98%		940,467
Dani California	97%	99%	98%	94%		1,457,076
Nightmare	98%	98%	96%	96%		655,633
Don’t Fear the Reaper	94%	94%	99%	97%		983,206
Reptilia	100%	96%	90%	97%		872,809
Electric Version	94%	97%	94%	98%		662,682
Vasoline	96%	99%	96%	94%		648,801

A slew of notables in this session. Jonypawks put up a four stringed 100% on Reptilia and we collectively surprised with a gold star performance on Dani California. Of extreme surprise was that I managed to get my own 100% on the board, but in vocals! The session was a blast, but I was incredibly glad to be done with vocals. After a much needed break, the first real problem with our session breaks presented itself.

All of the song groupings were arranged with a few heuristics. First, for the harder songs we tried to arrange things such that our band members were in the “right” place for the challenge. Second, we tried to give everyone as much variety as possible. Third, we wanted things to be in large blocks so that we were taking breaks and swapping instruments for more time than we were playing. However, I made a tactical error when I placed Detroit Rock City at the beginning of the next session. Jonypawks just didn’t know it at all. We failed our first song of the entire setlist and then I swapped jonypawks guitar for vocals for that single track.

For the rest of the session, we resumed our regularly scheduled arrangement of Nathan on bass, maber crushing the percussion, jonypawks on mic, and myself on guitar. This is our optimum arrangement, with maber, jonypawks, and I at our most skilled position and Nathan bring his very capable skills to lay the foundation on bass.

Song	Bass	Drums	Vocals	Guitar	Stars	Score
Detroit Rock City	92%	94%	92%	96%		525,864
Can’t Let Go	96%	96%	77%	92%		421,936
Next to You	92%	89%	84%	94%		463,774
Cherub Rock	98%	96%	93%	97%		1,276,721
Tom Sawyer	97%	95%	81%	97%		951,841
Enter Sandman	97%	98%	95%	98%		1,253,995
Green Grass and High Tides	87%	97%	72%	89%		1,346,898

Everyone really brought some great rock to the table. Other than challenges with expert vocals (which again, are our most difficult challenge for this setlist), a very solid presentation of 90%+ performances litter all of the songs. At this point, nearly everyone is playing a song that comes in the highest tier of their respective solo tour. Another great bonding moment came in the form of Green Grass and High Tides where I, a bit rusty, took on the longest solos in the game. Of course, I nailed the really difficult finger-work that I was nervous about only to butcher some simple four finger rolls later in the song. Sheesh. Still, an 89% on guitar with a four star performance overall isn’t too shabby.

And with that, we launched into the final section of our expert Endless Setlist:

Song	Bass	Drums	Vocals	Guitar	Stars	Score
Outside	96%	91%	90%	98%		823,094
Highway Star	92%	97%	87%	94%		1,491,713
Foreplay/Long Time	98%	98%	72%	94%		1,073,386
Flirtin’ with Disaster	86%	96%	94%	92%		1,181,707
I Get By	97%	95%	66%	95%		513,455
Run for the Hills	92%	85%	84%	89%		433,679
We Won’t Get Fooled Again	98%	93%	75%	98%		1,232,678

An incredible finish! Foreplay/Long Time gave us our second fail of the night, when the vocal “wankery” at the end took out jonypawks unexpectedly. (Not that we shouldn’t have been expecting a challenge there, but we didn’t.) We were so wrapped up in our epic instrumental performance that we had used a greedy overdrive path and left no overdrive for a save. The end of the song provided no overdrive opportunities to correct and we were beaten. A second attempt with more conservative overdrive use posed no threat at all, still landing a five star performance.

Run to the Hills is, by far, the hardest song in the game. We Won’t Get Fooled Again finishes the set list, but that choice by Harmonix is clearly one out of respect for the contribution to rock that The Who has made and not out of respect to the brutally fast high hat/snare work and triplet strings action that Iron Maiden delivers with Run to the Hills. After beating our way through Run to the Hills with a particularly notable performance by Nathan, it was down hill.

During We Won’t Get Fooled Again, that’s when we noticed how careful we had been playing. Normally we play with a lot of energy, practically throwing ourselves into the performances with wreckless abandon. We’re just silly, it’s true. However, our desire to complete the Endless Setlist had prepared us instead for a calculated team effort. We started to cut lose a little in We Won’t Get Fooled Again… and then it was over.

We yelled we screamed, but there was one thing on our minds more than anything. We needed more Rock Band. We wanted to cut loose. It was GO time. So we selected a 4 song Make a Setlist, and let each band member pick what song they wanted to play and one what instrument. To allow even more ridiculousness, vocals was mandated to be on Easy!

The set was the most epic we had ever played. Maber chose to sing Casey Jones by the Grateful Dead, putting his rendition of the groovy favorite down to a preposterously enthusiastic Little Endian (that’s our band name). We followed Casey Jones with Nathan’s selection, War Pigs with Nathan on drums. Maber stayed on vox, though I’m sure the microphone could pick up all of us singing the song at the top of our lungs.

For part three of our gratuitously platinum setlist, I chose to sing March of the Pigs. After carefully and roboticly delivering pitch-accurate singing that sounded more or less like crap, I was raring to just scream my face off in spite of the pitch detection software. I delivered March of the Pigs with such vigor that I even managed to get a “Messy” on the Easy difficulty. I also threw the microphone stand down during the breakdown and tried to knock over my band mates.

The finale for our delightfully self-indulgent “riding on coattails” performance was “This Ain’t a Scene” by Fallout Boy. I know, it’s silly to think that a group of individuals with discriminating taste in music would end with such a trite pop rock hit, but that over-the-top simplicity is exactly what we craved. Jonypawks on vocals, myself on guitar, maber on bass, and Nathan on drums, we just destroyed that track. Guitarists were spinning, the drums quaked, and the mic stand rarely stood on the ground.

It was over. It was legendary.

Thank you, Boston! Good night!

Update:

I almost forgot! Here’s some aggregate statistics from our setlist, broken down by instrument!

This put our average number of stars at 4.57 (counting gold stars as 6).

Independence Day
Chipotle takes a short break.
Thursday it is, Yay!

It’s certainly no secret that my favorite game of all time is Rock Band. A huge fan of Harmonix games since I first played Guitar Hero, not a single Tuesday goes by that I don’t buy all of the available Downloadable Content for RB and have a session with my best friends.

This morning was a huge surprise when I awoke to breaking news that Rock Band 2 has been announced, and it’s coming out in just two months! Just two months!

I don’t even have any particular novel information about the release. The vast majority of the information currently known about Rock Band 2 is the super-set of information from the previously linked press released and this interview on IGN.

But novelty aside, I’ve just gotten so excited about the news I couldn’t help but try to shout it out on the inter-tubes! I wish I could buy a 360 and RB2 for everyone I know so that they can experience this game that has me so livid with joy. But, of course, I can’t… so I’ll just have to settle for this blog post as an expression of my exuberance.

It’s been a long time since Matt Hoosier and I were “on the air” doing political talk radio, and I’ve slowly grown much more apathetic since that time. Particularly, it amazes me just how obviously bad things can be while the majority of people don’t care.

This article by Wired is disheartening, but with a bit of a silver lining. The article highlights a press release by the awesome MAPLight.org group where a stunningly clear connection is shown:

Maplight.org analyzed the contributions to both sets of the Democrats and found that those who switched their votes received, on average, 40 percent more money in campaign contributions over the last three years from Sprint, Verizon and AT&T’s political action committees.

It begs the question, “How transparently corrupt does our government have to get before anyone really cares?” Perhaps people like to joke about corruption and greed in politics, but somehow are in denial that it’s true? It’s hard to guess what the rationale is for maintaining the status quo when the status quo is so broken.

Of course, it’s unlikely–understatement–that it’s only the telco PACs that are padding the votes in this manner. It seems likely that there’s a huge correlation between “donations” and voting records. What seems to be the silver lining on the dark cloud is this MAPLight organization; who subtitle themselves “Money and Politics: Illuminating the Connection”.

It would probably be best if you just visited MAPLight.org yourself, but I think that this referral mentioned on their site is the thesis for my appreciation:

“What used to take hours to dig up and analyze is now laid bare for you to see in seconds or minutes.”

— California Progress Report

Maybe people really do manage to keep their head in the sand when it comes to corruption and politics, but in this “new information age”–with projects like MAPLight–I like to think that ignorance will no longer be an option.

I used to think that napping was impossible. I just couldn’t do it. If I took a nap, I didn’t nap, I slept. Of course, this wasn’t a big deal until I came to K-State and joined some twenty-five thousand other “traditional” undergraduate students. (For those that aren’t intimately familiar with the college liffe, the majority of traditional students have a sleep schedule that includes being up late, getting up early, and taking an afternoon nap before dinner.)

Eventually I was able to take naps now an then, more of a necessity than a voluntary choice, and even now I have some successful naps and some more unsuccessful naps. However, now it turns out that napping is “in” and comes with instructions!

Divine carnitas
Enshrined in burrito bowl
Thank you, Chipotle

As a quick blog update, I decided to give the blog css a little love. It’s nothing significant, but should make things a little nicer to read around here. I’ve added whitespace around the posts and images (which now float right) and tidied up that big gray block of rarely-does-anyone-give-a-crap-links at the bottom.

Gotta keep up Lindsay after all…

Strangely enough, it appears that I’m going to be switching back to GNOME from Xfce due to performance. For whatever reason, screen redraw time after changing virtual desktops in Xfce was noticeably slow.

Thankfully I have coworkers with identical workstation hardware, who quickly demonstrated that it wasn’t my hardware that was lacking. A quick trial of GNOME showed an enormous increase in perceived render time during virtual desktop switches.

So much for Xfce being GNOME-lite, eh?

Busy, busy, busy. While you wouldn’t know it by just reading my blog, back around March 10 I proposed to Lindsay and she said, “Yes.” (Sucker! Ha ha!) A significant portion of each day now goes towards wedding planning.

Generally, this is a pretty fun process. Event planning is certainly something that I’m familiar with, and in most regards a wedding is “just another” event. The interesting thing about wedding planning is the constant battle with cognitive dissonance. It seems that, in general, women have been planning their wedding since they were just barely old enough to understand Disney princesses. As such, an enormous number of the decisions made during the wedding planning process are elevated from “easy” or even “trivial” to “emotionally charged”.

It makes the process so much harder than it should be. Balancing the expectations of a wedding from all the parties involved with the reality of a large and expensive event is surprisingly challenging. Sometimes a great idea is immediately shot down because of the cognitive dissonance it creates with the perception of how that aspect of the event should go, only to grow to desirability after enough time has passed for the great idea to gain familiarity and the preconception is rationalized away to remove it’s influence. It’s a process I can understand, but it’s taxing! Lindsay and I have fought more about this stuff that we have about anything else in our almost 3 year relationship so far.

Perhaps I’ll use that as my excuse for why I haven’t been blogging. Anyway, most of the hurdles have been jumped by now. The event is 80% planned, and I’m pretty proud of the outcome. Lindsay decided early on (after pondering the conclusion to one of our large disagreements) that she didn’t want to just stick with her preconceived wedding and wanted an event that reflected us both, as a couple. It was a remarkable and rather noble decision, I think. Apparently, even the very idea of a groom expressing opinion on a wedding is considered with a chuckle in most circles. In contrast, my bride has decided that our wedding will be a partnership from start to finish, a decision I’m proud of.

It provides a significant amount of my motivation to provide event planning services. I can’t imagine getting married and just being another attendee. I wonder how other grooms-to-be managed to be so apathetic?

The first book I dove in to start my science fiction odyssey is Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. I first remember hearing about this book in various interviews with John Carmack between 1997 and 1999. I was pretty sure there was a .plan update back then too, but I couldn’t find it for linking.

The questions of Carmack were in the context of the technology he had revealed with Quake, the “true” 3D game that took to the internet more so than any game before it. I don’t remember John ever mentioning a specific preference for the book, but the memory forever associated Snow Crash as a book that the visionaries of computer programming had read.

I found that I loved the book. The dystopian future, heros, and humor kept me interested and engaged for the entire duration. The single element of the book that has stuck with me most was just how visionary and influential the book was. When reading the descriptions of the “metaverse” (the author’s better-sounding-word for “cyberspace”), I was taken aback constantly by how accurate the metaverse described current virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life. And every time, I had to remind myself that Snow Crash was written long before any of those virtual worlds existed. Instead, Snow Crash came first, and then all of these virtual worlds I’m now familiar with emulated it.

The hacker ethos permeated so much of the book, that after reading it I had to read more about Neil Stephenson. I wanted to know just how an author of novels came to know so much about the values and mannerisms of us: computer geeks, and even of me.

To use a tired and obtuse methodology of giving reviews a score, I think Snow Crash is a 9 out of 10.

I’ve recently taken to reading Science Fiction. I’ve rarely made time for fiction, focusing almost entirely on technical reading and philosophical non-fiction. However, it didn’t escape my notice that most of the visionaries of the world reference fiction often.

So I’ve started reading Science Fiction, starting with those books that are often cited as excellent and influential. I’ve also been posting my thoughts on The Book Barn forum on Something Awful. They have a thread dedicated to books you “just finished.” I’m going to start cross posting my thoughts here as well.

I’m making a little bit of progress with the blog. As you can see by this (mis)styled page, the theme is starting to get converted. It will probably remain partially broken for a while, as I tweak things as time allows.

I’ve been holding back some posts about books I’ve been reading, mainly because I wasn’t sure how to handle images with the new blog. However, I noticed today that WordPress has a file upload system integrated in. I think I’ll give that a shot.

Looking over the archive of entries, the metadata is just so sloppy. I’m going to be going back through my archives, pruning sparsely used categories and generally organizing things. For the most part this is completely inconsequential, but just in case you managed to subscribe to an RSS feed for a specific category, and you managed to follow it to the new URI, it might disappear anyway.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the blog going, but I decided to take the plunge and get something running again. After the recent redesign of www.tbradshaw.net, I had almost convinced myself to write some new software that would handle my blogging and better serve the purposes of another project.

I’ve since remembered that having something up and running is better than nothing. So here it is, better than nothing…

So for the last month or so I’ve been running Windows Vista RC1, trying things out. My primary reason for installing Vista was the installation process. I’m so freaking sick of the crappy Windows XP installer that it’s difficult for me to blog about it without dropping my rating from a PG-13 to NC-17.

Suffice it to say that I’m offended at an installer that doesn’t support years old technology (SATA) without requiring ancient technology (a floppy drive). Vista’s installer has resolved that problem in both ways, first providing full SATA support and second by allowing drivers to be loaded from floppy drives, CD-ROM, and USB storage devices. They’ve also done a few other nice things, like ask almost all of the questions at the beginning so that you can go have a donut while the installation finishes. Review of the installer? Two thumbs way the hell up.

Things start to fall apart a little after installation though, the crux of the entire situation being memory usage. Freshly booted, nothing running, idle, Windows Vista uses about 650 megs of RAM. We’re talking a fresh installation as well, so there’s nothing else running. It’s offensive. My relatively nice computer with a gig of CAS 2 latency RAM was upgraded to a sporty new video card… and game perforance went down after upgrading to Vista! Down!

Simply put, Vista uses too much RAM. Even after disabling every single internal service I could disable without crashing the box: the Defender, the nice new UI, absolutely everything; it still used 430 megs of RAM. Is Vista worth the sticker price? Maybe… I guess… depending on how much you pay. Since I’m a student in the Computer Science department, it’s free, so yeah I guess. However, is Vista worth buying a new computer (or at least a butt-ton of RAM) for? Definitely not!

In fact, I was previously offended enough by the installer that I refused, on all counts to install a floppy drive just to install XP. However, I’ve been having a huge amount of fun raiding in WoW lately, and that is enough. I’m currently downloading SCSI drivers for my SATA controller to copy using a freshly installed floppy disk drive to disk.

Before I had experienced Vista, there was nothing that was going to make me go through the additional work to install crappy ol’ XP. After experiencing Vista… turns out it’s worth the extra work just to stick with XP and not use Vista. How’s that for an ironic turn around? I just got owned.

I noticed today on Slashdot that IGN has released a complete track list for Guitar Hero 2!

To say that I’m excited would be an understatement. I’ve already been downloading music to fill out my Guitar Hero 2 playlist on iTunes, just so that I can be familiar with the songs before the November 7th release. Now (as soon as I get my PowerBook back) I can finish up the track listing completely, in order!

A quick note before I dive right into the track list: 40 licensed songs things time instead of 30, and it look to have gotten a lot harder!

• 1. Opening Licks
  • Motley Crue - Shout at the Devil
  • Danzig - Mother
  • Cheap Trick - Surrender
  • Wolfmother - Woman
  • Spinal Tap - Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight
• 2. Amp-Warmers
  • Kiss - Strutter
  • Nirvana - Heart-Shaped Box
  • Police - Message in a Bottle
  • Van Halen - You Really Got Me
  • Kansas - Carry on Wayward Son
• 3. String-Snappers
  • Foo Fighters - Monkey Wrench
  • Alice in Chains - Them Bones
  • Iggy Pop and the Stooges - Search and Destroy
  • Pretenders - Tattooed Love Boys
  • Black Sabbath - War Pigs
• 4. Thrash and Burn
  • Warrant - Cherry Pie
  • Butthole Surfers - Who Was in My Room Last Night
  • Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend
  • Rolling Stones - Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’
  • Guns N’ Roses - Sweet Child O’ Mine
• 5. Return of the Shred
  • Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name Of
  • Primus - John the Fisherman
  • Sword - Freya
  • Thin Lizzy - Bad Reputation
  • Aerosmith - Last Child
• 6. Relentless Riffs
  • Heart - Crazy on You
  • Stone Temple Pilots - Tripping on a Hole in a Paper Heart
  • Stray Cats - Rock This Town
  • Allman Brothers - Jessica
  • Jane’s Addiction - Stop
• 7. Furious Fretwork
  • Anthrax - Madhouse
  • Living End - Carry Me Home
  • Lamb of God - Laid to Rest
  • Reverend Horton Heat - Psychobilly Freakout
  • Rush - YYZ
• 8. Face-Melters
  • Avenged Sevenfold - Beast and the Harlot
  • Suicidal Tendencies - Institutionalized
  • Dick Dale - Misirlou
  • Megadeth - Hangar 18
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd - Free Bird

Yeah. Amazing. Can’t-Freaking-Wait Amazing.

It started this morning my phone was uncharged thanks to a loose USB jack on my phone charger. Annoyed as hell that it had happened again, I went to investigating.

The problem was simple to find, after removing the plastic case to the voltage increase adapter I found that the solder that was use to affix the jack to the PCB was broken and allowed the jack to wobble. “No problem,” I figured, “I’ll just get out the soldering iron, wick up that solder, and resolder it to make a new attachment.”

Turns out, I was right. It was just that easy. Unfortunately, once when I had sat the soldering iron down and was focusing on manipulating my desoldering braid for the next heat-up I picked it up by the metal element rather than the handle.

It hurt pretty bad, but not enough that I couldn’t keep working and finish. It sucks now though, because I have two nice blisters on my fingers right where I would hold a pencil. So my right middle finger has a little blister on the top by the knuckle–no big deal. However, my index finger has a big blister right on the underside (or face?) of the finger–bigger deal. Of all the places to get an injury, as a computer nerd a big burn on the end of the right index finger is about as bad as it gets, barring amputation.

So now I’m at my desk with a small sandwich bag of ice on the desk surface and every few seconds I have to place my finger back on the desk on the ice pack to avoid the very strong burning pain. When it stays cold, it’s totally fine. Unfortunately, typing really gets the blood flowing to the finger and hitting keys towards the top of the keyboard (like say, ‘y’ or ‘7′) actually tap the blister.

I’ve got lots of homework due tomorrow as well, so “not typing” and “resting the finger” aren’t an option.

I’m really happy that my phone charger is totally fixed now… but I’m not entirely sure that it was worth the trade.

Doh. Rough couple days.