November 2007 Entries

guitar_hero_pros pros indeed. Unfortunately, there are no Jimi Hendrix tracks on any of the Guitar Hero/Rock Band games. I really hope that changes some day. There is a character that somewhat resembles Jimi in Guitar Hero III, but it's not the same...it's not the experience.

Guitar Hero is a lot of fun, but I have to admit that I'm having more fun on the drums and the vocals than the guitar. Maybe they're closer to the real thing, maybe it's just that they're different. Maybe it's the fact that I'm actually learning how to play the drums :) I saw the pic to the left on CodingHorror, and Jeff notes in the comments that the drums in rock band really do teach drumming:

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You can take a person that’s playing on the expert levels in Rock Band on the drums and put them on a real drum set, and they can play the drums. And I watched this happen with a Q&A staff of 25-30 people. Maybe 2 or 3 of those had experience of being drummers, but they’ve been playing the game for months now, and what we’ve got is 30 drummers in the Q&A department who are pounding away in the Hard and Expert settings. These people have learned the fundamentals of drums, and this isn’t abstracting fundamentals — you can put these people on a drum set and they have some basic skills now. As a payoff for playing a video game, that’s incredible! Rock Band is going to be out there training this wave of new young drummers, and that’s a really exciting aspect of the project for us.
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Rock on.

Darren Neimke talks about building ajax applications, both with and without a button to intercept...Darren has this way of explaining things in a way that always makes me nod my head in agreement. Thing is, I haven't really had the opportunity recently to hack a lot in asp.net. It's easy to forget with all of the ajax content on the net that essentially, it's just javascript that interacts with asp.net and other web frameworks really well. Thx, Darren.

As a thanx you to Sir Wally for kicking me in the butt to start blogging again, I'm linking to a site he told me about called HappyMappy.com that he is involved with. I did a search on sports in the Houston area and was surprised to see "Htowns Arena Theatre" in the results. That's hood, Sir Wally. It makes my mappy happy :P

and welcome to my new blog. :)