I’m spending the rest of the week on Lake George, soaking in the lake, riding a boat dragged tube, and generally enjoying myself. I’ll be back in a week.
Praise for bytearts Rock Band guitar repair kit
I love Rock Band – it’s one of my favorite videogames of the last year or so, and it’s turned me into an unexpected fan of ‘party games,’ something I’d been pretty skeptical of in the past (Mario Party? Super Smash Brothers? Pshaw!). Everyone I’ve turned Rock Band onto has loved it, and Susan and I are looking forward to Rock Band parties at her place this fall. The one fly in the ointment has been the guitars – there’s no way to sugar coat it, they’re simply unreliable pieces of crap. Why a Chinese or Taiwanese factory can churn out reliable DVD players for $20 but can’t produce a reliable $60 plastic guitar is beyond me, but it’s been a frustrating experience. I’ve had to disassemble the first guitar I bought at least a half dozen times in attempts to ‘tune’ it so that strums on the strum bar would register, using instructions I found online. This worked, but it would eventually creep back out of alignment due to what is in my opinion a flaw in the design. To the credit of EA, the publisher’s of Rock Band, they’ve had a pretty generous return policy on the guitars so far, but I basically concluded nothing they could do for me would permanently fix this issue due to the design flaw. Fortunately I found a link in the official Rock Band forums to Bytearts, who manufacture a replacement circuit board/microswitches/mounting hardware for $20 shipped. I installed this on Saturday and love it. The installation process was relatively simple, and the difference in the guitar performance is amazing. For the first time since I’ve owned the game I feel like I know for sure when *I* made a mistake when I’m strumming versus wondering if it was the crappy hardware failing to register. I celebrated this by buying the new Who pack and had a blast Saturday afternoon playing through all of it. It’s great.
Anyway, if you’ve got a Rock Band guitar that’s failing to register strumming reliably, consider checking out the Bytearts kit, it’s fantastic. Meanwhile, I’m on to the next challenge, which is finding a way to fix the unreliable Overdrive mode tilt sensor. I bought a second guitar and the thing came out of the box unable to reliably register Overdrive. Curses to the hardware designers at Harmonix – Great great game, shitty shitty guitar hardware.
Bet you didn’t know Susan has a ginormous head
Susan was invited to be one of the subjects of a public art project on campus last fall that involved having her portrait sketched by an artist, then allowing any member of the campus community to doodle on the portrait. The finished works were then publicly displayed on the outsides of campus buildings and around campus for several months. For most of that time Susan’s portrait was hung inside the Mead art museum, but for a little while it was hung outside the building she works in. They’re beginning to take the portraits down, so we quickly snapped a shot the other day. Witness Susan of the giant and not so giant head:
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Kirsten pointed out in the comments that Susan looks like Queen Elizabeth in that picture, so here’s a higher resolution shot of the actual artwork:
Entertaining thread on metafilter about Action Park
Andrew pointed me over to an entertaining thread about Action Park, the long closed and fabulously dangerous first person amusement park* that I used to go to a couple of times a year back in the mid 80’s through the early 90’s, and I couldn’t help contributing my favorite little vignette from my times in the park to the thread. The thread starts here on metafilter, and my contribution is here. As a teaser to incent the clickage, the story involves an unwelcome enema. How can you resist clicking through to discover how that could happen at an amusement park!
* first person because most of the rides featured you putting your body in some form of harm’s way, be it on a waterslide, alpine slide, running down rapids in a tube, or jumping off a platform on a bungie cord.
Spoiler below! Don’t read till you’ve read the metafilter story!
I should add that I didn’t tell the whole story over on metafilter because I figured no one would believe me, but the coda was, after Brian and I waddled over to the first men’s room we could find, we opened the door to discover a little kid who had absolutely exploded with diarrhea and was standing in the middle of the bathroom in obvious distress. We couldn’t figure out what to do about the kid, and after a brief mexican standoff we both retreated and waddled off in search of another bathroom, both of us unwilling to use the completely soiled one.
I am well and truly f*cked
I knew the headline ‘Good Cholesterol dementia risk’ was going to be a problem when I saw it, and clicking through proved me right. Research in Europe suggests a link between a lack of “good” (HDL) cholesterol and poor memory functions. Anyone who knows me knows I have a terrible memory for details. What they may not know is I have a chronic problem with low HDL cholesterol. When I was first diagnosed with diabetes years ago, my HDL/LDL ratio was atrocious, and despite years of experimenting with various diet and drug regimens, the highest I’ve ever gotten my HDL is 20. Anything below 40 is considered a risk for heart disease. I’ve been as low as 12. The only good thing about all this is I probably won’t remember it’s a problem in a month or two 😉
The article’s over here, for those who are curious.
Rock Band: immensely useful forum thread for instrument repair
So you bought Rock Band or Guitar Hero, and you love it, but your guitar broke/keeps breaking or you’ve heard there are modifications you can make to it to make it play better. You’ll find this thread really useful – it collects every known repair and mod known in one handy location. This helped me find a fix for my constantly breaking guitar. Screw Harmonix for paying the shoddiest factory on earth to produce these things, btw – I can buy a DVD player for $50 that lasts for years, but their $60 plastic guitars don’t last a month and cost me an extra $20 to get em working. Anyway, check out the thread, it’s great. I’ll write up the repair I used seperately since the folks who made it, bytearts, deserve every little bit of google-fu I can contribute.
Public service announcement: Bioshock for only $15
Bioshock is the spiritual successor to two of the greatest videogames ever made, System Shock and System Shock 2. I rarely solve games, and while I don’t think Bioshock really lived up to its heritage, I did play it through to the end and agree with the generally positive reviews it got. This weekend Valve is offering it for only $15 over on Steampowered. If you like atmospheric shooters with some light RPG elements and great plots, there’s nothing else like it on the market and it’s definitely worth playing through. For $15 it’s a steal.
Friday Fun Link: arachnophilia
You’re a spider in a web, and bugs are flitting about, occasionally getting caught in your web. Your job is to eat captured bugs, build out your web, and repair the damage bugs inflict on it. Controls are simple – click to eat a bug captured in the web, click and drag between two points to spin a new section of web. You have to balance your need for food, which grants health and more fluid for web spinning, against your need to build out your web – the larger and more tangled it is, the more bugs you can catch. Sound fun? Check it out – it is. Requires a recent version of the flash plugin and plays nicely in the browser.
More evidence that eating curry regularly is good for you
Some time ago I linked to a research study suggesting that eating curries helps stave off the onset of Alzheimer’s. Now there’s evidence that it can also help combat the effects of diabetes and obesity. Specifically, compounds found in Tumeric, a spice often used in curries, show promise. There are more details over on sciencedaily.com if you’re curious.
How to spend a hot summer weekend, in film:
Susan and I spent a 3 day weekend on Lake George this past weekend. This short clip:
Dave jumps off the west dollar island cliff on lake george from David Hamilton on Vimeo.
pretty much sums up how we spent our time 😉
Dave's Place/Metamusing 