So I've been playing Rock Band for years now (since about 6 months before it came out in oz) and now I've finally finished Lego Rock Band on xbox. Ages ago I played a heap of it on ps3 but never actually bothered to finish it before losing interest. Then with Rock Band 3 coming out I switched platforms (at great expense) to xbox to get better access to the rock band network. (I was on ps3 because it lacked region coding issues for RB1/2 which were delayed/not released in oz.) Rebuying my DLC was just the height of the bullshit that DRM does to us. Fortunaly I was able to pick up RB1 and LRB cheaply locally, so I could (pay the fee and then) export their songs to play in RB3. Unfortunately RB2 was never released in oz so that wasn't an option - however calling up EA and requesting an export code did work - because the UK codes don't work here so if I had bought it from UK for my oz xbox I would be ok. So I've got most of the songs anyway. I had to pay more than double for the privilege though. Sigh. People are never against DRM until it costs them for a stupid reason.

Getting hold of intstruments turned out to be harder than I thought. The guitar I had from GH2 was ok but couldn't handle expert on RB3 so I sourced a real RB2 guitar via amazon which is awesome and with the camera/mic meant I could calibrate my system properly. The Mic I had was fine - usb mic's work on both platforms. However the drums was the real issue. There was heaps up on ebay, but I wasn't going to pay that much for them, not $150-200 for a used RB1 set shipped in oz anyway. Further complicating this was previously I wanted to get the ion drum kit which was awesome but expensive. Then by a fluke of luck I found it on ebay, new, for about $400 shipped to oz. So I snapped that up and 3 weeks later I had a real drum kit for xbox.

That rekindled my interest again. After getting LRB I decided it would be good to get gamer points off it, so I started playing it. Mainly guitar on hard, just to finish and hopefully 5 star the whole game. Well some time later I found myself in the last vehicle nealy having unlocked all the gigs. There was an achievement for playing all gigs (except 2 specific ones), not 5 staring them, just playing. Sweet, so I checked on my progress and I'd unlocked 160/161 gigs and the one I hadn't played was on excluded. Great, the game bugged out on me, this being 24 hours of game time into it. Then some googling later I discovered the last gig would only unlock once I'd hit 230 gigs played, and I'd only played 175 at the time, because there wasn't much point replaying many ever since there were usually more unplyed ones available. So I was royally pissed to say the least.

Then came the suggestion on the forum to just crank out the gigs on super easy singing with a fan onto the mic. That would 5 star nearly any gig that didn't need tapping. So I did that, mic hanging in front of the speaker on super easy, for 50 gigs. Oh my god what was I doing this for again. As I got bored hearing the same song over and over I started working through them taking notes of which needed tapping or not.

So now I present the list of Lego Rock Band tracks that can be 5 starred without tapping (or using overdrive); This will also include some of my DLC songs at the time too (not all are playable in LRB due to mature lyrics).

• Accidentally In Love
• All I Want
• Breakout
• Can't Let Go
• Check Yes Juilet
• Chereb Rock
• Crash
• Fire
• Free Fallin
• Get Ready To Rokk
• Ghost Busters
• Girls And Boys
• Grace
• I Want You Back
• In Too Deep
• Lets Dance
• Life Is A Highway
• Losing My Religion
• Naive
• Roam
• Rooftops A Liberation Broadcast
• Ruby
• So What
• Song 2
• Still Alive
• Suffigate City
• Summer of 69
• Swing Swing
• The Passenger
• Thunder
• Tick Tick Boom
• Two Princes
• Valerie
• Walking on Sunshine (had 4 taps)
• Wanted Dead or Alive
• We Are The Champions
• Word up
• You Give Love A Bad Name

And the ones that have sizable tapping bits:

• 29 Fingers
• A-Punk
• Aliens Exist
• Ballroom Blitz
• Dead On Arrival
• Don't Fear The Reaper
• Dreaming Of You
• Epic
• Green Grass And High Tides
• Hysteria
• Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)
• Monster
• Outside
• Pleasure Pleasure
• Ride A White Swan
• Short And Sweet
• The Final Countdown
• Tom Sawyer

Using this list it make it rather painless to do the rock marathon (15 random songs) and the endless setlist (30 random songs - from all your songs) while paying little attention. The endless setlist I got took just over 2 hours 15 minutes and had some longer songs in the random set (Tom Sawyer, Wanted Dead or Alive) and my finale was Green Grass and High Tides.

So as I write this I've now got 890/1000 gamer points on it with only 3 achievements left - 2 of which need 4 players to do and one needing my expert guitar skills to be much better than they are. The funny thing is, even though I 5 starred every gig, I've only got 1849 stars, and I've been through the vehicles over and over and can't find a missing star!

Now onto Rock Band 3 and to get good at druming again. Oh and keyboard since I bought that too.

I guess the previous bitcoin post was a bit of a wake up call again. About 14 days after that post one card's fan stopped spinning and died. Fortunately I was alerted and shut things down before any damage was done. The card was returned for RMA. I'd hope for a new one back - considering the fan stopping could have damaged the GPU, however I was at the mercy of the supplier. And I'm still at their mercy as this friday will be 4 weeks since it was returned and still no word whether it will be repaired, replaced or refunded. A lot changes in 4 weeks. BTC2USD for example, is down from 12 to 4.5. Hmmm. I did get the PCI-E extenders and they do work a treat.

Thursday this week is RUOKDay 2011. So I've been listening to TripleJ's hack program a bit lately and it reminded me of about this time last year when an episode dealt with RUOKDay which was very interesting to me at the time. It raised a very important point which wasn't immediately obvious. Don't jump in and ask someone if they're ok unless you truly and honestly are ready for any answer.

Speaking of listening to things, at work we've taken a liking to listening to the CFox. They seem to play lots of music from when I was in high school, which is cool, mixed in with some new stuff and more metallica/nirvana than most stations would play. The ad's are funny too, being from Vancouver it's all Canada-ay. After noticing they seem to play the same tracks multiple times in a day (like all commercial stations) we started tracking it. Pumped up kicks had it's day, and is dwindling now, it's still funny when it's heard around the place though. It makes me laugh.

Minecraft. What can I say. There's a reason I didn't play WoW and this could be it. So far I've only lost one whole evening to it (and built a Nyan cat). It's fun to do stuff in, but is a massive time sink. I also built a weighted companion cube, 35x35x35 too, only another 5 or so hours. Oops.

Storage. I've got the sata port multipliers I wanted, out of China which went as smoothly as could have hoped. I did take precautions on paying by credit card by obtaining a prepaid mastercard to pay with, which was fine. The Woolworths ones have the best fees of the ones I looked at, and was easy to buy and use. Highly recommended. So far I've only done basic testing with them on the doomed (bitcoin) AMD board. I need to get a wriggle on with this project, because the new tv shows all start this week.

"Not all those who wander are lost." - J.R.R Tolkien

Ok so with the surge in price of bitcoins in june-july spiking to USD30 each and then crashing back to about USD12 it got some decent media coverage.

Perhaps I was in a vunerable situation, looking for something hobby like and a decent distraction. See I needed a distraction from storage as that's a problem still sort of wrecking on the rocks waiting to sink. Mix into this the lack of a vmware box and I've sort of lost the plot again.

So I sank some cash into a box to mine bitcoins, which was fine, or would have been fine if the hardware didn't have issues. Basically I rushed into it and opted for something available right now vs shopping around for a quality product. So the Gigabyte board I have has a fault which took about 2 weeks to isolate, and one of 2 dimms is also faulty. Now I really hate returning stuff, and after dealing with gigabytes useless and slow support decided to never buy a product from them ever again, and I still have to convince the shop that there is a fault. So that will be downtime, and in bitcoin mining - all downtime costs money. Real money.

A further complication came from a software hang issue caused by ATI Catalyst drivers, OpenCL code and an accelerated video layer (or GPU call) on Windows. Basically a major bug in the ATI drivers causes a hang of the machine if a video plays while OpenCL code is running. This was after realising the driver bundle with control center caused crashes itself, so switching to the driver only pack at least let me isolate the problem. Oh and the fix has been committed for the driver release due out AFTER the next one. So October apparently. Thank's AMD/ATI. I'll never buy your products ever again too. For reference, this card was released in NOVEMBER last year.

The memory fault isn't such a problem now, but once this fad wears off (or becomes unprofitable due to the price of power going up due to failure of the government (to cater for population growth or restrict immigration)) I was hoping to use this box as a vmware host. But alas, it's again apparent that I'm not allowed to have things go well or to plan.

Further proof of this was the build up to the final Harry Potter film. My glasses broke, and not having spares anymore (long story) left me without sight. Skip forward a week and I'm still without, and now without more money too. Health insurance is such a scam. It barely covered 25% of the cost of replacement glasses. Sigh.

I'm not allowed to win. Someone please remind me why is it I try at all.

Perhaps I should move to some far away land which is cheaper than here. Perth's now in the top 10 most expensive cities to live, and it's higher up the list than New York. What the hell am I staying here for (apart from America being filled with americans).

Hmmm

HALP

Quite a few weeks back, while doing some blog software related coding I came to have an interesting discussion with Billy about some pretty basic blog constructs which there's no right answer for. Specifically pagination and previous/next page links.

It was interesting to compare and contrast the various combinations out there and wonder about the origin of them and so on and so forth.

It pretty much came down to which way around the previous and next links should go. Some sites use previous to mean older posts, and next to mean newer, others swap the labels. Then you get the left/right side part of the debate. If both links are presented on one line, does the one to older posts belong on the left or right.

Comparing to a book was good. Next page is newer content, and located bottom right, previous page is older content and bottom left. I agree with that layout on the screen and even the labels.

Mix into that the page numbers, front page, page 1, page 2 and so on. For simplicity blogs usually have the pages numbered from the front page going backwards in time, not forwards. That would be a bit odd but I have seen it a long time ago, the benefit there is a page10 link will always have the same content on it, however the older articles linked off the front page will link to a high page number. One major benefit of this style of reverse (forward) numbering is if you're generating static content, the already complete pages won't ever need regenerating (unless templates change).

Jump forward a few weeks and it's all moot. As it doesn't really matter I just left it as it was on my blogging related experiment. So far it hasn't really had much of a test, so I'll leave it as is and see what develops.

That turned into quite a bleak blog post, devoid of links and actually anything interesting. Oh my.