Melted Banana Hand – Rocking out with Rock Band

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Rock BandWhen Rock Band came out a few weeks ago I was excited to try it out. Luckily my good friend Brian bought it and invited me to try it out. Ever since we’ve been meeting once a week as Melted Banana Hand. My impressions?

It’s more of a game than any of the Guitar Hero’s. Rather than a playing a list of songs and then being done, the idea is that you tour as a band. You will end up playing the same songs more than once but that’s ok because of how it’s done. Instead of finishing a song, your objectives are finishing a set list or finishing a venue. Because of the structure of the game it is also able to incorporate downloaded songs into the game itself rather than just adding it to a list of playable songs in quick play mode like in Guitar Hero.

The Guitar is only O-K. It looks great and I love the addition of the lower fret buttons I just wish they were used more. The game doesn’t force you to use them it simply increases the bonus you get when applicable. It would add even more depth to the game if it were to force you to use the lower frets during solos.

Solos are new to the game. For guitar this simply means added points and most likely faster sections with more notes. For drums this means you can play anything you’d like, which means a lot of fun. For vocals you can say anything you’d like. The solos in the game create a new and very dynamic musical environment.

The drums are impossibly hard. The guitar in Guitar Hero wasn’t easy to begin with but with some practice it got much better and was completely playable on hard. The drums on Rock Band are a completely different story. It’s hard on easy and insanely impossible on medium. Anything beyond that is just crazy talk.

Melted Banana Hand is still meeting once a week and the vocals are always up for grabs considering my friend Brian and I can’t at all. If you’re interested just let me know and I’m sure we can find a spot for you.

Subscribe to Feeds using TwittFeeder

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RSSTwitter is a great update and notification system. You can send it messages with a variety of tools including Instant Messaging, Text Messages and the Twitter website itself. Twitter’s mission statement reads:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

One of the most useful features about ‘new web’ is feeds. Getting updated whenever the sites you check change is probably the best enhancement to come out of the internet. No more wasting time checking sites that haven’t updated yet.

TwittFeeder asks the question: What are your favorite websites doing? It allows you to easily subscribe to feeds using twitter. Once subscribed you’ll get updates via Direct Message.

To use it first start following TwittFeeder. Once you are it will automatically start following you. When it does you can start subscribing to feeds. To do so simply send ‘subscribe http://feedurl’ to twittFeeder as a direct message. If you’re using one of the standard Twitter tools this is accomplished by sending the following message to twitter:

D twittFeeder subscribe http://feedurl

That’s it! once you’re subscribed twittFeeder will start sending you direct messages using any notification system you’ve already setup in Twitter. The great thing about this service is if twitter ever adds another notification type you automatically get your feed subscriptions sent there for free.

The notification system twittFeeder uses is whatever your notifications are currently sent to by Twitter since it simply sends you the updates via a Twitter Direct Message. If you’re not a user yet you should be but the notifications currently supported are:

  • Text Message
  • E-mail
  • Instant Messages
  • Twitter website
  • Lots and Lots of 3rd party applications

To unsubscribe to a particular feed simply send ‘unsubscribe http://feedurl’ as a Direct Message to twittFeeder.

Disclaimer: at the moment twittFeeder is scheduled to run every 10 minutes so updates won’t necessarily be immediate. That number might go up or down depending upon usage and several other factors.

Jeffrey Mullin

~ randyaa ~ 3 Comments

My niece’s brother, Jeffrey Mullin, was recently shot and killed in Rochester NY. It’s always extremely sad when someone so young passes away but when it’s from such a violent act it hits twice as deep. Unfortunately Rochester is one of the most violent cities in America and we live and work right smack dab in the middle of it. People here often dismiss the murders in Rochester to the gangs and somehow believe it doesn’t happen to good citizens. Try telling that to Cassandra, my niece. Somehow I think you will come away with a different opinion.

It’s time to wake up Rochester. We need more police presence and we need better schools. According to the 2006 census there’s roughly 200,000 people living in the city of Rochester. There were 54 Murders here in 2005 and 50 so far in 2007. That’s roughly 1 in every 3700 people. Put another way, thats almost 27 people for every 100,000. That’s almost four times the national average (which is only 7)!

The Democrat and Chronicle has a piece entitled Not Forgotten where they list each of this year’s murders and have short slide shows dedicated to them. I think this is important. I think people forget that these murders are more than just statistics and that every one of the people lost was important to someone.

I copied Jeff’s slide show for my niece and I thought I’d share it with everyone, so they could learn a little bit about Jeff instead of hearing about number 50.

I’ve also uploaded the original in case anyone wanted a copy to share.

The 2 Billionth Flickr Photo

~ randyaa ~ 2 Comments

It’s interesting to see the 1st or a significant nth item posted to any service. So often though they turn out like the first youtube video. A waste of space. It’s nice to see when a milestone is actually something worthwhile. That’s the case with the 2 billionth flickr photo. It was posted a while ago I just haven’t had the chance to post it yet. Here it is:

Originally uploaded by yukesmooks Just in case you were wondering how to find the Nth Flickr photo simply use the following:

http://flickr.com/photo.gne?id=XXXXXX

Simply replace the X’s with the photo number you want to take a look at.

Mike Merryfield the Comedian

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

Stop it or I’ll give you a knockin’ ullllllright?

We saw Mike Merryfield at Comix Cafe last weekend and he was one of the funniest comedians we’ve seen at Comix. His style of humor reminded me a lot of Brian Regan my favorite comedian of all time. I found one of his recorded shows on his website and I’ve included it below for your listening pleasure.

[audio:https://aldrichfamily.org/2007/12/mikemerryfield.mp3%5DHe’s also available on youtube as MikeMerryField and I’ve included his best video below.

Social Network Update Overload

~ randyaa ~ 2 Comments

Social Network GraphDifferent Audiences see you in different places. I use lots of different services and for different reasons. For the purpose of this post I’ll use only Twitter Facebook and my blog. The number of people that see my ‘tweets’ on Twitter is significantly less than the number of people who see my blog posts. The number of people who see my blog posts directly is significantly less than those who see my Facebook updates. For this reason I have created synchronization points.

Facebook automatically imports my blog posts whenever there’s a new one. At the same time I use TwitterSync to synchronize my twitter updates with my Facebook status. The number of people my posts reach is far greater on Facebook than it is on my blog alone. Many of my friends on Facebook are not tech savvy and therefor are not into feed reading yet. In fact many of them rely on sites like Facebook to get them updates.

You probably think (like the Technology Evangelist) that this means that the people that subscribe to all these services are suffering from Randy Aldrich information overload. If you’re subscribed to each of the 3 different services without any modifications you’re probably right.

I suffered from the same problem. Some of my friends have many services and end up duplicating their content in more than one just like I do. Unfortunately sites like Facebook do not allow you to ‘ignore imported posts’ from certain users. Until that ability exists in the services which you use I suggest making use of Yahoo Pipes.

What I did was create a Pipe that imports my Facebook notes as well as several friend’s blogs. I then use the unique operator to weed out the duplicated posts and that’s it. It is really that simple. Simply combine all the feeds you need to filter through, and utilize the unique operator to filter out the duplicates.

Spring Lake Park

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Denver at Spring Lake ParkA few weeks ago I discovered an excellent new park only a few miles from our house. Spring Lake Park is not a dog park but it certainly seems like one. I love exploring new places to take our canine friends as I get sick of walking the canal path every day. Our first trip to Spring Lake Park gave us an unexpected gift. Dogs dogs and more dogs.

As it turns out other locals take their dogs there to run and play. And all off their leash. This couldn’t come at a better time as I’ve been trying to find a place closer to home than my parents to let them run.

At first glance the park is relatively small. The real gem, the place where the dogs run and play free is in the back. After you park your car you have to walk back along a gated roadway until you get to the second field.
We’ve now been to the park 6 times in the past 3 weeks and we plan on going every time we get a chance. If you have a dog and live in the area I would highly recommend it. Letting them run and play with other dogs is great (for them and you).

Hollywood Sucks but Beowolf Rocks

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We saw Beowulf tonight at the IMAX in 3D. Wow. I think any epic movie must be seen at the IMAX and if possible in 3D. It added a whole other level to the movie experience. Until now I had never seen an entertainment movie in an IMAX (I have seen some short educational specials at different times). Adding the 3D effect to Beowulf was simply incredible.

Beowulf the movie itself was okay but without the graphical eye candy it’s nothing special. However; it’s still a must see especially in 3D at the IMAX. The story was changed quite a bit from what I remember of what I’ve heard before. I only have two real complaints. The first is the lack of a fight with Grendel’s Mother. The second is the ending which is horrible and typical Hollywood bull.

Can’t they just let a story be? It’s bad enough that every movie these days is either a sequel, prequel, remake or based on another piece of entertainment(book, comic book etc). Why do the stories of our times need to be left unfinished? The songs of old (such as Beowulf) were never sung until after the story itself ended. Why are today’s stories any different? Isn’t it better to know the ending than to be left in suspense?

Trailer below. (High quality Trailer from stage6 here).

[metacafe]http://www.metacafe.com/watch/920271/beowulf_trailer_2/[/metacafe]

Carbon-Free Stackable Cars

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Carbon-Free Stackable CarI recently ran across an idea from MIT students for Carbon-Free Stackable Cars. The idea is to simply extend the range of public transportation. Public transportation typically only allows travel to the most common places. Often your real destination is off the beaten track. If that’s the case and the distance is too great people will often choose private transportation instead. This idea attempts to close that gap.

This reminds me of ZipCar in Boston. They leave cars in residential neighborhoods and allow you to reserve them online. You simply walk to it and pick it up to make use of it by the hour or the day. There’s no attendant and no complications. It’s simply a service you use at your convenience.

The fact that the cars are Carbon-Free is a huge bonus. Since the idea is to travel just small distances it seems like the plugin electric idea is a great fit. I can’t wait to see something like this put into place.