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Big Changes

June 24, 2008 / / 3 Comments

I’m going to have some really big changes coming up in the very near future. I received a letter from my landlord a while ago saying, “Hey, your lease is up on August 14th. Want to renew?” My immediate response was, “What the fuck?”

Our lease expired in October of last year, and we’ve been living on a month-to-month basis since then. If he had sent a letter saying, “Renew or leave by the end of August,” that would have been understandable. This letter seems to imply that he has no idea what terms he agreed to when he signed our lease, since a.) he never contacted us when the original lease expired and b.) if he already knew we were living month-to-month, he’d have given us a deadline for August 31st, not the 14th.

Since our apartment is a dump, (leaking ceiling and faucets; tiny, uncleanable bathroom; no air conditioning; horribly expensive to heat; no laundry facilities; etc.) there’s no way we’re renewing the lease. This is forcing several issues.

First, Megan and I broke up quite some time ago, but we’re still living together. She has no reason to stay in Madison, and she’s trying to get into a massage school in Oregon state. Living without her is going to be really strange and difficult. I’m going to be a mess for a while afterwards.

Second, I just got my Linux+ certification. (94%! Whoo!) I’m hoping to parlay my new certification into a new job in a new city–with a lot of luck, Google in Seattle.

If all of these things happen–no Megan, new job, new city, new life–it’s going to be the most significant shake up I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t know if I’m ready for it.

Guitar Hero

June 8, 2008 / / 3 Comments

I finally managed to get a Wii a few weeks ago (it’s not a coincidence it’s been that long since I last posted) and got Guitar Hero III to go along with it. It’s an incredibly fun game, and I’ve been playing the shit out of it. I powered through the easy and medium difficulty levels fairly quickly, then cut back on my playing for a while.

This was partly because once I’d gotten to the “hard” difficulty level, it’s too difficult to be as much fun–but also because every time I closed my eyes I saw notes coming down the fretboard at me, and couldn’t get the songs out of my head. There’s actually a name for this: it’s called The Tetris Effect. It creeps me out that my brain is rewiring itself in order to concentrate better on a stupid game.

I thought I’d give it another shot, so I picked up the “guitar” yesterday and immediately failed the first song. Then again. After getting booed off the stage for the third or fourth time, I thought I’d give practice mode a try, to see if I could actually manage to complete a damn song.

Here’s the thing about practice mode–it’s just practicing the fucking song. That’s it. The rest of the band doesn’t even play along with you. Depending on how slow you’re playing, the guitar part sounds tortured and distorted by the console streeeetching out the original soundtrack. (This might be a Wii-only thing, since the PS3 and 360 have a lot more horsepower available to them.)

As I was flailing wildly through a half-speed rendition of Poison’s “Talk Dirty To Me,” it all suddenly felt very stupid–I was practicing “playing” a fake guitar, to “play” a fake song, and it wasn’t even fun. If I wanted to pointlessly grind away at something I’m bad at, I could pick up my real guitar, fail miserably at that for a while, and actually be sort of accomplishing something.

Big Audio Dynamite

May 17, 2008 / / 0 Comments

I picked up a pair of high-end headphones last weekend–at Kmart of all places. I was killing time before I needed to be somewhere, and was browsing the clearance rack in the electronics department. They were priced at $20, dropped down from $60, so I thought I’d give them a try.

They have active sound cancellation, and they sound fantastic. They’re easily the best headphones I’ve ever purchased. Unfortunately, here’s the problem:

I can now hear how many of my mp3s suck. If I’m listening with lousy headphones, everything sounds equally lousy–but now that I can actually hear details some of my favorite songs sound awful.

Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger sounded so muddy that… I’m ashamed to admit this… I paid for a legal copy from iTunes.