tekHedd – the blog

I guess it’s time for my cool signature generator script to stop looking at XFire, because I don’t run it any more. The audio quality is so-so, the volume levels are always off for voice chat, it causes game crashing… well when it comes right down to it the only good thing about it is that it works in-game.

Now I’ve discovered that I can use the Steam community in-game. It has better voice support and a very slick interface. Granted, it only supports a few games at the moment, but I’m hoping that will improve with time. (Correction: I’m wrong about that, it supports a lot of games. All you have to do is launch them from the Steam interface.)

I remember that when Steam first came out, everybody hated it for being oppressive DRM. Including me. Since then, I’ve come to really like it, because while it prevents me from running multiple copies of software, it also makes it very *easy* to run the number of copies that I’ve actually purchased. I like that.

Enough ranting about Steam. Back to Java JPA. Whee.

Lately I haven’t really had much to say, because I’ve been working and playing too much. I think I have one band too many, and when I finally do get an evening to myself, I spent too much of it playing Fallout 3.

Fallout 3

I keep waiting for a real AAA game to come out and raise the bar, then all of these recent games that have been scoring 9 or 10 in reviews will become 7’s and 8’s like they should be. Fallout 3 is a strong 8, which makes it head and shoulders above a lot of other games. In my world, Oblivion should have been a 6.5, and Far Cry is a 10 as a tech demo but a 5 as a game. Etc.

And yes, I’m still playing Fallout. The side quests keep distracting my character from the stupid main quest. I still think it’s a great game, but I do think it will mostly be remembered as Bethesda’s first attempt to not totally piss off the fans of an existing franchise. Sure, they fell a little short and a lot of fans are still pissed, but maybe this is a turning point for them, and they’ll start treating their properties with class.

But there’s not really enough time to play games these days because of the bands. Most of you are probably thinking “oh it must be fun  to play music all the time”. Um, yeah, I guess. It just takes all of my free time and money. But there is a lot of good news on the band front since 420 Special‘s first gig.

13 Singers

After auditioning about half the free world, 13 Mirrors found a singer. It’s amazing how many nice people are out there who really don’t match up with our music. We’re totally pumped up about the sound and how well it works. His name is Ken, and simply stated, he’s good. But, who knows, maybe it’ll fall apart. We’ll see how it works out. We’ve recorded a couple of rough takes which tend to appear and then disappear from the 13 mirrors web site. Lurk at that site, and you can catch glimpses of unfinished stuff that we really don’t want you to hear!

Wild Turkey Blues Something Something Band

Last Friday, I played the most out-of-tune music I’ve played that I can remember. It’s a long story, but basically one guitar player’s instrument was set up wrong, and the other guitar player was so drunk that he couldn’t get in tune, and we played anyway. Ouch! I wish the recording had come out so I could show people how bad it was.

Updates as events warrant!

One of my bands, the 4:20 Special String Band, had its first outing this weekend. We played for one of the most prestigious of all possible occasions, the NORML Colorado Medical Marijuana Harvest Cup 2008. Since none of the band members are actually card-carrying legal Marijuana users, we were not involved in the judging in any way whatsoever. No, really. (Anyway, we don’t really advocate anything, we’re just the minstrels.)

As it was a paid function (with dinner!) We needed passes to get in.

VIP, indeed.