Sorry for the bad pun but sometimes you just have to right?

 

Last night the kids went to bed the masters was over and I finished watching Full Metal Jacket (awesome movie BTW) I decided that I would try my hand at the drums on Rock Band.  In our little gathering I do not play drums, My wife and 1 of our friends do. I play Bass and have been moving up the Guitar Difficuilty to the point where I can finish some songs on Expert. I am a decent Hard guitarist. That being said, I do want to be able to play the drums so I decided to set it up and create a new band and get to drumming.

 

I started it up and found out that I am not as bad as I thought I would be. I managed to finishe completely my first two venues with only have difficuilty with one song, Time We Had by The Mother Hips [will come back to insert link]. The wierd bass drum pattern and the change of the cymbal snare combo had me thrown all off.  I am finding that it is more fun then I initially had with the drums when I first started as well.

 

I thought that song was hard and had told my wife about it because I had never heard the song.  So I fired it up for her and wow I was impressed, she got a 98% on Medium and had to go at it on hard. I was not just going to sit there so I powered on the guitar and played it on hard with her. She got 84% and I got  92% and I decided I could do the song on expert so we went at it again and and She got 86% on hard again and I got 96% on expert.

 

I will be back at it again this evening to continue the world domination. 

Me and the wife have been playing much more rockband recently and we are starting to get better, We challenged both our first co-op Hard song and Expert song last night and while the expert song was not pretty it was finished without anyone dying.

 

I have also come to the conclusion that Rock Band in part has strengthened our Marriage, with all the money, health and job issues we have been fighting a lot more recently and it was begining to take it's on our relationship. We don't have the money to go out as a simple dinner costs almost 100 bucks when combined with the cost of a babysitter so we have to get our entertainment with the kids. While I love my kids sometimes it is nice to just be me and not be Dad.  So we started having friends over on Saturdays and doing dinner and then putting the kids to bed and then enjoying our friends and some rock band, along with a few adult beverages ;). 

 

The past few weeks we have started playing a couple nights a week, just her and I and have been truly having fun. It has allowed us to have fun with each other again and allow us to find parts of each other that we had forgotten about. Looking forward to more. 

This past week (not in calendar terms) has been crazy.  Real busy at work and just trying at times at home.

 My daughter has just been a terror and is a horrible listener and it makes it very rough. It is not like she doesn't know what is going on, she fully understands that you tell her don't do thatm she just doesn't care.

 Example : I told her not to touch her brothers yogurt, she will stop and then 15 seconds later try to sneak it off the table and then when you just give her the stink eye she will pull her hand back then look at you square in the eye and go and grab it anyway. So frustrating. 

Then at work I am trying to implament an employee management calendar and it is proving to be more difficuilt then it should. I am using the Rad Scheduler by Telerik and it is no where near as easy as it should be.  I am getting closer each and every day but I can't help but feel that if it takes me a week to figure out how to work within the constraints of this control, then couldn't I have just rolled my own in that time?

I installed Sitefinity this week and have decided to use that as my framework for the new business venture and so far have found it to be really good. A litte frustrating in getting it set up as I had to work from a blank project instead of the install and go approach but, that being said it was still nice and easy.  I have to get used to writing user controls instead of pages and making everything a little more self contained but that makes perfect sense and should be easy to adjust too.

I finished my 5th season in NCAA 2k8 (the last good college basketball game) and managed to win the title wth the University of Lousiana Lafayette Rajin Cajuns. I was a little sad with this season ending for the first time as I was losing the core of my team. My star Power forward, he was the best player I had ever had. My starting Center, he was a good rebounder, a good shot blocker and capable of putting up points when I needed him and finally my backup PF He was a great three point shooter and a great defender. However I managed to snag 5 4 star recruits out of it.  I have played 4 games so far this season and while I have gone 3-1, losing only to Indiana (they had great big men) I miss the go to guys from last years team.  I don't have that guy I can count on getting me a basket when I need it.

 

So while I did get the red rings they went away as quickly as they came. Had some friends over last night for some good food, good beer and good times. 

I tried Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Otter Creek Copper Ale. They Sierra Nevada was a bit bitter for my normal tastes however I did enjoy it. It had some fruity undertones to it. The bitter was not a true bite though. It was a nice bitter. The Otter Creek was more my style, it had a caramel taste to it and much less of a bite. The two of them together were a perfect match.

So we played some rock band 2 and had a great time. I finished a couple songs on expert and survived some others.The funniest moment of the night came while playing living on a prayer on Expert, playing the Bass and that bass line just was rough and we get to the final chorus and I had died once already. Then our singer (my wife) gets the giggles and fails out of the song. With me struggling to keep up, our guitarist and Drummer were left to carry the load and the band failed out, ON THE LAST NOTE. 96% complete and we had to do it all again.

So as I have said I am developing a stat tracking site and I think I am going to undo what I have done and convert to using XML instead of using a database. I want to do this for a couple of reasons, 1. My host allows me 1 free database. I can add more but at a cost and since this is just a hobby I can't justify the expense. 2. I need to learn how to use XML and .net and I am more of a project driven guy then a learn through abstraction. So I will update here with any good tutorials and lessons I learned.

So for the third time I have officially gotten the red ring of Death. For those that don't know this is basically when you xbox 360 decides to crap out on you, leaving you high and dry. The good news is that it is still under warranty from Microsoft and will be fixed for nothing. The bad news is I wasn't able to play in the LS Left 4 Dead night and will probably miss a Gears and Beers night tomorrow. Hopefully I can borrow a system for Sunday night as I play in a Gears League and don't like letting people down.