Zero Day McMafia

First and foremost, props to my retail brethren at Amazon.com for getting GTA 4 out for delivery on zero day. My copy is in a Big Brown UPS Truck on its way to my doorstep even as I write this.

Second, props to Misha Glenny for publishing McMafia only a few weeks before GTA 4 dropped. It’s a fascinating read about global organized crime, with a particular emphasis on the rise of major criminal syndicates in eastern Europe around and following the time of the demise of Soviet Communism. Highly recommended for more reflective gamers who might like some serious background on where our fictional protagonist Niko came from.

PS3 Goodness

With the wife out of town last week, I finally brought the PS3 up from the basement and hooked it up to our HD set. At 1080i the Blu-Rays of “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Black Hawk Down” looked amazing, the “Trnasformers” trailer looks sweet, and Resistance: Fall of Man went from a run-of-the-mill FPS to a compelling demo of HiDef gaming.  Of course, what I’m really drooling about right now is Grand Theft Auto IV.  I had the trailer launch last Thursday blocked off on my work calendar :)  Only six months plus change to go…

And, lest the wife complain about the PS3, in it’s spare time (which is most of the time) it’s running the folding@home client, helping find a cure for cancer while simultaneously heating our living room.

Sibelius 3 = Pain

It’s been more than a year since the last time I used my copy of Sibelius 3, and now I remember why.

If the world worked the way I wanted it to, I would do all of my composing/arranging in SONAR 6, then Sibelius would directly import the SONAR .wrk file and let me tell it how each channel (part) should be laid out (percussion staff, bass/treble clef with the divide at a particular point, how lenient to be before creating multi-part notation on a single staff, what to call each instrument, quick transpose of an entire part by an octave or two since bass guitar parts are usually played an octave below where they’re notated, etc).  Instead, I have to export from SONAR to a standard MIDI file, import the MIDI file into Sibelius, then gawk in horror at the trainwreck my masterpiece has become, wondering why the heck a piano part spanning 5 octaves got shoved onto (and around, for several inches on either side) a 5-line percussion staff, why my rhodes part contains some notes with “x” heads, why Sibelius is helpfully flagging ever note below C as “too low” for the bass guitar, and why the vocal and drum tracks are coupled together as a grand staff.

Sibelius’ output looks great, and when I have written from scratch in Sibelius (usually transcribing stuff I had written or learned elsewhere), it’s a pretty good program.  But God help me every time I have to import something composed elsewhere into it.

The Ultimate Guitar Strap

Back in the mid-90s, a friend of mine got an amazing guitar strap.

I don’t say “amazing” lightly.  It was beautiful soft leather, about 3 inches wide, and cut with about a 15-degree at the shoulder such that it actually sat squarely on your shoulder, distributing weight evenly across its width both on your shoulder and across your back.  At the head of the strap, the fastener was attached to a short leather dongle which was joined to the strap by a swiveling joint, completely removing torque from the strap.  (I don’t remember if there was one at the other end of the strap as well).

My bass felt a lot heavier than normal this morning, and I found myself wishing I had one of those straps.  So I came home and started googling, and can’t for the life of me find it.  I remember my friend saying the company was having a rough go of it (this was ca 1996), but am surprised I can’t find any references to the name or the design.

If anyone out there remembers who made that perfect guitar strap (or knows someone who can custom-make one for me), please let me know.

My Sidekick (II)

Plusses of the Sidekick II in its current encarnation:

• Web browser is powerful enough to shop amazon.com and to browse and edit MediaWikis.
• Web browser is more than powerful enough to browse all of my favorite blogs.
• Camera, email, phone, text messaging, web browser, and games all in one.
• Very ussable keyboard.

Minuses:

• Web browser isn’t powerful enough to support WordPress posting (too AJAX-y).
• T-Mobile’s data coverage around Seattle isn’t yet reliable enough to count on having connectivity at any particular time.
• Music ringtones are waaaay overpriced considering they’re mostly just 5-second sound bites from the middle of the songs. I can download the whole song for half as much money from iTunes.
• The camera is weak weak weak… crummy resolution (640×480) and crummy exposures in anything but high-light settings.
• No MP3/Ogg/AAC player and no easy interface to extensible storage (flash, SD, etc).
• No open-source PIM synchronization tools (Evolution).
• No local physical synchronization media - it has to be done over the public Internet.
• Web browser apparently isn’t AJAX-ready (gmail and google maps don’t run on it).
• Closed Java platform - you can’t download apps off the web, just buy apps from Danger.

Word on the street is that there is a Sidekick III very near to release. So I have to ask myself, is it worth spilling hundreds more dollars into this, or should I spend a little more and get a nice open-platform VoIP-enabled handheld like the Nokia 770 (which also happens to run a Debian-based OS)? The choice seems clear to me…