Dwarven Digging

Today I got to observe a game of Dwarven Dig, a board game I've had for at least a few years, which occasionally gets played. I'm not sure how those playing felt about the game, but I thought it was excellent fun. Roughly, the goal of the game is to dig into the treasure chamber (at the center of the map), grab a treasure, and make it back outside, which incidentally means you can use any entrance, not just the one you came in. The game starts by laying out the hexagonal tiles which form the board, and in such a way that you get to place good tiles near you, or bad tiles near paths which others may have to take. This is only the beginning of the antagonism between the dwarves.
I think what I observed in this game that I found enjoyable to watch was the same quality I have seen in Munchkin: there's a whole lot of backstabbing that goes on, to try and stop whoever seems closest to winning from actually doing so. This is helped by one of the dwarves abilities, which is to cause a shockwave which not only damages the hex they are in, but also nearly any target hex on the board. This can be done even at the start of the game, when the different dwarven digging parties are across the board from each other. I had great fun trying to convince people to use this ability, which culminated (though probably not directly, as I think at that point Mason had already committed to using it) in a beautiful shockwave which took out three dwarves at once (each player starts with 4), including the miner which initiated it. (At least, I'm remembering it was the shockwave that cut those groups down to size, correct me if my memory is faulty. I do know that miner died while doing a shockwave, it was an excellent way to go).

So, this is a random post about a board game I observed this evening, so while I'm here, I will mention some other ones: I really want to play a particular board game again, but I can't recall what it was called in order to find it. I played it with Jon and two friends while we were visiting for the wedding. It was based on a gangster-run moonshine operation, where you tried to get as much hooch as possible sold from the different nightclubs and speakeasys. There was bidding for trucks to transport the booze, you could buy more manufacturing capability, and to get first selling rights at a speakeasy, you had to have the most gangsters in the back room. It was an excellent game, but I can't recall what it was called.

Also on the board game news front, Carcassone was released for the xbox 360, so I may give that version a try, the regular game is excellent and moves pretty well. I'm also trying to locate a copy of Overlord for the 360, but no luck with that so far. That's not a board game though, so it deserves another post if I do ever get it.

Ratatouille

Ratatouille is an excellent movie, and you should go see it if you haven't already. I realized at the end of the movie that my face was getting tired cause I was smiling and laughing so much, and that is about the best thing I can say about a movie, so I will leave it at that.

Frisbee Day

Today is thursday, which is Frisbee Day. At least for me, that is. Every thursday, a large group of people get together and play ultimate frisbee on the field behind Beckman Institute. We usually have mostly grad students and non-caltech people show up for the game, though recently there have been some SURF students, and displaced people from the more serious ultimate group which was playing on the north field until softball season.

For some of those reading who may not know what ultimate frisbee is (or just "ultimate"), I direct you to this link. There are three qualities I like about ultimate: it requires a lot of running, but a good portion of that is short sprinting, which I am good at. It requires upper body and hand/eye coordination to throw the frisbee well, as well as there being a lot of technique to the different styles of throws. Finally, it's also a good thinking and mind-reading game: if you know some of the basic strategy to playing, fast decisions and being able to read people's motion, you can do a lot of fun things.

To illustrate the last point, let me mention part of today's game where such a situation occurred. In ultimate, since you must throw the disc to advance play, when someone is trying to throw to a teammate, there are what can be thought of as passing lanes, the clear areas of the field in which they can actually throw through. If they throw too close to a defender, the disc could be intercepted or knocked down (roughly equally good), and so there are clear limitations based on the current field position to where someone will throw. If you add in the motion of all the players to the mix, you can tell which currently open lanes will be closing, and which people on offense are actually entering clear passing lanes. Today's game had just such a situation (and here I realize that I actually need a diagram. I'll add one later, check back if the word description is confusing), I was playing defense, guarding one of the players on offense, and was pretty far downfield from where the thrower was. In this type of situation, I pay a lot more attention to the thrower than to the person I'm guarding, because there are only a few things the person being guarded can do that will require me to react to them (they are: sprint towards the thrower into a passing lane, or sprint downfield away from the thrower to get open for either a long pass or for a continuation when the thrower passes to someone else). As it happens, the person guarding the thrower was forcing the throw to be to only one half of the field, which helps tremendously in working out where the pass can go, and so when the pass was released, I could tell exactly which path it would take to reach the person I was guarding, who made a move towards the outside of the field. Which meant that instead of trying to catch the person I was guarding, I could take a more direct route to the frisbee and intercept it before it even reached them.

That probably sounds pretty complicated to be thinking about all the time, and a lot of the time it doesn't really even help: the throw could be perfect and you'd have no chance to reach it first, the person you're guarding could be a lot faster or less tired than you, and so on. But I still find that aspect very fun, as it adds another dimension to the game.

Anyways, that's what I look forward to on thursdays. Today we even got to play two games simultaneously, there were enough people for two games of 5v5 (you can play 4v4 up to 7v7 normally, and sometimes we have substitutes so people don't get as tired. 3v3 is possible, but really really tiring). I feel a lot more in shape now than when I started back playing after the winter, though I still get really sore after the games, it doesn't last long. The important thing is that it's really fun to play.

Hah!

So it looks like my original timing simulations were pretty accurate, the crossover point for the new code being faster is looking like somewhere between 40-60 bases, which is even lower than I'd originally thought, and within the error bars for my data to agree with the other random sequence data.

Which is probably meaningless to anyone reading this. Roughly, my new program can be compared for some cases to a previous incarnation (not written by me), and for longer sequences should be much faster (the time complexity is lower by at least a factor of n). For short sequences, the older program has a speed advantage because it has a caching system which, when it is working, can actually be effective for really short sequences. (It's pretty much useless for long sequences). I originally did some data on short notice, which suggested that at 50 bases the older program was faster, but at 100 the new program was faster, and for longer lengths there wasn't even a comparison (older program went exponential above 100, mine stayed linear til about 1k). Another person using my program to do some timing got results which were very strikingly different, suggesting that the crossover point was above 100 before mine even broke even. They had a lot more time to actually run sims (I had a few days and was out of town for a while), and so they had more data points to work with. After meeting up with them today and talking, I decided to run a much more exhaustive look at the appropriate ranges, and the data now supports a crossover near 50 pretty well. Happy. I wish I could push it lower though, theoretically I should be able to, but it may involve some nasty coding which I don't want to spend time on.

No Content

Void where prohibited by law. Do not ingest. Objects may appear closer than they are. And now for something completely different.

So, I recently read an open thread at Making Light (#86) and there were many interesting parts to the thread. One of which brought up Doctor Who, which I remember seeing a long time ago, as Granddad really liked it and taped a lot of episodes. I don't even know which doctor they're on now, but I recall my favorites were Tom Baker and Peter Davison, who I think were the fourth and fifth Doctors. And now I checked and they are currently on number ten. So anyways, reading that thread made me remember my favorite moments in Doctor Who, and I think my favorite one of those was in the first appearance of Tom Baker, in the episode Robot. After the Doctor regenerates, he's usually a little unstable, and in this case he keeps popping in and out of the TARDIS trying on different costumes to try and figure out who he really is.

Another great part of that thread were people coming up with verses to "Real Old Time Religion" (which I think is a folk song by Pete Seeger, or at least the version I've heard is), including such diverse gods as Cthulu, Crom, Cookie Monster, Darwin, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and others.

Anyways, hopefully will post with more content soon, but for now there's just my comments/redirection on things I read in the Making Light thread, because I'm too shy to actually post there. I really wanted to come up with a verse for various CS geeks along the lines of some of the later posts which had verses related to physics and such.

Messier and Messier

Today's excursion by the rats was cut short when Scotty discovered his favorite dirt pile, which neither L or I have had a chance to clean up and make rat proof. I didn't notice this for a while though, because Barrick, Lu Bu and Cao Cao were running diversionary tactics all over my keyboard and lap.

Potential Mess

A while back L was growing some plants, and so we have a bag of potting soil that was used for said endeavor. Given the size of our apartment, and the lack of a convenient gardening shed or the like, storing the bag of potting soil is something of an issue. Luckily, the shelves in the bedroom had been cleared of all their comics/books, which are now neatly organized in the living room, and so there was empty space for the bag of potting soil.

I once read that rats really like to play in dirt, digging and tunneling. I'm pretty sure that is correct, based on observational evidence. Scotty was a mess, with dirt everywhere on his nose, whiskers and paws. I tried to help him clean up, but he seemed rather more annoyed that he wasn't allowed to play in the dirt any longer, instead of being properly grateful. Oh well.



In other news, we went to Din Tai Fung (which I'm sure I have mangled the spelling of) for dinner tonight. It is a dumpling place east of here, near the racetrack, and we've been there a few times before. It was very delicious, but this isn't a review (perhaps I will write one later?), instead I wanted to mention that we had exactly one dumpling left over, which was a red bean dessert dumpling. It got brought home and we let the rats have at it, and took pictures. I haven't looked at them yet, but maybe the next post will be about it, if they're good.

Yawn

I'm currently working on some simulation software, which has finally entered the usable phase and several other labs have access to it and have been testing it out. This is a fairly big change from the development phase, and I've been getting a lot of feedback from people testing it. One mistake I've made though has been to keep revising the code based on the reported bugs and needed features, without letting it stabilize into a release copy which can then be further tested. This only was really apparent over the previous week, when some of the features I'd written in were requested by one user, but I couldn't get them a copy which had those working, because my current version had another whole chunk being re-written and debugged for a bug another person had reported.

This was pointed out by several people, and I'd noticed the issue myself but hadn't anticipated it which is why it even happened. Anyways, the whole point of this post is to relay one bit of wisdom which was passed on to me when talking about this type of situation: If you wait to let people use a program until it's perfect, it will never be used. This wasn't exactly what was happening, but it is something I have trouble with sometimes.

Late postage!

So I am very late in posting an entry for thursday and friday. Uhoh! I think this is more a sign of having been busy these days, but maybe it's getting harder to write again? Time will tell. In any case, after you are done reading this post, you should scroll down one to read the photo-post about Emily's graduation.

This post also contains photos. In particular, I was experimenting with several ways of framing/cropping a shot, similar to how some of the rat photos earlier were brightness cropped (I didn't know that was what it was called, but it sounds right!).

Here's one variant of the brightness cropping that I really liked:
I think combining this with a change in brightness/contrast could be even more effective. It's also sorta neat to be able to change pictures into greyscale, as some things look a lot better that way.

Here's the next effect I fiddled with, but couldn't really find a place to use it effectively. Doing this conversion (called "posterize") on only an area of an image doesn't really work well, but on a whole image it can be pretty neat:
Here we have a comparison photo. I found an option which is supposed to enhance the colors in a picture:
The left one is raw from the camera, the right is with the colors enhanced. I think the right side version is actually more accurate to what my eye saw, I also did some comparisons with pictures of myself, and the color-enhanced version actually matches my skin tones a lot better than the raw camera version.

Finally, the following photo is from the set after Emily's graduation, and I haven't actually changed it, I just really like the picture and wanted to post it.
There you have it, some interesting effects, and I'm now caught up til saturday's post.

Graduation Photos

I have a selection of photos from Em's graduation to post. These were all taken by Frances during or after the graduation, so all the credit is hers.

Here we have the story of the graduation, in pictures:
Here we have two of the audience eagerly waiting for the ceremony to start. We found a good set of seats up in the bleachers and settled in and started reading the program. In this picture, Jonathan is smiling like crazy at the camera, because Frances is taking the picture (presumably? or maybe he's just always smiley!), and Mom is reading the program, probably looking for Em's name. The program was actually pretty interesting, I especially liked the section where it gives the names of all the doctoral thesises (thesii? theseses?), because it contained all of them, hard science ones and movie/theater ones, and so on.
Here we have L and myself before the ceremony started. I think L is playing Animal Crossing, and I'm reading the program as mentioned before. The waiting for the ceremony went on for a while, and then finally it began! Everyone stood up and there was in general a whole lot of noise. The entire row of us waited in anticipation as the graduates filed into the stadium, until this happened:
Emily appears! We were looking in the right spot and though it took a while, she shows up, walking in with Zev in front of her, and Margaret behind. Except in this picture, it's not really apparent that they're in that particular order, but it will soon be clear! Notice also that Emily has immediately spotted us in the stands, and is smiling like crazy, which is good cause we were smiling like crazy too and waving our arms, and hats, and there was even some jumping up and down. Emily, having spotted us, immediately decides to show her friends where we are sitting:
I'm told that this was pretty unsuccessful, even though we were wearing some memorable hats and waving and stuff, there were probably a lot of other people in the stands wearing memorable hats and waving and so on.
And now they have arrived at their seats! This is about ten or fifteen minutes into the ceremonial procession, and so they got to face the audience for a while, because no-one was up on the stage yet and so it would be pretty boring to face the opposite way. It took another fifteen minutes for the rest of the people to arrive in the stadium, during which time several of us got tired of standing up and sat down. Others of us went looking for other things to take pictures of. Like this one:
That is one huge ring! I'm not sure whose hand+ring+cell phone this is, but it's a great picture. Also during this time, we noticed that on one building adjacent to the field (I think it was the sports trainer's complex, or locker room building, or something like that), the following was going on:
Setting up for dinner! These waiters were bringing tables out, setting up tablecloths and stopping every once in a while to check out the commotion on the field adjacent to them. "What's this, a graduation going on? I hope they're done by the time our dinner guests are here."

Meanwhile, everyone is still entering the stadium, and it has become a lot harder to actually spot Emily in the crowd, even though we know where she is standing. Luckily, Frances is really good at this:
Yep, there she is! It really looks like Zev and Margaret have just vanished, though.

I now arrive at the point in the story where a very important point must be made. Remember when I said that we were all standing up and cheering as Emily entered the stadium? And then after a while, some of us got tired and sat down? Well, even as it rolled along to minute 30 of the processional entering the stadium, this one was still cheering:
Yep. The whole 30 minutes. I'm really surprised Mom still had a voice after that was done. :)


Next we have the really important part: people gave speeches, the speaker talked, groups of students stood up as the head honcho read out the degrees they were awarded. All this, however, really doesn't lend itself to my telling the story in pictures though, and so I will refer you back to my previous post about the graduation speaker if you want to get a better idea for this part. Frances did take pictures here, so ask her for them if you're really dying to see some pictures of the speaker, and so on.

The next part, however, is VERY important, because it is at the end of the ceremony, and Emily is so very happy that it is now bubble time!
During the ceremony, it looked like a bunch of people in the school of communication had bubble stuff, because there were huge amounts of soap bubbles floating up above them. It was only at this point, when people were departing, that we find out that Em is one of the ones blowing bubbles!
I especially like this picture, as it appears that Zev is blowing imaginary bubbles, and the guy in the same row on the far right is looking really jealously at the bubble blowing fun.
Finally, the whole thing is over and we spent a while trying to find everyone in the crowd. Luckily, we do, and there are two more great pictures:
Mom and Dad and Emily!

The kids! No, I'm not sure why we are balancing the tall people on the left side and the short ones on the right. Maybe we were trying to balance the hats, one on the far left, and one on the far right? Anyways, there you have it, a picture-version of Emily's graduation.

Short Post (Open Thread?)

Today's entry is going to be a short post. I have a bunch of pictures from Frances of Em's graduation last friday, but haven't put them in order yet, that will likely be the next post.

At the moment I've been frustrated by/at work, one of the things I've been working on has been a lot more annoying than I expected: there are two different parameter files for the energy model which contain roughly the same data, but the format for each is fairly different, up to the point where the indexing is different (one is 0-indexed, the other is 1-indexed) and the ordering of base pairs is also different. This roughly translates to it being a royal pain in the neck to have a backend data structure that can be fed data for both types on demand. So it's gone slower than I expected, but I have a meeting tomorrow which I'll need to have some demonstrable progress for, not just the hundred lines of code I've put together which only appear to work.

Another frustration has been the temperature. It's been nice and warm out here, but inside it's still a lot cooler, usually because for some reason the existence of air conditioning means that it should be kept way too freezing inside, such that one cannot be comfortable both inside a building and outside it. It has been way too cold in lab lately, and I find myself freezing when trying to work on straightforward but not really mind-intensive work, so I get distracted a lot easier. The simple solution, I suppose, is to change the thermostat, but my office mate prefers it very cold. Thus this doesn't really get anywhere as one of us will be rendered ineffective. So I've been working more from home, but I'd rather be in lab where I have other people to bounce ideas off of.

Anyways... I also thought perhaps this post would be a good one for an open thread, so if there's something anyone reading wants to start a discussion about, go for it! Or just comment on working temperatures, or whatever else suits your fancy.

And yes, I just noticed this is not really that short a post. I really admire some short posts, but I can't seem to write posts like those. Here's an example of an excellent short post which I would aspire to: Neil Gaiman's blog. Look for the entry on June 19, titled "A hundred thousand tumpty tumpties". I really like how he chooses words such that a few short sentences compose a fairly detailed picture of a moment in his life.

Rat Guide

This is a quick guide to our new rats, with a photo of each, plus special bonus pictures at the end!

This is Barrick:
He has found a quiet place to hide where none of the other ratties would dare bother him. Unfortunately, it is in the clothes hamper, and thus the humans have found him and are hoping he did not chew on any towels.

Next we have Blue:
He is checking our router settings and all the cables, making sure none of them are chewed on or otherwise rendered unusable.

Next we have Cao Cao:
Cao Cao is being a good photo-rat and is posing on my shoulder as I take his picture in the mirror. This photo shoot turned out so well that it inspired one of the later pictures.

Here we have Lu Bu:
He is clearly exhausted from keeping the other rats in line, and thus is laying down for a nap. Conveniently, this is right next to the door, so if someone should come in or out he will have a perfect chance to scoot out the door after them.

Finally, Scotty:
"It's a mirror! If I jump high enough I can see myself!" For some reason the rats really liked the mirror, I sat down near it and that caused them to investigate. While doing so, several of them tried jumping up into the mirror, as I'm guessing it looked like a ledge they could hang on to. I have no idea how I got lucky enough to take this picture.

Finally, we have some bonus pictures. These were inspired by my earlier attempts to photograph ratties in the mirror. First we have Cao Cao, who was actually quite calm and interested in that rat he saw in the mirror.

Lu Bu decided to investigate the mirror as well, but he didn't get a lift, so his view was a lot worse. Great shot of all his whiskers, though!
And finally we have a group photo, all the ratties clustered around my toes while I was working on taking pictures in the mirror. This one turned out really well, I'm not sure how I got the lighting to work, as the tones are very nice and non-flashy, but the rats are very in focus which isn't very common when not using the flash.

And that's it. I did some cropping on most of these photos, and on the first five there's obviously some changing of brightness, I was experimenting to see if it would draw attention better to the rats, while still giving an idea of their surroundings. I'm happy with some of those ones, but I'm not as sure about others, I think the effect is better used on only a few (Cao Cao, Barrick, Blue's turned out well. Not as sure about Lu Bu or Scotty's). The last ones were only cropped, they turned out good.

Lap Rat?

Two little events to write about today, both about the rats. The first is that the moon aligned with Earth, Mars and all of Jupiter's moons, and when I went to put all the rats back into their cage after their daily time out, they were all already in the cage. This is probably not as unlikely an occurence as the moon alignment mentioned above (which could very well be impossible), but it's certainly the first time I've ever seen it. Usually at most one or two will be in the cage when they are allowed to run around, but this time I saw three in the cage when I went to put them back, and it turned out that I was just not seeing the other two in there (Scotty was in the wheel, and Blue was blending in).

The other interesting thing is that we may finally have one of those fabled rats who like to just sit around in one's lap. The so-called lap rat we've long thought was a myth - we've always been told that the male rats are a lot calmer than female rats, and are usually much better lap rats, but up to this point none of our rats have liked sitting still long enough for us to actually call them a lap rat before they have left the vicinity of said lap. Today, however, it appeared that Lu Bu may be the first of our rats to actually qualify. He's already very social and likes to be near L and I, and today he hopped into my lap while I was using the computer, and sat there for a while. I even petted him a bit, which is usually cause for the quick evacuation of wherever they may be sitting, but he took that in stride as an opportunity to help give my fingers a manicure. This was quite ticklish, but appreciated on my part, even though I really needed both hands to type at the time. He eventually got bored of the lap and ran off, but it's definately the longest I've seen, and I suspect as he gets older he'll be calmer and sit still longer.

Plane Flights

I have decided upon a few rules which apply to traveling and plane trips. If the flight is going to leave at 7AM, you will not get much sleep the night before. Since the trip to the airport usually takes an hour or so, and you have to be there a little early, there are some very early wake-up times involved, and since I tend not to go to sleep before midnight, this means that there's maybe a 3 hour amount of sleep the night before. Not really a good situation, so I think in the future I will try to not take morning flights. In this particular case there were other constraints which meant that it'd have been fairly hard to do anything else, but it did reinforce the badness of morning flights.

The flights we took were actually rather interesting. We went to Chicago and back, without going to the same airport twice. The initial flight was LAX to Chicago O'Hare, and the return flight was Chicago Midway to Ontario. Pretty crazy, we also had a different airline for each flight. They got us there in time though, which is what really matters.

I had a few other thoughts about traveling: if you are going to need to take a taxi one-way and the distance is fairly large (like Evanston to Midway), it may be cheaper overall to just get a rental car, which also adds some extra mobility during the extra time you'll get to use it. This also seemed possibly true for the return: we got into Ontario early in the morning, so I didn't want to ask any of our friends for a ride, but the shuttle was fairly expensive. If we could have done a rental car from there to Pasadena and dropped it off at Pasadena, it would likely have been cheaper, plus we'd have some extra mobility for the day. Some things to think about next time we are planning a trip, for this one I'm just glad to be home and get some more rest. I wish we could have stayed longer, maybe schedule the flights different so that it'd been more restful while there too, but at least now I know some of the pitfalls.

Swimmingly

A long time ago, I used to really like swimming and going to the pool. Then my teenage years came around, and my really bad acne and I got very self-conscious and didn't like going to the pool, mostly because I would have to not wear a shirt and then people could see the scars on my back from the acne, and my thin arms (which I don't mind, but tend to get a lot of comments. Hence why I usually wear my jacket, which hides them.). I'm not sure why this bothered me so much, I know it seemed very important to me at the time, even when I wasn't really self-conscious about most other things. I think perhaps there was some disconnect between physical appearance which bothered me, and social interactions of other types which did not. Regardless, I didn't like swimming for those reasons, even though I always really liked being in water and diving and swimming underwater and so on.

I haven't actually been swimming much since then. I can only think of a few times in the last few years, mainly at gradiators and once or twice otherwise. I do however like going into hot tubs. It doesn't really feel different, but I think there is a difference. Notably, when I go to a hot tub, it's inevitably with friends, and there aren't usually many (if any) outsiders there who I don't know. That environment really changes how I'm self-conscious. Sure, the scars are still there, I'm still scrawny-looking, but since I'm with friends, that doesn't bother me (it doesn't bother me in normal situations either. If people can't accept my physical appearance, that's their problem. Just in the beach/pool environment that doesn't seem to apply). They accept me and there aren't many people I don't know there, so I don't feel bad about it.

I think part of the issue was how women who didn't know me might judge me based only on a meeting at a pool or beach. I think I was fairly concerned about this, as I was still single and really wanted to not be dismissed outright for my appearance as a suitable friend/boyfriend/etc. I think that was a silly concern now, but my perspective has changed a lot.

Anyways, where was I going with this? Well, Frances mentioned that we should bring swimsuits when visiting for Em's graduation, because there was a pool and a hot tub at her place. Saturday night we actually went to the pool. I wasn't feeling very well (had a headache that grew pretty bad before I could take any excedrin for it), but I didn't want to not go. So we all went down there (Jonathan, Frances, Emily, Mom, Lorian, Uncle Dan) and they all hopped in the pool while I sat on the side to try and let the excedrin work and feel better. I spent a while thinking about it while sitting on the side of the pool. After a while, I realized something. I didn't really have a problem with pools any more. Sure, the water is usually too cold for me which means I'm physically uncomfortable, but I didn't feel self-conscious. If anything, I was happier that way, I was there with L, who I know likes me and my physical appearance, I got to watch her play around in the water, which was a definite bonus, and I really didn't care what other people thought about me in that environment. Not that there was anyone but our group there, but when I thought about it, it wouldn't really have mattered to me if there were others there I didn't know.

After that, I felt a whole lot better as it was like a problem that I'd had sitting around in the back of my mind had just gone away after so many years. Eventually my head started feeling better and I sat in the hot tub for a while, then got dragged into the frigid water of the pool and really had a lot of fun playing around in the water.

Graduation Day

Today was graduation day for Northwestern University, in which my sister Emily would be graduating from the School of Communication. L and I flew out early in the morning to be able to make it in time, and for once there were no travel issues.

The graduation was held in Northwestern's football stadium, which was pretty impressive. I want to compare it to the one at Gainesville, but we only saw the outside of that one so it's hard to guess the size differential. In any case, we walked in through the gates and presented our tickets, which got barely a glance, received a program, and the first thing that greeted us was a concessions stand, with popcorn, hot dogs, pretzels, and drinks (sodas). Wow. I was pretty tempted, just to say I had a pretzel at Em's graduation, but we'd just eaten lunch beforehand so I wasn't that hungry. We found pretty good seats - the ceremony was held at 6pm, which meant that the sun wasn't at the peak, and the seating was set up such that the ceremony (held in the center of the field) was facing the west set of seats which were nicely in the shade. At first it looked like some of the graduating class were going to have to sit in the sun, but by the time everyone arrived it was all in the shade.

So, people arriving... first, let me mention those present in the stands: Jonathan, Frances, Mom, Dad, Lorian and myself. Frances had her nice camera with and was taking pictures for a lot of this, I will try and get some of those to post here. The processional march into the stadium was a really impressive display of coordination. The graduates came in from both the north and south sides, in three different streams from each side, ending up (somehow) in the correct section of seats for each school. I later figured out the trick, there were colored strips marked on the ground for the path of each stream of students, which they mostly stuck with. The actual processional took nearly thirty-five minutes for everyone to arrive. The slowest group was the faculty, followed closely by the fifty-year anniversary alumni, but it was only a little while in before it stopped being boring, as that's when we saw Emily arrive. We'd been clued in to where she'd be sitting, so it was easy to tell which stream of people she'd have to be in, and once spotted we got to do the whole "pointing her out to the people that hadn't seen her" yet routine. This was compounded by Emily trying to point us out to her friends who were walking next to her - Zev and Margaret (I think, I'm not very good with names). Zev apparently couldn't spot us at all, which was funny to both sides based on the facial expressions and the relative ease at which the rest had spotted each other. I should mention that mom at this point was extremely happy and kept waving to Emily happily during the entire rest of the processional. Eventually several of us got tired and sat down. The ceremony was interesting, it started with a prayer. However, it wasn't a particular religion's prayer, but rather a very odd attempt at being acceptable to everyone regardless of religion. Except in the sense that it completely left out any polytheistic religions, and atheists, etc, etc. It was also a case of speaking a whole lot, but not actually saying much, in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate prayers for their meaning and intent, even though I'm not particularly religious, the emotion and meaning behind a lot of prayers I really like/agree with. In any case, this one sorta fell flat for me. There was another at the end which I actually liked a lot - the benediction was given by a Jewish rabbi and was good to hear, didn't make any apology for what religion it came from and still had a good message and presentation.

Anyways, now we get to the commencement speaker, skipping over the honorary degrees section. The commencement speaker was Julia Louis-Dreyfus, an actress whom I wasn't familiar with, but apparently played a character on "Seinfeld" as well as many other things. She was also an undergraduate at Northwestern, who did not graduate! This was an excellent combination for a commencement speaker: she not only knew the undergraduate population, she knew all sorts of great in-jokes for that crowd and made it accessible to everyone in the audience. She was witty, funny and serious at all the right points, and it was an excellent commencement speech. The interesting thing is if I compare it to Caltech's, the main points had a lot of similarity: they were really concerned about the environment and where we will be in the future, but her presentation was upbeat and encouraging, pointing out the little things one can do to try and make a dent, and the patterns and behaviors that can change to make progress. In summary, the speech was excellent and kept attention very well, and who can dislike a speech where one of the big pieces of advice given to the students was "Don't be an ass!"

After that it was pretty much time for degrees and walking out and stuff, they don't call all the names for the graduation, which is probably a good thing considering how many people there were and that it took two hours even without that. I did notice that there weren't really any of the annoying air-horns that invaded Caltech's ceremony, which was nice. Also, as a random footnote, Jonathan did get a hot dog in the middle of the ceremony and it looked excellent. I think graduation ceremonies with concessions stands are an excellent idea, I'm sad now that I didn't get a pretzel.

Gone to Evanston

I'm currently out of town, so this is a filler post until I get some more time to actually write. We (L and I) are in Evanston, which is home to Northwestern University, and pretty near to Chicago. We're visiting for my sister's graduation, which was the date of this post (I'm putting it back a day, haven't had internet access for a lot of the time).

Bored of Basketball

The NBA finals ended today. Am I the only one really bored by this, when I used to really like professional basketball? I haven't actually been following basketball much, but occasionally check out how the various teams are doing, usually the Lakers, the Hornets, the Heat, and the Bobcats are the ones I look for, since I have various connections to those. The NBA playoffs started up, what, a month ago, and for some reason nothing seemed interesting about them until Golden State started making a run against Dallas, which was pretty cool and the games I saw were fun to watch. After that, though, it was pretty much over. I watched Golden State play against Utah and lose, and got bored of the rest that I saw, with the only bright spot being LeBron James stepping up in their series against Detroit, which was pretty neat as it was actually reminiscent of Michael Jordan. For someone who gets compared to Jordan a whole lot, it was interesting to see a time it actually felt like a fair comparison.

The finals, however, were a complete dud. The Spurs destroyed that other team they played, and it never really looked like an actual contest was happening. Sure, Cleveland could have won several of the games played as they got close, but it never felt like they were actually in the contest.

I think part of the problem was the length of the early series in the playoffs. When the teams play best of 7, it's really hard (for me) to get interested until three or four games have been played, because everything is just building tension towards the games where one team or the other can clinch the series. Except for many of these they never reached any point of tension. In the first round, of these three were won 4-0, two were 4-1, two were 4-2 and one was 4-3. The latter three actually were fairly interesting. I think, however, it would be a lot more interesting if the first rounds were actually a lot shorter: three or five games, as then even the first games can be instrumental, and at least if it's going to be a blowout, it'll be over quick. Even the way the NCAA tournament does it would work, where a single loss and you're out, just open up the playoffs to more teams, set up a bracket and let them go. Maybe that team that's at the bottom of the standings makes a great run and wins the playoffs! It could happen, however unlikely, and that's the sort of story that would get me pretty interested.

Anyways... while I doubt many people reading this actually are interested in the NBA, do speak up if you've got ideas or comparisons. :)

Trends

Continuing the trend for this week, I'm going to actually write a short post.

Today's excitement was the DSL dying at the apartment, only to mysteriously work again after a few hours, while talking with the line techs. There was also a flat tire later on the way to dinner, which wasn't that bad, even though I'd been sitting in the seat closest to the tire that blew (back right) and it was rather startling. The tire got changed fine though and we made it to dinner just a bit late.

Tired

Today was a long day. Lots of stuff done and to do, but managed to not stress out completely. I think that counts as a win in the grand scheme of things, though I'm hoping it doesn't leave me too tired for tomorrow, given how late I'm up.

Anyways, a few short stories today, mostly about the ratties. I did take lots of pictures, but haven't the time to check them out, crop and post them here. Maybe tomorrow for that. In any case, they did do some rather cute things today.

I had chow mein for dinner. This seemed like a good idea, I like noodles with assorted vegetables and beef. I suspect the problem was not actually in the choice of meals, but the environment in which I ate. That would be while sitting on the floor of the bedroom, trying to keep track of where all the little rats were running, while L was working on cleaning their cage. On the one hand, eating dinner while sitting on the floor did make it a lot easier to keep track of all the rats: they were all climbing over me, trying to figure out what the great smell was. The worst it got was with Cao Cao, who is small enough and daring enough to climb all the way up my arm and onto the back of the hand that was holding the fork I was trying to eat with. I think he had this grand plan, of reaching the hand and then making a dive into the chow mein and eating all that he could. Sadly for him, that plan was thwarted by the distraction of being offered a noodle if he would only leave my hand alone so that I could eat. On the whole, though, I think the dinner was enjoyable, as there is something really cute about the way the rats eat noodles.

I have come to the conclusion that our rats like us. Or maybe just people in general, or it could just be that anyone moving around attracts their interest. I suspect it's more than just the latter though, as some non-person movement can really startle them. When we let them play in the room, inevitably there will always be at least one or two near us, if not climbing around directly on us. Lu Bu, Blue and Scotty seem to be the most friendly and generally more likely to hang out. Cao Cao tends to always be off getting into trouble, though he has been known to hang out on the keyboard tray under L's monitor. Barrick tends to hide the most, as usual. I've also been teaching them to come when called, right now just a general call for all of them, as teaching them individually is a royal pain. It works pretty well, of the three times I called them tonight there was a 4 rat average response. Lu Bu and Blue in particular make a beeline straight for me, usually on an accessible path. Scotty, on the other hand, tries to reach the call from wherever he is, which today led to an amusing scene with him sitting on top of the clothes hamper on my chair, while I was sitting at the foot of the bed. He stared for a while, trying to figure out how to reach me, before I reached out to let him climb across.

Monday

I have a hard time with mondays. There never seems to be a good way to start the week, I have lots of things to do and picking a starting point is very hard when everything seems like it needs to be done first. At least today it was a little easier, as I could continue with the write-up I was working on yesterday. But a lot of times, it just feels difficult to start things up on monday.

I think the solution is to spread things out onto the weekend more, so I'm always working on a current task and can just shift to new things as needed. But sometimes I feel so far behind that it's hard to know where to begin.

Head over Heels

I spent a decent bit of time today doing some writing for work, so this post is going to be a little short today. In honor of it being a short post, I'm going to pass along a few amusing incidents with the ratties, for those interested in such things.

This afternoon I went to give Lu Bu his medicine as usual, and all the ratties were dozing off as they usually do in the afternoon. This is usually a pretty cool thing to have the dozing ratties, as one of the cutest sights is to see a rat yawn as they wake up. Today was no exception, as several rats did wake up as I fed Lu Bu his medicine. Barrick, however, managed to top all the rest in the yawn department. He meandered over to where I was feeding Lu Bu, over the ramp, poked his nose over the ramp and did a gigantic yawn as he somersaulted off the edge and down the ramp. He picked himself up on the landing below the ramp and did a quick look around to make sure he wasn't spotted, and then went back to napping. L and I were laughing at the sight, we've never seen quite that spectacular a yawn.

Rats like large objects. This seems to be a universal truth, evidenced tonight during rattie play time. L had several sheets of paper sitting on the desk adjacent to her, at some point one of these got knocked onto the floor (likely by the rats). Blue found the paper first, and immediately grabbed it and started trying to take it to the closet, where the rat cage is. Note that this is a full 8.5" by 11" sheet of paper, a lot larger than the rat, so they carry it by grabbing an edge and hopping along. Hopefully while not standing on the paper, or they have a tug of war with themselves while trying to move it. After Blue got the paper to the closet, he seemed happy and wandered off. Next up was Scotty, who found the paper by the closet and immediately decided it was a rare and wonderful object, and carried it back halfway across the room and hid it under the clothes hamper. He showed it off to several admiring rats, Lu Bu and Barrick, who came to investigate it, but eventually all three wandered off. After sufficient time had passed, though, Lu Bu came back for it and carried it off yet again, this time to behind a box on the lowest shelves in the room. So far it appears to be safely hidden there, but only time will tell if it will remain there.

Oh, and on a side note, today was our second wedding anniversary. As usual it was a spectacular day, filled with all sorts of special events and presents. (Translated: we went out to dinner at Zono Sushi, that's about it) ^^

Spice

We went to see the movie "Paprika" today. If you haven't seen it yet, the following paragraphs may contain spoilers. The short review is that it's a good movie, and you should go in expecting it to be strange. I should mention that it is in japanese and we saw it with english subtitles.

The longer review: There were a lot of interesting characters in this one, and I was pretty happy to see many different types. The story is based around some devices that allow someone to share another's dreams, and several of these getting stolen. The evil bad guy (tm) was pretty easy to guess, but exactly how he was evil and what really was up was extremely difficult to tell, partially because the line between reality and dream sequences was very thin at the best of times, and non-existent the rest of the time.

Of the characters in the movie, I really liked the story of the police captain - the movie starts (roughly) with a journey through his dreams, and later those same dreams are revisited through a different perspective and it really ties his story together. One of the other things I really liked were some of the traveling/chase scenes which involved Paprika - the changes she takes and the scenery jumps are extremely hard to predict and were really cool in that weird way.

The only thing I found a little odd was the ending. I think it made sense, but I dismissed an earlier scene as being important for a completely wrong reason, and so didn't notice some of the things which I should have in order to make the same scene near the ending actually make sense. It's hard to explain. Actually, the whole movie is hard to explain, I feel like I need to have a dvd of it handy and playing as a reference while trying to write about it.

So, I'll end with the comment that it was a good movie and worth seeing, just for the weirdness/surreal settings and the interesting characters.

Graduation

I went to Caltech's graduation today. On the whole it was pretty much a graduation. I liked the inaugeration ceremony for the new president, though I had trouble actually understanding what he was saying. He seemed to have a good rapport with the crowd and was fun to listen to even without understanding what he was saying much (I have a hard time understanding anyone with a thick accent, I'm not sure exactly why).

The commencement speech, on the other hand... Well, let's say he did not have much of a rapport, if any, with the crowd. The choice of messages was a brave one, and at least somewhat interesting, but I got extremely bored with the delivery when I started to be able to predict the upcoming lines and themes. So I ended up reading the handy book I'd brought with about halfway through, checking every few minutes to see if I could still predict where he was. mf0m, says Cao Cao, who is trying to help me write this entry. I'm not sure what that means, but clearly Cao Cao had a strong opinion on the commencement speech too, and he didn't even go!

Let me see, what else about graduation. I still wish the glee clubs were allowed to sing the hallelujah chorus, rather than the adapted version, it just doesn't sound right to me. As far as people walking goes, I was there to see two people from my lab graduate (Jongmin, Rebecca), and one from another lab who I've worked with a decent bit (Justin). They all graduated, not much suspense there, but it was nice to be able to see it. :) I also got to meet (a little while later) the person who did all the paintings for Erik and our lab which were on display at the lab art show two weeks ago, she is a friend of Erik's and came by on a tour of the art display (still up since the art show, as Erik has been out of town.)

Anyways, that's about it for graduation. I'm glad I went, but I'm a bit tired cause I didn't sleep well and got up a bit earlier than usual for it.

Tarren Mill Recruiters

Ok, so you're a recruiter for the Tarren Mill quest chains, and you're going out and surveying the local flora, fauna, dangerous factions in the area, that sort of thing. You walk over to Durnholde Keep, once a mighty place, but now the home of some syndicate personnel, measly level 20 to 22 types, though they do have two NPC's, both Jailors who are level 24, and you go Hey! Perfect stars for a quest! Well, stars in the sense that they die and give you the quest item needed to rescue the two noble orcs who have been chained up there. Not that they'll actually leave and go back to Tarren Mill once you rescue them. Nah, it'll be "too dangerous" and they'll catch up to the quest taker. That's sure to get on the good side of the person doing the quest, cause no-one likes to do both a key item kill quest followed by an escort quest, twice!

So anyways, you're this recruiter and you've now got a great quest nailed down. Orcs in distress, evil syndicate baddies holding them hostage. Not that the syndicate are even bad guys enough to have a faction rating for them. Bloodsail pirates got faction, but that's cause they're pirates. The syndicate tried to get ninja billing, but they made a mistake and the shadow mages didn't look much like ninjas. But wait! You've got one quest, and the big boss in Tarren Mill says that's no good, you've gotta have at least one other quest for the area, or no-one in their right mind is gonna do it with all the travel time overhead! Ok, so you head back over to durnholde keep, meet up with Jailor #1 (you've forgotten the name already) and nail down a quick kill quest contract: ten each of the rogues and watchmen. Maybe they don't want the shadow mages hunted, no problem. You're set, and hardly take a glance back as you head back to Tarren Mill.

At this point you've made a big mistake. They've only got a handful of rogues! Anyone doing the quest is going to show up, free both orcs, off a bunch of watchmen and shadow mages, and then spend an hour wandering around the place trying to find the rogues! They're only level 22, they don't even have stealth yet, but for some reason the syndicate haven't hired enough of them. Plenty of watchmen, not that they raise an alarm or anything, but no rogues. And here we have the lesson: If you sign an group of evil guys to a quest contract, make sure there are enough guys of the right types there to fill that contract.

Lord Cao Cao

Finally we arrive at the post for the fifth rattie, the smallest but not the least, Cao Cao. Cao Cao was the first named, along with Lu Bu, for he was a mighty rat even though he was also really really small, with Lu Bu weighing in at nearly 50% more. He's still the smallest rat, but he's also the most active one as well.

We got a nifty rat wheel, featured in this picture:
It's an enclosed wheel, with the openings on the opposite side from that seen in this picture. Playing nearby are Blue and Scotty, with Lu Bu watching. All new things you introduce the ratties to naturally brings a certain amount of skepticism from them, which usually means that eagerly waiting to see how they will interact with a new thing usually brings disappointment as they ignore it. Cao Cao, however, figured out right away exactly what the rat wheel was for and immediately ran like crazy in it. And ran like crazy when we were trying to get to sleep, and then taught the rest of them how to run like crazy on it so that they could continue running while we tried to sleep even after Cao Cao got tired.

Here we have a good picture of Cao Cao:


He's a siamese coloring, which is basically a pure white with grey-brown hints on the ears, nose and tail. He's also the only one with the red eyes, the rest having the more usual black eyes.

To round out this description of Cao Cao and his personality, we have a photographic sequence, which I'll just notate with various bits about him. (Does anyone know how to make stuff on blogger appear only after a link? "below the fold" as it's usually called. I'd like to do that with the extra pictures here so it doesn't get too weighty.)

Cao Cao is a natural acrobat:
Yep, that's a three feet on the cage, one foot on the clothes hamper, getting set to jump over.

If you start taking pictures of rats, they come to see what all the flash is about.

But sometimes they get distracted and instead show off their balancing skills.

The next sequence shows off a particular trait we've seen in the ratties: they get into trouble. For some background, L went to a huge amount of trouble to buy some really nice cable organizers to stow all the power cables, network cables, etc, to keep them out of the way of the rats (who like to chew), so that we could at times let them run around the bedroom. Naturally, this doesn't work terribly well, as evidenced by the following behavior:
"Who, me? Play on the neatly organized cables?"
"Ok, enough posing for the camera. Now, what can I do while I'm up here?"
"I wonder where this cable goes?"
"This looks promising." (This is actually how he got over there, that black cable his front paws are resting on is the power cord from one of my monitors, he climbed over on top of it.)
"Changed my mind, it's climbing time again!"
"You know, this place looks pretty familiar. Where should I go from here?"

He actually did several loops around like that and then used the power cord to climb back over to the desk. I think he just likes the climbing around. Of course, once he arrived on the desk, this is what happens next:
After an exhausting trip, he naturally had to have a Dr. Pepper. I'm just glad he didn't try to drag it off with him. There you have it: Cao Cao, adventure-rat.

Demographics

One of the things I always liked about the USA Today newspaper is those little boxes in the corner which have a bar chart or percentage breakdowns or stuff like that on some random topic. I'm not sure why they appealed to me, it's not as if they usually had meaningful information. If I were to guess, it's just because I like numbers, and I have an easier time remembering number breakdowns rather than orderings on items. (For instance, a set of word-number pairs feels easier for me to remember compared to a list of just words)

So, when looking around a day or two ago, I stumbled on a post on Making Light which linked to a very interesting article in New York Magazine (italicized, cause that's how they did it on Making Light, and they must know the right way to do this sort of thing). The article is called "The Profit Calculator", and the best part of it is all the little graphs and bar charts that break down various statistics about each business. Some of the various entries are also quite interesting, I liked the restaurant ones especially to see how much they actually pay for ingredients compared to how much they charge, though I would have also liked to see the hidden costs for each ingredient rather than just the cost margin between materials and sell price - things like how much time does it take to prepare, how experienced a chef is needed to make that dish, that sort of thing.

Eddie's Market

There is a little shop near Grant Park, the park just across the street from where we live, and it is called Eddie's Market. It's been there for a long time, I know certainly since before I came to Tech, and I'd expect for quite a while before that as well. The shop had sandwiches, and chips and ice cream and sweets, all the things you'd expect to sell to the parents and kids who frequent Grant Park in the afternoons and on the weekends. I'll always remember the three people who worked there, though to my shame, I don't think I ever asked their names even though they felt as familiar as old friends. There was the man, tall and with a kind face and who I always felt was interested in whatever I had to say when we'd make small talk while he was making sandwiches. There were the two woman, one of whom I always thought was the man's wife and was quiet but clearly in charge, and the other, who seemed older, and who loved to talk about the area, the people she'd met and in general just liked conversation.

A while ago, maybe several years, I learned that they were going to close down the shop. It had been theirs so long and they'd gotten tired and wanted to move on. I couldn't blame them, but I also found it hard to even say anything to them about it. I wish I'd said something, maybe another thank you for making my sandwiches for so many years, or just good luck for their future plans.

I started writing this with the intention of reviewing the new Eddie's Market, as it re-opened after a while with a new set of people running it. They apparently wanted to change the name, but the person who owned the property said they shouldn't. I think, however, I'm just going to leave what I've written as it is and leave the review for another time.

To those that ran Eddie's Market for so many years, should you ever read this: Thank you.

Ship's Engineer

And now, the fourth in the series about our new ratties. This time starring Scotty, the illustrious engineer.

Scotty was named such because we didn't want to name him Sun Quan, for fear of the archers. Or at least, that makes a better story for how he got named that. Sun Quan was tossed around as a name for one of them, since we already had Cao Cao and Lu Bu, but we decided that Sun Quan would be entirely too much of a handful. "Spotty" was tossed around as a possible name for Scotty, as he is black with white spotted patches, but it didn't stick and Scotty was used instead.

He's sometimes hard to tell from Lu Bu as they are both black and white, but Scotty has much less white on him overall, and very small spots, where Lu Bu has a gigantic white blaze on the forehead. Scotty is also the second largest of the rats, starting out a decent bit smaller than Lu Bu but he's been trying to catch up since. Scotty is the mountain climber of the group. No peak is too tall for him. His default direction of travel is upwards.

At this point, Barrick tried to help write the description of Scotty. L says: "He's probably going to put propaganda like 'pees on his food'" Bad Barrick, go hide in the corner.

Anyways, Scotty is very energetic and interested and tends to always be exploring and finding higher spots to climb to. He's pretty calm as far as petting goes, but has a low threshold for duration and will start squirming pretty quickly. He doesn't seem the dominant type either, not really going out of his way to tussle with any of the others, but he doesn't do badly when he does.

Finally, a pictorial comparison of Scotty and Lu Bu, to assist in telling them apart:













This is Scotty! He is being very annoyed at me for holding him still for this picture.














This is Lu Bu. A bit darker of a picture but the difference in coloring on the forehead is really apparent when comparing this to the previous one.

Restaurant Shyness

I ran into an interesting situation in a restaurant for dinner today. We were at Indochine Palace, a Vietnamese place I like for their Pho, and we'd nearly finished the meal when the waitress brought an absolutely delicious looking dish past us and to a group sitting at a table behind us. It was some sort of crisp noodle base on a plate with vegetables of all colors heaped on top. So here's the interesting part: do I ask the waitress what the dish is, so that I can try it later?

This is a tough question for me usually, because I don't really like interrupting the waitress or calling attention to myself. In this particular situation it wasn't that bad, as I've been to this restaurant many many times and at least recognized the waitress (she is one of the ones who always remembers what I order), so I asked. It turns out it was a vegetarian dish whose name I have already forgotten, but I know the spot on the menu where it appears (in both vegetarian and non-vegetarian versions). So I'm looking forward to trying that one next time we go there and I don't really want the Pho. Unlikely, I know. :)

Anyways, what do other people think about this situation? Is that type of interaction with waiters/waitresses hard for some people but not others? I know I usually have a hard time even calling for a check.

Heroic-mode Guitar!

Guitar Hero II is an excellent game for the PS2. I never actually bought it, or the first game, though I played Tim's copy a lot. That recently changed, with the release of Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360, I picked up a copy of the game, along with the guitar controller which was redesigned for the 360. The short verdict: Excellent game, my hands hurt.

As far as I can tell, there are very few differences between this game and the PS2 version. Most notably, there are 10 more songs, and eight of them were added to the career mode, by making each block have 6 songs, including the encore, rather than 5. Some of the songs have been rearranged a little, so while each block has an additional song, the final set doesn't have any of the new ones, and the first set has two of the new ones. See this article for complete details on that. The other difference is that there's the achievements which are tracked for each profile. The one I'm proud of currently is "Eddie Van Halen Award", which is given for a streak of 500 notes without a miss. I got that one on "Less Talk More Rokk", by Freezepop, on medium difficulty. Also amusing was "Rock Snob Award", given for refusing to play an encore. (Hey, they wanted Free Bird as an encore! I had to say no!) I got help for the "Hendrix Award", which is given for completing a song left-handed.

Song list review: (New songs)

Possum Kingdom - Toadies. Not a cover. For being in the first set, on medium difficulty, this one had some fairly tricky fingering and rhythm. Notably it starts you on the sections which are long repeated notes followed by an almost hammer-on (doubled note, you do have to strum but has a similar feel). Good practice there, and it also has several offbeat sections which can be surprising unless you are paying attention. I don't actually know the song, but L says she's heard it before and she liked it.

Salvation - Rancid. A cover. Not very long song, which is nice, but I didn't really like it. Only interesting part was similar almost hammer-ons as in the previous one.

Life Wasted - Pearl Jam. A cover. In the second set, and I nearly died trying to play it the first time. Has some really tough fast fingering parts, and near the end there's a "this part is just to be an asshole to those playing guitar hero" type solo. On medium difficulty I could manage it, but I wonder what it'll be like on harder settings. Good song though.

Billion Dollar Babies - Alice Cooper. Cover. Love this one, just a fun song to play. Not really as hard as some of the previous ones, but could be because I can play this type of song better. It has some nice solo type sections and the vocal sections are awesome.

Hush - Deep Purple. Cover. Another fun one to play, has a good combination of single note sequences and chord sequences. I like the way it sounds, too, looking forward to seeing what the co-op bass part looks like.

Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo - Rick Derringer. Cover. Lots of off-beat notes, good sequences and has some hammer-on moves in it which I found good to practice. Also a good one for me to practice not releasing lower notes in long sequences that will re-use them.

Dead! - My Chemical Romance. Not a cover, woot! Also a totally awesome song. Pretty fast, lots of cool sequences and arghhhh I only missed two notes that time! This one gets my approval as the best song that was added.

The Trooper - Iron Maiden. Cover. Hardest song in the group that was added to the career sets, the main difficulty on medium is a sequence of lines that just gets painful to try and finger individually, but can be done a lot easier by holding the lower frets and doing the upper sequence. Even that is really tricky in this one as you have to both add notes and reveal to other notes in rapid succession.

Bonus tracks:

Drink Up - Ounce of Self. This one sucks. Hard to read sequences and it's basically the same stuff all the way through to the end. Probably a good one to practice hammer-on and pull-off moves on, but not that fun to play and the music isn't my style.

Kicked to the Curb - Noble Rot. Easier than the previous, and actually fun to play. Has some fast solo sections that are actually readable and also helpful in learning how to do the long runs with no strums.

Honorable Mention - Soy Bomb, by Honest Bob and the Factory to Dealer Incentives. Excellent instrumental bonus track, that I don't think I played in the original ps2 version, but was apparently present.

There's also some purchasable tracks for download on Xbox Live, but so far I've managed to resist getting Killer Queen, my favorite song from Guitar Hero. The other thing that deserves mention is the new controller. The action on it is pretty good, and I found it a lot easier to trigger star power with a subtle motion on this one, making it a lot less distracting than it sometimes can be. It also has a d-pad, xbox button, and start/back buttons! Now I just gotta find a use for that. Maybe Castlevania: SOTN using the guitar controller? :)