Extremely Dangerous

L, M^2 and I started a band. (In Rock Band. We're thinking of starting a band not in Rock Band too, but that's further out.) With the goal of only playing songs on expert difficulty. This was surprisingly easier to start out than I had expected. I was on drums, M^2 on guitar, L on vocals. We opened the night with "Say It Ain't So", and while I was expecting that to be our top scoring song, it only clocked in at #5 as the night went on.

Most fun to play: "Here It Goes Again" - OK Go. This one was a real blast! I actually got the drum beat and we were rocking it like mad.

Second most fun to play: "All The Small Things" - Blink 182. Crazy drumming but it felt so good! We followed this one up with "When You Were Young", one of our favorites, but it was also a real killer on the drums. I managed to die about 2/3 through, and after that couldn't get back into the beat. We finished the song with me having failed out, but the others held through.

Gaming the system: The setlist that lets you get a van has a mystery song. The first time we tried, it was Epic. Ouch. After the burn from that one, the next shot got "Go With The Flow", which some readers may recall I was horribly stuck on about a week ago, on hard. That went poorly as well. Third try we got the Ramones and finished it off. Whew. (Do I need to say which song by the Ramones? Didn't think so.)

You can tell it's been a good jam session when you have to get up to change your shirt halfway through. And then it's dripping again when you finish.

"You can tell it's been a good jam session when the guitarist can't find his shoes." - M^2

Group Meeting - Presentation

So I gave a presentation on my simulator yesterday, including some experiments I was trying to reproduce, and also to give a tutorial on using it, to get more people using it so I get more feedback. As it turns out, I didn't have enough time for the tutorial section yesterday because there were lots of very good questions during the overview and experimental sections, which I don't really mind.

There was only one really embarrassing slide, where I managed to completely miss that I wrote one thing and meant another in two different places, and didn't see that on my read-through before giving the talk. Oh well. Other than that, it went really well, and especially nice was the new laptop - I could see on the laptop screen the current slide, the next slide, current times, all sorts of useful info, and thus I very rarely had to look at the projector or anywhere except the audience. Which is one of the keys to a good presentation, in my opinion, as I can gauge how interested people are, and how confused, pretty easily. So that worked very well, and there were a few really tough questions, but E helped me out on those when I couldn't manage them, which I very much appreciated.

Since the tutorial had to be postponed, I gave it instead this afternoon. There was again a really good turn-out for it (the room was full both times) and it went over well even though the material here was a lot drier. Hopefully I'll have a bunch more people working with the simulator soon. :) Also, afterwards I got lots of compliments on both presentations, and E. even said he was very impressed with them. So I'm pretty happy today that everything went well. :)