How To Relay The Obvious

This was a hard one. You know, I use a lot of straight logic in what I do, and sometimes, people don't quite understand logic past their own function in life. Such is the case with this problem with a printer. Paper insurance forms come in two varieties at the moment: red and grey. The printing difference here is that the red forms print just text on pre-printed forms that are colored in red (or actually, pink) and the grey forms print the text and form in its entirety.

The way our program works is that you select red or grey, which in effect selects whether you want the lines or not. This individual was having a problem with the grey lines printing over a red form. Logically, there are only so many ways this can actually happen. Either they have selected the grey form option or its a problem outside of our control.

I watched them pull up a window showing just the text lines of the form with no grey outlines and they hit print. It printed with the grey lines on top of the red. Total weirdness, right? This means that the problem was outside of our program's control since once it passes the image of the claim into Adobe Acrobat Reader. It's actually the Adobe program that does the printing along with the local printer hardware and printer driver.

I was left with two answers here. Either they had some weird paper loaded that had this goofy outline on it already, or something in this ancient printer preprinted the grey lines of the form. Well, they got their IT guy over there and he determined that he had to switch out the printer since it was misbehaving. It is good when people listen.

The Sets Grow

So last night I was origianlly going to play piano with the guy who plays drums, but he was still getting in from his business trip, so we're looking at tonight. Instead, I played on Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Yeah, both of them. I recently ordered from eBay at a killer price a Rock Band Guitar (that's pink for the Queen and Princesses) and the Guitar Hero drums.

Now these drums were a little tricky until I discovered that the orange and yellow cymbals were labeled left and right and I switched them. Now, it works much better.

So I quickly jumped it from Hard to Expert, and found that while pretty much any song will work all right on guitar, some songs should not be used for drums. Since I can do the expert level, I like to think I'm a pretty capable player, and when it comes to some of the easier tunes, I can nail them to the wall. Such was the case with the first song of this particular set. I got five stars on it.

The second song was called "Some Might Say" and it's by Oasis. I don't know what it was about this song, but I could not get the beat at all. The pattern on screen was very, very easy, but I couldn't lock that beat for anything. I would get in a groove, and then the beat would go away. I have one suspicion here: the drummer on Oasis wasn't consistent. They were able to map the song easily enough, but I imagine I would have to pay almost deadly attention to the little dots on the screen to get it down, just because the tempo is inconsistent enough to not let me zone out and play. It's just not good for us human metronomes.

Admittedly, I did kick into that one after playing Rock Band for an hour and a half, but for the encore song of that set (after I narrowly got through Some Might Say), I got 99% and five stars, so I'm pretty sure it isn't me.

So at this time, I have two guitars, drums and mic for Rock Band, and one guitar, drums, and mic (which is the same Rock Band mic) for Guitar Hero. My second GH guitar gave up the ghost. Well, actually pieces of both guitars died -- the strum bar on one and the green and red buttons on the other. So I took the neck of one and the body of the other and put them together. All I need is another GH guitar and I'll have two complete rhythm games.

To top it off, the Rock Band drum pedal works as the second bass pedal for Guitar Hero. Unfortunately, it won't work as the primary pedal for some reason. Can't figure out why. I woudl use it as the primary if I could thought. The GH pedal sucks. It feels flimsy, and it's really easy for it to accidentally slip on some of the harder songs and register an unintended bass hit, which spoils the streaks. On the bright side, it appears to be a cheap midi drum pedal, so it is possible that a better constructed electronic drum kick pedal will work on it. In addition, the cymbals just plug in to the kit using 1/8" jacks, just like a electronic drum kit does, so it's also possible that you could get some real electric cymbals to use with it. The red, blue, and green drums are fixed, though, so they aren't going anywhere.

The most interesting aspect of the GH drums is the MIDI port in the back. Yeah, a MIDI port. I suspect that you could hook this toy up to a MIDI sound generator and use it as a simple drum kit apart from the video game. It's not a bad little set. The cymbals are raised, and the drums have a more durable pad to them than the clickety-clack construction of the Rock Band drums. Where RB clicks, GH thuds.

That being said, they're still both equally fun, and the extra drum and different layout is taking some getting used to. The most significant change is that on RB, the crash cymbal is usually the green, but on GH, it's the raised orange - green is just another tom. Hence "Enter Sandman" is a totally different experience on GH than on RB.

It's too much fun, and I ended up playing for about 3 hours last night, so I got nothing done that I actually wanted to, like practicing the real guitar. I played a little piano and a little guitar, but I recalled that I hadn't checked the music stores this month for new stuff. I was going to do that "real quick," and ended up playing for a while on RB. Well, an hour and a half later, I thought I'd see if GH had any new stuff "real quick," and once I reviewed the store, I played another hour and a half. Oh well.

Another Another Reason I Don't Understand People

Oh boy. You know, I wrote this whole thing yesterday evening about this random email. right? Well, some smart aleks tossed around the question of this email eating up our 100Mb limit of space that those who store their emails on the server have been crunched down to, and they figure if this email doesn't die, it'll eat that space up fairly quickly. It actually won't since it's all text, but the thought of a single reply all email killing the space max is amusing.

Anyway, after yet another comment from someone about not hitting "reply all" to the email, it wasn't 15 minutes before yet another genius popped a reply all to request to be removed from the email list.

I mean, seriously, do you people actually look at your email and think before you hit reply? I just had to laugh.

If anything comes out of this, I'll bet the original sender will think twice before sending an email to that list again...no, probably not.