Geek Alert!

For quite some time now I’ve been looking at getting an iPhone. I am constantly at auditions and such where I need to know my availability and would have to say “I’ll let you know when I get home and check my Google Calendar”.
Now before you even say it, I don’t want to carry around a good old paper calendar/notebook/whatever. I share calendar’s with several people so we can easily see each other’s availability and I don’t want to have to document things in multiple places either.

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I was using a text replacement program called “Texter” and a program called “Ditto” that let me paste from a list of things I’d copied recently instead of just pasting the last thing copied. I had some problems with Texter causing issues so I ditched it. Today I found “Phrase Express” which replaces Texter and Ditto and does a whole hell of a lot more! You can use it to easily insert text, auto-correct, launch programs and web pages, paste from a list of recently copied things, execute macros and a whole lot more.
For example, every time I send out a letter to submit for cast or crew, instead of manually typing the same thing every time I can now just type “cast@” or “crew@” and it inserts my entire cover letter. Or I can type “sig@” to insert my signature. The hotkeys or keywords are completely configurable by you. I put the “@” symbol on my keywords just so I don’t accidentally cause an insert without meaning to. If I wanted to I could also make a hotkey if I wanted to such as ctrl-alt-S for my signature, or windowskey+s, or any combination of ctrl-alt-shift-windows+any key.
Check out the website for a much better explanation of all the features. I’m totally digging it so far.

This game’s awesomeness can not be overstated. Jess, Staci and I spent most of today going through the tour mode. Then when you’re done playing you can spend forever choosing from the many awesome costume options, tattoo art, designing your band logo and more. Now if only our replacement guitar would hurry its way here so we could stop being handicapped on guitar. Best game ever. However, I don’t see how any human is supposed to play “Won’t Get Fooled Again” on drums on expert. It’s positively insane.

And it is every bit as bad ass as the hype preceding it. We had planned on shutting it down at 10 p.m. so as not to disturb the lady below us (I hate living in a condo for that reason) but at 9:50 she came knocking to ask us to turn it down. I told her we had planned on quitting at 10 but she appeared pretty irritated (normally she’s quite polite when asking us to shut up, and yes it has, unfortunately, happened many times) and said that it had been going on 4 6 hours (which I think it had) and that we had no idea what those drums sounded like down in her condo.
*sigh*
I really hate disturbing her as I like to keep good relations with people in my community, but we’re certainly not going to quit playing games or listening to music. We already keep quiet after 10 (including no washing clothes because when it drains it sounds like a waterfall to her) and even when we are doing something we try to keep it to what seems like a reasonable volume.
Argh. What a pain. And now I’m always self-conscious when I see her around and I’m paranoid about the noise level all the time.
But anyway, Rock Band does indeed rock. So much so, I think I might just sell my PS2 and all my guitar hero games. No need for them any more. I have so many other games I want to play and Rock Band scratches the same itch and does it WAYYYY better. Better controllers, better graphics, better game play, better everything.