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.

Well, not exactly. We've been discussing getting a new bed for some time. It seems like a rarity that either one of us gets a decent nights sleep without feeling achy, crunchy or like we need to see a chiropractor. This is a bummer to us because about 2 years ago we spent a good amount getting what was supposed to be one of the best mattresses at this particular shop. I was not looking forward to trying to figure out what mattress to try next. You just never really know until you've slept on it for a while so "trying it out" in the shop is pretty much useless.

Cut to today. After getting an insanely great amount of clothes for both of us at Goodwill for only $100, we headed to Costco because I wanted to look for this little portable AC unit a friend had told me about to use in the room we call "The Cave" where my computer and home studio resides. For some stupid reason the AC vent going to this room is about half the size of all the others so it gets warmer than the rest of the house.

As soon as we walked in they had these queen size memory foam mattresses for only $600. Now anyone who had ever looked at a memory foam mattress will know that this is a pretty incredible price. We had always wanted to try one but had never seen them for less than a metric ton of money. We asked about their return policy and Costco has an awesome policy of "if you don't like it, we'll take it back. Period. Doesn't matter how long it's been. No time limit." I strongly felt that this was the bed we needed to get.

So we didn't find the AC unit I was looking for (my friend, Greg, is going to pick one up for me from Sam's Club where he saw it), but we ended up with a memory foam mattress for about the same price we paid for our old one! And three tubs of sabra hummus which is the best hummus ever. It is THE reason we got a Costco card.

On other fronts, I've been hella busy with acting gigs, some Production Assistant work, our own short films, gearing up for our first feature, and many other things. Life is generally good and I hope to stop being such a crappy and infrequent blogger. I film for about a week on an independent feature this week, I'm the lead in another indie feature shooting next month and have a part in a third indie feature in July.

Grand Theft Auto IV has also sucked up a huge part of my life. It's awesome and addicting. Rock Band still rocks We had the best Rock Band session ever Saturday night at Greg's home theater. Though he has it on Ps3, we brought our Xbox because, of all our friends, we by far have the most songs since we have bought almost all the downloadable content. We played for about 6 hours getting our band all the way to the Hall of Fame gig, but by that time we were all tired so our attempt at the brutal 8 song setlist to get into the Hall of Fame will have to wait until next time.

That's about all my brain has to spit out at the moment and even all that is the highly condensed summary. Ya'll come back now! Ya hear?

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.

I know my blog has been completely Rock Band-centric lately but it's what's going on!

You haven't truly experienced Rock Band until you've played with Jess singing "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys. Awesome.

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.

Today our guitar controller started acting up. Up strums work but down strums only mostly work. Every now and then they just decide not to work. Though this made things very difficult, it did not stop us from playing. Hopefully EA will be quick in issuing us a replacement.

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.

Making the "Miis" on the Nintendo Wii (Miis are your little avatars you can make) is fun enough to be its own game. So far I've made all 4 Beatles, Kevin Smith and more. You can also post, download and browse Miis on the "Check Mii Out" channel. Dude, the Wii rocks.

Tomorrow...

the day...

Rock Band for the 360!

I don't know how I'm ever going to be productive again. I'm currently addicted to Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii as well as Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxies is out and I hear talk of many other cool games. I'm still 2 songs away from completing Guitar Hero III on the PS2 and we've got Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect coming out for the Xbox 360. And of course Rock Band coming out this week. Plus many, many more. I'm swamped!

We had been planning to get a Nintendo Wii someday but that happened yesterday when a friend of ours had the chance to pick up one of 60 Wiis that Best Buy had received. He didn't want one but knew that we did so we had him grab it. We should be picking it up from him tonight.

Just what I need! Something else to stop my productivity. We've played with our friend's Wii (saucy!) so we know the fun in store for us. Come visit! Play with our Wii!

So I think the iPhone is very pretty and has some pretty cool "wow" factors. It's way too expensive though and I read a pretty thorough review that highlighted a lot of the shortcomings too. I really love my phone but lately I've really been wanting something that I could use to check my Google calendar too so that when I'm at an audition or something and ask "are you available on these dates?" I don't have to say "I'll tell you when I get home and check my calendar."

A guy on the film shoot today had one. They are very sleek but I really don't think I would like it anywhere near enough to justify that kind of price tag.

I have a first generation TiVo that I've since hacked and upgraded in many ways. I've added a second hard drive, replaced the first hard drive, added a cache card and an ethernet jack so it can communicate with my wireless network instead of using the phone. When I first bought it I bought the "lifetime subscription" which has long since paid for itself but is locked to this particular unit. They no longer offer lifetime subscriptions and you can't transfer it.

They were having a special where you could buy a new HD TiVo for $300 and transfer your lifetime membership to the new unit for $200 (basically buying a new lifetime membership even though they technically aren't offered any more). I was so tempted, however we don't have the money to do it and we don't have an HD TV. It would have been more for prevention of future problems. Eventually I will get an HD TV and HD service at which point our TiVo will no longer be of any use because it will not handle HD quality.

Uhh, bummer. That's really all there is to this story.

I always wish there were an easy way to keep up with comments on other people's blogs instead of having to just manually check all their entries to see if there's any new comments (which is the case for most blogs). For a long time I used a plugin which allowed people to sign up for email comment notification but I think pretty much only Jess and I used that.

Therefore I now have a comments feed as well as an entries feed over on the left there. Use your favorite newsreader (I use Google Reader) to keep up with new comments posted here. It's all new to me so I'm not sure exactly how it's going to work but hopefully any time a new comment is posted you will see it in your newsreader.

While we were filming the movie we had taken our Playstation with us to play Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2. At some point, something had messed up and we lost all our GH2 save data. I had completed the game on every difficulty level and completely 5 starred Medium and most of hard. I was distressed. For a long time, I couldn't find the will to climb back on the horse and start all over again.

Then a few days ago, I started my band over and went straight for expert. I don't know what was up, but I tore through expert like a madman doing far better than I had the first time through expert even though I hadn't played in quiet some time. Today, all I had left was the final 4 songs on expert. My first time through, I had to really practice and play through each of those songs, many, many times before finally completing them through sniper-like use of my star power. Today, I finished all four of them on my first try. My GH2 mojo has never been stronger.

I just finished finally Guitar Hero II on Expert. I don't know if I'll ever be able to 5 star most of the songs on expert but at least I'm ready for the upcoming Guitar Hero: Rock the 80s, Guitar Hero III, and eventually Rock Band