Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Ladys and Gentlemen...The Beatles!

I've just come from picking up my copy of The Beatles for the Xbox 360 at GameStop.
It is only the crushing press of scheduled afternoon meetings that is preventing me from even now claiming Swine Flu and making a bee-line home to my fake plastic instruments to take it for a spin.
One cool thing is that it includes a Beatles shirt for your avatar. I can think of at least one person at my house who will be very excited about that.
And another cool thing that I noticed from the package is that you can have up to six players, which makes sense - drums and two guitar/bass plus up to three microphones.
As a bonus for pre-ordering - which I did yesterday afternoon, it comes with a code for three free download songs that apparently you get to choose from a selection. There's only one public downloadable song right now ("All You Need Is Love"), so not sure how that will work. I left it all in the car so I could actually get some work done this afternoon.
I also have a class tonight, so I won't actually get my mitts on this until about 7pm.
We picked up our new and improved drum controller (with cymbals) on Monday and it is pretty cool. Can't wait to take it for a spin on the Ed Sullivan show or in the Cavern Club with the Fab Four.
BTW, MSNBC had a fun little piece on the "funnest Beatles songs to play". I also saw some mention about some of the things Harmonix did in the development of the game to make it more approachable for n00bs who just want to play some Beatles music - like having all the songs unlocked out of the box and having Easy Mode always be "No Fail". Pretty smart.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

How I spent my summer vacation

In honor of Labor Day and the end of Summer, I wanted to recap some of my non-vacation activities.

Worked. Including re-orging twice. Sigh.

Moved into a cubical. New office is nice, but this is my first experience in a cube. As cubes go, it is OK, but definitely a step down from an office.

Took 4 college classes. Mostly just lame ones that are requirements for my degree.

Lost over 45 pounds since Memorial Day. Currently at 203 and headed to 180 by the end of November.
My approach? Exercising more and not eating anything. Simple as that. I eat about 1200 calories per day and run/walk about 2.2 miles M-F and a 3.5 mile trail run on Saturday.
This is great, except none of my clothes fit and I’m too cheap to buy more.

Other than spending some time with the kids while they’ve been home, overall it was a pretty sucky and uneventful Summer.
Here’s to (probably an equally sucky) Fall and Winter and I’ll see if I can redeem myself next Summer.

But, hey Shadow Complex is awesome and The Beatles comes out this week, so I guess that’s something.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Ummm…

There’s a very sad and important message in this somewhere.

schoochildren