Solution in Desperate Need of a Problem

I saw this (sadly very real) commercial while we were out of town for Christmas and it caused me to blow red wine out of my nose at the five second mark.  

If you decide to watch all two minutes, though, you should come away with the definite feeling that there is very little overlap between folks that a) have the ability to earn and collect achievements and awards and b) need this thing at all.

Perfection Through Incompetence (Part II)

(Continued from Part I)

So now you have a basic framework for why I volunteered to be the go-to guy for this year's Angel Tree effort at work.  My job would have been to get 15 tags from the Salvation Army, give them out to sub-coordinators, wait a few weeks, then collect and deliver the bags, but I wanted to see how the whole thing was run from beginning to end.  Getting the tags and waiting around is just the middle part of this process.

The Salvation Army is always looking for volunteers to do this and that so it was no surprise to me when the local rep told me they needed people to "process applications".  I said "Cool. Sign me up." and picked a two-hour shift from the available times.  I figured I would be sifting through a pile of paper or electronic forms in some back room somewhere.

No.

I showed up at the local SA and stood outside with a crowd of other folks waiting to get in - the door was locked.  After a few minutes someone recognized me through the glass and showed me in to the gymnasium.  The door was promptly relocked.

The gym floor was divided into three sections by tarps and dilapidated wooden equipment shelves.   The first section contained 140 folding chairs and was where the interviewees could sit and fill out their paper applications.  The second section, behind the tarp, was where after-school kids could play basketball or whatever until someone came to get them.  The third section is where people like me would be interviewing people and approving or disapproving their applications on a case-by-case basis.

After a short training session the doors were unlocked and we (the interviewers) were sent off to our tables.  Most of the other SA employees there were clustered around socializing - there really wasn't much for them to do except hand out the occasional clipboard or write a name on a list.  They were just doing what any close group of co-workers would do during their downtime, but I am not quite sure what they were doing there in the first place or why six of them were needed to do it.

We (I and the other interviewer) had both come directly from work and were dressed as such. Way, way overdressed for the job of looking over hopeful applicant's paperwork and pawing through birth certificates, social security cards, letters of Power of Attorney, gas bills, and whatever other evidence these sometimes-clearly-sometimes-not-so-clearly needy folks had to present to be allowed the chance of getting a couple of new shirts or a winter coat or a cheap RC car for their kid(s).

I felt like a 1930‘s banker.  I felt like a fraud.

As I would peruse these documents some folks were obviously embarrassed to be going through this.  They were nervous and sad and would spontaneously go into great detail about why they were there as I was going down my checklist.  Some of the stories were truly heartbreaking - especially ones involving the newly born or the newly departed. It was plain the person just wanted someone to sit and listen to them for a while.  2011 has been a hard year for a lot of people.

That said, for every one of these terrified and nearly apologetic applicants that I saw, four would come through that were deadened or otherwise ambivalent to the process, and one other would come through vocally annoyed that there was a process at all - this  program was their God-given right, after all.

For what it's worth, I didn't turn away or recommend against anyone being helped during my shift.  I mean, even if someone didn’t demonstrate the proper level of need (they all did, FWIW), who the hell am I?  I’ll tell you who - I am just some overdressed jackass with ten minutes of training who is one cosmic coin flip from sitting on the other side of the interview table.

(To be continued.)

Fool's Errand Du Jour

While the boy was down for his nap, the wife and I chatted over tea and coffee and sorted thousands of Lego pieces by color.  Well, technically "translucent", "wheel", and "minifig" are not colors, but you get my drift.

We are well aware that this will be the only time ever they will be sorted at all (unless "the pieces are all within plus or minus one degree of latitude and longitude" counts as "sorted") so you might be asking yourself "Why bother?"

I guess my response to that is a mumbled and embarrassed "I dunno... Neat picture, though."

Perfection Through Incompetence (Part I)

[Editor's Note: It took a lot of internal debate and conferring with family and friends on whether or not I should write this article.  Please forgive me if it comes out non-linear and unfocused (well, more so than the stuff I usually write about) - I just can't figure out how to get all the thoughts out there in an order that makes for a smooth read.  Maybe the disjointed, clunky, and often self-contradictory nature of this post can be seen as a metaphor for how this whole experience has left me feeling.

Sure.  Let's go with that.]

This holiday season I volunteered to help out with the Salvation Army's Angel Tree program. 

If you are not familiar with it, here it is in a nutshell.  Needy families apply at the Salvation Army for Christmastime aid.  If they are below a certain income/expenditure ratio they qualify to have their children receive items through this and an associated effort, Toys for Tots.  As the name implies, Toys for Tots is (mainly) toy-based but the Angel Tree program is more focused on clothes, although there is a little overlap there.

New, unwrapped toys are donated to the Toys for Tots program and don't go to a particular child.  Under the Angel Tree program, numerically-coded tags like the one shown on the left are labeled with a needy child's first name, age, gender, shirt, pant, and shoe sizes.  These tags are then hung on Christmas trees at participating locations - usually malls or big box stores - around the region, where people can pick one, then buy some stuff that fits the criteria on the card.  At that point they can deliver the stuff to the SA directly or sometimes back to the tree where they picked up the card.  Sometimes businesses can request a certain number of cards be set aside for pickup and a central coordinating person distributes the cards as they are requested.

As Christmastime approaches, the families that applied for aid are notified of where and when to show up to get their clothes, toys, books, and games.  By its very nature, the Angel Tree program is more uncertain than Toys for Tots since a tag may or may not be picked, it may or may not be lost, it might be picked and simply forgotten about, etc.  In any case, if a bag of clothes gets returned along with the tag before the submission deadline, the parents are notified that clothes are there for them to pick up, too.

A little history on my part.  As a kid, I had been on the receiving end of charities like this, although not this one in particular.  Church handouts, government assistance - stuff like that.  The why's and wherefores aren't important, and it wasn't all that horrible.  As with most kids I wasn't really plugged in to the family finances, but even as I look back I can't justify the logic of having had both cable TV and government cheese in the same house.

The point is I now choose to do some volunteer work now and then to close the karmic loop a little and to show my three-year-old son that no man is an island. 

I have no illusion about the role "dumb luck" plays in the events in someone's life, for better or for worse.  I mean, sure, we are all the sum total of the key decisions we make, but each of these decisions is tied to the next by the most tenuous, gossamer thread imaginable.  If you were to go back and give any one of these threads the tiniest of pulls you would yank everything out of alignment in a nearly random fashion and the whole thing would come crashing down around your ears.

But the most frightening part of that is that you don't get to control these threads holding life's events together.  Hell, most of the time you don't even get to know they are even there until you look back over your life and appreciate how ridiculously improbable the particular sequence of events that have led up to build Now-You actually is.

I will go as far as to say I can convince myself that I would literally not have anything I have now (most importantly my wonderful wife and child) if it weren't for the fact my sister and a friend of hers intentionally left an unsmoked cigarette in an ashtray twenty some odd years ago.  I chose to smoke it (my first cigarette, it was) and here I am today, writing this paragraph.  The chain goes something like: if I left it be, I would not have had anything in common with certain high-school friends, I would never have been convinced to join the military, I never would have gotten the G.I. Bill, moved to the area, met my wife-to-be, etc, etc.

So, yes, I understand and appreciate "dumb luck".

However, to those unaccustomed to hard work and the making of measured decisions and who instead prefer to wear inertia around like a comfortable pair of well-worn sneakers, the achievements of others through their efforts can be dismissed as "luck", too. Not only does this provide those folks with a certain amount of comfort for making horrible choices (it's not their fault, after all), it also gives them a reason to never make new choices at all (because success is only achievable to those who have been helped or are lucky).

You have to admit that this is an excellent survival strategy but it only works in the long term if others are around to pick up the slack.  

(To be continued...)

What a Bargain!

Two-for-One religious holidays and free shoe rental?!?!  Rejoice, indeed!

Someone Else's Home for the Holidays

Well, we are out of here for the weekend.  Sorry about not writing in a while.  Same excuses apply - busy at work so no time to write at lunch, this netbook's keyboard has just about had it, sun got in my eyes, etc.

I have been piecing together my next big article, though, about my time volunteering at the Salvation Army this season.  I have given it the working title "Perfection Through Incompetence"... I hope to have it done by Tuesday.  We will see.

In any case, all our love to all of our friends and family this Christmas.  God bless!

New Product Review, Old Product Update

A while back I saw an episode of Man v. Food where the challenge was to eat six Atomic wings from a place called Quaker Steak and Lube.  He passed the challenge but those six wings looked like they kicked his butt pretty good.

We have one locally, I love spicy food, and they sell the sauce there so I picked some up.  That's it on the left.  Yep, that's a gen-yoo-ine medicine bottle and medicine dropper.   Not shown is the campy release form that comes in the bottle allegedly indemnifying the company from and damage you are going to do to yourself by ingesting this stuff.

Duly warned and respecting that caution is the better part of valor I cooked up some chicken nuggets and put a single drop on one.   It was hot, flavorful and delicious - not just pure heat.  I put a bit more on another and I was sweating.  I put enough on to coat the entire topside of a piece and I sweated a bit more and my tongue and throat definitely were feeling it, but in no way was this stuff the hottest sauce I have ever had.

That's not snobbery or false machismo.  I have ordered hot chicken fingers from places in Western New York where I was forced to roll down the car window before I made it home because my eyes were watering so badly from the fumes.  It is possible the stuff they sell via the drive through at Quaker Steak is intentionally less hot than the wing challenge stuff they advertise inside.  Also, I did not slather the nuggets with the sauce - I might be writing a different review if I did, possibly from the comfort of a hospital bed.

So either a) it is not as hot as advertised b) I got the dosage wrong or c) I pulled a Wesley and built up an immunity to the Iocane powder within this “highly dangerous” product super quickly. I will try the Atomic wings the next time I swing by the place and give an update later.

As tasty as this condiment is, six bucks for two ounces of the sauce precludes slathering vast amounts of this stuff on otherwise bland food every day but this might make for a fun stocking stuffer for the spicy food lover on your Christmas list.

The friend I bought the Whiskey Stones for had this to say about them:

I still like the stones, but I cannot use them for the broad application I had hoped for. While they seem to work perfectly for, say, whiskey, for wine they are absolutely horrible. The stones make the wine simply undrinkable. I put them in some port wine, which tends to be sweet and the outcome, while cold, was not drinkable.

I am thinking with really strong liquor like whiskey the stones don't alter the flavors but something tannic like wine seems susceptible. I don't know if it matters if the stones are either soapstone or granite.

So there you have it. Whiskey stones: for whiskey :)

Cheatsmith

Even WolframAlpha knows the answer to the question “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”

I am shocked and disgusted that when you ask the Google any question about Rocksmith, though, you are fed page after page of people offering up cheats and hints for the game. Oh, I realize that a lot of the responses from the search engine are automated – it sees you are asking about Game XYZ and it offers up the Cheats and Hints page to XYZ from some game site where you can get infinite lives, unlimited ammo, and a false sense of accomplishment. It's the same mechanism that causes Amazon to unthinkingly ask you if you would like to see a Kindle version of the kid's pop-up book you are ordering. I understand.

If going to these sites twelve minutes after you buy a game is your bag, I've got no issue with that. I'm all like “Whatever, man...” Don't get me wrong, I understand frustration. It's just not my style to throw down my controller, stick out my lip, stomp my foot, and pout “Oh, hard things are hard!” and storm off to find out how to “Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A” my way to success.

After all even I was reaching my limit in GTA San Andreas and would have given anything for just a smidge more RC airplane fuel in that idiotic “Supply Lines” mission. But, after enough flight hours to qualify me for a small aircraft license from the FAA, I did it. I finished a nearly meaningless task. Huzzah.

See, I have a stick-to-it-iveness that borders on the clinically insane for some things. Of course, I have a very W.C. Fields attitude when it comes to lots of other things as well - “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.”

Gosh, I'm complex...

I do have a huge problem with the idea of a Cheats and Hints page for Rocksmith. Now, these pages might be totally automatically generated and completely blank or otherwise devoid of shortcuts – I hope I never find out. I mean, what would be the point? To turn yourself into the guitar playing version of this guy?

I had an epiphany a couple of nights ago. Quite a sobering one, in fact. I was staring down dejectedly at my guitar after yet another failed attempt at the Rolling Stones song “Play With Fire”. Angry. Silent. I felt robbed. Cheated. I knew I was doing everything right, yet I only earned 90% of the points I needed to progress to the next level. What the hell did this freaking thing want? There must be something wrong with the game. Or the guitar. Maybe if I adjusted the delay settings...

Just then the playback started. I usually skip by these because either I pass the song and I want to go on to something else or I fail it and I want another try right away. This time I listened to me playing without the distraction of, well, actually playing.

It was awful. The cacophony that was emanating from my TV speakers... I... I did that...

And then it hit me.

It's me. The problem has always been me. For three full decades I have been blaming the P.O.S. controller or the game or some other imaginary nonsense for what has always been a shortfall of talent on my part. Whether it was failing to guide Pitfall Harry over the scorpion, misjudging a leap to the next girder in Jumpman, getting devoured by hellspawn in Doom, failing to rescue a homie in need in Saint's Row, or missing a power chord switch in Rocksmith, it has always been me. The evidence is right there in beautifully rendered color and faithfully reproduced audio.

Me.

Well, that simply won't do.

I am not a very musical person and I am unfamiliar with most of the songs in this game. Sometimes it feels like I am trying to play a fractal or like I am in an uncontrolled horizontal free-fall into my television as notes and chords with no discernible relationship to those before them or after them zip by me either mangled or completely untouched. It's been that way for each of the songs so far until I have heard them enough to appreciate the structure of the music I am listening to.

I shut down the Xbox and got to work. The main chord progression in “Play With Fire” is G-D-G-C-Em. I know this because I strummed it well over 1,000 times over two day's time on my sofa and out by the grill until I felt I was doing it well enough, fast enough, and consistently enough to try the song again without tripping over the notes that follow it.

It took me a few more tries but I got it. The entertainment-starved virtual people at my gig even enjoyed it.  Cool.

What was even cooler was going back and playing some of the songs and technique challenges that tripped me up so badly earlier in the game. I swear, it looked like the notes were balloons floating at me in bullet time and my hands were acting of their own accord. I still play the songs badly but it does appear that I am learning.

The timing of this article is especially apropos since I just learned that Jimmydunes passed “Surf Hell” by Little Barrie after dozens and dozens of attempts. Congrats, man! I have had that song in my set but at a much simpler level so far than he has to deal with recently. He said that when he finally passed it he felt like handing out cigars. I can totally dig that.

I am currently stuck on “Well OK Honey” by Jenny O. It's a good song to be stuck on. After I nail this one (this week , I think, time permitting) I will play my first 5-song gig, get maddeningly stuck on some other song, rinse, and repeat. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get off my soapbox. Carnegie Hall awaits.

Ow, My Sides

Thanks to Jimmydunes for sending me a link to the funniest thing I have seen in a very, very long time. Enjoy.

Happy Fun TIme

[NOTE: It has been brought to my attention that there was something wrong with posting comments recently. I think the problem was somehow related to having an expired poll in the sidebar. Now that I have deleted it the problem seems to have gone away. So, if you had posted a comment over the past few days and you never saw it approved and put up, most likely it is because I never saw it. Sorry for the inconvenience.]

So, fine, I don't have a book to read. Big whoop. I've got other stuff to fill my meager free time when the boy is asleep and I am not.

For example:

Thanks to Rocksmith have been spending a lot of the past month holding a guitar. I have honest-to-God calluses on the fingertips of my left hand, and it feels weird to type. I am loving this game/tool. I will put up a progress post tomorrow, I hope.

On a quieter note, I finished Blueprint 3D. An unknown 2-D blueprint is exploded into 3-D space, the pieces are re-scaled, and then the whole thing is given a couple partial rotations. The goal is to rotate the mystery drawing around the three axes until the pieces line up and, from your point of view, become a line drawing of the Taj Majal or a Jeep or whatever. It is beautifully done and relaxing but not very challenging. There are too many pieces of text that immediately clue you in to two of the axes and you can usually nail the third in just a few seconds. I won't be buying any add-ons unless the text is removed.

Also “finished” W.E.L.D.E.R. It's a game that is a combination of Tetris and Scrabble, but without the time constraint of the former and without the full dictionary of the latter. Again, it's beautifully done but not very challenging. There are twelve levels but, while each one is a little harder than the last, it's far from impossible to come up with good-scoring words especially with unlimited time to do so. The types of tiles they throw at you (red hot ones you can't touch, broken ones that can't move) increase the difficulty quite a bit but that only makes the game feel like a chore you are chugging through. Meh.

I watched the last four minutes of the Bills-Jets game last Sunday. It is good to know that if Steve Johnson ever escapes his handlers and goes on a rampage through downtown Buffalo the best way to defeat him is to hit him in the damn hands with a football, cuz he is probably not gonna know what to do with the thing.

While getting stuff together to wash the wife's car this past weekend we discovered it was windy enough to fly a kite. So we did. [Editor's Note: As I re-read this prior to posting it occurs to me that I am implying that a) I wash my wife's car at night and/or b) enjoy flying kites at night with her while the boy is sleeping. Creeeeeepy. Neither of these things is true. We were all awake. It was daytime. I just felt like putting the kite stuff in this post.] For my sister-in-law's edification:

Happy kite: soaring, majestic, a joy for all to behold:

Sad kite: ripped, faded, alone:

The kite looks like it might break loose any minute now, though. It has been 263 days since my sister-in-law piloted it into the tree roughly twelve seconds after taking the controls. Will it be a cheap Christmas gift for someone or will it stick there for another seven months? Only time will tell.

Finally, the British government has put out a code breaking challenge as a recruitment tool for the Government Communications Headquarters (GHCQ). It looks fun so I will be spending some time at night working on this one. I hope it is not a purely computer-based cipher that only requires clock cycles or specialist knowledge to solve. I get the feeling it is more general and clever than that, though. I guess we will see since it is only going to be up for the next ten days. Good luck, all!

Nice Try, Universe. Nice Try.

A week or so ago I put up a poll:

I am currently in-between books. Should I get the new Stephen King novel?

• No. Time travel be damned, remember your vow. For the love of God, remember Under the Dome.
• Yes. It will probably be fine and the universe has better things to do than to try and trick you into reading another crummy novel, anyway.

The results are in! Four votes of “yes”, and four votes of “no”. Well, that figures. Thanks for nothing, Internet.

I am leaning toward “no” anyway because of Siun-Kelan's comment about one of his books “The Cell”. I read that book, too, and she has an extremely good point. I went to Wikipedia and found a list of his works and discovered that all the way back to the third book of the Gunslinger series I swear to never read his stuff again only to break that vow every three years or so at which point the promise is reaffirmed.

You know, I might have the same deal going on that Lewis Black has with candy corn...

I spend an above average amount of time trying to solve puzzles, especially those of the type that are in the sidebar on the right. I really, really love a good challenge. I try the Kryptos puzzle every now and then even though I feel I am seriously outclassed by the worldwide efforts underway 24/7 to crack the code. I have devoted an embarrassing amount of time to the Kahn's Cons puzzle even though an Internet search seems to indicate I am the only one on the planet trying this one, forcing me to assume that I am the only one that has not been let in on some sort of twisted inside joke. :)

What does this have to do with Stephen King? Well, while looking through today's WIRED posts I found this:

A&E released seven exclusive videos from its upcoming mini-series Bag of Bones, with a catch: to access the videos, first solve a series of increasingly difficult puzzles hidden in the lines of text complementing an online photo essay, Dark Score Stories. … Puzzles are integrated into the experience through messages hidden within each photo essay. Bold letters in the website’s introductory message instruct readers to “go down left side” for clues to seven increasingly difficult challenges.

Increasingly difficult challenges? Say, that sounds really interesting... I think I'll just cli... Ah, ah, ahhh, Mr. King! I don't think so!

As the saying goes “Fool me seven times, shame on you. Fool me eight or more times, shame on me.”

Drunk On the Go...

A friend of mine recently celebrated, against all odds, another birthday!  Congrats, man!  Nothing for it but to give him whiskey stones. 

No, that's not something you need an antibiotic or surgery for.  It's a product.  Nine soapstone cubes you put in your freezer, you understand. What better way to cool a drink than to drop a few hopefully sanitized playing-die-sized rocks into your whiskey?  Well, sure, there's ice, I guess, which is cheap, plentiful, and effective, but where is the potential choking hazard in that? 

Actually, he gave them a go and said that its not really a hazard since they sink.  Unless you are a child or like to chug your whiskey (or both, I guess) it's not a problem.

Sticking with the motif here he also got a flask.  This one, I think.  Jim Gaffigan's routine notwithstanding he was wondering what to have engraved on it.  I told him I don't know but I would ask the Internet for him.  He said go ahead.  I said are you sure?  He said yes.  I said okay, but don't be surprised if you end up with, say, suggestions for lots of Hello Kitty themed nonsense. He basically said "Bring it."

Now in order to help you appreciate the Hello Kitty engraving idea you should have a better idea of who we are talking about here. 

Weighing in at twenty stone and built like a brick privy, his quiet intelligent demeanor cleverly hides the fact that this family man and community organizer is actually tightly wound spring made of hundreds of Brock Sampsons.  Not the sissified introspective version he has morphed into in the later seasons of the Venture Brothers, either.  I am talking old school Brock "they hit me with a truck" Freaking Sampson. 

I have no evidence to support this... yet.  Personally I think the whole "being constantly surrounded by pushy, petulant idiots while maintaining a calm a Zen Master could only dream of achieving" thing is a carefully maintained act - one that can't last forever.

But when he goes, even Dr. Banner's darker side would probably tell him "Hulk think you need take it down couple of notches".  This would be especially true when he descends on the local Apple store and demonstrates to the Illuminati shopping there that you can cram an iPad pretty much anywhere if you are persistent enough about it and you don't take "No!  Oh, dear God, nooooo!" for an answer.

I hear he once made Chuck Norris cry.

Also, he's Irish. 

Thank God he has a good sense of humor...

I think this is all you need to suggest a tasteful engraving for his new gift.  Leave a comment if you have an idea.

Foodstuff

It has been twenty years since I have been wowed by a Thanksgiving dinner, but last Thursday's feast was one for the books.  Don't get me wrong - the food is routinely fine and plentiful but there has always seemed to be something missing. 

Most likely my "complaint" stems from the differences between food selection and preparation between where I hail from (Western New York) and here (Southeastern Virginia).  You know, as I review the previous sentence I see of course it would be that way.  I mean, what the hell else would it possibly be, the color of the flatware or the lighting or something? I really felt confident going into that sentence, too...

Regardless, two decades of the missing whatever decided to show up all at once last Thursday, kicked in the door, and demanded to be included in this year's festivities. 

It was awesome.  In addition to the traditional fare, which was exactly correctly perfect FWIW, my wife made a leek casserole that was out of this world.  Also she made a huge tray of meatballs that were apparently molded from raw hunks of primal deliciousness and cranberry sauce.  Also she made this really exotic garlic and fruit-based stuffing that was as complex in texture as it was in flavor.  It even looked interesting.

I ate.

I ate not until I was full.  Oh, no, dear friends, no.  You see, technically, I was full before the meal started since she also made these killer deviled eggs.  Now,  if you served me eight scrambled eggs and told me that it was not, as it would first seem, four days worth of breakfasts but instead just an appetizer I would probably gag a little.  Or maybe a lot.  But add a little mustard, mayo, and vinegar and all of a sudden I magically poof into Adam Richman or that Japanese hot dog dude.

No.  I ate until I was tired.  This has never happened to me before (well, probably as an infant...) Whether I was physically exhausted from the non-stop hoisting of goodies from my plate to my gob or whether I was in a near narcoleptic state from endorphin poisoning, I didn't know or care.  I needed a snooze.

I fell into a self-induced coma about the time my son went down for his nap.  Two hours later, much to my shock and delight, I woke up.  I was also shocked and delighted to discover there was food left over.  O, most frabjous day! 

There were only two things missing to make this the perfect Thanksgiving, though.

The first is the traditional drunken shouting match and near fistfight initiated by someone forgetting the canned cranberry sauce (again, if you can believe it... I mean they only had one thing to remember and they couldn't even do that right) and ending in the sullen tears of a randomly picked "loved" one cascading miserably into an ashtray crammed with the butts of semi-extinguished Marlboro Reds. 

Say... that would be an awesome Norman Rockwell painting, dontcha think?  Let's give it the working title "Pumpkin Pie and Domestic Incident Related DUI".  Picture it: Two Irish cops are hauling a blue-suited but disheveled and clearly drunk man past a traditionally-laden dining room table while family members cower tearfully behind the remains of an overturned china hutch.  The man is shaking the remains of his  crumpled fedora angrily at the onlookers and through the open, broken front door you can make out aghast neighbors assessing the damage to a 1949 Packard and a light pole.  One of the neighbors is smoking a pipe.

Ah, memories...

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  The second thing that was missing was green olives in the veggie platter.  Man, I love those things.

Sigh.  Maybe next year...  Happy Thanksgiving, all!

This Forest Smells Funny...

Ah, yes, the majestic Pretreated Pine.  The vacuum-sealed denizens of this largely insect-free habitat love to romp and splash in its many carbon-filtered streams...

I.J.A.S.B.

A couple of years ago I was walking into a local 7-11 as another dude was leaving.  He looked at me, beamed, drunkenly shouted "GO YANKEES!", and left.

I was startled but I managed to breeze on by with a non-committal grunt and went to get my chips or beer or whatever I was in there for.  I had no idea why I was targeted for that guy's outburst until I went to get my wallet to pay for my stuff. 

It was then I noticed I was wearing the New York Yankees t-shirt my wife picked up for me a while back from someplace. Target, I think.   Later I found out there was a World Series going on and the team was doing well.  The guy saw my shirt, was a fan, and assumed I was, too.  Mystery solved.

Oh...  A side note, here.  This post might seem to some people like some kind of anti-spectator-sports rant or some other elitist garbage.  That is sooooo not my intention here, nor is it how I feel.  If you like to seriously follow all kinds of sports or are a dedicated fan of just one or two teams, that's awesome. Good on yeh, mate.

Personally, though, I don't pay too much attention one way or the other.   I occasionally check to see how well a handful of teams across a couple of sports are doing this season, but I don't have a dedicated "watching sports" plan.  I would like the Sabres to bring home the Stanley Cup and I would really like the Bills to bring home something more than a "Super Bowl Participant" certificate and a GOOD TRY smiley-face sticker but it doesn't really affect me one way or the other.

Pfft... While I'm at it why don't I just wish for a unicorn?  Let's get back to what I was talking about.

Basically, my dresser is full of comfortable shirts that advertise various sports teams or products I have no particular loyalty to.  As with my collection of ballcaps close to 100% of the time I am not aware of what they say.  I just grab one and go.

So while I am warming up my lunch at work, standing in line at the bookstore, or even just walking through the mall, about half a dozen times a year I will be hit with what I think are utterly random yet upbeat questions or comments from total or near-total strangers.

From my point of view stuff like "Hey, ya' think they got a shot?", "Did you go there?", "I just got me a set of Pings", or, yes, "GO YANKEES!" are totally out of the blue until I have time to mesh gears properly with the world around me and respond like someone who hasn't just dropped out of the freakin' sky.  

I have gotten quicker at recovering but a two-second puzzled stare to a stranger or coworker who is just trying to be friendly looks pretty much like the non-verbal equivalent of sighing heavily and saying "Now, what do YOU want?"  It might even appear hostile. 

Since I am not going to ditch all of my comfortable t-shirts and well-worn hats I need to come up with a good "cover story" to explain those lapses away in a way that 1) is friendly and 2) results in the fewest follow-up questions possible.  The second requirement is very important since I usually don't know jack about the current events surrounding the team or product the person chatting me up assumes I support. It becomes obvious very quickly that I have no idea what I am talking about and the uncomfortable silence that follows doesn't do anyone any good.

Any suggestions are welcome but hurry because I am very close to responding “The pearl is in the river” or “Is it safe?” just to see what would happen... This violates Rule 1 above. At one time I was seriously considering taking a bunch of my t-shirts to an embroidery place and having them tastefully stitch the initials I.J.A.S.B. on the fabric somewhere. But having to explain that I.J.A.S.B. means It's Just A Shirt, Brother over and over again violates Rule 2 like crazy.

This is all pretty embarrassing but it is more so when you consider I pride myself on having a significantly better than average "situational awareness" – closer to Jason Bourne than to Mr. Magoo or Inspector Gadget.  I guess really need to reassess that self-image.

For example...

At the gym earlier this week I got off the treadmill, went to the bathroom, and changed my sweat-soaked shirt.  I like to do that before I start using the weight machines as a courtesy to others. No one likes to mount a pre-moistened ab workout station, after all. Well... no one worth speaking of, anyway.

About two minutes into my benching routine I notice the reflection of myself way off in the distance and I see this:

Damn it.

See, my wife picked this shirt for me from an airport gift shop when she went to Philly for a conference some months ago.  I have never seen a game, I don't know what their team is called, and I have no idea what they are known for outside of the current heinous scumbaggery.

What I do know, though, is that this is not the shirt to be wearing right now.  Saying "It's just a shirt, brother" is simply not going to cut it.  I covered the logo as quickly and casually as I could manage with my gym towel, made my way to the bathroom, and changed back into my damp but thankfully nondescript plain white Haynes cotton undershirt. I don't think anyone noticed but still...

The Penn State shirt was soft and comfortable and fit well but now I will have to see how it does in its new role as half a dozen new, good quality shop rags. Meh.... it's just a shirt, brother.

SnowUrchin's Got a Brand New Poll

I had a colossal “situational awareness” fail at the gym today but I don't have enough time to get into that right now – Rocksmith calls.

Tomorrow... I'll write it up tomorrow.

In way of a space-filler, though, here is something else. After reading Under The Dome by Stephen King I vowed to never, ever read another one of his novels again ever ever ever. To realize the strength of this statement you need to realize that The Stand had held the top spot in my favorite books of all time for the better part of two decades.

I love time travel stories. I love alternate history stories. I will watch the Back to the Future trilogy whenever I notice it is on TBS (Federal Law mandates it is on at least once a week). I even “get” Primer.

Today, I learned from a Wired article that Mr. King has a new book out. It's called 11/22/63. It's about time travel. It's about alternate histories.

So here's the poll: I am currently in-between books. Should I get the new Stephen King novel?

• No. Time travel be damned, remember your vow. For the love of God, remember Under the Dome.
• Yes. It will probably be fine and the universe has better things to do than to try and trick you into reading another crummy novel, anyway.

The poll is in the sidebar on the right. It will be up for a week. If you can't see the poll, it doesn't work for some reason, or you just feel like commenting, leave a comment.

New Puzzle Hint, Halloween Puzzle Answer

It's been a while since I have posted a hint to one of the Secret Puzzles on the Secret Puzzle Page.  Here is Hint #3 for the New Desk Puzzle:

Hint 3 (Posted 11/13/11): Gur svefg yrggre vf "J".

As usual the hint is posted in ROT-13 encoding as to not spoil the fun for those of you not quite ready for some help.  You can find all the other hints and all the other puzzles in the sidebar on the right.  If you think you know the answer, post a comment or shoot me an e-mail.  Good Luck!

Oh, yeah, since this post pushed the Halloween Puzzle off the bottom of the page, here is the answer to that one (spoiler below):

Here is the puzzle:

Coloring the jack-o-lanterns black and the pumpkins white then giving the pic a couple of flips results in this:

Scanning this image with your smartphone gives you the message "Happy Halloween from the 36th Lock!"

Sacrilegious, You Say? Try Sacri-Awesome!

One of the things I was going to build in my workshop this fall was an Advent calendar. I remember them being neat. Thing is, I think that project is going to be on hold until next year at least. Why? While we were in DC the wife and I were able to get away to do some early Christmas shopping and what to my wondering eyes should appear but the item on the left.

Yep, we picked one up.

Is there anything that says Joy to the World more than a Yoda minifig dressed up like Santa? If there is, keep it to yourself because, frankly, I just don't think I could handle it. On the other hand, if you find absolutely nothing positive to say about this ridiculous amalgam of Star Wars, Legos, commercial Christmas, and traditional Christmas ask Santa to get you an autopsy this year cuz you, my friend, are officially dead inside.

I am soooo looking forward to December 1st.

Headed Out

Headed to DC this weekend to visit some relatives and to get some awesome food.

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves. 

Say... I have a topic.  With the holidays approaching we are starting to get a whole lot of catalogs in the mail, one of which is called Hammacher Schlemmer.  This is my first experience with one so I have a question for those of you who have seen this catalog before:  Is this some kind of a twisted joke or something?

I mean, I am not sure it would ever occur to me that this item is the answer to any question I could come up with, other than "How shall I fritter away $350,000 today?"

My 740 Cents Worth

A couple of days few months ago my father-in-law mentioned that he has been rolling pennies since 1997 and he has about one hundred dollars worth squirreled away. He is aware that pre-1982 pennies are mostly copper whereas post-1982 pennies are mostly zinc, so he asked me “At what point will the pennies I roll be the mostly zinc kind?”

“Huh. That is a really good question. I don't know. Why?” I asked.

“Well, with copper prices being so high I was wondering if it would be worthwhile to melt them down just for the bullion and I don't want to sort the coins.”

Fair enough. Even if it only took me three seconds to grab, orient, read, and sort a penny I doubt that I would want to spend the next eight hours scrutinizing tiny numbers on hunks of metal on the off chance I was going to get something other than self-induced nearsightedness and blue-green fingertips for my troubles.

I told him I would get back to him with an answer. This post is that answer.

So what determines the distribution of dates of the coins in a coin roll, your pocket, your soda-goo-filled drink holder in your car, your change jar, and your kid's piggy bank?

Assuming that the pennies have been sufficiently shuffled through the hands of the multitudes before you get your grubby little paws on them there are three main forces at work:

1) The quantity of pennies released each year by the Mint.
2) The length of time that has passed since their release.
3) Hoarders and collectors.

The number of coins put out by the Mint varies widely from year-to-year. The list below shows the number of pennies made each year since 1959 (the year they switched from wheat reverse to Lincoln Memorial reverse).

1959 1,340,731,500
1960 2,167,289,000
1961 2,506,611,700
1962 2,399,193,140
1963 2,528,130,400
1964 6,447,646,500
1965 1,497,224,900
1966 2,188,147,783
1967 3,048,667,100
1968 4,852,420,571
1969 5,684,117,200
1970 5,480,313,904
1971 5,355,669,059
1972 5,975,265,508
1973 7,594,998,883
1974 8,876,665,183
1975 9,956,751,442
1976 8,895,884,881
1977 8,663,992,300
1978 9,838,838,400
1979 10,157,872,254
1980 12,554,803,660
1981 12,864,985,677
1982 16,725,504,368
1983 14,219,554,428
1984 13,720,317,906
1985 10,935,829,813
1986 8,934,262,191
1987 9,561,856,445
1988 11,346,550,443
1989 12,607,002,111
1990 11,774,659,533
1991 9,324,386,076
1992 9,097,578,300
1993 12,111,355,571
1994 13,632,615,000
1995 13,540,000,000
1996 13,123,260,000
1997 9,199,355,000
1998 10,257,508,500
1999 11,597,665,000
2000 14,277,420,000
2001 10,334,590,000
2002 7,288,855,000
2003 6,848,000,000
2004 6,836,000,000
2005 7,700,050,500
2006 8,234,000,000
2007 7,401,200,000
2008 5,408,400,000
2009 2,354,000,000
2010 4,010,830,000
2011 5,481,686,000

I include this list here because the Google refused to give me the answer in the form I needed however nicely I asked and I wanted to give others a chance to find the info easier. All data is from the 2011 Official Red Book: A Guidebook of United States Coins. Please note 1) any errors are my own – this was a lot of tedious data entry and I may have messed up in places 2) the numbers represent the sums of all non-proof-set types from all mints for that year 3) the 2011 number is just an estimate based on the average of the previous five years.

In case you were wondering, 439 billion Lincoln pennies have been minted since 1909. Twice as many pennies as there are stars in our galaxy... Wow.

Over the past five years I have rescued three wheat pennies from my change. One is from 1921 and the other two are from 1947. One time my mother found an Indian Head penny in her change but that was about about 25 years ago...

“And once I sawr a blimp.” Jeebus, SnowUrchin... Focus, wouldja?

The point is that when the Mint decided to change up the look of the penny in 1959 people started hoarding wheat pennies like crazy (many people still do this) so there is a statistically significant lack of pre-1959 coppers in our change today. It is reasonable to assume that there are no wheat pennies in my father-in-law's coin rolls.

How long does a coin stay in circulation? According to this site, “most modern coins that circulate last about 25 years”. That answer is 100% accurate while at the same time 100% useless for our purposes. What is “most”? What is “about 25 years”? What happens to them? Do these hunks of metal just decay away?

No, they don't decay away... not really. They get lost. Or turned into jewelry. Or thrown into wells. Or crushed by railroad cars (awesome, btw) or by those 51-cent souvenir maker dealies. Or hoarded and rolled and placed in a box in the closet. We can assume that people take pennies “out of play” in some form or fashion all the time independent of the date of the coin.

Hey... If that is a valid assumption then we can actually assume they decayed away and we can figure out what percentage of coins of a certain year are still in circulation by using a formula that is typically used to determine the amount of radioactive material left in a sample after some time has passed.

Here N0 is the original number of coins, T is the amount of time that has passed, and t ½ is the half-life of a penny. “The half-life of a penny,” you say. What have you done here besides turning a barely interesting question about coins into a nearly unreadable geeky one about coins?

Half-life is just a term that means the amount of time that needs to pass before the sample have been reduced to ½ its original size. If I have a stash of pennies laying around I should be able to figure out this alleged half-life by looking at the dates on a small number of them.

I searched my son's piggy bank (calm down – he was napping and he got them back anyway), rifled through the junk drawers, and checked the cars and came up with 73 pennies. Probably not enough for a good sample but that has never stopped me in the past so let's see what we got.

Of the 72 American pennies (there was one Canadian coin in the lot) two were from 1982. They started making the zinc-core pennies in October of that year so it was a coin-toss to determine what their composition was... literally. The newer pennies sound different than the older ones when dropped – I had one of each. Check it out for yourself. I'll wait.

Those of you who actually did this little experiment will notice the pre-82s have a distinctive “ring” when they fell, while the post-82s have a duller, almost-clunky sound. Go ahead and try as many times as you need to hear the difference or until you hear “Hey! What the hell are you doing in there?!” coming from the next room, whatever comes first.

All of the coins were collected during this year (2011). I sorted them by date and discovered that 50% of them were from 1995 to 2011, and the others were from 1959 to 1994. I weighted my radioactive decay formula with the quantity of pennies minted and adjusted my guess at a half-life until I got the same 50/50 date as I found in my little pile of pennies. This gave me the half-life of a penny of about 23 years... Pretty close to the 25 year number from the source above. Cool.

You know... I had a lot more to say on this, but I have been circling the runway here for over a month. Let's land the plane already and present the data cuz I am really tired of having this post in my “to do” list. If anyone out there wants to chat more about it, shoot me an email or post a question in the comments section. Here is the graph:

Here you can see that my father-in-law needed to start collecting pennies in 1990 (not 1997) or so to have at least some rolls with 50% copper. Also, even not including the cost of operating a smelter, the price for committing a Class 5 Felony for melting down coins in bulk is $10,000 and/or five-years in a federal prison...

Is it worth it? Not for him. When you try to ask “the Google” what the current price of copper is you, again, don't get a straight answer. Instead you get the feeling like you were just dropped into a busy marketplace in Marrakesh: “Sir! Yes, you sir! Come here my friend! You look for copper, I give you best price, no problem! Come, come! My office is just down this narrow, badly-lit alleyway...”

Go to WolframAlpha, instead, if you want to find the price of metals. $3.28/pound as of today, FWIW.

I have graphs showing the number of non-wheat pennies per person in the USA peaked in 2001 at 848, but now we are down to 740 per person – roughly the same as what we had in 1990. Wait... don't go... I have more charts... Didn't you want to hear about the effect the 1943 copper shortage had on the copper distribution per capita in terms of pennies, or how recessions may be able to be predicted by the pattern of penny production in the USA... No?

'Kay, then... Bye...

A Few Milestones

I quit smoking one year ago today.  Go, me.  I occasionally still have cravings but so far so good.

Had first ever parent-teacher conference this morning.  We are told they are using less than a liter of Holy Water per day during their "The power of Christ compels you" one-on-one time and they haven't had to resort to employing "The Device" in a few weeks, so good news all around.

I kid.  He is doing just fine.

In addition to mowing the lawn for what is likely to be the last time this season, I finished sealing the deck this weekend (last weekend was called on account of rain).  Man, I am glad that is over.  It looks great.

Finally passed "In Bloom" in Rocksmith.  I am not sure if I actually deserved to go on to the next level or if I am on the receiving end of a pity-filled, government mandated "No Rocker Left Behind" program.  I must have rehearsed that song seventy or eighty times before I passed.  Well, give me an "E" for effort cuz God knows it sure as hell doesn't stand for a proper E chord most of the time.  But I passed...

You know who loses here, though?  The poor virtual people that paid to hear me play at my gig.  They enjoyed the first song of my set a lot but not my horrible rendition of In Bloom when it came time to play it.  Away went the cheering and the cell phone cameras and out came the dead-eyed uncomfortable silence.  They weren't hostile, but I definitely got the feeling that if someone suddenly shouted "Get him!" they would have rushed the stage...

They did not ask me to do an encore.  I have to be honest with you... that hurt my feelings just a little bit.  I can almost picture the club owner avoiding my eyes and softly saying “Go. Just... just go...”

More later.

Sweet Dufresne's Hammer!

This is a picture of about 1 cubic centimeter of play sand. My son (and I can only presume each member of his class), smuggles an average of this much pulverized rock home in their shoes after each school day. If this continues they will have, collectively, stolen nearly 10 pounds of of sand from the school by the end of the school year.

Well... At least I assume it's sand and not the detritus from a covert tunnel excavation...

Worst. Shawshank Redemption remake. Ever.

Cranky Old Man Restaurant Review II

My wife, son, and I were out and about one Saturday and we stumbled upon an Indian restaurant called Saffron. We decided to give it a go for lunch.

The only other Indian food I have ever had was from Nawab, a local chain.  I like the chicken Masala, the naan, and whatever the green tomato stuff you dip your bread in is.  Or maybe only I dip my bread in it and its actually supposed to be for something else.  You know, it might not be tomato-based after all. Hell, it might be a dessert for all I know... Look, I'm getting off topic and it's not important, anyway.

What can I say about the place?  Well, it's in a great corner location and it's very clean, beautiful, tastefully decorated, relaxing, and almost completely devoid of customers.

Uh oh.

Now, there were a couple of other folks there, but the visible wait staff outnumbered the customer-occupied tables about eight to one, easily.  You would think that they would have descended upon us like lightning, grateful for something... anything, to do.

But no.

How do I word this?  They weren't eager to seat us, but they didn't give off a vibe like we were bothering them, either.  They weren't rude... quite the opposite, in fact.

Picture a restaurant that is not a restaurant at all, but, in fact, a movie set.  The staff is not made up of waiters and waitresses and busboys, but actors all playing their parts.  You walk in, expecting food.  Now, they are not allowed, for whatever reason, to break character and just shoo you away so they are forced to do something.... Panicking and lacking options, they choose a representative to imitate a slightly chloroformed Arte-Johnson-based Renfield and eventually come to take your order.

As awkward and crummy this analogy is, it's apt.

The unblinking waiter-or-possibly-alien that glacially shuffled on over to exceedingly politely help us with our drinks selection paused for about one and a half seconds longer than is customary between our responses and his acknowledgment of them.  It gave the impression that he was uncontrollably drifting into elaborate daydream sequences every few seconds and the surprising noises coming from in front of him that sounded like "Pepsi" or "water with lemon" were snapping him back into reality. 

You might argue that the delay due to some kind of language barrier issue. No. I know what that is like and this wasn't it. This was more like we were talking to him live via satellite or something.

We finished making our selection and he resignedly allowed himself to be pushed toward the drinks station through the majestic mechanics of plate tectonics and several decades later he or possibly his grandson returned with our beverages.  He then deigned to take our food order then he shuffled back off at a velocity normally associated with someone repeatedly slurring “brains... brrraaaaiiinnnnss”.

I assume at that point at least one of the dozens of "movie extras" that were standing around silently staring into the middle distance was able to break off from the group, post an Indian Food Chef Wanted notice on Monster.com, interview several hopeful candidates, hire someone, then put our order in because, much to our delight and amazement, the food eventually came.

I got the tandoori wings and the wife got the chicken masala.  The flavor of both dishes was fine.  In a blindfolded taste test, though, I would only be able to tell the difference between the two dishes because mine had more bones in it. 

Maybe they delivered the wrong thing.  I don't have a lot of experience with Indian food but I am highly suspecting that it is non-exotic in the same way Mexican food is.  That is, do the same five or so ingredients go into everything so each slightly different combination is technically christened a new menu item? 

Don't bother rolling your eyes and saying in what I picture is a cartoon-y Jeeves the Butler accented admonishment "(scoff, scoff) Dear boy, you are talking about Americanized foreign food.  The reeeeaaaahhhhllll stuff is ever soooooo much better.  Nothing beats eating fresh curried chicken while punting on the Ganges, you know..." (polishes monocle, rides off on polo pony)"  Yeah, maybe but guess what? I'm here, not there.  This is what is realistic for me to do and is what I have as a baseline so leave me alone, imaginary snooty British guy.

We ate and after a spell grew tired of waiting for the server to return. After getting up, walking around the restaurant and discovering a gaggle of surprised and not a little nervous "waiters" holed up in a corner I asked for the check and one of them went to get it. Eventually we were allowed to pay. I didn't tip because, frankly, I am not sure they would have known what to do with Earth-money anyway – the gesture would have been lost on them and possibly even frightened them.

Later, I had time to look up reviews of the place and they all said basically the same thing: "nice atmosphere, ok food, really slow service, go to Nawab instead".

Yes, yes, yes, and will do.

Cost in Space

I was having a discussion with a colleague about the recent Chinese docking mission. To be honest, it was less of a discussion and more of me helplessly cornered in the breakroom trying to pour myself some coffee while being bombarded with his displeasure at… at…

You know something? I am not quite sure what he was upset about. Whatever it was, it had something to do with “the Red Chinese”, China’s space program, taking over the moon, and something about starving babies.

He might have had some derogatory things to gravelly slur about the Washington Redskins and Obama-care as well. He was kind of all over the map and I wasn’t really listening but Mr. “Hey You Kids Get Off My Lawn” did get me thinking about the cost of doing business in space.

If you go to Wikipedia you see that there are an awful lot of countries out there with at least some ability to send stuff into space. Let's just pick some: China, Europe (ESA), India, Russia, UK, and the USA.

Let’s see how much they spend per year:

Wow. That’s quite a spread. But, like most people, I can’t really wrap my head around really big numbers – after a point they become meaningless. Let’s divide by the number of people in each country and see what we get:

Hmm. This chart reminds me that, about 10 years ago, you couldn’t read a mainstream (whatever that means) news article on the Chinese space program without the author (or editor) inserting a paragraph like you see below [USA Today 10/01/2003]:

Skeptics say an expensive manned space program is a political vanity project that a developing nation can ill afford. Though China has enjoyed impressive economic growth for a decade, annual per capita income remains just $800. "I frankly think it's a waste of money. It's kind of a bread-and-circus routine," says James Mulvenon, a China-watcher at a Rand Corp.'s office in Arlington, Va.

For whatever reason, you see less of that talk nowadays.

But money is money. How much of an impact does this yearly cost have on the wallet of your average citizen? Let’s divide the above numbers by the yearly income per person and see what we get.

Well these are sure small numbers… You could think of it as a significantly less than one percent “Space Program Tax” across the board. That’s really not a lot of bread, is it, now?

Right?

Well, let’s change the graph above into something we can all put our hands on. Using my best guesses for current-ish local prices (based on averages I quickly gleaned from Google searches), let’s convert the numbers above into the true “coin of the realm”: food.

Even taking account my sloppy averaging on the cost of various types of bread in places around the world it seems like my colleague's “starving babies” argument against China having a space program is a little exaggerated.

Oh, I suppose you could argue that no country should have a space program unless every one of its citizen’s is well fed. Ok… fair enough. Should literacy also be 100%? What about health care? Social security? What is the cutoff for crime rate? Should there be a set minimum average income per person, too? Should it be dependent on what the goal of each space mission is? Is there a monetary value you can place on national pride? If so, how much gold per person is that?

I am not trying to imply a viewpoint one way or the other, FWIW. I am simply not smart enough to answer any of the questions above. Any way these questions are answered, though, there is one thing for certain: there is no such thing as a free launch.

Rocksmith: An Outsider's Opinion

I mentioned recently that I have been playing Rocksmith for the Xbox.  I am enjoying myself immensely.  I am bothered, though, by the lack of helpful reviews of the game. Oh, there are a lot of reviews out there, all right, but none I saw seem to be written with you, the reader and potential buyer, in mind. 

This post clumsily attempts to fill that gap.  I hope it helps those of you who stumble upon this.

Some intro info so you don't waste too much of your time (this is kind of a long post):

I don't cover the gameplay much - that's been done by people who are good at it. Here, I give you my opinion on who will like this game or hate it. Also, I give my impression of the multi-player feature, my input on required guitar quality, and one possible solution for audio lag.

I am just one dude with an opinion that works for me.  I am not a game reviewer or a gamer.  As a matter of fact the word "gamer" badly bothers me on some indefinable level.  Maybe it's because the hard gutteral at the beginning and the "er" at the end try to make sitting on the couch to the exclusion of all else sound action-y, honorable, and something to be striven for.   Maybe I am just jealous.

I am not a musician and I would (at this time) go into a panic if you handed me an out-of-tune guitar and told me that my next meal depended on me tuning it by ear.  I listen to pretty much anything, but I am not a connoisseur of fine or even good music - even the most cursory glance at the Montage list in the sidebar demonstrates that. The fact I even allow some of these songs to live on my iPod should send up a number of red flags on my qualifications for you right there...

This is not a cheap game ($70 unbundled, $200 bundled with a guitar).  In addition, you may also be weighing your options for buying a separate, second-shelf-from-bottom electric guitar (like I did) sending your total cost well above $350.  That's a lot of scratch to shell out for an item that is purely for amusement.  Hell, that's a lot of scratch to shell out for anything that is a "want" versus a "need", really.

You may be considering getting this as a big Christmas gift for yourself or a loved one.  Maybe you have seen the commercials on TV and are intrigued by the possibility of learning guitar in what appears to be a fun way.  Should you commit to such a large expense, or will the game be played a few times and set aside the day Saints Row 3 or the new Madden comes out?

That, my friends, is strongly dependent on your personality type and what you expect from the game.

Think. Were you tricked into getting in shape by having a Wii Fit bundle or the P90X DVDs in your house?  Did those super expensive Rosetta Stone disks teach you Chinese with little effort on your part?  And let's not forget about the short-wave radio, the unicycle, and the karate outfit sitting in your closet.  Is having an unused guitar staring at you balefully from just to the left of the TV for months on end going to bum you out?

You may respond "But this is different" and give some perfectly valid reason for why it very well may be.  Maybe you have a love of music that overcomes the crippling inertia you have encountered when setting your sights on other far-reaching goals in the past. Only you can make that judgment, of course.

Learning guitar is hard.  Learning guitar is time-consuming.  Nothing in the world is going to change that and anyone who tells you otherwise, princess, is trying to sell you something.  The best you can hope for is that the learning curve has some pleasant scenery to look at while you are climbing it. 

Rocksmith does that well.  Extremely well.

Some reviewers who bill themselves as mainly musicians erroneously report that the goal of Rocksmith is purely to teach you how to play guitar and it does so badly.  The game doesn't make that claim.  It is, though, a very fun way to learn the fundamentals of guitar playing from a gaming standpoint.  Although it teaches things you, as a newbie, might not know, it is not a professional music teacher any more than a Lego kit based on Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater tries to be an instructor of architecture. 

Some people who review games professionally but lack music background are also harsh.  Not sure why.  Maybe they are pressed for time and can't really spend the hundreds of hours it would take to go “from zero to hero”.  Maybe they are stuck on Nirvana's In Bloom and, tired of practicing (or unwilling to practice with this weird new "controller"), complain overly much that everything is locked up and argue that you should have access to everything out of the box. Me, I don't care if stuff in this game is locked up or not.  I totally understand the complaints but I respect the game maker's rationale here. 

After all, golf is a skill-based game, too, and you would never consider playing the holes of a local course in some bizarre order or even skipping some because you don't like water hazards or sand traps.  If you want to do well, get your butt to the the driving range and hit a few buckets and see if that helps.  If you aren't willing to put in the time and effort, stick to metaphorically putting through windmills if the challenge upsets you so much.

That said, the songs are all unlocked in multi-player.  Multi-player game play is awesome.  It is great "jamming" with your buddy even though the two of you are at completely different skill levels.  Don't sweat the score.  Since the game (in single player, too) adjusts in real-time to your current ability notes and chords will appear and disappear as you do better or worse.  This means that lower skill players will have fewer and easier notes, palm mutes, bends, and chords to try and therefore fewer opportunities for scoring.  This is fair and is totally as life should be. 

I had a blast even though Jimmydunes routinely had three to five times the score I did.  If you are the type that pits yourself against someone who you know is way better than you at something and then cries "foul" when you do worse than them consider a different game.  Also consider therapy.

I imagine, though, that two equally matched people (guitar newbies or not) would have a really awesome time engaging in friendly competition liberally doused with a bunch of good-natured ribbing throughout.  I am looking forward to that immensely.

Regarding Lag

I run composite cables out of my Xbox because I once had audio issues a while ago when I tried to play Dirt with an HDMI hookup and never switched back because 1) I saw no need and 2) it is a real hassle to connect and disconnect stuff in back of the TV.   I go directly from the Xbox to the TV and I do not have a surround sound system.  I use the out-of-the-box lag number (50 ms) and I have not noticed any problems, but your ears are better than mine, I guarantee you that.

A slight lag was noticeable - even to me - with Jimmydune's setup (composite cable, optical audio from TV to sound system).  We played with the lag numbers but couldn't figure out what, if anything, we were actually doing.  The lag setup screen stupidly does not have a way of immediately testing the effects of changing the numbers.  This is bad in and of itself, but the description for how the lag adjustment works makes things very unclear as to what to expect when the numbers are changed. 

See if you can tell what the paragraph in the pic to the left is trying to imply. I can't figure out how to parse the paragraph to force it to make sense. How can a note appear earlier or later? Compared to what, exactly? No matter how many times I read those words I get a definite “bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish” vibe from them. We couldn't tell what, if anything, was happening when the numbers were adjusted.

After I left his place he played around some more with his setup and had this to say:

I am using the Component/Composite combo cable that came with the Xbox. The component cables (R-G-B) go into my TV, and the audio composite connectors (R-W) go directly into my external sound system. The yellow composite connector is not used. Lag is nonexistent and I never had to go back into the lag settings of the game to change anything. The only drawback, and I'll get over it soon, is that I have to unplug my optical cable from my audio system whenever I want to play Rocksmith and then plug it back in when I want to watch TV or use my PC. In the 21st century I shouldn't have to throw my back out leaning over the back of my entertainment systems multiple times a day, but whatever.. it is what it is. Most likely if I hadn't bought one of the cheaper Sony sound systems and splurged instead I'd probably have the option to leave them both connected and simply whisper towards my TV and it would switch gracefully between the connections.

Will Your Guitar Work?

What if you already have a guitar?  It says "plug in any guitar" so you should be able to do just that, right?  Well, probably. 

A long time ago Guitar Center was running a special on cheap Chinese-made electric guitars.  They only wanted $79 so Jimmydunes picked one up.  He knew it would be very low quality, but, for that price, he could beat on it and not feel guilty.

It turned out the single-pickup unit had a 60Hz hum that was pretty obvious.  Since I am told I know a little about electronics we opened it up and we were able to repair some shoddy wiring and filter out most of the hum, but the tone of the third and sixth strings predictably suffered a bit – tunable but kinda muddy sounding.  A few years later he bought a nice guitar for himself and he let me have the old one.  Fast forward to me trying to tune the thing using Rocksmith's built in tuner (after I tuned it outside of the game).  The third string would not be acknowledged unless I plucked it ridiculously hard and the sixth string simply would not register at all with the game.

So it seems that not ALL guitars will work - there is some minimum sound quality that is required for the game to function (which is why I now have two electric guitars in my house). This sounds like common sense but I mention this anyway because I am picturing well-meaning, generous-but-non-rich grand-folks inadvertently causing their equally non-rich grand-kids to be crushed Christmas morning because of this "gotcha".  The rich ones will manage.  Somehow, they will manage...

My new guitar is pictured here, slightly to the left of the television where I hope it lives only sometimes.

I would like to close with a pseudo-serious chart that you can use to determine if you and this game are a good match. Again, this is just my opinion.

The x-axis is your estimation, on a scale of one to ten, of how important guitar playing is to you.  A low score means you lack both ability and interest required to play the guitar someday in the future.  A high score does NOT mean you are (or think you are) Jimi Hendrix or Steve Vai.  Remember: this is NOT a measure of actual ability. A high score just means that you would rather play guitar to the exclusion of all other hobbies. A middle score is if you can picture yourself someday strumming a guitar around a campfire with family and friends.

The y-axis measures your "gamer-ness" or how seriously you take playing video games.  Again, this is not a measure of actual ability.  At the low end you really don't like or want entertainment in electronic game form.  At the high end you would rather play video games than do anything else. A middle of the road score is for people who enjoy video games occasionally.  They are "fine" with them and possibly even play up to a couple hours a day but have other hobbies as well.

If you score at the extremes you will probably not like this game because your expectations will not match what the game is designed to provide. As a hard-core gamer, you will probably feel it is too much of a learning tool and so it might not be “fun enough” for you. For you music nuts looking for a dedicated music learning tool, it might be too robotic or game-like and not take the whole guitar thing seriously enough for you.

But if you, like most folks, are in the fuzzy green area in the middle I think you are in for a treat. Like I said, I am not a musician or a gamer. I am hard-pressed to picture Future Me as either of those things. I might be both or neither. Who knows? But one thing is certain... I am looking forward to stomping the living hell out of Jimmydunes in multi-player someday in the not-so-unthinkably-distant future.

I am thinking something by The Black Keys.

How's that for a gauntlet, bro?