Themeless Randoms

Oooooohhhhhhhhhhh man this is going to be awesome! I’m a huge Metallica fan, and have played One on Guitar Hero III about a million times, and have also played the snot out of the classic DLC on Rock Band. If there is an entire game dedicated to my favorite band, I will definitely be inline for this release… then again, it probably won’t be as wildly popular as GTA4 was last month.

Anyway, here is the song list that I’d love to see included in Guitar Hero Metallica:

• The Four Horsemen
• Seek and Destroy
• For Whom The Bell Tolls
• Fade To Black
• Creeping Death
• Master of Puppets
• Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
• Orion
• Damage Inc.
• One
• Harvester of Sorrow
• Enter Sandman
• The Unforgiven
• The Struggle Within
• Bleeding Me
• The Outlaw Torn
• Fixxxer
• Astronomy
• Whiskey In The Jar
• St. Anger
• The Unnamed Feeling

Well thats quite a list and I’d be ecstatic if all of those were included. Some of those are 100% obvious choices, but a few may need some convincing to squeak in there. Hopefully I’ll get my wish for Guitar Hero Metallica… supposedly due sometime before March 2009.

After a few weeks of resigning to the fact that David Archuleta was the run away favorite to win American Idol, I was very pleased to see that the real star got 56% of the votes, and we have a winner that is not just the cookie cutter result of being cute in the eyes of screaming text-message-fanatic 15 year old girls across the country.

David Cook was far and away the best singer and performer in this years show, and that I can remember for a long time. Carrie Underwood, who I’ll reference later, is still the best, but Cook showed originality and presence that the karaoke kid could only dream to match one day.

On the Tuesday night final performance show, Simon was pretty blatant in stating that the karaoke kid was his favorite, and slammed Cook. Cook was able to say with a straight face that he performed the songs that he wanted to and the confidence spilled over into the voting audience. From what I’ve read the voters nation wide banded together to ensure a victory for the real star, and not to be outdone by the text-mania of the 15 year olds cheering for the karaoke kid. 90 some million votes, 56% of them for Cook… Congrats to Cook and best of luck in the future… To the dad of the karaoke kid, who has been counting on his meal ticket son ever since the star search days… better keep your day job!

On a side note, the show was actually pretty good, with some really good performances from ZZ Top, Bryan Adams, One Republic, George Michael, etc, but the show was stolen by past idol winner Carrie Underwood.

If you watched the show, saw that outfit, and heard the voice, you know why she is the most popular idol ever. Not to mention the top female vocalist at the ACM awards show.

Awesome show last night!

Link: American Idol

Link: Carrie Underwood

I was quite excited to learn that Steinberg had released Sequel, a stripped down version of cubase that is perfect for hobbyist recorders that want something that is feature rich, but not too confusing for someone to learn. I went ahead and downloaded the trial version that is available on their site, but have only had marginal success on OSX 10.5.2.

The first issue that I noticed was that during playback and occasionally during recording there was a crackling sound. It was as if my C2D 2.0 with 4gb of ram didn’t have enough juice to power the software. I checked around and found it was an issue that a number of mac users had been reporting.

Second issue is that all of a sudden I can no longer start the program. I’m still well within my trial period, but I get this error:

Syncrosoft License Control - Error

Application “Sequel 1.x Trial” has caused the following error:

eLicenser(s) contain(s) no valid license for this application.

Options:
- For troubleshooting information click <help>
- Click <Licenses> to view available licenses.
- Connect a valid eLicenser and click <retry>
- Click <cancel> to abort.

I’ve tried to uninstall it, re-download and re-install but still get this same error. I’ve posted my question on the sequel user forum, but still don’t have a reply…

I was really excited when I first tried this program out, but now that I’m unable to use it I may have to look elsewhere, or back to GarageBand.

Ok I admit it, the girlfriend and I are huge fans of American Idol. I never thought that I’d get into a show like this because I’ve always had the “if there isn’t guitar, I’m not listening” mentality, but this season I’ve started watching and now I’m hooked.

Anyway the big news from last night is that Carly Smithson got the boot. After watching the Tuesday night performances I’d say that she was hardly the worst one of the group. While Brooke White is still my favorite, she was hands down the worst and many thought for sure that she would get the boot last night.

Judges guessed that good looks and popularity kept certain people alive this week, and caused Carly and Syesha to end up in the bottom two. Syesha had hands down the best performance on Tuesday night, but the voters placed her in the bottom two. How she got there is still beyond me, but I don’t vote so I guess I can’t complain that much.

Till next week…