Nick Bradbury

My Rock Band/Guitar Hero Top 10 Wish List

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I'm hopelessly addicted to Rock Band and Guitar Hero.  I pretend that I bought those games for my kids, but we all know I really bought them for myself (and if the kids are nice, I'll let them play, too).

It's a sure sign that you're addicted to these games if you see colored notes flying towards you when you listen to music.  In my case, it's become so bad that when I hear one of my favorite songs on the radio, I often find myself wishing I could play it on my cheap plastic guitar.

So far, here are the top 10 songs that I wish I could play:

1. Frank Zappa - Peaches en Regalia
2. Stevie Ray Vaughan - Little Wing (Hendrix cover)
3. Led Zeppelin - Black Dog
4. Metallica - Master of Puppets
5. Avenged Sevenfold - Bat Country (dumb video, but good song)
6. Focus - Hocus Pocus (hat tip to Fake Steve Jobs)
7. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under the Bridge
8. The Beatles - While My Guitar Gently Weeps
9. Steve Vai - For the Love of God
10. Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb

Bonus wish: Metallica's One and Rush's YYZ are in the Guitar Hero series, but I wish they were available in Rock Band as well.  I'm a lousy vocalist, but I think I could do a decent job with the vocals on YYZ :)

The Bradbury Family's Rocking Weekend

This was a rock-and-roll weekend for the Bradbury household.  It started when my coworker Darrin Long let me know that Rush was playing at Red Rocks this summer.  I mentioned this to my wife, who suggested we both go, and bring our two kids with us.  I was able to get four pre-sale tickets, so fellow NewsGator-ites be forewarned: there will be a Bradbury invasion in June!

The musical mood continued the next day, when I broke down and bought a copy of Rock Band for the Xbox 360.  This turned out to be the perfect game for our family: I was on lead guitar, my son played bass, my daughter banged the drums, and my wife courageously handled the vocals.  It was a blast, although I have to admit, it was weird hearing my lovely wife singing Radiohead's "Creep."

That night I took a break from Rock Band to attend a Foo Fighters concert here in Nashville.  I like the Foo Fighters, but I'm not a huge fan, and I wasn't expecting too much from the show.  It turned out to be a great concert, though, especially the acoustic section.  And I believe it was the first time I've seen a triangle solo :)

The following morning the Rock Band fun continued after I bought a bunch of new songs on Xbox Live.  My son and I blistered our fingers playing Metallica's "And Justice for All" and "Blackened" on hard several times in a row.  We're both itching to play again, but we'll have to wait until next weekend, because we have a "no video games during the school week" rule here (a rule I'm cursing as much as my son is right now).

Great Performance by Nicole Atkins

My musical tastes lean towards the "loud and obnoxious" variety (for example, Avenged Sevenfold's latest CD has been blasting from my speakers this week).  But despite not being my style of music, this performance by Nicole Atkins blew me away.

If this woman isn't the next big thing, then there's something wrong with this country (via Rogers Cadenhead).

Guitar Hero II Ate My Weekend

Instead of going to Gnomedex this past weekend, I chose to stay home with my kids because today is their first day at a new school. So I had big plans for the weekend, plans that involved spending "quality time" with them making sure they were comfortable with going to a new school.

But then my son asked to play Guitar Hero II, which he received as a birthday present. And every plan went out the window. Holy crap, what an addictive game!

We'd already played all the way to the end when we got to try Freebird (on medium), so my son, my daughter and I spent the majority of the weekend re-playing our favorite songs. My daughter decided that Jane's Addiction's Stop was her favorite, while my son preferred YYZ and Pyschobilly Freakout. Me, I liked 'em all.

All I can say is, after a weekend of Guitar Hero II, I got blisters on my fingers. And I guess my kids are well prepared to enter the school of rock :)

My iTunes Widgets

Niall Kennedy has the news about Apple's new My iTunes, which enables sharing your iTunes purchases, favorites and reviews as Flash-based widgets. This is a great move by Apple, although I do wish I could customize which purchases appear in the widget (for example, I'd like to exclude music I purchased for my wife, since her tastes are quite different than mine).

You can also subscribe to an Atom feed of your recent iTunes purchases - something I've wanted for quite a while.

Impressive Guitarist

I added this to my link feed earlier today, but since this is a slow blogging week for me, I figured I'd share it here, too. If you enjoy the acoustic guitar, then check out this YouTube video of guitarist Andy McKee.

The Hype Machine RSS Feeds

Jason Calacanis just pointed to The Hype Machine, a free service which tracks MP3 blogs and builds a list of MP3 links that are downloadable by a podcatcher such as FeedStation.

Even better, they offer RSS feeds of their search results.  If you're using FeedDemon, simply perform a Hype Machine search from within FeedDemon's browser, then click on FeedDemon's autodiscovery icon  after it lights up to subscribe to the search results.

Every item in the feed includes links to both Amazon and iTunes, where you can purchase the music (I've already purchased a CD I didn't know existed thanks to the Amazon links).  One big missing feature, though, is Creative Commons license information - it would be nice to see that added in the future.

My 2006 Favorites

Yep, I'm joining the ranks of bloggers who write about their favorite pop culture releases of the past year. Sad, isn't it?

Music

This one's easy: Stadium Arcadium is hands-down my favorite album of the year. I agree with Fred Wilson that this double album would've been better if it was pared down to a single CD, but figuring out which songs to remove would've been tricky because even the weakest tracks are enjoyable. I've witnessed many of my favorite bands disintegrate or turn into caricatures of themselves in the 15 years since I graduated from college. Not so with the Chili Peppers - this album shows them getting better with age.

Honorable mention: The Beatles Love. The mashups are hit-and-miss, but the CD is worth its weight in gold for the digitally remastered versions of "A Day in the Life," "Revolution" and "I Am the Walrus" (three of my all-time favorite songs).

Movies

United 93 was the film that had the biggest impact on me this year. I initially avoided this movie because I mistakenly thought it was a cheap attempt to cash in on 9/11, but now I wish I would've seen it while it was still in theaters. United 93 is more respectful to history than any film I can remember, and it moved me much more than I expected it to.

Honorable mention: An Inconvenient Truth. I watched Al Gore's presentation on global warming two weeks ago, and it was an eye-opener - especially since I stepped outside after viewing it and discovered it was 70°F (definitely not the norm here for the middle of December). That's like hearing a banjo right after watching Deliverance.

And I'll give a second honorable mention to Monster Road, a documentary released on DVD this year about the bizarre world of animator Bruce Bickford. If you like weird movies, this will be right up your alley.

Video Games

It's rare that I have time for video games these days, and when I do play it's usually something like Unreal Tournament. But this year my favorite game was a little different: Lego Star Wars II. My son saved up for this game over the summer, and the day he bought it we played it together for six hours straight. I doubt I'd enjoy playing Lego Star Wars II by myself, but playing it with a seven-year-old was an absolute blast.

Honorable mention: GameTap. Alright, so it's not actually a video game - it's a video game service. After signing up for GameTap, I downloaded a ton of classic games like Zaxxon and Joust. It was fun to wax nostalgic over the quarter-munchers I played in the arcade when I was a kid.

Blogs

I read a lot of blogs, but Creating Passionate Users is one of the few that causes me to drop everything when it has a new post. I can't say I'm always happy to read what Kathy Sierra has to say, though - all too often she points out mistakes in software design and usability that I've been guilty of :)

Honorable mention: The Dilbert Blog. I'm not a huge fan of Scott Adams' comic strip (I've worked at a few Dilbertesque companies, so I find the strip too realistic for my tastes), but his blog has caused more coffee to be spilled (or spurted) onto my keyboard than anything else I've read this year.

Old School?

Yesterday Scott Johnson said that I rock because I'm an "old school" programmer (Scott - thanks for the kind words!).

Funny thing is, yesterday was my 39th birthday (yep, I'm one year away from the big four-oh) so it was kind of unnerving to hear that I'm old school already. But in the programming world, I guess I am old school - most of the coders I worked with in my twenties have either moved on to management positions or found another career. I can barely manage myself so management wasn't an option for me, and I have no desire to get into another field, so I guess I'll be coding until my fingers fall off.

Speaking of old school, the Red Hot Chili Peppers just put out the best album of their career. The double CD didn't grab me immediately (too many mid-tempo songs back-to-back), but now I can't stop listening to it (and I may never get "Storm in a Teacup" out of my head). Given that the Chili Peppers' lead singer is five years older than I am, I figure I can say my best work is ahead of me, too :)

What was I thinking?

So, last night I went to a Sevendust concert, and for the first time in almost two decades I got into a mosh pit. Let's just say that today my aching 38-year-old self is very aware of the reasons why moshing is done by a younger crowd...