After Guitar Hero II

In June of 2002, the Motley Fool wrote an article about Guitar Center warning investors of potential problems with its $18-per share price being too high for that stock at the time. They were concerned about P/E ratios and whatnot. By June of 2007, they were singing a different tune, claiming that $63 per share was too cheap for them to sell out. What is responsible for the turnaround? In my mind, and as mentioned in the latter article, it has a lot to do with Guitar Hero (which Guitar Center sponsored). This game has reignited interest in real guitar playing, and at the same time, for me at least, it expanded my tastes in rock music to a whole set of metal bands to which I had never given much of a listen.

Like many others, I dusted off my old acoustic and resumed strumming away. However, this time around, mere rhythm-guitar open-string chords and basic strum patterns were not enough. Having finished hard mode in GHII, I felt confident, or at least compelled, to try to play lead lines, shred some frets, bend some strings, and slide up and down the fretboard with full distortion. I need to rock, and to do that, a trip to the aforementioned Guitar Center where I plunked down $250 for the Strat Pack. p.s., if you just splurged your life savings into GTRC stock based on the last paragraph, don't worry, Musician's Friend is a wholly owned subsidiary. As a disclosure, I don't own any GTRC or Activision stock.

So now that you have your shiny new electric, the trick is, how do you play it? Many people recommend guitar lessons, and I certainly agree. I intend to take some myself any time now. But if you and ornery, intelligent, adventurous, introverted, independent person like me, you will want to do some self-teaching on your own. In any event, it is useful to have more than one source of information about guitar learning, so even if you do take lessons, the instructor should encourage you to learn on your own. If they do not, find a different instructor.

Here, then, are my recommendations for free online learning. Firstly, fire up iTunes or otherwise tune in to 1.fm and listen to some blues. If you live in the D/FW area, you are in luck, because the new station called Lonestar 92.5 is a commercial-free radio station that plays a lot of blues, country, rock, and other music with great instrumental solos, mainly guitar. It might as well be called the guitar hero station. Incidentally, Lonestar are also sponsored by Guitar Center. While you are soaking up some good blues, go learn the easy blues scale. This scale can be played anywhere on the fret, and then you can play just about any notes up and down this scale in a swing beat, and it will sound great. For rank beginners, I suggest first checking out these excellent absolute beginner guitar articles. Be sure to look around on that site and this one even if you are a little more advanced. For geeks like me, the information is offered in a very digestible format. If you get really serious about this stuff, you can go to this solo guitar site which has information about practice schedules, etc.

However, whenever you get to the point of learning about modes, go to this modes theory page. It is all laid out very logically and clearly, with no mystical mumbo-jumbo. Did you know, for example, that minor A is just a mode of major C? I didn't. Including that one, there are seven modes in all, but the CAGED method only teaches you five, and treats minor keys as a separate topic. Granted, two of the modes overlap so much that they use the same exact fingerings, but still, the theory is incomplete without knowing about all seven modes, and it seems kind of random.

So, did you dust off your old guitar/buy a new one after you picked up GHII? Did you start listening to different music, and/or gain an appreciation for guitar solos?

Free Java games for your SonyEricsson phone

This post is to walk everyday owners of Sony Ericsson phones, such as the w300i or w800 series through the process of obtaining free (legal) games that can be downloaded directly to your phone and installed, without a data plan and without data charges, as long as you have the regular USB cable (and a computer with Internet and USB). This cable comes with the phone if you order it online from Cingular. If you don't have one, you can get it here. Yours might not look exactly like this one, but if it came with your phone it should work. You will also need a memory card to do the install. This phone is kind of worthless as a Walkman without the memory card, so you might want to go ahead and get the full 1 gig Memory Stick Micro (m2) card here. These are the only items you will have to purchase for this process, and they are useful for other things, such as playing music and synchronizing your phone calendar with Outlook too, so you will continue to use them.

If you don't have the cable, I believe (though I haven't tested it) you can use bluetooth instead. This involves having bluetooth hardware on your computer, and turning it on on the phone as well, and making the connection, all of which is beyond the scope of this article. If you have success with this, please post below in the comments. The remainder of this article assumes cable use only.

Once you have the cable, and you have installed the memory card (just slide the back off the battery compartment, and there is a small hole labelled M2; with the phone face down, the card should be face up and the arrow should point toward the phone), you need some free software from SonyEricsson. Their site is a little difficult to navigate, so I will walk you through it as of today. If you're in the US, go to this link and choose your phone from the list on the bottom. To get to this link from the main site, simply go to http://www.sonyericsson.com and choose your country, and then choose product support from the start page under "I have a Sony Ericsson phone." Once you have chosen your phone from the drop-down list, the list will appear blank again, and move to the left, which is weird. However, above that blank list should be a picture of your phone, indicating that you have properly chosen the phone already. Under Software and Setup, you'll see a link for Software downloads. This is the one you want. When you click that link, you should see a link to Sony Ericsson PC Suite. The direct link is here for my phone, but I recommend going through the steps to make sure you get the one that is compatible with your phone. Don't worry if the picture suddenly changes from, say, a W300i to a W800i, like I said the site is goofy. While you are there, you may want to get disc2phone, which will allow you to put music on your phone; a subject for another day.

Once on that page, you'll see a tiny link at the bottom saying "download setup xxx". Do this, and install the program. It will appear in your task menu as a picture of a candybar cell phone, and it will be installed as Sony Ericsson/Sony Ericsson PC Suite from the start menu. Now you are ready to plug in the USB cable and then plug the cable into your phone. As soon as you plug the phone in, it will want you to select "file transfer" or "phone mode" from the phone itself. Choose "phone mode"; you almost never need file transfer except when you are running disc2phone. Windows may go through some of its gyrations to install USB drivers and such; reboot when it asks and so on. At some point the PC Suite software will be connected to your phone, and the icon will lose it's red "X" and will just look like a phone.

At this point, you are ready to get some free games and send them to the phone. You can find some at midlet.org (be sure to click through to midlet.org, not midlet.com). You can get games, utilities, and so on. They're free, so they might not all work with your particular phone. If you get stuck in a game that you can't seem to leave, just hold down the back button for a menu. Let's say you choose games, board, and you want Dots 1.0.0. There will be two downloads, a jar and a jad. Generally you only need the jar file. Save it to your desktop (you might need to right-click and choose Save target as...). Then right-click on the cellphone icon in your task tray, and choose File Manager. This will bring up an explorer-like interface with your phone listed in it. Double-click on the phone, and you will see Memory Stick and Phone Memory. Use the + sign tree on the left side to explore the folders below this. Under Memory Stick is MSSEMC, under that is Media files, and under that is other. Click on other in the tree, and the area to the right should appear blank (unless you've done this before). Now open up a regular windows explorer (Start/My Computer and hit Up icon to get to the desktop). From there, drag your .jar file (such as Dots.jar) from the desktop into the SE explorer "other" folder. The phone may prompt you at this point to accept the file. Say yes.

Now that the .jar file is on the phone, you are ready to install it. Go to the file manager on your phone (you can leave it connected for the time being). The file manager is under the regular phone menu, and it has an icon that looks like a folder. Select the file menu, and scroll down to the "other" folder and open it. In there should be your jar file. Choose install, and it will ask if you want it in games or applications. Games is most likely. When it is done, you can start it right away, or you can get to it later from the entertainment icon (looks like a ps3 controller), under games. If you have trouble getting out of a game, hold down the back button for a menu.

In addition to midlet.org, you can also go to Sony Ericsson itself for a number of free games (this link will get you to the wap server to choose your phone; your phone will have a set of applications and downloads). If you try to navigate to this link you can't get there, so just click on that link and select your phone-name. Anywhere else you can find J2me .jar files (known as midlets) might also work for your phone. Good luck! I will try to answer any questions posted below.

The Game that Changed My Life

Just this week, I bought a couple of video games. Yes, bought and not pirated. I make software for a living, so I don't pirate. No, they weren't the kind of fancy schmancy games that my son rents for the latest leading video game console on our big-screen TV. In fact, it was because my son had just rented a game for the XBOX 360 that I was talking to him about a game I had once played called Prince of Persia for the PC. This was the original side-scroller, with simple but elegant graphics and a great storyline, including a few genuine moments of emotional fulfillment. For some reason, I was feeling nostalgic, so I reached into the past for this game (through e-bay, where all our techno-kitsch lives), for the Sega Genesis, which is hooked up to my daughter's 13-inch TV. The other game I bought was, in a sense, made for the cuttingest-edge of technologies, but it is called Doom RPG. And this post will meander from the very beginnings of computers all the way to this cutting edge. Therefore, let me start at the beginning, because this is one of those long-chain causal relationships, as all life-changing events are.

When I was a kid, my dad was a computer programmer. At that time, to be a computer programmer, you pretty much worked at a bank, or a defense contractor. He worked for the latter. One day, which I still remember quite distinctly, he took us up to show us what it was all about, or at least the non-classified parts of it. This was circa 1969, so suffice it to say the computer filled a room. Connected to that computer was a small terminal, which had input (a keyboard) and output (a printer). There was no screen. My dad thought he could teach us something about the art of programming and what computers did in general by relating to us how a computer might be programmed to play a simple game like tic-tac-toe. He was a mathematician by training, so he broke down for us how the playing board could conceptually be rotated and flipped to the point that there are really only three first moves: corner, side, and center. At 7, this was my first introduction to abstract thinking. I liked it. If you don't understand it, don't worry, you can still get a job at Starbucks. But no, tic-tac-toe didn't change my life. In fact, after that point, I became so good at math that I always thought I would do that for a living. Here's a modern tic-tac-toe game for the computer. And here's one written by a nerd.

The other day, I was talking to my dad, and I asked him what was new. Now that he's into his seventies, there isn't much new. Just the same-old, same-old, working late into the night and long weekends to finish the latest overpromised, overengineered defense programming project! And here I was, hoping that someday I'd be too old to work like that anymore.

When I got to the ripe old age of ninth grade, I had gotten so good at math that they let me play on the timeshare computer after school. This was another room-sized computer somewhere, but it was connected to a small terminal in our school via modem. By small, I mean the terminal was only the size of a large desk. It had a keyboard, a modem, a printer (roll paper), a paper-tape reader, and of course a rotary-dial telephone next to it to dial-up the actual computer. As far as I knew, it only ran BASIC. The programs were stored locally on paper-tape, which is a roll of paper with holes in it about the size of pencil-holes, each representing one bit, arranged side-by-side in single bytes, about the width of masking tape. If your program was more than a couple of hundred bytes long, it was going to take a roll of paper the size and approximate weight of a roll of masking tape to store it. One one such roll was a program called TREK.BAS.

This program, if asked, would print out a set of instructions, and a screen using ASCII characters to display your ship, and what it could see from long-range sensors, short-range sensors, and when you fired photon torpedoes, it would print the galactic coordinates one after another, tracking the location of the missile as it travelled in the direction you told it. The short-range scan would take up about ten lines of paper, looking something like this:
.COMMAND:srscan
... 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
. 1 . . * . . * . . K .
. 2 . . . . . . . . . .
. 3 . . . . . . . . . .
. 4 . . . . . . . . . .
. 5 E * . . . . . . * .
. 6 . . . . . . . . . .
. 7 . . . . . . . . . .
. 8 . . . * . . . . . .
. 9 . . . . . . . . . .
.10 . . . . . . . . . .

You are the E, the Klingons are the K's, and the *'s are the stars. The program would print this screen whenever you wanted a short range scan, which was somewhat often for me. I closed down that closet many a late night when I really should have been doing something else. I don't know who paid for the paper for that thing, but I am personally responsible for President Nixon forming the Environmental Protection Agency in the seventies. It's funny, because I was never really much of a Trekkie. Yes, I know this is heresy among geeks, or at least it was, until that fateful day in 1977. I realized then that the thing I never liked about Star Trek, or for that matter most Sci-Fi until Star Wars, was the sanitized verson of the future that they had. In Star Wars, for the first time I saw it in a movie that made sense anyway, the computer broke down sometimes. Anyway, the game Star Trek dragged me from a love for mathematics to a love for computers. One of the most fun times I ever had with my dad was when I was writing a compiler for the Commodore 64 just for fun, and he was porting TREK.BAS to the HP150 microcomputer, just for fun, in the same room at the same time. My love for computers lasts to this day, as does his, I'm sure.

Which brings us back to today, and Doom RPG, and cell phones. The contract on my cell-phone was due to expire in November, which means I could get a new one practically for free, as long as I stay with Cingular AT&T, which I had planned to do anyway. Coincidentally, the battery life between charges on my two-year-old phone was down to about an hour anyway, so it was time for a change. For reasons similar to John Carmack's, I naturally started thinking about what kind of programming I could do with a new phone. I was also thinking about saving some money, both by writing programs I wanted on the phone, and by learning how to do ringtones for my daughter's phone and download them over USB cable. While doing research on this topic, I found Carmack's blog (above), and I also found the Motorola RAZR and all of its attendant hackage.

Because the phone has been heavily hacked (again, I wouldn't want to do any piracy, just personal programming), it was one of my prime candidates. However, it also was about eighty bucks even with the extended contract. At the same time, my daughter had discovered the w300i made by Sony Ericsson. This phone was on sale for $9.00 after rebate, so it fit my cheapo price-range, but it also has support for Java ME games with 3D support, FM Radio, Walkman (MP3), and Outlook calendar synchronization. As an added bonus, Carmack's afore-mentioned Doom RPG was available for this phone, and as that is the current gold-standard of cell-phone video games, I thought it was worth a look. The game I really want is Orcs and Elves, but I reasoned that by supporting Doom on that phone, I was encouraging a port of O&E to the same phone. The phone came with a data cable, and so far, I've gotten all the SDK's, signed up as a Cingular Developer, written some programs for it, downloaded others, and generally had a good old nostalgic time writing tiny programs in a heavily constrained environment for a very tiny screen, and it's all been a helluva lot of fun. I've even thought of porting this java game to the thing just for kicks.

Coincidentally, the game which my son rented from Blockbuster this weekend was called Star Trek:Legacy, with somewhat updated graphics from the aforementioned BASIC/Java game. He was playing it on our 100-odd-inch HDTV projector/screen on the XBOX 360 with 5.1 surround sound, and the graphics are nothing short of stunning. There isn't much to draw in space, so they make the most of it. It is quite impressive, with planets and nebulae and whatnot. It occurred to me that the screen he was playing the game on, rivals the main screen of the Star Trek Enterprise itself. (No, that's not my home theater in the picture. That guy is a REAL nerd). Anyway, I was walking down the hall tonight and I thought my son had gone out for a walk, because he wasn't in his room. He called out from his sister's room that to the contrary, he was in her room playing Shining Force on the old Sega Genesis. I guess some of my nostalgia rubbed off on him.