As part of those exams, you have to learn certain patterns (be it scales or arpeggios) in various keys, which the examiner will then ask you to reproduce at will.  This isn’t quite so hard as it sounds – it’s essentially just drilling the patterns to the extent where you can play them without thinking – but it’s fairly hard to test yourself at coming up with random sequences.

Previously I’ve written small C# winform-based applications to help with this, where it fires off a random sequence that you have to play back.  As I’m now trying to learn more WPF / Silverlight, I thought that this time I’d try implementing it with a shiny new UI.

As you can see, the UI has been kept fairly simple, influenced fairly heavy by the WP7 ‘metro’ interface (I should point out that the icons were designed by users on another site, which I’ll link to once I’ve remembered where I got them from!).

The function itself is relatively limited – essentially, there are three main groups of information dependent on the selected Grade.  These are:

• Single notes (useful for testing the knowledge of location of notes on a string / fret)
• Scales
• Arpeggios

Each grading includes scales and arpeggios from the prior grade, plus some additional items.  The user can select their grade option as follows:

The user can then select what section they want to be tested on (scales, arpeggios etc).  Once this has been selected, the system will then give them random notes, scales or arpeggios dependent on their options.  The user can also modify how frequently these appear, allowing them to practise slowly to begin with, then increase the speed as their memory improves.

As I’m by no means a particularly astute Silverlight developer, I’ll be adding further articles about how this project advances in the future, on the vague hope that somebody else might benefit from the array of cockups I’m quite liable to make.

In the meantime, feel free to comment or post any ideas as to additional features.

I hate Star Wars.

There, I said it.  It’s a paper-thin plot congealed in wooden acting, bad scripting, and peppered with characters that have as much depth and layers as the screens it was once projected on.  I don’t care how many times you try and figure in some backstory that some hack, desperate for cash, agreed to write in order to give the plot some backbone, it’s a crap series of films that were only worsened by the blatant cash-in of the ‘prequel’ trilogy.

The Halo series shares a similarity in that nerds around the world will try and fill in a complex backstory, giving detail and shade to the Master Chiefs adventures that Bungie would love you to think actually exists.  In reality, it’s the same as Star Wars. Good guys vs evil alien bad guys, aliens get shot at a lot, the end.

Bizarrely, Halo somehow escapes the clutches of it’s god-awful storylines, and actually manages to be a fun, if flawed game, so long as you skip the cutscenes and don’t bother pretending to try and follow what’s happening (you – good guy, aliens – bad guys. That’s all you need to know).

ODST continues the series in a very similar vein to Halo 3 – perhaps mainly due to the fact that they’re still using the same game engine, and ODST was – at least in game design terms – somewhat a rush job.  However, there are some distinct changes.  Firstly, you don’t play as the armour-suited Master Chief, instead taking the form of one of the improbably named Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (hence the ODST in the title – geddit?).  Due to only being a standard throwaway meatheaded soldier, you’re not equipped with the usual rechargeable shields, and you’re puny arms aren’t capable of dual-wielding weapons.

Single Player

Halos single player is always the side that let’s the game down.  In ODST, you switch between ‘newbie’, an unnamed, unvoiced plot driving device who searches through a desolate and rather drab city in search for your missing comrades by following beacons that appear around the map.

In theory, the device isn’t a bad one, the actual process of mulling around in a city that barely contains any enemies can be a long hard slog which eventually just starts to feel like a shoe-horned element which is only there to try and up the total length of the game.

As Newbie reaches each beacon, he finds a remnant of his previous colleagues, which then takes you to play the sequence of how it got there in the first place.

All well and good, but… it’s basically Halo 3.  Again.  Only this time you don’t have much in the way of vehicles, left only with what may as well be a skateboard, there’s nothing in the way of new enemies or weapons, and most of the ‘flashbacks’ are fairly short.

There’s really not much else to say about the single player – if you enjoyed Halo 3, you’ll enjoy the game.  It’s nothing special, but it’s also reasonable fun, and a fair way to tick off some of those extra hours of living you’ve been wasting.

Multiplayer

ODST has a form of multiplayer called Firefight, a co-op splatter fest that allows you and your friends (or a bunch of american teenagers who taunt you, your choice) to pit your wits and pistols against an ever-increasing horde of alien scum.  It’s weird that I use the term ‘horde’, because if you’ve ever played Horde mode on Gears of War 2, then.. well, lets just say it’s a fairly similar style game.

The game also ships with a second disc, which contains Halo3 multiplayer in a stand-alone form, along with the collection of maps that previously you’d have had to purchase via XBL.  While this is nice for those of us who didn’t spend their cash on a few extra maps, you have to wonder if this is particularly a good deal for the Halo fanboys who would’ve bought Halo3 and the relevant maps already.

Halo ODST as a package is fairly good fun if you enjoyed the previous games, but it’s real downfall is the fact that most of the people who are avid Halo fans would probably not benefit from the addition of Halo 3 multiplayer and relevant maps, while the game itself just skims being overly short and a little unimaginative considering that it’s a full priced release.

If you’re missing your fix of Halo, or just want to get into the multiplayer for a while without being kicked off every few minutes for not having the right map, then ODST is at least a temporary respite despite it’s downfalls.

At some point next week, I thought it would be nice to cook my very gorgeous girlfriend a meal, as a kind of token of appreciation for putting up with me for so long.  All well and good, a nice romantic gesture.. or at least, it might be if I could actually cook.

Just for the record, I can cook.  Enough not to burn toast, and to whip up an outstanding beans on toast, or a very agreeable post-hangover egg and bacon sarnie.  I’ve just very little experience at doing anything more complex than this, so it’s really about time I started learning.  Where better than a night where I might possibly near-poison the love of my life?

So, for the sake of Internet Entertainment, I will present you with my failures as a rather crappy chef, complete with the climax of both myself and Sarah, my girlfriend, heaving over the sink and praying for death.

The first step to learning how to cook is to find a decent resource, one would assume.  I’ve discovered a copy of a strangely unused looking Delia Smith book and, being the geek I am, have decided to have a look at Rouxbe for some insight (hey, if it’s good enough for The Gadget Show, its good enough for me).

Rouxbe seems like a decent site – well presented, with the navigation clean and simple (just like me – well, bar the clean bit), and recipes given with both text and video instructions.  Specific terms that I’m unlikely to understand are hyperlinked with a description, so I dont feel totally like an idiot when trying to work out what the three-pronged metal thing is for, and most of their content is free which is always a plus point.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be giving the site a go, seeing if I can actually concoct something that doesn’t on some level somehow resemble vomit, and posting the results up here.

Wish me luck, and can somebody get an ambulance / fire-engine ready just in case?

BT would say that though wouldn’t they?  I mean, if nobody talked then their little machines on the ends of wires would be fairly useless and they’d stop earning money.  Personally, talking is fairly low on my ‘things I’d much prefer to be doing right now’ scale, somewhere roughly above ‘drowing in a bowl of soup’ and below ‘cutting the tufty bits off the cat’.  Plus Bob Hoskins once played second-fiddle to an animated rabbit in a movie, so why should I listen to him?

You are cordially invited to an Interplanetary BBQ. 6.00pm, 4th October, 2452 at my place BYO Meat and Beer. RSVP: Year 2100 Cheers
Daniel Edmonds
Melbourne, Australia

Fortunately, the forced need to actually talk to people these days is on the wane, thanks to increasing uptake of email, social networking and mobile phones that are ever-more predominantly used for text messages.

Greetings from earth. My name is ricardo. I am bar FREE. Please stop by my house for a drink…
ricardo
Davie, FL, United States

Now, thanks to an observatory in Canberra, Australia, you can now force your garbled nonsense into the depths of space, towards the planet Gliese 581d, the nearest Earth-like planet outside our solar system likely to support life.  Just head to their website, www.hellofromearth.net, write up your super-important message (taking distinct care not to a) piss off any possible super-intelligent sentient life that might come and kick our asses, nor b) write something so dramatically inane that any form of life instantly groans and decides it’s not worth the trip any more) and they’ll send it off for you.

The Credit Cruch was hitting NASA harder than expected

we’re a mob called human beings. we make lots of mistakes but we basically mean well most of the time, although i wouldn’t trust us as far as you could throw us
deb
denmark, Australia

It will take a while to get there however, arriving some time in December 2029, so why not copy your messages into the comments here as well.  Hopefully we can finally prove that there might be some intelligent life out there after all.

It's a flying pig, so it's kind of like swine f.. oh, forget it

However, the difference in my case is that I’m one of the apparent infected, and have spent the last few days waiting for plague doctors to paint a cross on my door, and start the chants of ‘unclean’ shortly before attempting to set the house on fire.

Swine flu (or, to give its formal title, ‘influenza A H1N1) is apparently slowing in it’s spread. According to the Direct.Gov site, at the time of writing, the number of new cases is depleting (see sidebar comment).  However, there’s always the possibility that people just aren’t bothering to register it, or can’t get through on the phone lines.  It’s a lot harder to track now that the advice is not to go and see a doctor to confirm the cases.

The Health Protection Agency estimates there were just 30,000 new cases of swine flu in England last week. This compares with 110,000 cases the week before – a clear indication that the rate of infection is slowing.

..which is nice.  I’d been joking to colleagues at work about how it’d be a nice excuse for a week off work, and that you never actually knew anybody who’d directly got it, just that bloke who’s the window cleaner of their mothers aunts uncle… and then I managed to get it.

From a personal perspective, Swine flu isn’t fun.  From quite slight beginnings (Thursday morning started with a sore throat) the symptoms appeared quickly, including the delights of a massive temperature, headaches, aching joints – pretty much what the government advice suggests, but in reality it hurts a hell of a lot more than it sounds like it should.

Of course, you can’t specifically state it’s swine flu.  All you can do is fill in the online form or try calling the official swine flu hotline on 0800 1 513 100 – answer the questions correctly and you’ll be rewarded with flashing lights, the room filling with streamers and confirmation that you may have swine flu, along with an ID number which you need in order for your ‘flu friend’ (somebody who can go and pick up your medication who’s not infected) to pick up antivirals in the form of Tamiflu.

On top of the standard advice, a personal tip is to take lots of hot baths.  It seems to help keep your temperature to a steady slow roast rather than feeling like you’re you’re being cooked on a high heat.

Personally I decided against taking the antivirals, seeing as in reality all it supposedly does is decrease the time it takes to recover by a day, and to my mind it makes more sense to allow your body to try and fight it by itself (unless of course you’re suffering from any other health issues that may cause complications).

It should be noted that it’s almost impossible to get a doctors note, as.. well, you’re not supposed to see a doctor.  However, you shouldn’t need a note unless you’re absent from work for over 7 days.  If it’s still required, you can request one from your doctors, but it seems a little pointless – they essentially can only go on your word.

As I write this, the effects of the flu seem to be slowly dissipating after around 5-6 days, so hopefully I won’t be out of action for too much longer, but if there’s anybody reading this who has their own experiences then please, feel free to comment below.

As it always inevitably appears, the mention of The Beatles ‘Helter Skelter’ as the catalyst for his crimes never fails to bemuse me.  Apparently, the lyrics to Helter Skelter were “construed as an apocalyptic race war the murders were putatively intended to precipitate”.

Obviously.  When the song is pretty direct in that it’s about a fairground ride..

‘When I get to the bottom I go right to the top of the slide…’. Yep, can easily see how that suggests a race war.

RROD - If you've got an Xbox 360, you'll have probably seen these already.

Well, it seems it’s that time of year again, when the calming green glow of the Xbox power switch changes to a series of very angry-looking flashing red lights.  This is proving to be an annual tradition and, much like other yearly traditions, involves me calling people I don’t really know and having to give them money.

If you’re an Xbox 360 owner – and really, even if you’re not – you already know what this means.  Three red flashing lights or, as it’s more affectionately known, the RROD (red ring of death), tells you that your xbox is dead.  Expired. No more.

The failure rate is a better kept secret than the Queens bra size (although a hell of a lot more people would perhaps be interested in the failure rate, admittedly), and they range from Microsofts’ suggested 3%-5% - which is unsurprisingly industry standard failure rate – up to anywhere around 61%.

Of course, the sheer numbers of users reporting problems suggests that the failure rate is much higher than MS suggests.  A quick Google search on ’360 RROD’ delivers 656,000 results, and in an effort to try to dissuade any form of legal action, Microsoft upped the warranty for RROD’ed Xbox consoles to allow them to be returned up to 3 years after purchase.

There are apparently ways of circumventing the issue, which is reportedly caused by overheating components (the most likely culprit being the GPU) such as the now infamous towel trick, or affixing your own clamps, but in reality it would be preferable if the damn thing just worked without having to perform your own systematic surgery on it.

‘Cheapy D’ from sort of website shows how to perfom the towel trick in the video below.

Well, it looks like I’ll again need to pay for it to be fixed, if only because I actually genuinely like the console, but it’ll be likely to just get replaced with a refurb unit of the same spec and so still just as prone to the overheating problems as ever.

Having a brief check on the site, I’ve just found an old review I wrote for Carina Round’s “First Blood Mystery”.  Should say, I’ve seen Carina live a couple of times, and although I might be biased due to her being a local girl, she’s damn good live and well worth a watch if you ever get chance.

Also spotted one for Will Selfs rather excellent ‘Eat Yourself Whole’, which comprises mainly of newspaper / magazine articles, all of which have had the ‘Self’ treatment.

Click here for the playlist and get adding.