Welcome To The Complete Fucking Meltdown, Drums Rock, Make Up Your Mind

I started to make a long post about the World economic situation.  I deleted it – I can sum it up quickly:  The US is a bit screwed, but, almost the entire rest of the world is FUCKED now.  Fucked right up the ass with a $800 Billion Euro bill.  Sideways.  Without benefit of lube.

The next two years are gonna get reeeeeeeally interesting to see how this all shakes out.  The US gets another revolution in our government policies (think FDR sort of revolution, where the function of the government changed considerably), and the rest of the world… hell, I can’t even imagine now.

Ok, so, when I last updated about this customer, they had broken a project down into pieces that, well… kept costing themselves more money.  OK, so that happens.

THEN they changed the plan a bit again – this time without telling me first.  They dropped the proposed cost for PreVersion 1 and just made PreVersion 1 be a limited Version 1 so there was no need to changes between PreV1 and V1.  Following so far?  This means I get a check, and it’s short by $400 of what I had planned on.  Uh?  Fuck?

The schedule has changed multiple times.  Sometimes closer, sometimes further (MY schedule I quoted, on the other hand, is just fine – I put my schedule close enough timeframe wise that if they went weird, I was still covered.  And I still am.)

Fine.  So I don’t make as much.  *SIGH*

So I get another email today… the plan has changed AGAIN apparently.  PreV1 is based on the (minimized) V1 plan, but V1 is now a TOTAL REWRITE.

WHAT?!  THE?!  FUCK?!

Yeah, they know it’s gotta be re-quoted based on a new design as soon as PreV1 is completed, and they want work to start on it ASAP when PreV1 is completed.  Good god people.  Look, would you all just hand me your checkbook and get this over with already?

Meanwhile, I’m still $800 (total) short on my financial plan for the short term.  GRRRRRrrrr….

Well, I’ve beaten Rock Bands drumming game on Medium now.  I can only play for so long (well, I can only play so long on that machine anyway – the DVD drive has problems, and it crashes if you play too long) because I end up with blisters between my fingers, and I gotta let ’em heal for a day before I can play again (thank goodness for being a fast healer 🙂

Drums are the most bizarre musical experience I’ve ever had.  I always took drums for granted – yeah, they set the beat and a lot of the tone of the song, but, I never played ’em.  And well, I don’t nessisarilly have the best sense of rhythm anyway (er, well, its a shitload better now.)

Now I understand ’em a lot better.  Kinda interesting too – I’m surprised how much I fully enjoy ’em.  I don’t look like Animal playing anymore – UNLESS I’m playing a song by The Who.  Then it’s like… nessisary to play it that way.  Just feels right 🙂

I wish I had the time to actually study the terminology and theory behind percussion.  Maybe someday.  What I do wish Rock Band had was some sort of “free play” mode where I could just set a tempo, and play with ’em to take what I’ve learned in the game and see how well it applies to actually playing ’em.  That would be like mega cool.

There was only one really hard song for me in Rock Band on medium – “Green Grass and High Tides”.  It’s a 1-2 beat with a kick on the one.  The first third of the song, no problem.  The tempo kicks up a bit, and it’s 6 straight minutes of 1-2 beat with some minor interruptions (the whole song is 9 1/2 minutes long).  A serious aerobic workout by the time I’d inevitably fail it at about 85% done.

And of course I’m fascinated once again about how the brain starts re-writing parts concerning coordination because of a new concept.  I’m hitting the high-hat in perfect tempo – it’s like breathing.  There’s no actual thought concerning it, and it’s fast enough that if I DO start thinking about the high hat beat and trying to control it, I’ll start failing the song fast (guitar on Rock Band you can “cheese” your way through a lot.  The drums on a lot of songs you can fail it within seconds when you drop the beat.)  The only thing I’m controlling is when I see an exception to the beat on the screen.  About the first four times I see something “new” happen, I’ll have problems with it. Then the brain adjusts, and I’ve learned a new beat or exception (Ok, blues rhythm threw me for a loop the first time I tried it.  Way different than every other beat I had tried. A second run of the song, and I was fine already.)

I still have some minor problems with the kick – if it’s a kick that’s completely off beat, it throws me off, though that’s getting better too.

I wonder though – martial arts, for instance, changes the way you think and react to things.  If I’ve learned to disconnect all four appendages from each other and run ’em all on autopilot, wonder how that affects the thinking process?  Could this be the reason why the drummer in just about every band is a little… off kelter?