M-x Kelsin

So Caitlin and I bought tickets to see Voxtrot's last show in NYC. The show was extremely bittersweet but I want to describe the whole trip.

On Friday (June 25th, 2010) we got off work early and drove down to Stamford CT. We visited my friend Chris Beesley (and his wife) who live in that area for dinner at a pizza joint. Meeting up with such good friends that you haven't seen in a while is always a great thing.

Early the next morning we took the Metro North Railrood into NYC. These trains are much faster than the commuter rail in Boston but at the expense of being much bumpier. I could barely use my phone the entire time! We arrived at Grand Central station and immediately went downstairs to the dining concourse and got some breakfast. We then walked around Grand Central for a big (took some photos since the building is so gorgeous) before getting on the subway and heading up to the Bronx Zoo.

The zoo was fun and exhausting. We didn't do any of the special extra-money-needed exhibits, just the normal tickets. We saw pretty much everything and needless to say we were WIPED OUT by 1pm (we arrived right at 10am). We slowly made our way out and back down the subway to the lower east side to scope out the theater that Voxtrot would be playing at.

For a late lunch we stopped at the Flowers Cafe which was awesome. Nice tiny place with a great look. I had a roast beef + horseradish sandwhich while Caitlin had a grilled cheese. We both followed it up with some ice cream! After this we checked into our hotel. We choose to stay (Saturday night) at the Blue Moon Hotel. It is a little pricey (for us) but it was darn close to the Bowery Ballroom where we were seeing Voxtrot so we figured it was worth it. The workers at the hotel were extremely nice and I definitely want to stay there again at some point if we're able!

We fell asleep in the hotel! We woke up around 7 (show started at 9 technically) and went out to find food and head to the show. We ended up at Sakura Japenses and Thai restuarnt on Mott Street which was great! Our waitress was extremely nice and the food was great. I just had my normal Sapporo beer and chicken katsu. Caitlin had terriyaki chicken. Once full we headed over to the show.

There were three opening bands so the night ended up:

• 9:00pm The Black
• 10:00pm Ravens and Chimes
• 11:00pm Yellow Fever
• 12:00pm Voxtrot

The Black was entertaining (the bassist and drummer from Voxtrot are in this group). They describe themselves as country indie rock and that's pretty accurate. They hail from Texas and while they weren't exactly up my alley, I will pay attention to their future stuff.

Ravens and Chimes impressed me a lot. I REALLY enjoyed some of their melodies and will certainly buy their new album once it's out. They performed mainly new material that isn't on their myspace page yet.

Unfortunately for Yellow Fever I was getting pretty tired at this point. This is a really late show for people like my wife and I. We normally go to bed around 10pm! I did enjoy their set. The funniest part was when they started the chorus to "Ratcatcher". Both Caitlin AND I looked at each other with the question "Where do we know this from?". It's VERY odd for Caitlin to know a random song like that and we STILL have not figured out how we know that song... it remains a mystery. Anyway I did enjoy them but we were very eager for Voxtrot.

Finally Voxtrot came on and did one amazing show. I managed to record three of their songs on my iphone:

• Your Biggest Fan (missing the first line, sorry!)
• The Start of Something
• Missing Pieces

It was extremely bittersweet since we love this band, but was watching their last performance as Voxtrot ever. I pretty much have two favorites. They unfortunately did not perform Trouble but they did so Missing Pieces last (I recorded that one, see the link above). If you can definitely check out the studio version of Missing Pieces since his voice was shot in my video.

A great last show for one amazing band!

The next morning we headed back on the train to Stamford and drove back to Boston without incident. The trip was a great success and made me want to visit NYC much more often... but after I recover from this trip!

Saw Kate Nash last night at Great Scott in Allston and the concert was incredible.

New York band Supercute! opened the show and despite going on pretty late, won me over. They live up to their name and clearly like a lot of good music given their choices of covers. I did buy their CD for $5 and can't wait to listen to it. One song they even sang while Hula-Hooping the entire time (as seen below in my crappy iPhone photo):

Kate Nash impressed me even more than I thought she would. Her show was awesome. She even had a broken ankle and that didn't stop her at all. After the show she seemed to be in a ton of pain so I hope she feels ok and clearly I hope she realizes her fans loved the show!

She did a bunch of songs off the new album as well as a bunch off the first. She included some of the awesome artsy things on the new album which I thought was pretty cool. I did wish she played Mariella but all more reason to go see her again right?

The band was awesome especially the drummer. Her songs groove so well and hearing them played live for the first time was a real treat. She is a fierce performer (which is what I was hoping for) and the show did not dissapoint in the least. I would go see her again in a second.

More bad photos!

I love Ido mode in emacs. The fuzzy searching works exactly how I want. It automatically works for finding files and switching buffers which is great. Today I finally got it working for bookmarks and recent files.

For bookmarks I found a section on emacs wiki about how to make ido goto a bookmark directory when browsing for files. This isn't quite what I wanted. I wanted to use ido to complete bookmark names to go right to the bookmarks. After finding some example code I came up with this:

(defun bookmark-ido-find-file ()
  "Find a bookmark using Ido."
  (interactive)
  (let ((bm (ido-completing-read "Choose bookmark: "
                                 (bookmark-all-names)
                                 nil t)))
    (when bm
      (bookmark-jump bm))))

Reallyl simple, just bookmark-jump to a bookmark name using bookmark-all-names to pass the names to ido-completing-read.

The next step was to be able to complete on recently seen files. I came up with the following. It's probably not the cleanest or fastest code, but it gets the job done. It lets me complete on the filename (not directories at all) for all recently seen files. I don't know how this behaves when you have files that are named the same, but at the moment this works great.

(defun recentf-ido-find-file ()
  "Find a recent file using Ido."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((files (mapcar '(lambda (file)
                           (cons (file-name-nondirectory file) file))
                        recentf-list))
         (file (cdr (assoc (ido-completing-read "Choose recent file: "
                                                (mapcar 'car files)
                                                nil t)
                           files))))
    (when file
      (find-file file))))

I finally remembered to turn on google search keyboard shortcuts today. I'm so glad I did. The implementation is perfect. You can read about it on their blog, but allowing us to use j and k to search between search results is ... amazing!

I've finished my blog engine enough to move my blog over to it! My blog is now running on Heroku and is basically a small sinatra app that saves posts as flat files. More info can be found at the Github page.

This way you have history for your entire blog, with all edits. You can also write your posts in any editor you want. I actually have written about as much code for my emacs helpers than I have for the blog engine itself.

The features I cared about most are tagging. I decided to offload comments into Disqus. The features there (and the time saving aspect of not having to code comments) was worth the slight drawbacks to offloading my comments).

Overall I'm really happy with it. The only thing left is actually styling my blog. The current style is NOT going to stay. I'll be going over it with Caitlin and coming up with something. I'm hoping to have it be Emacs-themed, but time will tell.

I spent forever looking for an alternative to Ultraviolet. I originally thought I wouldn't be able to use this library on Heroku due to it needing a wierd regexp library. Turns out Heroku already installs this library making the install of ultraviolet a snap! Unfortunately I was having issues installing ultraviolet on my mac.

You need the oniguruma library installed. Since I use macports anyway this was the easy part.

$ sudo port install oniguruma

The hard part was that the oniguruma gem wasn't finding the files it needed. Turns out I just needed to tell it where to look.

$ sudo gem install ultraviolet -- --with-opt-dir=/opt/local

Bingo! Time to add awesome syntax code to my blog!

So I've been meaning to do three things for my music creation.

• Buy monitor speakers
• Upgrade to Logic 9
• Upgrade Zendrum

I realized on Sunday that I had two guitar center coupons (from the mail) that I wanted to use. One was for $50.00 off of a purchase of $400.00 or more. The second was 15% off of a midi interface. Now I figured I wouldn't be able to use both together, but I might as well try right?

I went it and picked up a pair of KRK Rockit 6's (I had generation 1 rockit 5's a long time ago and liked them even though they did eventually die on me). The store guy of course told me how I couldn't get 15% off of the midi interface I wanted to buy and I was ok with that. I just want to point out that if coupons are able to be used on two separate purchases, you should be able to use them together. Anyway this just meant that I would not be buying the midi interface from Guitar Center so overall their loss.

Moving back to the main complaints. This sales guy tries to sell me on their replacement program of course. For $20.00 a speaker I can get my money back if something breaks in the next 2 years. These speakers have a warranty of 3 years from KRK and I don't travel with them or anything so I told him I don't need it. A little push back but whatever. After this he went through the process of checking Caitlin's license (we were putting it on her card) and swiping her card. He also got my email and stuff like that. It took a while.

After this he said he had to get this approved... and walked away. We were spending a total of $371.00, not quite a large amount. I could spend multiple times this at a best buy without needing approval but whatever. He comes back with an older salesman.

This older dude then said (after looking at my account on their screen) "You don't want your money back?". After I said "what?" he repeated himself so I said "What money?". He then tried to sell me AGAIN on the replacement program. I told him how I already said I didn't want it. He then kept pushing and talking about how it's not a scam. I'm sorry but I know that Guitar Center doesn't give a shit about me. If the replacement program costs $20.00 a speaker it means that they make money at $20.00 a speaker on it.

Anyway, this took a while to explain to him that I already said I didn't want it, and I meant it. After this had asked to check MY license (after saying that it's not my card) AND Caitlin's license and card AGAIN.

Come on, in this day and age you need to make me want to travel out to your store instead of buying things online. This experience (while not horrible in any way) doesn't make me want to go back to this store at all.

Edit The speakers themselves rock. Have them setup in my spare room now. No complaints!

Good command to help fix gem problems:

gem pristine --all

Thanks to raggi in #eventmachine on freenode!

I LOVE IT.

Just a bit of back story. I never played a Final Fantasy game until X (and I played that one about a year after it was out). Since then I have only managed to play VI and VII and about 1/2 of XII. I am going to go back for XII for sure cause I did enjoy it, but not near at the level of X and XIII. VI was great but the battle system is not as interesting as all of the following ones. I would have to say that X is my favorite but I might change that after I finish XIII. I'm almost done with the story and plan on doing many of the extra things.

The story is what I expected. I think it's neat but it's very typical of other recent Final Fantasy games. Cool world filled with crazy technology and people that dress VERY colorfully. I'm not going to say too much about the story. I don't require an amazing story to like a game, this story is interesting and keeps me engaged. The characters are fleshed out even if they are cliche and that's fine for me!

The battle system is amazing. The first 3 hours (or so) can be misleading. Keep playing through it cause the system get's cooler.

You only ever control your main characters. You basically have a bar (starts at 3 segments and can have 6 if you get a characters ultimate weapon). You put actions on the segments (Some spells take 2 or 3) and then execute them all at the same time. In order to not waste time you have to place all of your actions before your bar refills. You can quickly execute less that a full bar if you need to, or cancel things that haven't happened yet (if you're quick) in order to do something else with the unused portion of your bar. That sounds complicated but it's really not. Basically you have lots of real time control to pick what to do.

Most fights you can just hit "auto" and let your character do it for you. I think this is a GOOD THING, cause it makes trash fights easy. The characters auto cast things the mob is weak to, won't cast things they are immune to, generally behave pretty awesome. The "auto" selection is pretty much what you're other two characters are doing as well (only slightly smarter since they have to pick their target automatically too). If you are selecting an action without thinking you can now hit "auto" and you can actually pick things manually when you need to. Sometimes this doesn't work but in this system I think it's perfect.

Now comes the fun part, at any time during combat (ANY time) you can change your paradigm. Basically you can change the job of each of your party members to one of 6 "decks". You can make the decks anything you want in the menus between combat. The job choices are as follows:

Ravager

Magic damage dealer

Commando

Physical damage dealer

Synergist

Buffer

Sabatour

Debuffer

Medic

Healer

Sentinel

Tank

So this means one second you are working with Com / Rav / Rav (more about this in a section) and suddenly the boss hits you all for a lot! You switch to Com / Sen / Med or even Sen / Med / Med to heal up and then switch back. It's great. It keeps you engaged in EVERY battle (including trash) while not becoming tedious and boring (so far). I absolutely adore it. You may think that you'll only ever switch between the two I just mentioned (or something similar) but if you did fights would take a long time due to the next bit.

Every mob has a bar that fills up the more you hit it. The bar usually starts at 100% and increases as you hit the mob. The more you hit the mob, the more damage you do! Easy! The trouble is the bar doesn't stay filled, it slowly goes back to 100%. If you manage to fill it (the filling point is different on different mobs) the mob gets staggered and you can do MASSIVE damage to it. For example: If a mob has a 130% stagger mark, then as soon as you hit 130% it jumps to 230% and increases much faster up to 999%. Once staggered you have a certain amount of time before the bar resets to 100%.

Now here's the cool part, the amount the bar increases / the speed at which it depletes / and the time in stagger is dependent on what you do to the mob. Ravagers fill the bar VERY quickly while not doing as much damage as Commandos. Commando's keep the chain from depleting fast while doing a bit more damage (As a side note: Ravagers do have physical attacks that chain fast, and Commandos have magic attacks that keep the chain from depleting so you aren't screwed if a mom is immune to physical for instance). If you do fill it up all the way with only ravagers (hard to do unless you use ALL three ravagers on a mob whose bar fills up fast) the stagger time won't be much. If you have at least one Commando in your party the bar won't go down fast at all (plenty of time to switch paradigm's, heal, then come back). Once you do stagger a mob you generally want to keep Ravagers in the mix to get it to 999% as fast as possible. Once it is as 999 switching to more commandos helps doe more actual damage on the mob.

Sentinels also keep the bar moving down slowly but not as reliably. Having a group of Sen / Com / Med is awesome since the Commando keeps the chain going (you won't lose it despite not adding to it very fast), the Sentinel takes hits (they taunt) and do it while taking little damage (guarding and counter-attacking) while the medic heals you up. Even if you have to Sen / Med / Med you can normally get back to a damage paradigm after without losing your chain if you react fast enough.

All of this chaining business means that fights are very different from each other. Different ones have different parameters changing the way your paradigms affect things. Some bosses need buffing or debuffing. Some only one healer is ok while others need a tank or a healer and a tank. Figuring out optimal paradigms in each case is an awesome addition to otherwise standard fights.

I can't get enough of this battle system. Every boss is a great challenge! You do hit X a lot to do the auto actions, but you are doing it while constantly switching jobs, and every once in a while (or a lot in a complicated boss fight) you go manual and have to pick actions. I think this completely kills the boring fights that many other games have while keeping you engaged and giving you a feeling like you're improving at the game while your character's stats are improving.

The leveling system is typical. You have a thing you drop points into that add to your stats. Very familiar if you have played FFX. The difference is at end game the characters are very different from each other still. They all don't have access to every ability even if they have access to ever job. I think this is a huge improvement. Not having everyone on the same grid means that the end game will still be interesting.

The game has everything about FFX that I loved. Ultimate weapons that can be hard to get. Tons of monsters and missions to beat after the game ends. Crazy monsters. Graphics are stunning. Some things though are improved. There are no towns! You buy things at save points. This just helps (again) remove a boring part of play. There are plenty of NPC's around but you don't have to talk to them individually. Walk by them and you hear what they're saying! These changes just make playing a FF game even more fluid and fun.

A quick point that I found great: You can't miss ANYTHING during normal play through. Everything can be gotten AFTER the final fight of the game so you don't need to worry about getting every chest if you don't want to (might save you some money here and there, but there will be nothing you can't get again via shops or mob kills). No missing a critical steal on a boss (there's no stealing at all actually). Another great change from some of the other games.

Anyway I love it and can't wait to get home and play some more. Most of my friends have not liked this game very much mainly siting the linear problem. I don't see an issue. The game makes you follow a story through 60% of it, but all FF games do so I don't know what people were expecting. The game exceeded my expectations in all of the right ways!

I preordered Bayonetta immediately after a friend told me about how awesome it sounded. I had been a big fan of the Devil May Cry series already so it's not a huge leap that I would love this game since it seemed to take the same attitude towards gameplay and style.

I LOVED this game. The gameplay is outstanding. It's just the right length. It has tons of re-playability. It rewards you early and often for good gameplay and the combo/ranking system is easy to understand yet super hard! It's my favorite out of all of the combat-centric-stylized-combat games I've played yet.

The gameplay feels like a fighting game. You have a TON of combos all made up of the two attack buttons (Punch and Kick). Depending on what weapons you have equipped you can do different attacks. Throughout the game you can earn weapons that you can permanently equip. You start with guns on your hands and feet (as you see in the videos for the game) and can earn stuff like a sword, ice skates, shotguns (for hands and feet), a whip, etc. Also throughout the game enemies will drop some really powerful (and often slow) weapons that you can equip and use for a short time.

The dodging aspect of the game is the best part. Hitting the right trigger makes your character dodge an incoming attack. The dodging works great and I never felt like I dodged and got hit during the dodge (Plenty of times when I think I dodged but Bayonetta didn't start the dodge before being hit but that's par with the course). The enemies do NOT hesitate in attacking you even if you are dealing with a different enemy. This makes dodging really important. If you are in the middle of a combo and you here the sound of an off-stage enemy shooting you with his angel horn, you better watch for the projectile and dodge at the right time!

Two aspects make the dodging even more useful. If you dodge at the last second (except in the hardest difficultly mode) you start Witch time which is basically this games bullet time. You can hit projectiles back to their shooters, and generally get some big combos off during witch time. You can also keep a combo going during a dodge. If you are trying to pull off a A-A-A-B-B combo and have to dodge during the third A just hold it down and continue the combo after (hopefully during witch time!)

You do have an energy bar that can help you accomplish many times. By default every full bar lets you do a torture attack on an enemy. These attacks DO stop the battle for a second while Bayonetta summons some type of torture device and does major damage to your current target with it. These all require some sort of button mashing or stick spinning (I don't think it's too much though) and deal a ton of damage. Your energy goes away a bit every time you're hit though so pulling these off can be quite tough.

The only other use of energy comes from many accessories that you can buy. Most allow you to hit A+B to use energy to do something, whether it's make you invulnerable to one hit, or do damage, etc. This combined with your weapon choice provide a lot of options in how you want to play. You can be more offensive or defensive as you see fit.

I can't say enough about how much I enjoyed this game. As soon as Caitlin finishes Mass Effect II I could see myself picking it up again to finish the Non-stop Climax (hardest) difficulty mode. I submitted my Penny-Arcade contest submission for beating Hard but I haven't heard anything yet about if I made the cut to receive a shirt. I hope I did!