So... we bought a house!

It's a deceptively large 2-bed cape in Arlington, MA. I've put together a comprehensive photo tour.

If photos aren't your thing, you can view my shoddy camera-work (and TERRIBLE portable video camera) and watch a video tour:

Or you can do none of the above. Thoughts/comments/suggestions are always welcome.

Due to my silly youtube video, I get a fair amount of youtube messages. When this happens, youtube send me an email which links me to a log in page. I'm supposed to type in my username and password and view the message.

Easy enough, right?

WRONG.

They screwed up their input focus-order somehow. What does this mean? I click "Log In". It asks me to type in my username, which I do. After this, I normally hit "tab", and type in my password. Unfortunately, when you hit tab in the username field, it brings you down to the "email address" field on the sign up form.

What does this mean? This means that if someone is sitting next to me while I'm logging in, and I act like I act on EVERY OTHER LOG IN SCREEN and typing in username, tab, password, enter - that person next to me will see my password in plain-text.

Well done youtube/google.

I'm a 25 year old guy living in Boston. I'm a very opinionated programmer. I also like to make music. I like to pretend I'm good at design/UI stuff, but really am probably just above average (for a programmer).

I have a wonderful girlfriend named Sara, who I often refer to as "the girlfriend". She is an Occupational Therapist, and that probably makes her a much better person than me. Don't ask me what an Occupational Therapist is, because I always get it wrong.

We have a cat named Peanut Butter. He has hair loss problems. And lately bowel movement problems.

So. About 6 months ago I hacked my Guitar Hero for Wii.

It was actually pretty easy to do since the Guitar Hero Guitar just plugs into the extension port of the wiimote. There has already been a lot of "research" on communicating with the wiimote on the computer. All I had to do was start from there, look at how they parsed out the nunchuck extension, and port that to read what the Guitar Hero guitar was doing.

Anyway, it turns out we get all 5 button states (obviously), up strokes and down strokes (separately), and 11 degrees of movement of the whammy bar.

I took this info and fed it into my handy synthesizer as I played and turned it into a sort of instrument. My keyboard has a pretty decent electric guitar sound, so it sounded sort of realistic. I used the wiimote's orientation and the whammy bar to add different "note banks" to let me play more than 5 notes.

I posted this on youtube and got a (mostly) good response from it. Although apparently I'm a fag... and look like Harry Potter... and should buy a real guitar cause that'd be easier. Even though I play real guitar (and you can see them in the video), and have a girlfriend.

Anyway, the video:

A "tutorial" will hopefully be coming soon.

I wrote and recorded a few songs with Sara a while back. They're up on myspace.

I want to write more but seem to be having trouble finishing stuff lately. Sara REALLY wants me to write more.

Hopefully I can/will.

I know it's been said before, but while designing this blog I really tried to keep it as simple as possible.

Viewing and adding comments should be able to be done in-line (while viewing the main page). On other pages, I always found that when some bit of text suddenly appears and the whole page gets reorganized that I had to re-orient myself before I could continue reading the page. To prevent this I first make room for whatever is going to show up, and then fade it in. It takes about a second or so, but I think it's worth it. Any input/suggestions on this would be great.

Besides the comments, I have a hierarchical set of 'tags', that act as categories, with special cases for the dates.

(On an aside, another benefit of doing the ajax-style comments is that it hopefully will prevent spam-bots from coming and doing their thing. I'm not sure how well the spam-bots simulate javascript, and I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be popular enough for someone to spend the time and figure out what ajax calls I'm making, etc. We'll see.)