Ian Benedict

As part of my guitar practice, I sometimes record myself to listen back in order to notice any mistakes I make. I started practicing a song called “Don’t Say Lazy”, which is a J-Pop song that is featured as the ending theme of a show called “K-ON!”. I uploaded a version of it with my guitar playing in the background. Enjoy.

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I’ve gotten back into playing the guitar and I figured I would talk about the pieces that make up my setup.

Epiphone Les Paul Special II:
This is a fairly basic starter guitar with a tone and volume knob, as well as a switch for the pickups. It has two humbucker pickups which don’t sound too bad. Overall, it’s a good economical choice to practice guitar.

Line 6 Spider III (15W):
A small Line 6 amplifier which features some good distortion effects. It’s a fairly good practice amp, but not for anything more than that.

Boss DS-1:
A cool distortion pedal that offers a variety of distortion effects. I don’t use this as much now that I have the following pedal.

ZOOM G7.1ut:
A multi-effects pedal I got last year. It offers a wide variety of effects and sounds that it can produce, making it great for getting the most out of your guitar. My favourite part has to be the USB interface because it can plug directly into your computer for recording and editing the effects patches.

Here’s a pic I took a while back of my rig with the only difference being some better cables.

2009 is finally here, though 2008 was pretty good to me. The holidays have ended (already) and the new school semester has begun. I don’t think many of the courses this semester will be too much of a pain so I should have enough time to get back into things like Kendo and guitar practice. As for new year’s resolutions, I think I’ll go with the general self-betterment plan this time around. I haven’t really had much to reflect upon this past year, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to aim to become a better person.

I’ve picked up a few things over the break. I got a brand new high definition monitor from BenQ. It is the E2200HD model to be exact. It supports up to 1080p which is ideal for my Xbox 360. I’ve been rediscovering all of the games in my collection in glorious high definition. It’s also pretty stunning to see anime in high definition. I also picked up a copy of Watchmen, the graphic novel that I’ve heard so much about but have yet to read. I’ve been going through that at a steady pace.

Also, after playing through Persona 4 on PS2, I have to say that the soundtrack for this game is very well done. I find myself listening to it a lot during my commutes. Sometimes, even more so than my regular stuff. I guess it goes to show that sometimes art can transcend the medium.

Here’s hoping for a happy and healthy 2009!

The fall semester is drawing to a close with only a few assignments and the exams remaining. Overall, I think I enjoyed my courses a lot more than I thought I would. Computer graphics was a pretty interesting course and actually put those dull linear algebra classes to use. I hope next semester is just as good, if not better.

On the gaming front, I finally got my hands on a PSP slim. It has opened a huge door to multitudes of Japanese RPGs and an assortment of other PSP exclusive games. My favourites so far would have to be Crisis Core and Initial D: Street Stage. Being able to play PS1 games on it pretty much sweetened the deal for me. As well, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: HD Remix finally hit Xbox Live! Being the huge Street Fighter dork that I am, I had to pick this up. This game has been rebalanced by David Sirlin, who is a competitive tournament player and Capcom employee. It’s a must-have if you’re into fighting games at all, and it’s available on both XBLA and PSN.

I’d better wrap up now and get back to studying.

The semester draws to its midpoint and so things start to get really hectic these days. Having a multitude of assignments and tests each week is stressful, but it tends to keep you on your toes.

Kendo-wise, practices are going really well this semester. There is an upcoming intercollegiate tournament at York University this weekend, and so I am very psyched about that. There is so much that you can learn from each of your practice matches that it is surreal. You learn a lot about yourself and your tendencies, in addition to your opponent’s. Even though I don’t have any high expectations for placing well in the tournament, just getting the notch on my belt and having that experience will be fruitful to my Kendo.

I haven’t really been playing playing many games due to not having the time. I may sometimes hop on Kongregate to do the latest card challenge for their Kongai collectible card game. One game I have just started playing, however, is Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia for the Nintendo DS. It seems to be the typical Castlevania fare (2D platformer with vampire slaying goodness), but the game is much more difficult than its other DS counterparts. This is good as far as I’m concerned since I found the previous ones to be too easy.

Other than the above, I haven’t really been up to much lately. This should change once the midterms blows over.

MMORPGs are unsurpassed at giving you an overwhelming sense of achievement. Being able to show off your character’s pimped out gear and abilities has been one of the draws of this genre, in addition to persistent awards for your achievements. The Xbox 360 has mastered this formula as well with the achievement system, even going so far as bringing out the dormant “achievement whores” in all of us. It’s a fact of life these days: we just like having markers for our gaming progress and love showing them off to friends. Enter Kongregate, a flash gaming website with integrated achievements in their flash games.

Kongregate has a great collection of flash games from around the internet, as well as some very high quality original games. It has popular games like Desktop Tower Defence, Portal: The Flash Version, Johnny Rocketfingers, and a ton more all with integrated achievements. My personal favourite of these is Kongai, an online collectible card game where you can gain cards by playing other games on Kongregate. It is surprisingly very well-balanced and deep for a flash card game, and quite addictive with online battling gameplay. I recently found out that it was created by David Sirlin, who is a high level SSF2: Turbo player and Capcom employee. He wrote a pretty interesting book called Playing To Win, which is available for free on his website, on the attitudes and mindsets that are common in all top players in competitive games. It’s a pretty good length and is an interesting read.

Overall, Kongregate is a great flash gaming site with games for just about anyone. It’s an excellent way to waste time and yet still track your achievements with most games.

I finally changed that boring theme and upgraded to Wordpress 2.6.2. I’ve been very busy as of late, with school starting and everything. I will try to update the blog more often now though.

I finally got my invite for the web 2.0 application BrightKite, so here are my initial impressions.

BrightKite is very much like Twitter, where you can post little notes to people on your friends list as well as the general public. Its main feature is the ability to also encode ‘where’ your posts are coming from. For example, if I had a GPS-enabled phone and I sent an update to BrightKite, not only will my post show up on the site but it will also show where I posted it from. Of course there are several privacy issues here (beware the stalkers!), but the site does provide a good amount of privacy features. What’s also pretty neat is you can view the public stream based on where you are, so you can see recent posts that originated from your area. For those of us without GPS-enabled devices, the option to add places manually on the site is there so we’re not completely left in the dark.

I can definitely see the coolness of using an application like this, especially when a lot of your friends get into it (with this being a social networking site and all…). You can set it to automatically update your Twitter with your BrightKite posts as well as add locational information to it, so you won’t need to message two different places if you have Twitter account too. Unfortunately, you can’t text message updates yet if you’re not in the US, but I imagine this will be rectified when it comes out of beta. I guess I have even more motivation to upgrade my phone now…

Check out my BrightKite profile here.

Just updated my Wordpress to 2.6. For those of you who run Wordpress blogs, I recommend the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. It makes life so much easier.

PS. I’m looking into changing my Wordpress theme, so if you know any good themes or theme sites, let me know.

I’ve gotten a bit of time to try out Dropbox and so here’s my little review of it.

For the uninitiated, Dropbox is a web 2.0 application that lets you sync files between multiple computers quickly and painlessly. It also comes with a nifty web interface to organize your folders and content. Although this sort of technology isn’t exactly new (to those of us in computer science or just in the know with code repositories general), it certainly manages to be easy enough to use and maintains a good amount of flexibility.

Basically, after installing the Dropbox application, it creates a little folder where any file inside it will be automatically synced to folders on other computers that are linked to the same Dropbox account. The install process itself very straightforward and fast, and the application itself seems very lightweight and memory-friendly.

I’ve been using it for the past couple of weeks now, mainly for keeping things like photos, documents and guitar tabs synced across both my laptops. It excels at syncing your content very quickly between all linked Dropbox folders and updating the web interface. Since the Dropbox application (which runs constantly in the background) is set to check your folder at very frequent intervals, dropping your file in the folder results in an almost instantaneous sync between the folders on other computers. A neat little feature I’ve used a bit is that any file you put into the public section of the folder gets a download link associated with it, so that you can share links directly with friends to the content in that folder.

One of the features I’ve yet to fully investigate is the “shared” folder, where you can share a folder between multiple Dropbox users and have it set to sync to all of their folders. As well, I haven’t played around too much with revisioning changes to files, but I imagine it works just fine.

Ultimately, it’s a very neat little application to have and is a godsend to those of us who find repositories such as Subversion a little too complicated to set up. Much like Twitter, I think it becomes much more handy to have around when more of your friends are using it, however it is very usable if you just want to share files across multiple computers. Dropbox is currently in private beta and is invite only.

PS. I’ve written this entire entry using the Qumana blog editor, which is a pretty neat free Mac blog editor. Here’s hoping it looks good on the site!