Four years ago, when I was about to turn 44, I decided I would attempt something new for me. I'm not the biggest klutz in the world...I can handle hitting a baseball and other basic sports feats...but I was always truly awful at basketball.

So, for the year between turning 44 and turning 45, I planned to go out every day and shoot 100 free throws, just to see if I could actually acquire a new skill at my age. I started a spreadsheet to track my progress and started a diary to document the year.

Unfortunately, after about a month of this, there was major upheaval in my life: the movie theatre I was working for was bought by another company, and a month or so after that, I was transferred to Alabama.

In the four years since, I've planned every birthday to attempt to get back on track with this, but I was always stymied by one thing: I couldn't find an outdoor basketball court that was marked with regulation lines.

A couple times I tried pacing off the correct distance, but I wasn't comfortable with it, and the courts I found were always either too busy or in poor condition.

The court I had in Indiana was ideal: two full courts, side-by-side, and lighted for night shooting. (When you run a movie theatre, sometimes the window of opportunity opens at 2AM.)

For that first month, I did it faithfully, rain or shine, with only a few instances where I had to double up on a day because something forced me to miss the previous day. I went from a first-day total of 12/100 to a personal best of 58% about four weeks in. Realistically, I averaged about 45% by then.

Well, today, when I was out walking a bit, I stopped to notice the basketball hoop near the complex offices. They did have lines painted, and while the surface was simply asphalt, it was well-maintained and perfect for what I was planning.

So I got back out there, this evening, with my birthday just three days away, to get in a little warm-up before I start my event (known as "????? for 36500") once again.

It was a bit tough. The first 50 shots were pretty darned ugly as I got a feel for it once again, and I could feel the extra weight I put on from living like a mushroom in a basement apartment in Michigan objecting to this punishment.

Ultimately, I got through it, a bit sweaty, a bit unimpressed with my numbers, and with my hands filthy from handling the basketball that's been rolling around in the back seat of my car for a couple years.

So, assuming no similar upheaval is in the offing, I'm ready to give this another go.

I've been out of work since the end of October, and I have been looking for an opportunity every day since then. Along the way, I learned that I don't qualify for unemployment in the state of Michigan because I have not worked exclusively in Michigan for the last 18 months.

In the last four months, I have barely been able to attract any interest, and the leads I have had either moved very, very slowly, or dried up before coming to fruition.

This is a unique problem for me. I've been out of work a number of times along the way, but never had trouble finding anything when I was actively looking. In fact, more frequently, companies have found me rather than the other way around.

Today was the last straw. I have finally reached the point, financially, where I need to make a move in order to survive. I can either stay here and look for a grunt job that barely pays the bills...but if I'm going to do that, why not live somewhere I'd prefer to live rather than somewhere I was plopped down and abandoned (and yes, that's what being laid off ten months after relocating feels like)?

So I'm putting together plans to head West, most probably Arizona, where I have family.

Yesterday afternoon, I got a voice mail from one of the slow-moving opportunities. This one has been developing for about a month: back in early February, I signed a "right to represent" document for the contracting company and I was told they would be scheduling me for a face-to-face.

When I got through to the representative this morning, it turned out to be a false alarm. She was just touching base to make sure I was still available.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of defeat, I guess.

So, after 16 hours of musing on the possibility of not having to move for no reason, I'm back to the Arizona plan again.

To paraphrase James Carville, "It's still the economy, stupid."

or

The Most Fun I've Ever Had at the Movies with My Pants On

I was going to write a blog here, but the tools at *mumble mumble* were better for the presentation.

So, without further ado, here's my AMC Select Best Picture Showcase photoblog.

My most recent contract position was terminated on October 31st.

Do you know when I found out it was ending?

October 30th.

And so ended my association with what was probably the worst contract position I've ever had, except for the people I met, every one of whom was great.

Wait...I should clarify that.

Everyone I met at the workplace where I was stationed was great. A large chunk of the people I met within my own contract company were not, specifically the gaggle of people they sent to "manage" us.

As I go on, I hope to make you understand why I put "manage" in quotation marks there.

The experiment I'm talking about is using this blog entry to figure out a way to write this experience into a worthwhile paragraph on my resume.

I expect, along the way, I'll be venting a lot, as well.

The first thing to do is to tell you the position was at Chrysler, which has been shedding jobs almost as fast as it's shedding money. About a week before I got cut, they announced they would be cutting their employee workforce (as opposed to contractors, which I'm) by 25%.

The next time you go to your job, imagine that every fourth person you see will be gone by year's end...that all that work you've been struggling to get done with eight people will now be handled by six. That's what Chrysler is setting up.

That is, of course, when they're not talking about "merging" with GM.

Anyone who knows anything about the auto industry knows that Chrysler would merge with GM like a penguin merges with a leopard seal.

Well, even with that going on, I still felt secure, because I didn't work for Chrysler. I worked for a contract company that had a five-year support contract for Chrysler's IT systems.

And it was secure. I was told I was doing good work in a difficult situation. Everyone understood that there were some kinks to iron out and that we were just starting to hit stride.

Then one of the Chrysler people was cut.

My company promptly hired her and replaced me, simply because they knew she had a lot more experience with the systems than I did.

Perfectly logical, and it doesn't bother me at all that that's what they did. It's the way they did it.

Because of the pressure on the project, it had taken me eight months to realize there was never going to be a good time to finish relocating. I arranged for a week off in September to return to Alabama and get out of my apartment there.

Then one of the offshore people--the folks we work with over in India--had some personal issues to deal with, and my company was not prepared for the possibility that he would need time off at the same time I did, so they asked me to defer my week off for three weeks--costing me an extra month's rent--so that they could be better prepared to cover for me.

So I did it. I put it off three weeks.

Oh, want to know why it was three weeks? I couldn't put it off one week because that was month-end and all the big processes were running. I couldn't put it off 2 weeks because there was an Indian holiday during the second week. So I had to put it off three weeks.

Basically I took a bullet that cost me several hundred dollars.

And when I finally did get to go, that was when they decided to bring in my replacement.

So just as I'm finally getting all my crap dealt with to make this 700-mile relocation, they're setting up to cut me.

I don't often swear in these blogs, but there is only one phrase to describe that: Fucked Up.

So this week, I've been recuperating from the shock even as the parent contract company pushes me to get my updated resume and other paperwork in place so they can try to get me on contract somewhere else.

Which will probably mean relocating again, less than ten months after I came here in the first place, and less than 2 months after I finally got all my stuff from the apartment in Alabama.

Fucked Up.

Anyway, the experiment is to follow an approach I've found works for me when writing a resume: talk about the job the way you would when you tell it to your sister, then go through it and make it professional.

So that's what I'm going to try to do here.

I probably should have realized just how screwy this whole thing was going to be from the time I got the first call. They wanted to move everything so quickly: I had contact just after my FedEx contract ended, and they were pushing me to get through the hiring process and get up to Michigan within a week. That wasn't going to happen in any possible way, so they settled on about a week and a half.

This was a cattle call. A rounding up of warm bodies with the hope that they had enough skills and savvy to fake their way through the process until they knew what they were doing.

I first reported on February 4th and was told that I wouldn't be at the tech center as anticipated but would be located at an office at one of the plants. This was no big deal except that with the plant being about 20 miles from the tech center, that meant I had to shift some of my plans for where I was going to look for a place to live.

Again, that was fine. Just a minor inconvenience related to settling into a new position. I'd done it enough times that it wasn't completely unexpected.

As for the job itself, the work was simple enough: one team with two components, and me taking the role of team lead. My work would be to facilitate the flow of the work on the team plus handle some of the support situations myself. Pretty straightforward stuff: two fairly big systems that used my typical tools--COBOL, IMS DB/DC, DB2, etc.--and three smaller systems that used a wider variety of software...the kind of stuff I would have to learn as I went. The other component of the team handled the JAVA stuff, which is not where my experience is, but I did my best to learn their side of it as well.

We should have known within the first two weeks that this wasn't going to work as planned: we were given about four hours of each day for knowledge transfer from the Chrysler subject-matter experts, and then expected to further our knowledge on our own during the free part of the day. This would have been fine except that the subject-matter-experts were so pressed for time that they did a great job of imparting knowledge during the sessions but a not-so-great job of pointing us at valuable resources for the self-study time. My side of things--the mainframe side--felt like we were getting some pretty good information, but it was coming too slowly and not in any sort of complete way.

The other side--the JAVA side--had it much worse: the subject-matter expert left Chrysler on our fifth day on the project and they were left trying to learn the systems from contractors with the rival company that had lost the support contract. If we were swimming, they were drowning. At least we had some idea where we were and what we were working with. They didn't even have that much.

The intent was to have us acquire the knowledge for two months, then present what we had learned in the form of a run book that would be a bible for the application...a source for people to turn to when they needed to know about the system. After the run books were approved, we were to shadow the contractors from the other company for two weeks, then have them shadow us for two weeks to confirm that we had learned the processes.

It didn't play out that way, of course, but I don't think any of us expected it to go as far astray as it did. Some of the run books ended up being little more than a copy and paste of the materials we were provided--though I strove to emphasize to the team that you shouldn't put anything into the run book that you don't understand, whether or not you wrote it yourself--and then the shadow/reverse-shadow process turned into shadow/go-live.

Again, not that big a deal, but I should have seen it as a harbinger of the summer ahead.

And, y'know, I think I'm gonna stop there. I could go into excruciating detail about what got fouled up and how, but I'd rather just leave the bile behind and think about what the emphasis was: the tools I worked with, the things I learned. Because that's all that's going to matter in a resume, and with an engagement as short as this one turned out to be, it's not even going to get discussed much in an interview process, which is just as well, because it's awfully difficult to explain how you got dismissed from a job despite doing it well.

I know I'm in the minority, but much like the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, I'm willing to speak my mind about what I've seen in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

Unlike in that story, though, no one else seems to be aware that the Emperor is naked.

I've finally realized that I simply don't connect with Nolan's movies. This isn't a big deal, as I don't connect with Oliver Stone or Robert Zemeckis, either. All three of these men are technically proficient and the craftsmanship of their films is beyond reproach, but not every director makes movies for everyone, and so far, Nolan hasn't been making movies for me.

Again, it's not a big deal. His movies just seem dry and clinical to me, and I never get caught up in the emotion the way he wants his audience to. The characters appear to be created to serve the devices of the plot, rather than the plot growing out of the genuine actions of the characters. As a result, his films become predictable despite a pretense of being surprising and filled with twists: you simply have to find a piece of unmotivated behavior and follow it to its conclusion in order to figure out where the story will lead.

Since I don't get caught up in Nolan's devices or in the emotions he's trying to wrest out of me, it allows me to watch the movie with a more objective eye than I would with other directors, such as Spielberg, Scorcese and Fincher.

My fundamental problem here I that I couldn't find any level on which this film worked for me. It didn't work as a Batman movie, and it really didn't work as a movie in general.

Why it didn't work as a Batman movie

For more than three years now, I've been fighting an uphill battle about whether Nolan's depiction of Batman is true to the comics as so many people think.

I've spent about 25 years of my life as an avid comic reader, and though I haven't been reading them much in recent years, I do have a feel for certain characters. Overall, I'm more a Marvel than a DC guy, but DC has released several seminal stories for their key characters over the years that capture the essence of what those characters are. For me, the best of the Batman stories have been The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, The Long Halloween, and—to a lesser degree—Dark Victory. In the older tales, the run that Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers had in the 70s did a great job of defining the character at that time. I didn't care for The Killing Joke, though it had moments that were of interest to me and which obviously influenced this film.

I won't go into detail about the basic problem I have with Batman-as-armored-shock-trooper instead of the more ninja-like portrayal that the best of the comics depict. Suffice it to say that that, combined with carrying dozens of gadgets created by someone else (remember, Batman is supposed to be a detective/scientist), are enough to make this character not Batman. But it goes beyond that.

In the first film, I had more of a problem with the chicken-shit nature of Wayne and Batman than anything else: he felt like a rich guy who equipped his way into thinking he was prepared to do something he couldn't emotionally handle. Contrast this to Year One, in which Wayne doesn't even dress as Batman until he knows he's got the chops to carry it off. The Dark Knight has matured him a little, so the only things really wrong with the character now have to do with the armor and toys.

I have a couple of problems with the two key support relationships in the films, as well.

While Alfred is properly depicted as having a disdainful attitude toward Bruce's approach to handling the problems of Gotham—which, frankly, he could and should have much more impact on as a captain of industry than he ever could as Batman—the idea that Alfred is answering questions for Bruce and explaining the nature of the Joker to him works against what that relationship is supposed to be in my mind. Alfred is not an enabler: he's supposed to be the guy who keeps Bruce grounded, even if he has to be snarky to do it.

Lucius Fox I've had a problem with from the beginning, and that problem comes to fruition in this film: the Batman is supposed to be a secret. This movie series gives us three people who know the secret, one of whom apparently keeps files directly pertaining to that secret available for a lawyer to stumble across.

Are Lucius and Bruce really that stupid and clumsy?

This leads me to...

Why it didn't work as a movie, period.

One of my problems with Nolan is that the behaviors of his characters always seem to conveniently fit what he wants them to do to make the plot move forward. There's never a sense for me that the story I'm watching is playing out the way it is because the characters are the way they are. Instead, the characters feel like their roles in the way things play out are conceived as an afterthought to how Nolan has decided they will play out.

For example, the lawyer mentioned above.

It was as though Nolan had decided that he needed a threat for the Joker to unleash on Gotham City, and worked his way backwards from there.

The Joker's plan is to get a normal citizen to become homicidal and kill someone innocent in order to save potentially thousands. The Joker needs someone for them to kill. The Joker is also trying to either kill Batman or get him to quit. How about a guy who is about to reveal Batman's secret, spoiling the Joker's fun? Well, to reveal the secret, he has to know the secret. Who could know the secret? A guy that works for Wayne as a lawyer who somehow comes across the plans for the Tumbler among other things.

But this depends on Wayne and Fox being idiots and leaving that stuff in the system where someone can find it.

Contrast this with Wayne figuring out a way to completely hide the Sonar R&D project from Fox: getting something hidden so deep that even Lucius couldn't ferret it out.

Inconsistent character portrayal based on what the movie needs them to do rather than who they are.

Similarly, the entire business with the ferries full of passengers rings false to me: the Joker comes over the PA system and announces to each boat—filled with 500 or more people—that they have the key to destroying the other boat in their hands. All they have to do is use it and they will be safe from having the other boat use it against them.

Now, maybe I'm crazy, but isn't Joker the bad guy, here? Didn't he lie to Batman about where Rachel was so that Batman would try to save Harvey, instead? Hasn't he been playing tricks on Gotham City for the past few weeks?

Why does no one—of the thousand people on either boat—even bring up the question that he might be lying to them about the detonator? That the real trick here might be that the detonator they're carrying is for their OWN boat, not the other one? Doesn't that seem like a typically Joker thing to do? You turn the key, thinking you're blowing up the other boat and your whole boat goes up in flames?

It's particularly clumsy because it would be an easy thing to get around: simply rig up something between the two boats that allows people to see that the detonator they're holding WILL affect the other boat—a system of cameras and a light that flashes if you turn the key away from the detonation position instead of toward it.

But, well, when the Joker suggests they turn the key, again, he could be lying.

This is how you make things "deep" or "complex:" by exploring the questions your plot brings up rather than ignoring them in favor of moving the story forward, however clumsily.

In the same scenario, we also see some of Nolan's blatant manipulation at work: the convict who demands that the Captain of his ferry give him the detonator. He makes it sound like it's his intent to trigger the detonator and blow the other ship up. You could argue that he does that because if he even hints at what his true intention is, someone's going to try to stop him. But that doesn't work because he's already the biggest guy on the boat and nobody's trying to stop him when he's talking about killing 500 people on the other ferry.

These are not hard problems to find: all you have to do is look past Nolan's slick, manipulative filmmaking and you can see the gaping holes in the foundation of his story. Once I don't buy that people wouldn't question what the Joker is telling them, nothing else that Nolan does with that scene is going to work for me.

I alluded earlier to the chase that Batman makes after what he thinks is Rachel. This, to me, is one of the messiest parts of the story: the Joker tells Batman where Rachel and Harvey are and Batman doesn't even give a hint of questioning whether he's lying. All it would have taken is one line as Batman takes off: after he tells Gordon where to find Harvey, he could simply say, "he might be lying, but we don't have time to second-guess him."

When the police are escorting Harvey across town, the Joker blocks their way with a burning fire engine. The cops elect to go down to "lower fifth," where they lose their air support. They do this despite the lane in the other direction on the upper level being completely clear. As a result, a huge amount of violent destruction ensues, with multiple cops getting killed. If you ask me, what you do in that situation is not follow what the Joker wants. You mess his plan up and see if your own approach to chaos can put him on the defensive.

And that's a fundamental problem with the whole depiction of the Joker: accepting that somehow Batman and Gordon have figured out "the Joker's style" after only two criminal acts, they simply let him manipulate them the whole rest of the way. If they think he's trying to lead them a certain way, they go along with it, and if they don't figure out how he's trying to lead them, they fall into the trap (like the cop who was guarding him).

It's no wonder the Joker was able to outsmart most everyone in Gotham City: the place appears to be fully populated with morons.

This section is for those who call Nolan's version of Batman "realistic."

I don't specifically have a problem with the stuff in this section. It's just that I've seen a lot of people call Nolan's Batman films "realistic," when they are, in fact, just gritty superhero films.

Batman, who's supposed to be a regular guy in an armored costume, reaches out and bends the barrel of a gun with his hand. He also catches the Joker while the Joker is falling off a building, using a cable gun that he holds one-handed to snare and support him.

An 18-wheeler flips end over end because of an elaborate trip-wire.

The destroyed portion of Harvey Dent's face still functioning normally or something close to it.

The magical sonar array that somehow uses phones that aren't even active to create a detailed visual image...even in an building that has only a couple dozen people in it.

Somehow managing to get a fingerprint off a shattered bullet...though there was a certain stupidity in presuming there would be a readable print on a bullet in the first place, especially since half of the bullet is inside the shell-casing when it's being pressed into the magazine. So when Batman finally DOES do some detective work, it's based on a fundamentally wrong assumption about what he could possibly find. More amusingly, the Joker actually uses the found fingerprint as a way to lead Batman into a trap.

A couple of nitpicks

Why would Batman use his Batman voice when speaking to Lucius, given that Lucius knows that he's Bruce? Why not just use the Bruce voice? Surely no one's listening in...

Eric Roberts' character Sal gets dropped off a building by Batman. We hear his ankles break. The next time we see him, he's just kind of hanging around the hospital hallways...on his feet, with no apparent means to support himself from having to stand on those ankles.

Performances.

There were some wonderful performances in the film. Heath Ledger, of course, was wonderfully cracked as the Joker. I was a bit disappointed that he was in the film so little considering the hype I had heard about him. Gary Oldman was his usual fine self in a very understated performance as Gordon. Again, not in the film enough.

Along the way, there were some average performances, as well. Aaron Eckhart—whom I generally love in everything—was very ordinary until he became Two-Face, at which point he really popped as an actor. Maggie Gyllenhall was ok as Rachel, but they really didn't give her much to do. Michael Caine felt to me like he was phoning it in, but Caine phoning it in is still better than most actors busting their asses. Same with Morgan Freeman.

But, frankly, I don't like Christian Bale. I've seen more than half a dozen films with him, and I just don't like his acting choices. For me, he never seems to escape being Christian Bale, no matter how hard he tries: there's this central, brooding core that seems to whine "take me seriously!" and it seems to be lurking in every one of his performances.

How deep does it go?

I suppose if you're going to think of this as a superhero or comic book film, there are things about it that are deeper than other superhero or comic book films. But critics are talking about this like it's a major crime thriller in superhero disguise. Setting aside that the characters are too stone stupid to solve a crime (they let a guy smuggle a carbon fiber gun into a courtroom and somehow don't get all of the Joker's knives away from him when they take him into custody), the depth in this story has to do largely with the Joker trying to get good people to do bad things. He takes an approach similar to what we see in The Killing Joke, telling people, in effect, that they're already so close to evil themselves that it takes only the right situation to push them over the line.

Never mind the fact that the choices he sets up are more about making difficult decisions—killing one to save many—rather than about how close we are to evil. The approach he takes is handled much better in David Fincher's brilliant Se7en, which gives us Kevin Spacey's John Doe character manipulating his foes perfectly: there isn't a single action they take that he hasn't anticipated, and in the end, they're playing completely into his hands. The Joker claims to be a force of chaos who is using the ways of the "planners" against them, yet his own plans require a flawlessness in design that seems to be too dense for our too-dense heroes to penetrate. The only reason he has the upper hand is because these professionals of law enforcement and a superhero who is supposed to be the foremost detective in the world can't seem to figure out what he's likely to do next.

It's Nolan's clumsy manipulation all over again: he wants the Joker to be chaotic and unpredictable, so he makes the characters take stupid guesses, explore blind alleys without thinking, ultimately leading them away from figuring out the twists that were obvious to me as an audience member.

Dr. Horrible, that is.

This week, Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" is being released. It stars Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicity Day in a wonderfully compact musical look at the world of superheroes and their villains.

In typical Whedon fashion, it takes a warped look at the whole topic, giving us a sympathetic bad guy and a jerkwad good guy.

Now as much as I like Nathan Fillion, this one belongs to Neil Patrick Harris from start to finish. Every single line delivery is perfect, and if there's some kind of acting award out there for weird little shows that are only released on the Internet (watch at Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog or buy it through iTunes for just $4 for all three episodes), Neil's going to win it, for sure.

NOTE: MySpace now has the full three-act series up in its video section.

I downloaded the first two Acts yesterday and I've watched them three times each already...they get better with each viewing because you're getting to know the songs.

Oh, yeah...they're not kidding about it being a sing-along. If you liked the musical episode of Buffy, this will be right up your alley: in the first two Acts--less than half an hour--there are about five songs including some very nicely done duets.

This thing's a blast: Acts I and II can be streamed from the site I posted above, with Act III going online tomorrow. Go and enjoy.

EDIT: Act III is up, and it's just as much fun, though a bit darker than the first two bits. As with all things Whedon, the end will leave you thinking about it well after you finish.

"Hey, it's been almost ten years since The Matrix came out. Why don't we make it again?"

Spoilers ahead for Juno and Sweeney Todd.

I haven't been to the movies much, lately. There just hasn't been much out that has been appealing to me, which kind of sucks because I can look out my window and see the local theatre.

Today, I went to see Juno and Sweeney Todd, which may be the strangest double-feature I've experienced. While I was watching them, though, I realized that technology has changed the way I'm watching movies.

Not digital projection--though that's had an impact, too--but the ongoing struggle for supremacy between Blu-ray and HD DVD.

About mid-way through Juno, I realized I was probably going to want to buy the disc when it was released. Since I have a PS3, I try to buy exclusively Blu-ray stuff right now. So right in the middle of the movie, I'm trying to remember which studio released it so that I'll know if I'll be able to get it. Answer: Fox Searchlight, Blu-ray, yes.

(And don't ask me why I remembered the studio midway through the film. That seems strange even to me.)

Here's a mini review of Juno:

It's what I wanted Knocked Up to be: Knocked Up was about an unexpected pregnancy forcing two people to grow up. Juno is about an unexpected pregnancy making at least one person realize that they weren't at all ready to grow up.

It was much more credible to me to see a character back away from the challenges of having children than to see a perpetual underachiever suddenly wake up and grow up simply because the point of the story required it.

But what really amazed me about Juno was that it was so much about broken people. Everyone in it is in some respects a patchwork person who is just trying to get by. Even the movie's "bad guy" was just someone who didn't realize until he was pressed that the direction his life was going in was not what he wanted.

Very funny, very profane, and altogether very human. Well worth seeing.

After Juno ended, I went to Sweeney Todd, which was in the auditorium next door.

Another film worth seeing, but if you don't realize it's a musical going in, you may find yourself--like the people who were sitting next to me--walking out before 20 minutes are up.

Yes, this is an adaptation of the most violent and bloody musical ever produced on Broadway, as handled by the director with the imagination to suit it.

And it actually worked as a movie. For something so dependent on stagecraft and stage presence, it at once felt very alien and very intimate. I'm sure people who really know the stage play probably feel that this didn't come up to the classic performances of Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, but I liked it.

Enough to think about getting it when the disc is released. Wait...what studio released it? Dreamworks? HD DVD. Grr.

So apparently until the format war ends, this is going to be part of my experience any time I see a movie, which is making the movie experience feel kind of empty, after the fact. I don't like having commercial concerns while I'm trying to enjoy a movie.

For the past year, a ridiculous amount of my life has been tedium. There have been punctuating moments of fun and joy, but for the most part, it's really just been a grind.

As a result, most of my spare time is spent looking for entertainment. After sitting around doing nothing at work, I get slothful and decadent and expect someone else to amuse me.

Or I play a game and expect someone else to amuse me in an interactive way.

The biggest break from this has been the games I play with friends, primarily music-oriented games in which we all can pretend to be playing instruments without ever having to study or practice.

To that end, I have been anticipating a game called Rock Band, that allows four friends to perform a song together, with two people playing simulated guitar and bass, one person playing slightly-less-simulated drums, and the fourth actually singing.

I got the game on release day and five of us over the course of about 16 hours played the crazies out of it.

The only disappointment was that the game wasn't compatible with another game's guitar controller, so we were forced to play three-at-a-time instead of as a quartet.

Well, the developers of Rock Band understood the problem and worked out a way for Rock Band to use the controller in question. They finished the modification about two weeks ago.

It still hasn't been released.

Turns out that Activision, distributor of the incompatible controller, has moved to block release of the fix.

This made me rather grumpy.

As much as I enjoyed Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2, the only reason I bought Guitar Hero 3 was because I was led to understand that the controller would be compatible with Rock Band.

And now I hear the murmurs, "why, Don," you are murmuring, "if you liked Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2, why weren't you more excited about Guitar Hero 3?"

Which is actually a very good question to be murmuring. Gold star.

Because, I reply in a loud, clear voice, Harmonix, the company that created and developed the software for Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2 didn't develop the software for Guitar Hero 3.

They were too busy working on Rock Band.

And so, the light comes on over your head and I can quit writing in a condescending tone. Another gold star for putting up with it.

Well, this, that, and the other and the two different games come out that follow two different standards and thus won't work together.

As a software guy, I can understand and live with that.

But this business of blocking a piece of software that was developed to give Activision access to more software than they are currently limited to.

Well, it has made me rather grumpy.

And, yes, I do know it's a video game and I'm not actually playing guitar or bass. And that's where the title of this blog comes from. In the grand scheme, it's pretty darned unimportant. This is the most banal of trivialities compared to the fact that I got into an accident on October 21st and I'm still paying for a rental car while I wait to get my car back. That's something to get grumpy and write about.

But, frankly, nothing can be done about that.

Activision had the fate of this fix in their hands, and rather than come down on the side of consumers, they elected to be insular and proprietary about it. Reading the announcement about the fix being blocked, you could almost hear their lawyers sneering, "yeah, but what's in it for us?"

Well, anyway, I took a moment to vent my grumpiness with Activision in an email, and I enjoyed writing it so much that, hey, I figured I'd spread the joy by sharing it here with you.

So, without further ado, my slightly edited email to Activision, which was submitted in a box labeled "Question:"

* * *

Less of a question, more of an objection. Surely not the first one you've heard on the subject nor nearly the last.

Please allow Sony to release the Harmonix Rock Band patch that allows the Guitar Hero III Les Paul controller to work with Rock Band.

I shelled out money for the PS3 version of Guitar Hero III because of word I had heard of controller compatibility between the two games. If not for that information--which turned out to be more incomplete than misleading--I would not have purchased your product at all.

Please be patient while I repeat that: if not for information regarding compatibility between the Guitar Hero III Les Paul controller and Rock Band, I WOULD NOT HAVE BOUGHT YOUR PRODUCT AT ALL.

With the news that your company is now standing in the way of making that compatibility a reality, I feel phenomenally cheated by your product relative to Rock Band: there are fewer songs that I like, fewer master tracks in the main game, worse online support, more trouble with guitar lag, song charts that seem designed more to be difficult than to be musical, problems with frame rate that actually impact gameplay...

(Wow...this is quite a list...until I stopped and thought about it, I hadn't realized just how much I detest the Guitar Hero III product as released for the PS3...)

...inferior graphics, poor redesign of Guitar Hero characters, no improvements in gameplay (Boss battles in a guitar game? What?), and no dedication to improving the game experience--just a rehash of what we've already seen in two games and an expansion pack.

But come to think of it, I don't know why I should expect Activision to support the compatibility of their controller with another game on the PS3 when it seems you've barely made an effort to support compatibility with your own game.

Please stand aside in your efforts to hamper PS3 users from using your product with a game that's worthy of the engineering efforts that went into it.