If you know us, you know that we love Guitar Hero and just over a week ago a new game called Rockband was released and was delivered straight in the loving arms of Gaffbhala. The game is exactly the same as the GH series only that RB comes with a mini drumkit and microphone enabling 4 people to play at the same time on drums, bass, guitar and vocals! A perfect game for me and my fellow housemates!

I’ve been playing it quite heavily over the past week or so and the other day I managed to complete the solo tour on the drums on hard mode. I sat my self down for a few hours every evening after work and ploughed my way through it.

My next step is to step it up a notch and try and complete it on expert difficulty Which should be fine for half of the songs but there are some pretty tough ones once you get into the tour! What I’m looking to though is that after I complete the drum solo tour I have the whole guitar tour to look forward to!

Last weekend I attended the Heineken Cup Final 2008 between Munster and Toulouse. In short, the experience was incredible. Following is an account of the weekend, one of most memorable of my life.

I left work at the usual time of 5pm on Friday 23rd May 2008. Except this time I had a bit more of the Friday feeling than usual. I was finally on my way to Cardiff for the European Rugby Cup Final between Munster and Toulouse. I had bought tickets way back before the season began and Munster had come a long way, fighting to come top of the pool of death and beating both Gloucester and Saracens in away quarter and semi finals respectively. Now they faced the giants of European rugby, Toulouse, in a very fitting end to their European Cup campaign.

My excitement heightened as I passed through security and noted that the vast majority of travellers that evening were dressed in red Munster jerseys sporting the familiar white Toyota text. As I approached my gate, it became clear to me that supporters were trying to get to anywhere at all in the UK that they could, regardless of distance from Cardiff. I presumed they would later worry about getting to Cardiff from Glasgow, Newcastle or Manchester or wherever they were flying to. It never ceases to amaze me how determined Munster fans are to get to a match.
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I’ve made a couple more songs the past few months in my boredom. So if you liked my post a couple of months back you might as well have a listen Check them out below or download if you fancy!

Belts

Download

Twelfth

Download

Since I was a kid I have always been into computer games. It all started with my Atari 2800, then onto the NES, Sega MegaDrive, SNES, N64, Xbox, and now Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, plus the odd bit of PC gaming along the way. Only during college I got a taste at some simple game design and programming and I have been meaning to get into it ever since. The picture on the right is a screen shot of a flash game I made in 4th year with Trish and another programmer plus two digital artists. The game was entitled ‘The Cloning’!

I have decided to get into game development as a hobby and what better way to start than try and get into Microsoft XNA. The nerdy rundown speil: “Microsoft XNA is a set of tools, complete with a managed runtime environment, provided by Microsoft, that facilitates computer game design, development, and management. XNA does this by freeing game designers from writing “repetitive boilerplate code”, and brings all aspects of game production into a single system.”

I’ll start by downloading the XNA development platform and I’ll try and look through some of the examples, tweaking around with some of the code. I have never programmed in .NET before so it might take me a while to get into it. But if its as simple as microsoft say it is I might be able to get my head around it. My housemate Ali also shares an interest in this so we’re going to try and combine both our efforts and design a game over the summer.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and I hope we’ll stick with it. Hopefully,we’ll have a simple game up and running that we can deploy on my Xbox 360 at the end of the summer

Let the nerding commence

Woohoo, Im off to Joe Satriani tonight!

For those of you who don’t know him, he is an electric guitar user, abuser and maestro. There are few people in the world who can actually extract juices from an instrument, but he is one of them and he’s playing in Vicar Street tonight at 7:30pm.I’m heading in with a few lads from work to view this guitar orgy first hand.

Suffice to say, ill probably come home and break my guitar into pieces because Ill never be that good.

Check out his myspace here for tracks etc.

I can’t believe it! I actually found my charger for my Sony Handycam I have not been able to use the thing for the past three months! The most annoying thing is that it was in a bag FULL of cables which I had previously checked at least 5 times… So if I looked harder those 5 times I would have had it ages ago! The funny thing is that I was actually looking for my headphone mixer and after about 5 minutes of looking for that I found the charger! Woohoo! Expect to see loads more rediculous footage and Gaffbhala malarky! Plus a music video for our latest Sonic theme song cover (this time Emerald Hill Zone). Check out the last one we did here!

Ok ok ok… this is just bizarre. Any of you who know us will have heard us utter the phrase ‘Chechens’ now and again. Before I go any further, let me give you a brief history of how this phrase came about and what it means.

A long long time ago I was sitting in a bar (how many stories start with this sentence?!) with Ali and his mate Dave from college amongst others. I noticed that Dave would regularly say “chat to you” whenever he was saying goodbye to somebody. However he didn’t pronounce it quite that eloquently. He kind of said it so fast that is came out as “chacha”. I thought this was hilarious and I took it on myself, saying chacha to people as a farewell.

Fast forward several years to gaffbhala where the phrase ‘chacha’ was adopted by Ali, Dan and Wig too. Its use was even expanded and the word chacha began to be uttered as an exclamation. For example, if Dan were to mess up a really easy section on Guitar Hero, I might say “Oh! Chacha!”. So anyway, as with most slang, the more we said the phrase, the more it morphed into other phrases. Some of the changes it went through were Chechnya, Chechnyan Jazz, Chechnens and finally ended up at simply ‘Chechens’.

So imagine my surprised last night when I was around at Emsy and her mum’s house and I noticed an article lying on the kitchen table about Chechens! I could hardly believe my eyes! So of course I took a quick snap with my phone and here it is. For everybody to enjoy in all its glory. Whatever next?!

On Friday morning a bunch of us (Ali, Lap, Lex, Mick, Róisín and Myself) are heading over to Minehead over in the UK for the music festival, All Tomorrows Parties! The festival is curated by the fantastic band, Explosions in the Sky! All Tomorrows Parties happens many times a year all over the world, and each time a different band takes on the role of inviting their favourite bands to come and play! So if you really like the band hosting, you’re bound to like the rest of them. Some highlights are: Battles, Broken Social Scene, Dinosaur Jr, Mono, Four Tet and De La Soul!

The festival is held in Butlins Holiday Centre over in Minehead and apparently all the activities will be available to us! So we better make sure we pack our swimming gear as there is a huge water park there! We’re sleeping in a six bed self catering apartment in the resort too which will feel very odd at a festival! So tent fun for us!

We’ve got an early flight on Friday and a mid afternoon flight back on Monday so we’ll all be getting two four day weeks in a row Hate that people in employment!

Oh yeah! We bought a BBQ up in Dunnes Stores last sunday! Tested it out the next day and it works a treat BBQ + Sun + Tuborg - Work = Happy Times! Click below for some photos!

A goof friend of Gaffbhala was in Japan and came across this in the street. Grioch is big news over there!