Controlling instead of practicing

I don't practice at home during the weekdays because the sticks are too loud on the DD-65 even if the sound is muted. I thought that I could practice the patterns on the computer keyboard with some music software or - to have more fun - on a midi pad controller. After some research I found this one:

AKAI LPD8 MIDI controller

It has arrived on Wednesday but I only had time for investigating its potential over the weekend. First I had problems to make any sound with it. It took some time until I found a software which routes the MIDI messages to the built-in MIDI synth of Windows XP. But it was useless. The latency was so big that it was not possible to play any rhythm with it. I was hoping that it's because the poor performance of XP's soft synth and not because of the controller. Then I found a very simple MIDI enabled sampler. The latency decreased a lot, but it was still not good enough for playing. Then I thought.. why not just use my DD-65's brain for the music synthesis? I plugged it into my computer and routed the messages from the LPD8 to the Yamaha drum kit. And then finally the magic happened. The drums responded immediately once I pressed a pad on the controller. :) And we have arrived at the end of the weekend. I can't wait till the next one. :)