You need Mountain Dew (diet will work but is not as good) and 99 BlackBerries.  Simply mix approximately 4 parts Mt. Dew for each part 99 Blackberries.

Be careful, this is one strong drink that tastes like Koolaid.  The caffeine will keep you on your feet much longer than you would think and if you are not paying attention you could have over a dozen shots in you before you even realize that you are drinking.  Very tasty and very potent.  Remember that 99 Blackberries is 99 Proof!  That is more than normal vodka or whisky.  Mixing 4:1 makes it 20 Proof.  So if you put this in a 20oz glass like most people do you are drinking 20oz of 20 Proof!!!  (Read: one sip, two sip, three sip, floor.)

If you are like me and never pull out the directions to the game you might get confused by the fact that there is no “run” option in the combat menu.  This lead me to believe that I had to fight the dragon.  I looked online and no one else is mentioning not knowing how to run away so I figured that I needed to post for those who are stuck and lost at this point.

In order to run from the dragon Bahamut you must hit the Right and Left shoulder buttons of the DS together instead of choosing to attack or use magic.  This will silently trigger the run option.  It is a very confusing bit of the combat interface and unnecessarily so.

Don’t worry that Bahamut will likely kill one or more of your party before you manage to escape.  Anyone who dies is magically alive again immediately after the battle.

I did not find out until tonight, I presume, because it was too hard for Sofia, who was only two years old’s, owners and they did not post the announcement of her passing on to her MySpace page until today.  I have been watching the page for over a year hoping that it meant that she had survived the poisoning but sadly that was not the case.

I’m sure that Adrienne Ostrowski, Sofia’s mom, misses her horribly.  I can only imagine how awful it would have been had Oreo left us.

R.I.P. Sofia.  July 5, 2004 – May 8, 2007.  Our thoughts are with you and your family.

Unless otherwise stated I do my conversions to the .mp4 MPEG4 container and extension using h.264 for the video and AAC for the audio. My intent is to have videos that play with excellent quality with consideration to storage requirements on my first generation AppleTV and on VLC. I am not concerned with compression time. I always use two pass compression and do not select “turbo first pass.”  I always use the “H.264 (x264)” codec option considering the target devices that I intend to use.

Update: I have since added a Sony Platstation 3 (PS3) to my output targets and am now using Handbrake 0.9.3 which is needed to support the PS3 due to codec limitations.  I am using this settings for AppleTV, PS3 and VLC for desktop use.

Anamorphic Cinema Content from 480p Source (such as DVD)

Bitrate: 2,500Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 160Kb/s – 48 & AC3 Pass-Through
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: On
Keep Aspect Ratio: On
Detelecine: VBR
Container: .m4v (Needed for AppleTV support of dual audio.)

Wide Screen HDTV Content from 480p Source

Bitrate: 2,200Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 160Kb/s – 48 & AC3 Pass-Through
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: On
Keep Aspect Ratio: On
Container: .m4v

Newer American Television NTSC (1990s Sitcoms)

Bitrate: 1,800Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 160Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: On

Traditional American Television (1980s Sitcoms)

Bitrate: 1,600Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 128Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak

Old British Television (1980s Britcoms)

Bitrate: 1,200Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 112Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slow
Denoise: Weak

Cartoons

Bitrate: 400Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 112Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: Off
Decomb: On

Hopefully this collection of settings will provide you with a starting point in getting the most out of Handbrake. At this time I am currently using Handbrake 0.93 and getting great results from the x.264 encoder. For computer based playback I highly recommend the use of VLC over QuickTime as its playback is much smoother.

More details as soon as I am able to play with it on Friday night.

Episode 56

• High Child – I Tell All My Secrets To My Guitar
• Ken Campbell – Tune for November
• Dust Rhinos – Mari Mac

Episode 54

• Dust Rhinos – Sailing with the Captain
• Dust Rhinos – Jedi Drinking Song
• Dust Rhinos – New York Girls (Live)

Episode 53

• Patra – Les Bigos
• Greg Tannen – Coney Island, Mid July
• David Ippolito – Tom Cruise Scares Me

Episode 52

• Aaron – All Fall Down
• Lee Coulter – Dance of the Traveling Lovers
• Kelly Brock – Maybe I’m In Love

Episode 51

• Lockdown – Hot
• Heather Sullivan – Stronger
• Greg Tannen – It’s You

Episode 50

• Hungry Lucy – Rainfall
• Dropkick – Dog and Cat
• Heather Sullivan – Somewhere There Lies the Moon

Episode 49

• Beat Assassins – Going Crazy
• Amy Courts – Company
• Katy Pfaffl – Beautiful

Episode 48

• Delphinium Blue – Boy Seventeen
• Radney Foster – Half of My Mistakes

Episode 47

• Beatrice Ericsson – Put A Little Love
• Amy Ayers – Ordinary Girl
• Delphinium Blue – Joy
• Munk – Perfect

Episode 46

• Katy Pfaffl – Someday
• Amy Dalley – Or Not
• Amy Dalley – Today
• Joe Stevens – And I Love Her

Episode 45

• Beatrice Ericsson – I Walked Away
• Lascivious Biddies – Famous
• Greg Tannen – Mary

Episode 44

• Beatrice Ericsson – Reach Out
• Whitney Steele – Movie Star
• Jeremy Kushnier – Angel Light

Episode 43

• Amy Ayers – My Place
• Berman – No One Understands
• Elisabeth Lohninger Quartet – Frag mich nicht, ob ich Dich liebe

Episode 42

• Whitney Steele – Crazy
• Alice Maria – Bring the Guitar
• KidMusic – Love After Love

Episode 41

• Lascivious Biddies – Betty
• Hungry Lucy – In the Circle
• Katy Wehr – Daddy Was A Lake

Episode 40

• Civilians – Let Go
• Delphinium Blue – Body of My Lover
• Katy Wehr – Minnehaha
• SkyKarR – The Beauty of Imperfection
• Cybster DJ (Feat. Adam Curry) – BioDiesel

Episode 39

• Friction Bailey – Auld Lang Syne
• Heather Sullivan – Twisted
• Nicole Hunt – Driven

Episode 38

• Dusty Hughes – Do You Hear
• Derek K. Miller – We Three Kings

Episode 37

• Friction Bailey – Silent Night
• The New Autonomous Folksingers – O Holy Night

Episode 36

• Option 42 – Raindrop Rhapsody
• Lynn Julian – Ham for the Holidays

Episode 35

• Jill Parr – Do You Hear What I Hear
• Podsafe for Peace – If Everyday Was Christmas

Episode 34

• Raym Barrett
• Friction Bailey

Episode 33

• Isaac Angel – Come Away
• Boxhedge Clippers – Hit Me Baby (One More Time)
• Amy Ayers
• Willie Shutter – Difference Inbetween
• Bari Koral – Aspiring Angel

Episode 32

• Beatrice Ericsson – Christmas Without You

Episode 31

• Everything Taken
• Epitaph
• Whitney Steele
• Twelve34 – Too Damn Late

Episode 30

• Manic Drive

Episode 29

• SkyKarR

Episode 28

• Sealed Weasels

Episode 27

• Hungry Lucy

Episode 26

• Allison Crowe

Episode 25

• Arschpopeng – Popeng Polka

Episode 24

• Sub-Level 2

Episode 23

• Andrew Buscemi – Kiema

Episode 22

• Farewell June – Irony

Episode 21

• Tangential Cold – Latino Chino

Episode 20

• Lynn Julian – If Farts Were Made Out of Superball Stuff

IBM officially announced its own product this morning based on OpenOffice: Lotus Symphony. Like its OpenOffice parent, Lotus Symphony is available for free.

SUN still makes StarOffice which is also based on OpenOffice although, at this time, it is still not available for free.  StarOffice is unlikely to ever be offered for free as SUN considers it to be the “paid support” version of OpenOffice.  Therefore if you want it without support you simply choose OpenOffice instead.

• Linux 301: Introduction to Linux System Administration (May 11, 2006)
• Firewall Basics (June 15, 2006)
• Network Attached Storage Basics (June 15, 2006)
• Project Management Made Simple (June 15, 2006)
• Wireless Security In Depth (June 15, 2006)
• Advanced Network Administration Best Practices for IT (June 15, 2006)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003: Administering (July 13, 2006)
• Protect Your Data: Back up to tape, disk and the network (July 13, 2006)
• Create Your Own Marketing Materials with Free Templates (July 13, 2006)
• Security for IT Professionals (July 13, 2006)
• Microsoft Access 2003: Introduction (July 13, 2006)
• Introduction to Storage Networks (September 24, 2007)

A large number of the games that I ended up with on the SNES were given to me when the console was fairly old and were not titles that I would have spent my own money on. My big titles for the console were the Mario games (because I had never had an original NES and they were practically new to me) and the RPGs like Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger. The one odd game out that was a real classic for me on this platform was Dark Waters 2.

• Super Mario World
• Super Mario All Stars
• Secret of Mana
• Chrono Trigger
• Dark Waters 2: New Horizons
• Earthbound
• Eye of the Beholder
• Drakkhen
• Ys III: Wanders from Ys
• NBA Jam
• NBA Live 95

The games that we owned for the Amiga were on 3.5″ floppy and have mostly deteriorated and no longer exist in a usable form. The computer still works fine, as of 2007, but sees little action. I have done my best to compile a list of the games that I owned and actually played on the system.

• Bard’s Tale
• Deja Vu
• Deja Vu II
• Uninvited
• Shadowgate
• Faery Tale Adventure
• Adventure Construction Set
• Pool of Radiance
• Curse of the Azure Bonds
• Hillsfar
• Double Dragon
• Ikari Warriors
• Rambo III
• Lemmings
• King’s Quest I
• Black Cauldron
• Ballistix
• Arctic Fox
• Arthur: Quest for Excalibur
• Shogun
• Hacker
• World Games
• SimCity
• Microsoft’s Flight Simulator
• Winter Games
• Seven Cities of Gold
• Omnicron Conspiracy
• SkyFox

• Suikoden
• Chrono Cross
• Final Fantasy VII
• Parasite Eve

We returned from Frankfort and decided to give them until Tuesday to deliver the desk before calling. So yesterday I called and talked to customer service about the desk. They said that they couldn’t help me (great customer service) but that someone from the warehouse would call me back (I assumed later that evening.) I thought that it was strange both that the customer service team couldn’t answer questions about the status of my order and that they thought that the warehouse would be useful since the one thing that they were able to determine for me was that the desk had not been shipped at all.

So tonight when I got home I decided that I needed to follow up as obviously the unshipped desk did not arrive nor did the warehouse call. Apparently the warehouse has little interest in shipping products or doing good customer service. So I called customer service again and they explained that the warehouse needs at least forty-eight hours before they would call back. The excuse for this turn around time was that the warehouse needed time to check with the shipping partner as to the status of the order. I could see this if, in fact, the warehouse had shipped my desk but in this case they had not. They were simply stalling.

I explained that it was not appropriate for the customer service department to stall on my for forty-eight hours on an item that I was trying to find out why it hadn’t been shipped in seventy-two hours especially when I had given them much longer than that in the first place. Had the customer service representative yesterday decided to actual take care of me they would have immediately cancelled the order and had a new replacement desk shipped immediately since it would be likely to arrive, assuming the warehouse people decide to show up to work at all, around the same time that the warehouse is supposed to return my call to let me know that they don’t intend to ever ship my original desk. The first customer service representative simply took the path of least resistance, acting like she was solving my problem and brushed me off.

Tonight the customer service representative was going to simply let me continue to have nothing done for me explaining that it was the warehouse’s problem and not customer service’s – something that should never, ever be said or implied to a customer. I mentioned that if the desk was ordered today that it would, hopefully, arrive within seventy-two hours but that if we waited for the warehouse to tell us what we already knew – that the desk had not yet been shipped – that it would take at least one day longer for no reason.  She agreed and went ahead and cancelled my current order and placed a new order for the desk which should, in theory, arrive within the next three business day.

Given that we know that it takes the warehouse forty-eight hours to respond to a request for information concerning a shipped product it therefore makes sense that the only reasonable way to get a good turnaround time from them is for me to then open a customer service request tomorrow.  If I open a case tomorrow then the warehouse should get back to me to let me know whether or not they have bothered to ship this new desk by the exact same time that it should, at the latest, have arrived.

I have often said that the true quality of a company is not seen until you have something go wrong.  Every companies makes mistakes and has problems.  There is no way around that.  Customer service is the place where companies have an opportunity to fix things that are wrong or to make them worse.  In the case of OfficeMax, they made it worse.  They could have shipped out a replacement desk immediately but instead totally blew me off the first time from customer service, then blew me off via the warehouse and then only did anything to resolve the issue when I proposed the only logical solution.  Why didn’t either of the customer service representatives take the initiative to fix the problem rather than just pass it off to the warehouse whom they knew were going to call for several days and knew that they hadn’t shipped the desk at all?  And why is the warehouse allowed to sit on a customer service issue for two days when they could tell me instantly that they had missed the order and needed to ship it right away.  The entire system is built for the purpose of stalling.

The only thing that I can imagine is that OfficeMax is stalling because they already have my money and just by holding onto my money they get to earn a little bit on it before they actually deliver the product that I paid for.  Even now I had to pay for the second desk (which we don’t even know that they are going to ship) up front just for the honor of possibly getting the service that I already paid for two weeks ago.  And, at some point, I will get credited for the original desk whose order has been cancelled.  So even now I am not getting the same level of service that I should expect should I be a new customer at this point.  A new customer would at least not have to have money held for a desk that OfficeMax just decided not to deliver!

Altogether, even though the customer service representatives were “friendly” this has been one of the most disappointing customer service situations that I have ever experienced and has totally turned me off to OfficeMax.  I was so happy with the products and the ordering just two weeks ago and I have used them for years but they managed to show to me that all of that good service was just a thin veil over a completely customer unfriendly organization.  They proved to me this week that they have absolutely no interest in having me as a customer nor fulfilling their obligations of sending the order that they had happily taken my money for.

The bottom line is that to my face people acted friendly but the actions, which speak louder than the words, were rude and obnoxious.  And now I am back to the beginning.  Maybe they will ship me a desk.  Maybe they won’t.  It will be another week before I have any way to know.  Even if I open a case to find out if it is shipping tomorrow I should not expect the warehouse to let me know whether or not they are going to ship me the desk until next week.

The worst part of the whole thing is that after all of the arguing and fighting over the fire drills and making a big deal that the fire drills were over this notice has gone out without so much as a peep or acknowledgement that they had just told us that this wouldn’t happen again.  They are acting as if they never made the “you may now stop ignoring the fire alarms” notice.  I can’t believe that the don’t have even the slightest hint at an apology for having made a big to-do about no more fire alarms.  It isn’t like months have past.  We have barely had the usual period between fire drills.  In fact, I don’t believe that we have missed a single “every other week” fire drill like we have always had.  Nothing has changed.  Not one thing.   Not the fire drills.  Not the lies.  And not the BS.

P.S. I am still waiting, after about two months, for the manager to call me back after they made a point of explaining how I could call the manager anytime that I wanted to to talk about the fire drill situation.