Year: 2008

Swiss Chalet Fries – Possibly the best in North America when done right

French FriesSwiss Chalet is a franchise available almost exclusively in Canada. There are a sorry few (3 as of this writing) stores in the United States, but generally you need to travel to the GWN to sample the Swiss Chalet cuisine.

As of late, the past 5-6 years, Swiss Chalet has become less and less dependable for good food or service. But when it’s good it’s *really* good. Their strip fries are slightly greasy with crispy portions on the outside and wonderfully greasy inside. They hold their own against ketchup or their wonderful Swiss Chalet sauce (both at the same time if you are adventurous) and rate a solid 5 out of 5 on Marc’s french fry scale.

Are airports destined to be the bus terminals of the future?

Airport to Bus TerminalI was discussing airplanes with my father earlier today and how the advent of smaller, more affordable jet aircraft will likely affect air travel of the future. Right now such aircraft are so expensive that only very wealthy folks or corporations can afford to take advantage of them. But with new “air taxi” services starting to come online hosting fleets of smaller, much more affordable aircraft, and with our wonderful TSA with all their extremism, I can see a stratification of air travel on the horizon.

Right now we have the big, stuffy common carriers – who fight tooth and nail to ensure that there are no laws to protect the rights of the traveling public – and the more agile economy carriers – who work hard to keep air travel at reasonable prices.

The Achilles heel of both carriers is that they must operate out of airports that are governed by, with all due respect, unimaginative, pandering dolts. There is a tremendous potential market growing out there as America’s super-affluent middle class decides that it would much rather not be caged in airplanes waiting for delayed flight slots or trapped in airports after having surrendered dignity and just-as-valuable time to get past the uninspired, callous, rude and ineffective security systems.

I am predicting that regional airports in America need to gear up for a boon in business as America’s middle class begin to discover affordable air transportation alternatives in their local cities while the poorer classes become relegated to the airports for long-distance travel much as the current underclass are today relegated to bus terminals for their travel needs. Just as with the bus terminal class, poorer folks do not have options and cannot exercise their power to shop elsewhere. But many Americans have more money now than they know what to do with. It will be interesting to see how much dignity is worth in airfare price premium.

*Update* Just saw this story about folks being kept on a Delta plane for 7 hours on Friday… *sigh*

Wildest Police Videos – Who thinks those special effects are helping the show?

John BunnellHoly cow! My TIVO offered me “Wildest Police Videos” today in the suggestions section so I thought I’d take a peek. The special effects are even worse now than they were before when I gave up watching it a couple of years ago.

I really enjoy watching the type of videos presented in this show, and host John Bunnell, while a little big on himself, is an entertaining enough host/voiceover. But who is the genius who thinks that every time a car moves there needs to be the sound of screeching tires, or whenever a tractor trailer is shown that we need to hear a truck horn sounding.

Also, I think a good quarter of television viewers these days must have some kind of DVR unit now where they can replay these videos as they see fit (if not, and they want the replay ability, they can buy one). I think it would be useful to replay the action now and then for some crucial segment to make a point, but pointlessly replaying the entire video segment by segment over and over again is obviously just trying to fill up the timeslot with no value-add to the presentation. Even cutting to the host and having him stand there and describe the action is preferable to those terrible effects.

I finally got fed up with the excess and just deleted the program without even getting half way through it.

What is really needed is to have the already great action sequences with John’s description of the circumstances (largely what he’s doing now) and then, to fill in the time freed up by not replaying each scene a half dozen times, have some follow up to the action. You know, “Was sentenced to 5 years in jail.” or “The policeman was injured but returned to work after 3 weeks.”.

This stuff is already sensational enough, it doesn’t need any help. Just some context.

“David Blaine’s” Street Magic

This spoof on those street magic videos is great. What do you think would happen if someone *really* could do the tricks that those street magicians do… and doesn’t stop doing them?

The two hapless marks in these videos are a riot, and “David Blaine” takes himself *almost* as seriously as the real thing…

The other videos in this series are here and here.

How to fix choosing the wrong CDDB album when ripping CDs in iTunes?

RecallI run Vista Home Premium and am using iTunes 7.5 as I write this.

I’m currently ripping the latest Harry Potter audiobook so that I can listen to it on my iPod. For most discs I am prompted to choose which “album” I wish to use. For consistency I am going with each track named as a chapter/letter (i.e. 1a, 1b, etc.).

Somebody, with a different numbering scheme inadvertently used the identical album naming convention so, for one of my discs I had to guess (hey 50% odds, not bad right?) when I chose the “other album” I ended up with different chapter names.

Now, when I pull the CD out and re-insert it, iTunes has locally recorded the incorrect track names for me and associated them with some unique identifier on the disc. How to remove the association between an CD and the CDDB album information once you’ve selected it?

Since I don’t really use CDs except to rip them to my collection, losing that information is not a big deal for me. So I just shut down iTunes, went to “C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes” and deleted the “CD Info.cidb” file.

Start up iTunes, insert the disk and *presto* I’m again prompted for the album. I will, of course, be prompted for every audio CD I stick in my CD player going forward, but again, that’s not an issue for me.

How to rip an audiobook to iTunes so it has bookmarks

RecallI won’t debate the ethics of ripping and sharing CDs in this post. Suffice it to say that folks who know me know my stand on this issue.

Where I can get audiobooks already in MP3 format I just do that. It saves a LOT of hassle. I even will get them in DRM’d format as I don’t tend to listen to audiobooks more than once.

But there is still a lot of content out there that you can get only on CD that I want to listen to on my iPod (I don’t have a CD player in my car, nor do I intend to get one), so I consider it fair use to purchase the CD and rip it for my own use on my iPod.

Steps:

  • I tend to listen to lengthy audiobooks (ones that I really wouldn’t have the time to read) so they often have many CDs. In iTunes I go to Edit > Preferences…  then click on the “Advanced” tab and then on the importing sub-tab I temporarily set:
  • “On CD Insert” = “Import CD and Eject”,
  • “Import using” = “AAC Encoder”,
  • “Setting” = “High Quality (128 kbps)”  <– personal preference, you can set for “Spoken Podcast” but I like the higher sound quality better.
  • Start putting your CDs in and, with luck, you’ll be offered albums from CDDB that will label your tracks for you. When  there is a conflict (sometimes different CD tracks are uploaded for the same CDs – usually by folks with differing ideas about how the tracks should be labeled), you’ll be offered a choice of available albums. You aren’t given anything more than the album name (no track details) at this stage, so pick one and make sure that you pick the same “style” from now on so that all your tracks will be labeled consistently. I’ll post a subsequent article about how to correct an incorrect choice in a few days.
  • Once you’ve pulled in all of your CDs fire up xnview (a free graphic and photoviewer) and navigate to where your tracks are located. If you don’t know where this is, right-click on the track in iTunes and choose “Show in Windows Explorer” (sorry Mac users). You may find that your tracks have been stored in more than one folder depending on the naming that you got from CDDB. In xnview, select all of the *.m4a files (aac encoded) and right click to select “Rename…”.
  • You’ll be presented with a dialog titled “Batch Rename” (as of xnview version 1.91.6). In the upper right corner check the “Extension” box and type “m4b”. You’ll see all the files you selected with the old name and the proposed new names showing at the bottom of this dialog. Click “Rename”.
  • Back in iTunes, select all of the tracks that you’ve just renamed and delete them (you’ll see little exclamation points appearing beside them as iTunes figures out that it can no longer find the files).
  • Then select File > Add Folder to Library… and choose the folders with the renamed files in them.
  • For ease of listening I create a smart playlist for these audiobooks:
  • I usually use the “Album Name contains” and use some significant part of the audiobook name
  • I also specify that the play count < 1
  • Make sure you sort by the track name. If you end up with a bad sorting order (sometimes happens with > 9 chapters), consider making two smart playlists and then use the Rating to separate them – one star rating for the first 9 chapters, none for the rest and then add this as a criteria for the smarplaylist.

Then, when I’m driving (my most frequent listening venue) all I need to do after I’ve selected the playlist and listened to the playlist starting from the beginning. If, in “settings” on the iPod, I have “Shuffle” set to “songs” then my iPod will stop after each track (my preferred method). I hit the middle button 4 times and I get the next track (the “count” parameter above excludes the one(s) I’ve already listened to). If I have “Shuffle” set to “none” then the iPod will play each track in sequence.  This is different between my older generation iPod (which does not refresh the list dynamically) and my current one (iPod Video – 30 GB) so YMMV.

Hopefully you find this useful.