March 2005 Archives

A view from the 2nd Floor of the atrium (3 levels up from the bottom)

Mmm.... everything tastes good covered in chocolate. No wonder Llew wants a chocolate covered boy.

I mentioned a while back that I recently moved into a new office (campus) that the CEO/owner of the company built (since we'd outgrown our old office and distribution center). It's out here in Riverton, UT way away from everything. On the positive side, it's peaceful out here. The downside is that the drive is longer, but it's not bad. It's by far a better working environment then the tower at the Jordan Commons was. Above you can see the atrium area of the building-- or at least the water "feature" (if that's what it's called) that takes up most of the room. Now that it's finally finished it should be a nice way to escape work for a few minutes without leaving the campus. This building is amazing.

Today is the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new building. It really is a big deal, with vendors, media and other guests touring the building and seeing what this company is all about. As a part of the day they provided an employee lunch-- the food was good, but of course what everyone was excited about was the chocolate fountain, hehe. Last time I posted about a chocolate fountain I was on a diet and hadn't really submitted myself much to the temptation-- just a solitary chocolate dipped strawberry.

I didn't hold back today, heh. It turns that that almost anything tastes good dipped in Belgian chocolate. My favorites were banana and marshmallow... but the rice crispies, strawberries, and cream puffs were also good (all drenched in chocolate, of course). I really wished I'd brought more stuff to dip in chocolate, hehe...mmmm it was so good.

Mar, you missed out. You can go to Moab to bike anytime, but how often can you cover your plate with chocolate?! Mmm....

Ever noticed now cola, and sometimes even just soda in general is called "Coke"? Oh yeah I'll have a coke.

A bunch of us were at Sam Hawk on Wednesday and Ty tried to order a diet coke. The response was that they had Pepsi products and he could have a diet Pepsi.

It was amusing simply because the menu says "(pepsi products)", but then has listed under your choice of drinks "Coke" and "Diet Coke", heh.

Have I mentioned that I'm easily amused?

Warning: Boring rant about compressed audio and shady (as in probably illegal) CDs. Skip this unless you're extremely bored. Most will not appreciate this, heh.

A little background before I tell this story. As many of you know, I'm an audio geek-- I love portable audio and I'm also very picky about sound quality. Most portable audio these days uses some form of "lossy" compression for it's music to enable you to carry more music with you in less space. Often these days they are called MP3 players.

MP3 is a "lossy" format. In a nutshell, you take pure, uncompressed, lossless audio from a CD and compress it, throwing away bits of information about the sound in the process. This is why it is called "lossy"-- parts of the data describing the audio or music is lost and gone forever in the compression process. It's like when you see an image on the web and it's all garbled or blocky, because it's been compressed to save space. The quality deteriorates the more you compress it, and you can never get it back.

One thing about lossy formats is that they can sound OK, but if you compress and already lossy copy of a song, you'll get an even crappier sounding copy. Why would anyone re-compress an already compressed song? Well first, a lot of people will download mp3s from the Internet, or rip their CDs directly to MP3. They then burn these to CD... but they're not CD quality, you can't get back the quality that was lost when it was first compressed. They give the CD to someone, they then rip the CD directly to MP3... it's now been compressed twice, and the resulting mp3s sounds even cruddier than the originals.

Ok who gives a crap about all this? Most of you can't tell the difference anyways. Well, here's an example. MiniDisc, which I've used since 1999, uses a form of compression to get CDs onto these smaller discs that technically have less storage space than an Audio CD. It sounds great. The problem is if you try to dub a MiniDisc onto another Minidisc-- it's re-compressing. You might not even be able to tell the difference then, but there is one. The more generations of compression it goes through the crappier it gets, just like mp3s.

This is why I give a crap: The whole point of buying CDs now (as opposed to doing something silly like buying already compressed music on iTunes music store) is to get a clean, lossless, quality copy of the music (copyright law is only of secondary concern to me I suppose-- sad huh?). If I didn't give a rats about quality I'd just download a lot of stuff.

What does this have to do with eBay? Keep reading.

Not long ago I learned that one of my favorite Eurodance/trance acts had a new CD out. Turns out it's probably been out for a year now, but I hadn't seen it because, well, I'm in the U.S. and we don't get everything they do over there. The group is actually German. I stumbled across their new CD on Amazon.com I think, and proceeded to buy it from one of their Amazon Market sellers. The one detail I failed to notice when I bought it was that the Amazon.com product description notes that it is an "Asian" release of the CD. Not an import from Germany but from Asia. Hmm...

So I get the CD, and right off somethings not right. I'm thinking maybe it's something screwy with how the CD plays on computers, given the different measures record labels go to these days to copy protect CDs. So I put it in my CD player in my car as I'm driving to work, and man-- it sounded HORRIBLE. Lossy as heck-- artifacts all over the place. Ever listen to those low quality versions of songs on a web site to hear what the music sounds like? It has this warbly effect and kinda sounds like there's something jingling or something... it's hard to describe, but it's not natural, it sounds like some sort of electronic distortion. It sounds like the CD I'm listening to was recorded off an Internet radio station and pressed to CD!

There was no possible way that the CD was supposed to sound like this. Especially when you pay $20 to import a CD, you better dang well get an uncompressed copy. So I contacted the seller regarding this problem and they replied that they could not do an exchange, but could refund my money if I returned the CD. So I sent it back, got my money back... something fishy. The CD was made in Singapore or something, and the copy I had was obviously made from a lossy copy. I have no idea how many times it was recompressed before being put on CD, but it sounds like it went from MiniDisc to MiniDisc several times. Besides, I had a couple tracks from this CD on other trance mixes I'd previously bought and the sounded better than this so I knew for a fact the CD was defective. It looked, as far as the eye can see, totally legit, too. It looked professionally produced, with the case, liner notes, etc.

Ok, I want this CD, so I start looking around at other e-tailers and eBay. Even eBay only has the "asian release" version of the CD. I'm not going there (the asian release) again, I already have a bad taste in my mouth. I was a bit frustrated that no one had a German release / version of the CD.

A couple weeks after getting my money back, for the heck of it, I look for the album in mp3 format. Download it, listen to it. These 192kbps mp3s sound better than the stupid CD I bought!

A couple days later a thought enters my mind.... "Check ebay.de" instead of "ebay.com". Bingo. Of course on the German eBay site there'd be no reason to import the Asian release because the original CD was released in Germany. All sorts of Germans are selling this CD, yay! Even better, there are a few that will ship worldwide ;) Fortunately I know just enough German to understand the word "worldwide", and with shipping it costs perhaps a bit less than my options for the Asian version, woot.

Who needs a company to jack up the price on a shady copy of an imported CD when eBay is everywhere? Hehe.... So I ordered the CD. I'm sure if I get shafted you'll hear about it. And apprently Super is still a popular word to describe how good things are in Deutschland, so I can just leave the word "Super" for feedback, if everything goes smoothly. Plus if it's a bad experience, what else do you learn in Jr. High German class if not the bad words? Hehe....

The trailer is here. Just over two months and counting. George is saying it will probably get a PG-13. It looks really sweet... All I can say is let the Star Wars mania begin. I saw the trailer after th O.C. last night (I was foolish enough to think it might be on during the O.C., but really-- if they put it on anywhere but at the end, people wouldn't watch the OC at all, they'd just tune in at the end to watch it. Silly me), then downloaded it a couple hours later and watched it again... and again.... and again, hehehe. I know I'm not alone in saying that a new Star Wars movie makes me feel like a little kid again. There are few things I get that excited about =P So watch it!

Edit: You can find the trailer here.

It's kind of twisted that I'm excited to watch Anakin go to hell and become Darth Vader, no? Let's face it-- Darth Vader is THE coolest character in the whole Star Wars world, no doubt. This is his movie.

Heh, I just can't help myself on these macro-shots.

Oh my. I was a little upset that Cinnabon was gone from the University Mall, as well as Fashion Place mall.... but all is well. Mel found that there is still a Cinnabon in the Crossroads Mall downtown... and being as cool as she is, she brought some over last night. Can you guess what I had for breakfast today? Mmm....

At least now I know where to go when I need to drown my sorrows in frosting and cinnamon.

Mel, you ROCK. I owe you now.

Last night I was craving something like P.F. Chang's Mongolian Beef so I stopped by this new place "Pei Wei" on the way home from work to check it out.

So I'd seen this place under construction for a while, and it's finally open as of recent, it seems. I wasn't sure what kind of Asian restaurant it would be, but it turns out it's by the same company as "P.F. Changs" - it's sorta like the more casual version of it, I guess.

I haven't been excited about a restaurant in a while, hehe... The Mongolian beef wasn't bad... not P.F. Chang's good though, at least not this time around. Not as flavorful, I guess. According to my boss you shouldn't get beef there, he says he gets the Lemon Pepper Chicken every time and loves it, so that'll be one of the next few things I try. I also noticed on their menu that they had a dish labeled "Spicy Korean". I may have to try that one next time, perhaps with chicken since it's probably not marinated in the sauce but just cooked in it.

You actually can get any of the main dishes with Chicken, Beef, Shrimp/Scallops, or tofu and veges... anyways, this place looks promising, I'll keep you updated on the food, heh. I'm also looking forward to trying the Honey Seared crispy chicken or crispy shrimp, since that reminds me of my other fave. P.F. Chang's dish.... dang, it's too bad I'll have to make so many trips to try everything, heh.