Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

December 28, 2005
VIA EMAIL

825 Pike Street
Washington State Convention Center
Seattle, WA 98101
1-866-700-8000

Re: Continued billing of closed account

Dear Managers, Gold’s Gym:

This document is being sent separately by fax, email, and mail. You may consider this your final notice before I open formal fraud proceedings against your gym.

In late July and early August, I went through a great deal of trouble to find a manager to cancel my account, first because I was incorrectly signed into your computer system as a 1-year contract when I actually was on a signed month to month contract. Producing the original contract, according to your manager Erica, finally allowed me to change my status and cancel the account, without any additional penalties or fees.

However, I am still being billed $33.67 a month, as I found out when I returned to Phoenix from school in NY and checked the stack of bank statements that were waiting for me. It never occurred to me that although I had met with a gold’s gym manager who told me my account was canceled, that I would continue to be billed.

Therefore, I demand a full refund for August, September, October, November, and the December months during which you fraudulently billed me for services I had canceled, did not ask for, and could not possibly use. This is a total of no less than $168.35, which you must refund immediately to the billing number for my account.

You will be well-advised to comply with these demands immediately and inform me in writing of your agreement to do so.

Sincerely,
Elliott C. Bäck
607-229-0623

I’m doing some cool things for the new ElliottBack.com. One of them involves integrating a community tagging solution, to which I’ve added or modified the following features:

+ Automatic tagging
+ Related RSS search feeds now in regular HTML as well as AJAX
+ RSS search feed item descriptions

I need to add one more feature, that is, to let everyday users add tags at will, too. Once that’s done, this tagging solution will power intra-post linkage as well as draw in valuable content from offsite.

Ripping a DVD to xvid or divx avi is really quite easy, if you have the right tools. You’ll first need to download DVD decrypter and auto gordian knot (autogk). DVD decrypter allows you to rip the raw DVD video and audio data off of your disk drive, decrypt the CSS protection, and finally remove any other protection schemes, such as Macrovision. AutoGK is a package of codecs and a GUI interface that will take the raw DVD data through an AV processing pipeline to produce a single windows video file.

Step 1: RIP

Put in a DVD and launch DVD Decrypter. Choose IFO (Information File) mode:

Now make sure you’ve selected a destination for your files:

Now you need to find which program chain to rip (PGC). Pick the one that’s the longest, or in the case of a TV dvd, the episode you want to rip:

Everything’s set up. Just click the green arrow and wait about twenty minutes, after which you will have a set of files which look like this:

VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_PGC_07 - Stream Information.txt
VTS_01_PGC_07_1.VOB

The whole ripping process shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.

Step 2: ENCODE

Launch AutoGK and select the first .vob that you just ripped as an input file, and set an output file name:

Now you need to select audio (choose the first one) and subtitles, if any:

If you’re ripping a TV, set the preferred size to 350MB, if you’re ripping a movie, choose either 700MB or 1400MB, depending on your preference:

Finally, click on advanced settings and choose MP3 VBR 128kbs:

Then click “add job” and “start.” After all this, you’ll have a log that looks like the following:

[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] AutoGK 2.26
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] OS: WinXP (5.1.2600).2
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Job started.
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Input file: J:\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_0.IFO
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Output file: J:\Output.avi
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Output codec: XviD
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Audio 1: Unknown language AC3 2ch
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Subtitles: none
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Format: .AVI
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Target size: 350Mb
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Custom audio settings: VBR MP3 with average bitrate: 128Kbps
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Started encoding.
[12/26/2005 9:07:27 AM] Demuxing and indexing.
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Processing file: J:\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_PGC_04_1.VOB
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Source resolution: 720×480
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Found NTSC source.
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Source aspect ratio: 4:3
[12/26/2005 9:08:30 AM] Analyzing source.
[12/26/2005 10:28:40 AM] Source is considered to be hybrid (mostly NTSC).
[12/26/2005 10:28:40 AM] Looking for optimal hybrid thresholds.
[12/26/2005 10:28:45 AM] Found threshold of: 1.38
[12/26/2005 10:28:45 AM] Output will contain 38690 frames
[12/26/2005 10:28:45 AM] Decoding audio.
[12/26/2005 10:29:16 AM] Normalizing audio.
[12/26/2005 10:29:28 AM] Encoding audio.
[12/26/2005 10:31:57 AM] Audio1 size: 17,708,400 bytes (16.89 Mb)
[12/26/2005 10:31:57 AM] Overhead: 1,547,648 bytes (1.48 Mb)
[12/26/2005 10:31:57 AM] Video size: 347,745,552 bytes (331.64 Mb)
[12/26/2005 10:31:57 AM] Running compressibility test.
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Duration was: 3 minutes 4 seconds
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Speed was: 12.61 fps.
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Compressibility percentage is: 55.96
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Chosen resolution is: 560×416 ( AR: 1.35 )
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Predicted comptest value is: 73.79%
[12/26/2005 10:35:01 AM] Running first pass.
[12/26/2005 11:02:56 AM] Duration was: 27 minutes 55 seconds
[12/26/2005 11:02:56 AM] Speed was: 23.10 fps.
[12/26/2005 11:02:56 AM] Expected quality of first pass size: 76.04%
[12/26/2005 11:02:56 AM] Running second pass.
[12/26/2005 11:42:42 AM] Duration was: 39 minutes 46 seconds
[12/26/2005 11:42:43 AM] Speed was: 16.22 fps.
[12/26/2005 11:42:43 AM] Job finished. Total time: 2 hours 35 minutes 15 seconds
====================================================

Step 3: WATCH

You’re done. Delete all the non .avi files and enjoy the fruits of your ripping.

This is a non-announcement: wordpress.org is switching servers, they tell us:

Switching servers, please check back in about a half hour. Thanks! — Matt

This is the kind of thing that we should never, ever see. Your servers should never stop serving content. If you have to switch, bring up a new array of servers hot and ready to go before you pull the plug on your old machines. Or use virtual machines to virtually swap in a well-tested beta instance for production. Real companies with real services cannot go down!

(Then again, what does it really matter? It’s not they sell anything.)

Update:

OK, it’s been at least three hours. *taps fingers impatiently*

Update 2:

Yay!! Go download Wordpress 2.0: wordpress.org/download/

Slut-o-meter describes itself as a Google webservice that:

evaluates the promiscuity of the subject you enter by comparing the number of Google search results with and without “safe-search” enabled. A complete slut would return unsafe results and no safe results. Alternatively, a clean name should produce the same number of safe and unsafe results.

Elliott Back is 11.3% promiscuous, while Georgie Bush is a whopping 17.9%. Monica Lewinsky, unsurprisingly, tops them both.