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June 3, 2015July 6, 2016

The Kings Island Meal Deal

For the 2015 Season, we once again have Season Passes to the great Kings Island Amusement park. Yep the whole family.

Working directly across the street from it for the last 10 years I’ve only been a handful of times. We had season passes 18+ years ago when we lived in Landen but not since.

Anyway, turns out they have this “All Season Meal Plan” which you can add to your season pass. It’s $90 plus tax and you can eat every 4 hours, so basically 2x per day if you’re there all day. Last year I’m told it had a 2 hour wait period, but they moved that to 4 hours this year.

So what do you get?

At almost every restaurant, or food place, they have combo deals that are on the ”Meal Plan”. It basically includes an entre of some sort and a side, usually chips or fries.

A burger and fries, a wrap and fries/chips, pizza and bread sticks, chicken fingers and fries. You get the idea. Of course no beverage is included. You can’t include that when a 20oz of something is $4 retail.

Along the same lines *most* of these combo deals are $14-$15 each. That’s right, two slices of Larosa’s pizza with bread sticks $15.00. Buddy is turning in his grave. Though those combo’s usually do include a drink I think.

So basically, for lunch, I hop on over to KI, and grab a meal. I can get in an out of there in 40 minutes most days. Sometimes less, and even ride a ride or two if the lines are short.

It’s early in the game but I’ve been there over 15 times at the time this blog post so I’ve already gotten my money back and the season’s just starting.

Here’s an example of some of the food items:
(These are actual meals that I obtained, your results may vary, it seems the staff is not really well trained on what you get and what you don’t in a lot of places).

Skyline 3-Way and Cheese Coney:

Not the healthiest, but likely the best value in the park.

Larosa’s Pizza

2 Slices and some breadsticks

The Reds Club (formerly Montgomery Inn) in River town has some pretty good food:

Their Buffalo Chicken Wrap is one of the better meals. Yes, that’s bacon on my burger, which isn’t part of the deal but if you ask nicely… The Buffalo Chicken Salad cannot be beat, provided you get the crispy chicken. The grilled chicken is suspect.

Chicken Shack Chicken Wrap:

What’s good here is you get to pick what’s in your wrap.

Hank’s Burrito Shack:

Hank’s is a Chipotle knock off. Truth is, it’s just plain horrible. The chicken is not good, the beef is really really bad, and none of it has any flavor.
Technically you’re only supposed to get a Burrito, or Burrito Bowl, or some Taco’s, but those also come with a side of chips and salsa. The best bet is what you see above the taco salad, which my buddies got all year last year. While I have eaten it a few times this year, we’ve been told it’s not on the meal plan. I don’t get it, it’s the same thing a burrito only the tortilla is deep fried, and not very well I might add.

So we’ll see. I can’t find my photos of the burrito bowl. I’ve had that twice and if I never had it again I’d be OK with that.

Then again I’d rather eat that then the craptastic food at the Potato Works:

What you see above there is some form of Chicken tender, that’s of lesser quality than a chicken-nugget from McDonalds. Maybe it’s the gluten free aspect that makes these so horrible, but the alleged chicken inside them wasn’t clearly recognizable as chicken. On that same day my buddy opted for the corn dog meal deal and it was equally bad.

Also missing photos are:
Chick-fil-A, you can get a regular Chick-fil-A sandwich and large fry. Yes their waffle cut fries. This isn’t a horrible deal, but it’s not a lot of food.

There is a Panda Express in the fest-haus. Which isn’t completely horrible it just depends on how fresh the food is and who’s serving. The orange chicken is pretty plain, and the king pao is fairly spicy. But the sides, the egg rolls, and Crab Rangoon’s without crab are pretty nasty.

You can get a 6” Subway sandwich too. But what we’ve learned so far is that you really need to stay away from the meals that are labor intensive. Building a 6” sub is hard for a lot of people and the line there isn’t worth the wait.

So I plan to post updates throughout the season. The plan is to try and eat as healthy as is reasonable. Chicken Salads, stuff like that when possible. But a burger and/or pizza will get in there from time to time. Thankfully the servings aren’t all that large and you end up walking quite a bit to get in and out of the joint. Literally a mile in and out on a good day.

At last check, I’ve eaten there 32 times. Money well spent. We were told recently by an employee there that the average person only uses the meal plan 2.5 times. (@ $90, that works out to $36 a meal for what could be a $14 meal). We’re just doing our part to keep them from making obscene profits Smile

May 10, 2015August 9, 2015

DIY PS4 Scuf Controller Mod

First if you don’t know what a Scuf controller is, check out their site: ScufGaming.com Basically they mod a controller by moving some buttons to the back. This essentially allows you to press X, O, Triangle or Square without the need to remove your thumb from the aim stick. Greatly speeding things up in games like Call of Duty, where there is lots of jumping, or if you use O for your knife button, not having to take your thumb off the stick to knife someone.

So, why would you make your own?

Well, I bought a scuf controller, and for me it sucks. I know a lot of guys swear by them but I cannot, for the life of me invoke the buttons they put on the back, they are too stiff, even with the paddles. Also the darn thing costs $225, or at least it cost me and that was the cheapest way to get all the options. One thing it does have is remappable buttons, something that this mod doesn’t have. A basic scuff which is what this mod gives you is $123.90 and a 7-11 day wait.

Of course they can also install options like taller sticks. You want a taller stick on the right for more aiming range of motion. That’s how I ordered mine and the fine folks at Scuf installed them backwards. (Meaning my left one was taller). They did offer to fix it but that would have been ~2 weeks to get fixed with round trip slow shipping so they can bite me.

Enter KontrolFreaks… I simply put one on the right stick to fix my problem.

Update While the KontrolFreaks did sort of solve my problem, I eventually ended up opening up the controller and putting a stock stick on the left. Tall on the left and super-tall on the right just didn’t work for me. Also, those knuckle heads put a tamper proof screw in your PS4 when they mod it. They don’t want you to take it apart, so you’ll need to hit that screw with a dremmel and make it a flat screw so you can remove it. If you’re like me and savaging parts from other broken controllers you’ll have a replacement screw.

So if you already have a $60 PS4 controller for roughly $10 for KontrolFreaks (shop around), and $4 for a couple switches, about an hour of your time, you can have a scuf too.

Get ready, here we go.

First, watch a youtube video on how to take your controller apart, I’m not going to explain that here. 4 Screws (don’t lose them) and a plastic spudge thing and you’re in like flynn. Separate the two halves, disconnect the charging connector (allowing you to take the back off the top). Take the battery out and you’ll be set.

While you’re on Youtube watch a couple vids on doing this mod. You better know how to solder, this is not the time or place to learn. The solder points on this board are fickin small. I’m good at it and it still caused me issues.

Get your stuff in order, these are the buttons I used from Radio Shack:

They are only $99 online at Radio Shack right now. Here: http://www.radioshack.com/spst-0-5-amp-momentary-switch-2-pack/2751571.html#

Second, locate the pads you need to scrub off the material to solder too. I had this motherboard and used this picture from somewhere on the web.:

In my world, I’m adding buttons for X and O, so the orange and blue dots are the one’s I’ll scrape the green circuit board cover off and solder too.

I’ll drill holes in the bottom and put the switches in (removing the rumble packs).

I drilled the holes in the bottom shell, using my best guess at location. I’d actually like them higher and will try that on the next mod. I used a drill bit just a tad smaller than the switches and actually screwed the switches into the plastic. Then hot glued them so they’d be reinforced.

Then carefully scraped my pads and soldered wires to the board in the right spots. I had some leads from arduino projects so I used color coded wires. You’ll pick up the grounds from the bottom.

Then before putting soldering the leads to the switches I temp installed it and plugged it in to my PC to test it.

Windows 7, type ‘usb con’ and choose ‘Set up a USB game Controller’, plug it into your PC and you can check the bottons.

Button Two lighting up is ‘X’.

My first shot had O shorted out so I had to remove it and resolder it and re-test. It is a small PITA.

Once tested I soldered the wires to the switches, and reassembled it.

Re-tested and was good to go.

Here’s the finished product:

O Button:

Controller Front and Back:

This controller has a butt load of hours on it and is actually quite sloppy around the sticks. I did the mod on this controller first as a test and it works like a champ. I will soon be that drop-shot SOB’s that everyone hates because I can Drop w/o taking my hands off the controller, and don’t have to use tactical layout either so R3 is still melee.

Success.

Update

So after modding this one successfully I thought I’d do another one. FAIL. I bricked a $60 controller. I still might be able to save it but right now X button doesn’t work at all. These solder points are so small, it’s really hard to do. I have found and ordered a couple of these from ebay: Remap Boards. If the link is bad, search for ‘PS4 Remap board’. This is a nifty ribon cable like board that goes between the main board and daughter board, and hijacks the connections giving you a reasonable pad to solder too. Also, most of my newer controllers have a JDM-020 main board and there’s no published pin out for those and it sure isn’t obvious. So this is required. mYaJ_ihpx9qVHb84AxheQFQ YMMV…

April 6, 2015April 6, 2015

Sometimes we get lucky

International business travel generally sucks, unless you’re unfortunate enough to have to do it all the time and can reap the rewards of perks from airline and auto rental memberships. Even then the amount of effort you have to put into it simply doesn’t make it attractive to me.

On my recent trip to the United Kingdom, I rented a car from Hertz.

Why do you need a car in London you might ask. Generally when I travel to our London office I’m taking equipment over or bringing something back or in 50% of the trips helping them move offices. Our offices are also on the outside of London, just outside of the reach of most of the tube. That’s why I need a car. What about taxi’s? Taxi’s suck. So there.

I’ve rented a car there 4 times now. That process itself is usually pretty hateful. In fact the last time through “National”, we were basically scammed. I had initially booked the reservation through Kayak and rentalcars.com, but the agent at the airport capitalized on my over-night red-eye fog to bait and switch me. So needless to say, National will never get any of my business again, ever. But that’s not what this article is about.

This article is about the awesome service I received from Hertz. A magnificent upgrade to a brand new Mercedes CLS350 AMG Estate wagon. When I say brand new, it had 9 miles on it.

I price shopped via Kayak again, but actually booked the car through United.com. Then hooked up my (new to me) Hertz Gold membership to the reservation. This means other than having pre-done the Hertz Gold membership, they knew nothing about me. I had not previously rented 10 vehicles from them. They just treated me like gold. I hopped on the shuttle, they dropped me off and told me where my parking lot stall was. I got there, and found the car. Checked the bill, and was ready to set sail. The only thing that was missing was the need to add the insurance to the reservation as our corporate insurance doesn’t extend overseas. So we hopped into the reservation counter, handed them the invoice and they just took care of it. Easy peasy.

Basically what I got to tool around in was this:

So how awesome was it?

It was awesome. Of course the steering wheel was on the wrong side, but it was super comfortable. Had plenty of power, and got decent mileage on top of it all.

It was a turbo diesel, with ‘eco’ features. This ‘eco’ feature is a new thing over there where the car shuts off when you’re stopped. You pick your foot up off the brake and the car just starts back up. Every time you stop. At lights, at parking stalls, at roundabouts, when you’re about to pull out. Yeah, all of those times. I hate it.

Thankfully you can turn it off. I couldn’t however figure out a way to have it turned off by default. I would change that if I owned one.

I didn’t take photos of the interior, but there was plenty of room in the trunk for two large checked bags.

It simply drove and handled like a dream and I put 500 miles on it over the course of 7 days on a trip to Dover and a trip to Brighton beach and some tooling around in the country.

So would I drive this car again? You bet. Would I buy one? You bet, if money wasn’t an issue. Would I rent from Hertz again? Absolutely.

Fun times.

Actual car driven on real roads to real destinations, not on a closed course:

October 25, 2014October 25, 2014

Family Photos

We took advantage of the good weather today and hit Sharon Woods for some family photos. Of course everyone got along and nobody died so it was successful Winking smile Kind of a family, engagement photos for Maggie, and senior photos for Molly.

August 23, 2014August 23, 2014

Europe 2014 (Part 6 of 6) | Germany – Castles

Wednesday morning started early. Turns out, if you want to actually see the inside of the Neuschwanstein Castle you need tickets. In order to get tickets you need to reserve them. In order to reserve them you should do so no later than 3 days prior. That didn’t work for us. Your other option is to show up early and stand in line. We heard and read about long lines. We had a back up plan though and that was to hook up with the free tour from the same folks that handled the Munich tour. They start their tour from Munich and the bulk of the cost is the train tickets to the castle, and when you get there you still have to buy the tickets but tour guides have an in and can get them. So that was our goal to drive down and meet the group at the train station.

We left Munich about 9am, it’s roughly a 2 hour drive, but we wandered through some small German villages on the way and pulled into the town beneath the castle just prior to noon. We made the call to just stand in line. The line was about 30 minutes long and our tours for the castles were at good times. 12:50 for Hohenschwangau the castle the crazy king lived in, and 3:20pm for the fancy castle.

Words cannot describe the beauty there.

You have lots of options to get up the mountain to the castle. Busses, or horse drawn carriages. But you still have a good 15-20 minute hilly walk in front of you.

The views are amazing though. So, the short version of the story is, this King, King Ludwig II was kind of a nut. He never married, lived alone and like to decorate and build ‘fancy’ castles. You can draw your own conclusions. He started on this castle well after the home we live in was built, so in the scheme of castles it isn’t very old. It is cool though, and it was a good idea to finish it even after he died. It would have been a shame to let that go to waste.

They don’t let you photograph anything inside either of the castles, primarily to keep the tours moving and motivate you to buy a book.

After touring the castles, we beat feat south, through the Alps. There’s no point in taking photos in the Alps. You cannot do them justice with a point and click camera. The shear beauty of the

We have some pretty impressive vistas here in the states, out in the Rockies, but they still don’t compare. After rolling through the Alps we stopped in Innsbruck, Austria for dinner. We found a quaint Italian restaurant in town and dinned there. It was late and again just about everything was closed so once again we ended up with Italian.

Claudine was beat, I think it was the yarn shopping on the prior day that did it. 😉

On Thursday we stayed in town. I walked Freising with her, and we stopped in at the local cathedral. It was simply amazing.

After spending the morning in Freising, we headed north to Landshut where both Martin and Rob live. Trausnitz Castle is there at the top of the hill, and it dates back to the 1200’s. We didn’t have time to take the tour, so we walked the grounds and all the public places. It was amazing.

The park and surrounding grounds of this castle were amazing. We saw deer in the forest on the way back to the car. We then headed back to Freising to have dinner at the Weihenstaphan Brewery Beer garden. The oldest continuously operating brewery in the world. The food was great and the beer was great what more could you ask?

After dinner we drove Mark to his hotel and returned to ours to pack for the flight home in the morning. We got up early for the long day, only made longer because both of our flights home were delayed.

So there you have it, 2 countries, and a whole bunch of stuff visited in about 4 and a half active days of vacationing.

Now I need a vacation from my vacation.