Reality15

Living arrangements really depend on what kind of atmosphere you want. If you're someone that wants to roll out of bed and be at work in five minutes, Cedars is definitely the way to go. If the air conditioning is a problem there, you can always buy a window air conditioning unit and have maintenance install it for you. That being said, if you're looking for more of the "Cedar Point lifestyle" I'd definitely recommend Commons dorms. Keep in mind these are typical "college dorm" type housing arrangements, so don't go in expecting anything amazing. Just remember that you're not going to spend very much time in your dorm other than sleeping. One thing I would suggest that hasn't been mentioned is to take advantage of every crew-related opportunity available. Back in '07 we had a "Pep Rally" before the season started (don't know if they still do that) that was absolutely amazing. Crew dinners/parties are fun, as well as going to ride nights with fellow crew mates. Your crew is your family for four months, doing things outside of just working with them can definitely make or break a summer. Final piece of advice, since you'll probably be eating in Stockade since you're at Mean Streak, is to stay away from the potato salad in the box lunches. I don't think I'm the only one that's had bad experiences from it...

A nice pair of shoes as compared to several cheap pairs is definitely the way to go. My first year, when I worked Maverick, I ate through three pairs of normal shoes. Not learning my lesson, I went through another three pairs my second year because I moved around so much. Last year, I went out and bought some nice $150 shoes with the best quality gel inserts I could find, and they haven't even the slightest hint of falling apart. Even with doing a lot of moving around this upcoming season, I really don't see this pair of shoes having any problem, and they went through EVERYTHING last year, from being completely submerged in the nastiest water ever to operating a dirty bumper car floor. Spend the money on nice shoes and you'll not only be more comfortable but you won't have to spend your day off going to Meijer to buy shoes every other week.

Robb, how do we do family memberships using the form? I'm planning on signing up within the next two weeks (come on, paycheck...) and can't figure out how to do the multiple members...

That is SO much more reasonable than the $60 for a family membership to ACE that gets you nothing more than the standard club benefits and a few publications every year that, by the time they get to your door, are already out-of-date. I was a maybe before, but now I'm a definite yes.

I'm more interested in what the prices will be for family versus an individual membership will be, honestly. That's what I'm looking forward to hearing on March 15. I'm planning on doing it for myself no matter what, but if the benefits are there for parks we're planning on visiting this year, I might have to sign Kara up too.

Kara's sad you're not going back to merchandise this year, but merch has always been the problem department at Mich. Advent. I told her to switch to rides, but she's terrified of being in control of a ride. lol My goal with Timbers this year is to try and bring the teamwork, efficiency and fun you can find at the big parks to the crew. It's my first time back to operating a coaster since Maverick, after two years of water rides, and I really hope I can bring some Cedar Point-isms over to help make things enjoyable again. I love spieling, too, I actually won the "super spieler" award at Cedar Point for Coastermania (some people on here might remember my "FILL THE EMPTY SEATS!" campaign), so Timbersfest is going to be freakin' amazing. Hopefully the weather's better this year for it, attendance was WAY down compared to a few years ago, and absolutely a disaster compared to the first few years. Jon "just glad I'm FINALLY not operating a water ride" Roost

As has already been said, skycoasters are absolutely a blast to work. I almost went back to being regular crew on Ripcord instead of a TL this year, just because it's so much fun.

Dear Title Fairy, please grace me with a new title. This one is old and busted, I need something new and fresh to help liven up my posts. No request on what it is, I think you should know what's best.

I don't think that impacted anything I did in high school, however. My coaster enthusiasm wasn't known around the school, I think even my close friends didn't even know about it.

Well, on a somewhat lighter note... I never had good luck with girls in grade school, I want to say I dated a whole two people throughout the course of high school, the longest being four months. I was always classified as a nerd because I ran the school TV station, was drum major of the marching band, and spent half of my day during senior year in the computer lab teaching a Photoshop/video editing class. Needless to say, I was king nerd of my school. As of December, I'm happily living with my fiance and helping to plan our wedding. We met in marching band her freshman year of college, and a few weeks later we were dating. After two years of dating, I proposed when we were celebrating Christmas this year, and the two of us couldn't be happier. And, to prove something to all the little coaster nerds out there, she had never been to an amusement park or on a coaster. It's actually fun for me to take her to parks and watch her reaction, and it's funny to see what rides she likes and doesn't (often the exact opposite of a lot of enthusiasts). She'll never be as big of a coaster nerd as I am, and I think we're both okay with that. Kara's first amusement park, Six Flags Great America, in 2007 Back at Six Flags Great America again in 2009 on one of her favorite rides, Buccaneer Battle

Well, look at that. What a surprise. EDIT:

Well, now I can see it in Chrome as well. Too bad I don't see any Holiday World on the list yet.

Use the flux capacitor and go back to 2008 then. You could change all of this and we would never know.

If I do it, am I going to get a little signature move?

Man, just imagine if you worked there. It takes a complete jerk with no life to run those rides.

Oh heck, while we're shouting names out there... Michigan's Adventure! Nah, too small and out of the way.

Alphabetical order, perhaps?

Odd. It doesn't redirect in Firefox or IE, but it does in Chrome. Very odd. I even reset the DNS and cleared the cache. And after I saw the page, I SAW it by accident. Not sure what all it means, though.

Nope. Redirects me back to www.ThemeParkReview.com

I think it's a stronger argument that Ed Hart didn't spend a dime on the additions after he sold the park to Premier. Premier may have honored that plan and installed the rides that were in his 10-year-plan, but I would go as far to say everything 1999 and later was payed for by Premier, maybe even 1998 (depends on when Twisted Twins was payed for) But saying Ed Hart payed for it is like saying Six Flags payed for Wildwater Kingdom to be installed at Geauga Lake, it doesn't make sense. Business doesn't work that way. Ed Hart sold the property in 1997, he's not going to go and invest more money in it.

If that's the case, then Six Flags would own all of the rides. Not a single ride is left from the original 1987 season, because the only two rides that re-opened with the park in 1990 was the Starchaser and the Tin Lizzies. The Starchaser was repurchased by Ed Hart, and then was sold to Darien Lake in 1995, but all that remained of the Tin Lizzies was the track, new cars were purchased by Ed Hart. I'm taking a tourism property law class right now, and if they go by a literal interpretation of the law, then (as long as it was a very basic contract), Six Flags can take anything that doesn't damage the land. For example, if you lease an apartment, it comes with nothing, much like Kentucky Kingdom did when Ed Hart began the lease. You move in your furniture, much like Ed Hart did with the rides. He sold the rides and the lease to Six Flags for $64 million (which I think is for the additional land and buying the rides), similar to if you sold your furniture to someone who agreed to sublease from you. Now, your landlord is saying your furniture is his property. Technically, anything that doesn't cause a permanent change to the land is considered personal property, and should be the property of Six Flags. However, anything that makes a permanent change to the land is considered a fixture, meaning that Six Flags would have to leave it or remove it and turn the land back to its original state. The way I see it, Kentucky doesn't have ownership of anything but the land, buildings and other infrastructure on their property. I don't think Six Flags is trying to remove any of that, they just want to get the rides off the land and give it back to the fairgrounds.

Hint of advice with Maverick: when you load into and throughout the ride, have your legs sitting normal. When you get to the final brakes, cross your legs. It relieves the pressure from the lap bar and makes it more comfortable to sit in the seats. Trust me, after countless morning test rides there's definitely a trick to riding it and not getting hurt. After all those rides (read: hundreds of them), I never once lost circulation in my legs.

Thunder Canyon has a pump that draws water from Lake Erie. Snake River Falls brings in water from Lake Erie at the start of the season, but uses that water throughout the system with its own pump and filtration system. I'd assume Shoot the Rapids will probably use water from the lagoons or Lake Erie, but use its own pumping system. It's done that way so that if one of the pumps fails, only one ride goes down instead of both. Or if you need to keep one ride "dry" for the day to do maintenance, you don't have to shut down both. EDIT: Hector beat me to it.

Alright, I just got done ripping Coaster Expedition 10 using the settings I described above (62% Constant Quality, Deinterlaced Video, H.264 Codec, no chapters, 720p, 5.1 surround sound), and the total filesize is 2GB (about double your goal, around 1/2 the size as the original DVD). Now, I know the DVD isn't in 720p, which would probably help get the filesize down quite a bit, and the audio's not in 5.1 surround, also something that would help the filesize drop. I ran a test using MPEG-4 codec, a 1GB filesize and a lower audio setting, and while there was a bit of quality loss, it's still perfectly playable and watchable on our 32" HDTV. In my personal opinion, I wouldn't mind the larger filesize if it meant the full DVD quality. I'd be willing to put aside 2 GB - 2.5 GB for each Coaster Expedition / Raw "DVD" and still pay the same price as a DVD, but I know there are a lot of people that don't have large hard drives and don't do a lot of media watching on their PC. While I'm at it, a cool idea would be to sell the "DVD" as a file on a small TPR-branded jump/pocket drive for $20. You can get a jump drive for less than $10 in bulk nowadays, slap a TPR sticker on it, put the "DVD" on the jump drive and make quite a profit. We did that with this year's marching band DVDs, and more people were interested in buying it this way than on a DVD, and it ended up costing less and taking a lot less time. Let me know if you want me to run another test with different settings, I have the files on my computer still. -Jon Roost

I've been using HandBrake for a lot of my compression. 1GB in size might not have the best quality, but here's an example: I ripped a Comedy Central special yesterday that was an hour and a few odd minutes long. At 62% constant quality, keeping the aspect ratio as-is and 720p resolution, the file is still only 1.43 GB and neither of us could tell the difference between the DVD and the file being played on our HDTV. That being said, I also ripped Napoleon Dynamite yesterday and it's only 821MB, still crystal clear quality and actually longer than the Comedy Central special, so I guess filesize really depends on your settings, but I think the 62% setting is working really well. I can't say I've experimented with chapters yet simply because I don't have any need for chapters with Windows Media Center / MediaBrowser thanks to the "Resume" feature. I know it's possible in HandBrake, I think you just import a CSV file with the chapters in it and it adds it automatically. If you don't have a CSV file I think you can add them manually (or just make a CSV file, I guess), again, not entirely sure. I'll try running a rip of one of the Coaster Expedition DVDs today and see what I come up with.