Then the comeback began. It was that familiar feeling I’ve had so many times over the past decade when you just know they are going to win. But what really caught my attention was something Jon Miller said after the Yankees had scored four runs in the 9th against Jonathan (Guns of) Broxton and he was walking off the field to the dugout. Broxton came into the game with a four run lead, so it wasn’t a save opportunity and giving up those four runs in the ninth wasn’t a blown save. Broxton didn’t come back out in the 10th, that honor was bestowed upon George Sherrill. Since the game was tied when Sherrill came in, Broxton wasn’t the losing pitcher.

So Broxton doesn’t get a blown save or a loss, but his four runs in one inning is good for a 36.00 ERA. So his stats aren’t completely unscathed, but I think I said it best with my tweet last night.

What a statistical sin that Broxton gets neither the blown save nor the loss in that game.

“Soccer is a game for 22 people that run around, play the ball, and one referee who makes a slew of mistakes, and in the end Germany always wins.” –Gary Lineker

In the interest of time, I figured I would try and find a walk through for Final Fantasy to make sure my memory was as good as I think it is. After all, when I played the original on NES, I wasn’t even in high school yet.

So it appears that no one has created a walkthrough for this specific version of the game, but luckily, I found an original that should work just fine since the content of the game is the same.

Click here for the Final Fantasy walkthrough

In case you are wondering, my part is made up of:

Fighter/Monk/Thief/Red Mage

Here is a shot of my party in Elfheim.

I wish you all good luck in the battle against Chaos.

Prizes? Yes thats right. There is loot in Ramp Champ. As you can see in the picture here, I’ve collected some sick prizes by spending the tickets of my winnings. The expansion packs that you can purchase from the app store also include new prizes to spend your tickets on.

In addition to collecting tickets for each game you play on these levels, there are three specific goals of each level to strive for. For example, one simple goal is always to reach a certain point level, usually 10,000 points, but sometimes higher.

As far as gameplay goes, its a very straight-forward flick of the screen to fire the balls at the targets. It’s a very short learning curve, but it takes a while to master.

The game was developed by Icon Factory and DS Media Labs. I don’t know much about these companies, but they have done a good job with Ramp Champ, and I’d be interested to see what else they have come up with.

Goals:

• Knock down all the clowns
• Hit all five little ducks
• Score over 10,000 points

Tips:
However, the hardest goal of this board is to knock down 5 ducks. But you don’t see any ducks on the screen, and that’s because all the clowns of each row must be knocked down before the ducks show up. This means you have to knock down two clowns with one ball multiple times.

The good news is that if you can successfully knock down all of the ducks, your point total should be over 10,000 points, and you’ll have completed all three goals in one game.

If you are only looking for points to rack up tickets, you are best served by attacking the bottles and targets at the top of the screen. This is definitely a good board for ticket grinding.

The second level shown here is called “Breakwater Bay” and gets things a little more interesting. Breakwater features multiple moving targets: Crabs, Seahorses and Fish. But that’s not all, there are also pearls and sharks to be on the lookout for.

Goals:

• Catch all three fish
• Cultivate the black pearl
• Score over 10,000 points

Tips:
Like all of the levels, this one has an easy goal and two more challenging goals. The three fish are up at the top of the screen and even though they are moving targets, it is not that hard to his three of them in one game. Catching all three fish unlocks the sharks which are worth a lot more points. First you unlock the shark fin, and then the big shark himself. This is a good way to score a lot of points, because they are large targets and worth a lot of points. The black pearl is a little bit trickier of a goal since it is hidden, but not surprisingly, the pearl is in the clam in the middle of the screen. If you hit the sea horses on both sides of the clam, eventually it will open. Hit the first pearl and then the black pearl will show up.

Goals:

• Destroy the first wave
• Destroy the second wave
• Score over 11,000 points

Tips:
I am not going to lie. These goals are hard. I have only completed the first goal, so if anyone has any tips on how to destroy the second wave, I would love to hear them. Like most of the levels, destroying the second wave with the nine balls you are given must involve hitting multiple targets with one ball. The problem lies with how small the targets are and their proximity to one another. It takes a very skillfully thrown ball to hit two targets in one attempt.

If you are more interested in collecting tickets for loot, i would not recommend this level. The targets aren’t worth many points, and I haven’t averaged many tickets per game on this level.

Goals:

• Plant all the pixel flowers
• Tip over the canine bovine
• Score over 13,000 points

Tips:
Now this set of goals is a real mixed bag. Planting all the pixel flowers is done by hitting all of the targets. There are six of them, and with nine balls, it is not a very challenging goal. But the next two goals are very difficult. First of all, you must plant all of the flowers to start the unlocking process for dog cow. When the flowers appear, there are two in the front row that are slightly different color. Knocking down the one on the right will make dog cow appear in the top row. Knocking down the one on the left will make a bomb appear in the top row. In order to score over 13,000 points, it takes unlocking both of these items and hitting all three moving targets in the top row. Because you only get nine balls, this means you will likely have to knock down all three items with 1 ball. I have not yet completed this, but I feel like it is attainable.

Goals:

• Shelve the elves
• Clock the Claus’s
• Score over 15,000 points

Tips:
The first goal of this level is very straight forward. The elves all live in the front row, and once the initial ones are knocked down, a few more show up. These are smaller targets and move fairly quickly, but with nine balls, it is somewhat easy to accomplish. Although not a goal, the reindeer in the second row behave similarly. Once you knock down the three stationary targets, two new moving reindeer show up. Both of these reindeer can be knocked down with one well placed ball. I have to admit again that I have not completed the second or third goals of this board. In fact, I don’t even know exactly how to complete them.

And that’s it. If you are looking for a fun game to occupy some time, without making your brain work too hard, give Ramp Champ a try. If I wind up buying the add-on packs, I will give a short review of them as well. Until then, good luck rolling!

I tried to find places to get them online, but it looks like Pet Smart is the only place. They didn’t have anything on Amazon or .

This sucks. People want to complain that there is no playoff, but I would much rather prefer neither a playoff system, nor the BCS. How many times was there a serious problem determining a college football national champion for the decades and decades that we had neither? And what we did have was tradition. Best Pac 10 team vs. the best Big 10 team = Rose bowl. Rivalries, bragging rights, etc

Blame TV, whatever, I don’t even know. I just know this sucks. What sense does it make that Ohio State is playing in the Rose Bowl on January 1st, and Iowa and Michigan State(6-6 Michigan state mind you) are playing after them on the 2nd and 5th.

In conclusion, Adams and Patrick divisions in the Wales Conference of the NHL, As many bowl games as possible on January 1st, and none after that date, with the lame bowls taking place earlier, and 2 divisions in baseball with no wildcard.

It even has a youtube trailer, which is the first time I’ve seen that for a book.

If you are looking for a quality piece of fiction. Something to take your mind off of the day to day worries of the world that reads very quickly and is highly entertaining(no pun intended), this one is recommended.

Inherent Vice

I just happened to mention it to another friend at the time and he was describing what sounded like a completely different game and experience to me. Vast collaboration with 39 other players at the same time, voice chat via a program called “vent”, and incredibly challenging boss encounters. It sounded more like a marketing campaign, but in the next breath he mentioned that he was about to level a new character, along with another friend, and offered for me to join up with them on his server and with his guild. I joined up with him that night and what I consider my real WOW “career” began. Within a few weeks I had a much deeper understanding of the game, was leveling like lightning, and learning more about my class, a Mage at the time. The social aspect of the game was also really hitting me now too, with the guild using the small add-on program called Ventrilo with allowed for everyone online to talk to one another with the tiny push of a button.

[ad#adsense inline text]

We reached level 60 and joined up with the guild raiding Molten Core. The guild wasn’t what you would call a “hardcore raiding” guild, so we raiding on saturday afternoons, once a week. But soon after I got my first taste of raiding, I wanted more than that, and preferably not on a weekend. Which brought me to my introduction with hardcore or “end game” raiding. I started taking note of which guilds on my server, Elune, were raiding more often, and taking on the more challenging raid instances. By this time many guilds on Elune had cleared Molten Core, and 3 or 4 had cleared Blackwing Lair, the same 3 or 4 were working on the most recently added raid instance Ahn’Qiraj. I decided to apply to a guild called Just Crusade. Prior to my application I had really started getting into the finer details of the game. Every piece of gear needed to be best in slot for me to be happy, the problem was I didn’t have access to that gear, so instead my goals were best in slot for the bosses which I had killed, and when I applied, I included all these details and showed my enthusiasm towards the hardcore portion of the game. That week I was accepted as a trial member, and came along on an alt-raid of Molten Core, and an “official” raid of Blackwing Lair and Anh’Qiraj.

Things were definitely different in JC than in my previous guild. My previous guild was friendly and nice, and when things in the game didn’t succeed, that was just the way it went, and nobody seemed to mind. Try again next time, next week, whatever. It wasn’t until reaching the end of the raid that I really started to notice a difference, when we got to the content that was actually challenging for this group of players. That’s when the yelling started. The people making mistakes got defensive, people argued about strategy. Not like debate club, but more like a family. You can yell at your sister, but you do so because you love her and want what is best for her. This is how the guild was operating. They weren’t yelling to be dicks, they just wanted to succeed, and to do that meant to succeed as a group. And after a short while I realized that they were not only great players, but also great people.

Up until now I’ve spoke about the game exclusively without much mention of when all of this playing took place. At this point I was playing the game basically every weeknight. JC didn’t raid on the weekends, but I still played a bit on the weekends. But it was the 5 raiding nights a week that attendance was required, which took a toll on my personal life. It basically meant coming home from work, eating a quick dinner and immediately booting up the game and playing. A night of raiding was usually around 4 hours, so as you can imagine, this wouldn’t be the ideal situation if you were in a relationship with me. In fact, the relationship I was in at the time ended in the middle of a raid. And so did my “career” as an active raider. My girlfriend at the time owned the condo that I lived in, so I moved onto the couch at a friends house, and tried to get my life back on track. I think it was at least 9 months before I even considered playing WOW again. But due to new friends starting to play and the expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, I eventually started again.

I could never really get back in the swing of things with WOW from a game play standpoint. I loved playing with my real life friends, and I loved grouping with my old guild from time to time, but part of the experience was very hollow to me. I had seen what the real end game of WOW is all about, and I missed that part of the game. The problem was the sacrifice that came with it. In order to play the game at that level, you have to commit the time, and that I couldn’t do. Then a few years ago, I moved to California, and WOW became one of the main ways of staying in touch with friends back East. But I was caught in a quandary. On one hand I enjoyed playing a game with friends, on the other hand the game was growing more and more boring the way I was playing it. The last chance that I gave to WOW was the most recent expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King. New content always makes for less boredom, but before long I reached the point of de-activating my account where it still stands to this day.

But what is probably the most intriguing point of this article, is that during all the time over the past few years, call it The Burning Crusade era and more recently the Wrath of the Lich King era, I wished that I was still actively raiding. I would read forums like elitist jerks, mmo champion, wowinsider.com (now known as wow.com), I would follow my old guilds DKP to see what they were killing and looting, and I would constantly be learning about strategies for the new boss encounters, new gear, patch changes to stats, talent revisions, you name it, I was reading about it. If you’ve read any of my articles about investing, you know that I think my brain works like a vacuum when I am interested in something, sucking in all the available information to process and digest. I can’t tell you how many times I used a talent calculator on wowhead.com to try out a new talent build each time a patch changed something. Over time I leveled almost every class to full level with a few exceptions (no warlocks or hunters), so I could spend hours “theorycrafting” on both the current and upcoming ideal specs. I do data analysis and statistics for a living, so it comes naturally to me to look at this game from the mathematical standpoint, and trying to optimize DPS, healing, mana consumption, etc are just big challenges to me.

The problem is that it’s just not possible for me to play the game as I want to, and the game as its available to me is not interesting. QQ, right? I feel like I can’t be alone in this situation. Now that WoW is approaching its 5 year anniversary, there are plenty of people who have given it up. Yet the overall number of subscriptions continues to move higher, even if it has slowed in growth rate. I’m sure Blizzard has statistics as to how many people have quit the game, how many re-subscribe from time to time, and their reasons for giving it up. (They ask you every time you cancel your subscription after all)

For now, I’ll just continue doing all of the other things that I do with my life. When the next expansion pack comes out, I’ll consider playing it again, but by then maybe even that won’t interest me.

signed,

Maybesew (no armory link, the toon’s been transferred and renamed)
Gnome mage
Server first (Elune) 5/5 Enigma set
Server first C’thun kill
Server first Ouro kill
Server first Viscidus kill (something like 3rd alliance guild worldwide)

So what’s my point? I wish it was easier to listen to Howard. I would listen to Howard around the clock if I could. And I don’t just mean if he were to broadcast live shows 24 hours a day. I’d be happy to listen to the current offering that Sirius XM radio broadcasts on Howard 100, but that’s where the problem really starts to take form. I’ve had a rocky history with Sirius, mostly due to the radios themselves than anything else. But recently, another disappointment manifested itself with the release of the Sirius XM iPhone app. Let’s go through the history of things to show just how much of a fan I am to put up with these problems, and still be willing to offer more money to Sirius. When Howard made the move to Sirius in January 2006, I wasn’t making much money and couldn’t afford a radio or the subscription, but a friend sent me recordings of the first week. I still listen to those recordings fairly often, as I think they are some of the best shows Howard and the team has ever done. From the opening fart noises, the revelations, and of course, what would the first week on Sirius be without the Howard Stern show announcer, George Takei.

The Problem with Sirius = The radios

When my wife and I started dating, she came along with a Sirius X-act radio that she bought as soon as she found out Howard was going to Sirius. She also told me that it never worked. When she brought it over to my apartment, she was right about it. No matter how I positioned the antenna out the window and facing the “southern sky”, we could never get reception for more than a few seconds at a time. Customer support wasn’t much help either, just telling us to try it in another window. We moved to another place, tried it there, and the same result. Then eventually when we moved to California and tried it one more time, and we were able to get it to work about 50% of the time, albeit with wires running across the room from the stereo out the window.

Having a little more money in my pocket to spend on things, I decided to get a Sirius radio for my car. I already had an aftermarket Alpine radio in the car with my iPod adapter, and I found a specific Sirius-Alpine adapter and ordered it. As soon as it arrived I brought it to Best Buy to be installed, and all was well. Somewhat. The reception in the car was better than what I had been experiencing at home, but it was far from great. But what was really the good news, was that around this time Sirius started its internet streaming and I could listen at work. I was in heaven. It wasn’t as great as when Howard was on my alarm clock radio and I woke up to hear him every day, but from the time I got into the car on the ride to work until I got home at night, there was a good chance that I was listening to Howard. Then my car radio stopped working. I brought it into Best Buy, and the guy there said it needed to be reset. He also said that sort of thing happened a lot with the 3rd party radios. So it worked again for about a month, and then it stopped again. Since I was mostly listening at work, and the car reception was never great, I didn’t even bother to bring it back to Best Buy again.

So I was surviving with just listening at work when my wife bought a new car with a Sirius built-in radio. Now this is how Sirius is supposed to work. She always gets reception in her car. I don’t know if it was the Alpine Sirius adapter, or the antenna is came with, but it was nothing compared to this. So with her free six month trial, she also got an online account. I decided to cancel my subscription, since we’d be using hers. When I called up, the customer service rep suggested putting a hold on my account and re-starting it when my wife’s free trial expired. Sounded okay to me, so I did. But what happened in the meantime was Sirius changed their policy on internet listening to cost an extra $2.99 a month for accounts after a certain date. By switching from my account to my wife’s we lost our “grandfathered in” clause, and now would have to pay more to listen online.

Enter the Sirius XM iPhone app

Now Sirius has released an iPhone app to listen to their channels, 120 different channels to be exact. And its a good looking app too. In addition to the streaming channels, the different channels have images and graphics that look nice, and it has a lot of potential to add more as well. Think of the way the Sirius radios stream text that describes what the current programming is, but a graphical version of that. They could definitely do some cool stuff with it. But as you probably already know if you are reading this, Howard 100 and Howard 101 were left out of the Sirius XP iPhone app, so you can’t listen to Stern this way. The explanation from the Sirius site:

Why don’t certain channels appear on my iPhone / iPod Touch?
SIRIUS Subscribers visit:
SIRIUS & XM offer all of the channels for which we have mobile performance rights. For that reason, certain channels which may be available on your satellite radio or online radio service may not be available on a mobile device like the iPhone.

So that’s a legitimate reason, how to we resolve it? And that’s what brings me to the crux of my article. I want to pay to listen to Howard Stern. I don’t really want anything else Sirius has to offer. I know Howard and everyone else on the show talk about how great the music channels are, but they just don’t appeal to me. I don’t think I’m alone on this one. If I want to listen to music, I will put on something I want to listen to, otherwise I want to listen to Howard. Or watch him on Howard TV, which I also pay for.

So what’s the point?

Howard are you getting the idea here? I have money that I am willing to pay to listen to you, I just need a reasonable way to do so. I don’t want to pay above and beyond a service (the standard monthly Sirius subscription), plus an upgrade fee (“Premium Online” service), plus some undetermined amount if and when the mobile performance rights to your show are added to the iPhone app.

Why can’t online listening be its own stand alone product? Why must I be tied to a car radio when the internet is the future of your broadcasting? Sirius just announced that over a million people downloaded the Sirius XM app within the first 2 weeks. On Apple’s last earnings call, they announced that over 40 million iPhones and iPod touches have been sold, all of which can run the Sirius XM app. As Ralph said to Mel Karmazin when he was on to discuss the merger, the car companies are barely interested in selling satellite radios in the first place. Broadcasting on the internet means no more expensive satellites to maintain. Mobile broadband will allow both phones and car radios to receive their radio signals from the internet in the very near future. Another blog sees other potential in the iPhone app in the realm of al a carte programming. I completely agree.

I was planning on ending this article with a link to some epetition where people could sign and show their support for this idea, but I decided against it. I just want to listen to Howard. I want to pay to do so. But I don’t want to pay for what I don’t use. I would gladly pay $9.99 to be able to listen to Howard online and on my iPhone and none of the other Sirius channels.

I’d love to hear some feedback in the comments on what other people would pay for just Howard. And if you’d be interested in paying for just internet radio and not having to pay for a radio subscription that you don’t want.