It was an enjoyable, funny show and our whole family had a good time watching the antics of the Addamses and the Beinekes. I didn’t find the music/songs to be as earworm-worthy as those from “Wicked” or “Rent” but they were still pretty good. As a comedy goes, though, I found myself laughing a lot! If the US tour is coming near you, I recommend you check out a showing.

For lunch we hung out at the tailgate party (although I did have to snag a veggie sub from a nearby Subway for my daughter the vegetarian) and then it was time for the band concert, uh, I mean, football game. It was a perfect day for football: low 60s and sunny, but way too windy, which made it feel colder. I used my Gorillapod to create trumpet-cam (video here) as we played with the student band in the stands and for the halftime show. It wasn’t much of a football game, though, as Flyers beat Davidson 28-0. It was nice to catch up with old friends during the game, though.

For dinner, we met up with my family and more friends at Young’s Jersey Dairy where we let the kids run through the corn maze:

Before grabbing some ice cream (the only real reason for going to Young’s ).

It was another long, but fun day, as we got back to our hotel by 10:30pm. Tomorrow we have to get up early to catch our flight back home.

So my daughter and I had this great idea: we’d ride again, both pick the same song, and then “dance” and lip-sync during the ride to make a really cool, one-of-a-kind music video! And that’s just what we did, to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” The preview on the interactive kiosk seemed great (and hilarious, us singing along while the coaster loops upside down) so I ordered the $40 DVD and requested delivery to our hotel room. That was Saturday morning so the rest of the day and most of Sunday while we waited for the DVD to arrive we kept talking about how cool it was going to be.

We found the disc waiting for us in our room when we got back from Islands of Adventure on Sunday afternoon. I booted up the laptop, and played the disc. I knew almost immediately that something was wrong as “I Will Survive” started playing over the familiar Universal logo. Somehow I suspected right then that our video had not turned out as we expected it would.

When the video finally ended, my daughter looked at me crestfallen. The majority of it was animated graphics and computer-generated views of the roller coaster. Cut into this was the occasional video clip of us in the car plus some video from fixed cameras on the track as we whizzed by. None of our lip-syncing or dance moves “worked” since the music track of the DVD wasn’t synchronized with the music we were hearing on the ride itself. Maybe our expectations were too high, but the final result was so far off it was depressing … I felt tricked, duped. “A fool and his money …” I suppose.

After we got home, I went through the video clip-by-clip and came up with this breakdown:

Time our names were on-screen (text only) : 25 seconds
Time our in-car video was on-screen       : 32 seconds
Time of fixed track camera video          : 26 seconds
TOTAL personalized time in music video    : 83 seconds

You’re reading that right … only 58  seconds of the over 8 minute video actually showed us. Even the “ending credits” were longer (2 minutes, 17 seconds) because they listed the music credits of every song available on the coaster! If you check out the web page about the coaster on Universal’s web site, you’ll see this:

…Gasping with excitement, you’ll rock out to the song YOU pick before strapping in. And, it’s all recorded on video. Edit your adventure into a music video, and buy a copy to take home or send to your friends.

It’s true high-tech, customizable, multi-sensory entertainment. This groundbreaking combination of audio and special effects engineering, sophisticated on- and off-board video and one-of-a-kind personalization takes you on a coaster experience unlike any other.

Re-read that phrase I highlighted above. Is the 83 seconds of “personalized” video I ended up purchasing for $40 what they consider “all recorded on video”? The ride itself is 1 minute, 45 seconds long so that can’t be all. I didn’t care for (or want) the extra graphics and video that padded out the run time to over 8 minutes, I just wanted the start-to-finish in-car video of my daughter and I riding the coaster.

If you want to see what one of these videos looks like, there are a lot on YouTube. Here’s one that even has the Gloria Gaynor song so it’s pretty much exactly the same as mine except for 83 seconds. Notice that the first “personalized” clip doesn’t even show up until 1 minute, 31 seconds in.

I’ve written to Customer Relations at Universal about this and am awaiting a reply (reference numbers EM-254285 and EM-254384 in case anyone from Universal happens to see this). I’m sure by now it’s impossible to get the start-to-finish video of my daughter and I (if it even ever was possible) so I simply requested a refund. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Am I over-reacting? I’d be interested to hear from other people who have purchased their video if they were satisfied with it. In the meantime, if I do hear back from Universal I’ll be sure to update this post.

Update (09/13/2011): I was contacted by Amazing Pictures Customer Support and they are refunding me the money for the DVD. I’m satisfied now, thanks Universal.

I took Friday afternoon off so we could pick up my daughter right after school and head over to Orlando and beat the traffic on both sides of I-4. We were in the Disney area by about 4:45pm and went to check into our hotel for the evening. Here we encountered a problem that threatened to ruin our little getaway weekend.

Some time ago we had acquired a coupon for a free night’s stay at the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando and decided to use it for this overnight trip to Epcot. My wife had made the reservation using the coupon and had confirmed it would be good for just the one night. Well, while trying to check in, the desk clerk informed my wife that the coupon could only be used for a stay longer than one night. In other words, we’d have to stay two nights to get the one night free. The hotel was booked (due to a conference) so the rate they quoted us was over $200. Despite our arguing that we had confirmed, when making the reservation, that the coupon was good for only a single night, the clerk wouldn’t help us. She even said they had a lot of people who had been trying the same thing! So why was the reservation desk allowing people to make single night reservations, only to be turned down upon check-in? What a scam. We told them to forget it and just left. Needless to say we won’t be staying at a Hyatt any time soon, and they can expect a strongly worded letter about our recent experience. While walking back to the car, I called the Disney resort reservation line and got us a room at the Pop Century in less than 15 minutes.

With that unpleasantness behind us, we drove over to the Pop Century and were checked-in and unpacked in our room by 6:00pm. What a stark difference to the Hyatt. The room and resort itself might not have been as lavish as the Hyatt, but the whole experience reminded us why we really love staying on Disney property when we visit. This also allowed us to hop on the Disney bus to Epcot that evening, instead of having to drive.

The whole point of coming over to Epcot Friday night was to catch Big Bad Voodoo Daddy in concert at the America Gardens Pavilion. By this point (thanks to the Hyatt fiasco) we had already missed the first two shows, so we started walking around the World Showcase and sampling/sharing the international food at the various booths in each country for dinner. We made it halfway around to America just in time for the 7:45pm show, and it was great. I’ve got all of BBVD’s albums, but this was the first time I’d seen them live in concert. My daughter really enjoyed the show as well (“Go Daddy-O” is now her ringtone for me on her cellphone).

After the concert we did some more snacking around the World Showcase and then watched the Illuminations fireworks show before catching the bus back to our hotel.

Saturday morning we had breakfast at the Pop Century and then checked out and drove to Epcot so we were there for the official opening at 9am. We followed the huge crowds into The Land to ride Soarin’ (apparently everyone had the same idea), and then walked over to the other side of the park to ride Mission: SPACE and Test Track. After a brief stop in Innoventions West to play The Great Piggybank Adventure, it was 11am which meant the World Showcase was open and it was time for lunch!

This time we started from the opposite direction as last night. Overall, we sampled foods from: Chile, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, China, South Korea, South Africa, Singapore, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, Morocco, Belgium, Spain, France, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Greece, and New Zealand. Whew! All of them were fantastic and we really had a great time.

Good food, good drink, and good weather added up to a great time with the family.

Being a trumpet player myself, I was a big fan of Dizzy, primarily because of his sweet horn and the cheeks (although try as I might I could never play with my cheeks puffed out like that). When I was a freshman in high school I had an upperclassman bully (yes, they exist even in marching band!) take my cornet and bend the bell up (why he did this, I cannot remember). It kinked the bell tube though so of course it wouldn’t play that well. My parents had it repaired but that was pretty much the last straw for that old horn (which I had been playing since grade school) and I ended up getting a new silver Yamaha trumpet (which I still own and occasionally play) so it ended well.

One of my favorite memories of Dizzy was his appearance on The Muppet Show:

Man, that guy could blow! Happy Birthday, Dizzy!

This can particularly be helpful when setting up a new TiVo (letting you quickly copy the SPs from your old box to the new one) or for easier mass-reorganization (say, during the new Fall TV season) without having to endure multiple “please wait” screens doing it on the TiVo directly.

In my brief testing, when I copied a Season Pass from my old original Series2(which has no HD channels) to one of my HD boxes, the SPM automatically selected the corresponding HD channel, which is neat. If I copied a show that aired on multiple channels, the SPM prompted me to select which channel I wanted to use:

Unfortunately, WishLists, manual recordings, and Guru Guides aren’t supported in the SPM so if you use any of those they won’t appear online. Thus the order shown in the browser might not exactly match what’s on your TiVo. For example, I have “dummy” auto-record WishLists (ARWLs) on my TiVo Premiere that I use to order shows by day in the Season Pass Manager (a tip I got from astrohip on the TiVo Community Forums) and those don’t show up in the SPM. So while the online SPM is cool, I’ll still be keeping all of my stuff documented in Excel.

Despite a few minor quirks (one time I couldn’t copy a Season Pass since the show wasn’t currently airing, and I had a few weird things happen while re-ordering), being able to manage my Season Passes online is a welcome addition to the TiVo service. It’ll be interesting to see if the development community comes up with any cool apps using this new feature.

Since I’m writing about TiVo, I might as well mention that Pandora internet radio was rolled out to the TiVo Premiere platform last month. You can now play your Pandora stations directly through your TiVo. I’m relatively new to Pandora but have been messing around with it on my iPhone and it’s impressive how well it matches my musical tastes just by creating a few artist-based stations. I still use Galleon to play my iTunes library and custom playlists through the home theater system (i.e., during a party or when I’m grilling in the backyard) but having another source of semi-random music (with minimal commercial interruption) isn’t a bad thing. Hopefully Pandora will be added to the TiVo HD and Series3 platforms as well.

Netflix on TiVo has been around for years but I only just recently became a Netflix subscriber and now have the chance to use their instant streaming on my HD TiVos, Wii, and iPhone/iPad. I guess this means I won’t be using Amazon’s Video On Demand service as much!

And finally, @tivodesign tweeted that the new 14.6 software rollout has begun for the TiVo Premiere. Hopefully we’ll see some more performance improvements in the HD menus!

That’s enough TiVo stuff for now!

Ok, yes, an interesting combination but that’s to be expected in a random playlist. What caught my eye was the similarity of the cover art for those two tracks:

Strange!

The way the musicians were arranged on-stage helped showcase the three different styles of music we would be hearing. On the left were the strings for the orchestral numbers, in the center were the drums and bass, which combined with Harry on piano for the traditional jazz combo style, and then on the right were the trumpets, trombones, and saxophones for the big band numbers. For two hours he played a good mix of songs from the new CD and other recent releases plus a few of his trademark New Orleans jazz combo numbers. In addition to singing and playing the piano (of course) he also played trumpet and bass! “I suck” he joked, but of course he was pretty good.

During the breaks between sets he would talk and interact with the audience, which is always entertaining. He talked about how great it was for New Orleans to have the Saints as the Super Bowl champions (he apparently went to the game and got to meet a lot of the players afterwards). He jokingly talked about how 94% of the country doesn’t understand the “who dat?” chant and proposed (and briefly sang) a more understandable “who is that?” version. He told a funny story about his recent trip to the Grammys where he met Jennifer Hudson and had “her junk” on his arm during a photo shoot (“and she has a lot of junk!”). Another memorable  moment was when he said one of his daughter’s friends said he played “grandpa music” and the four women in his house would rather go see Kesha than him (which prompted  him to sing a few bars of “Tik Tok“).

Like my “Good Eats Live” experience last summer, however, there was a negative aspect to the show that will taint my memory of it … the super-annoying lady sitting directly behind us was a “woo girl.” Yes, at the beginning of every song she recognized, she had to shout “woooo!” at the top of her lungs in her ear-piercing, high-pitched voice. And not only that, she took advantage of silent moments to yell out song requests (“play ‘Come By Me!’”) or inappropriate comments (“Harry’s hot!”). By the end of the concert I was ready to turn around and strangle her. Arrrgh! There were a few other annoying hecklers in the crowd, but Harry dealt with them good naturedly (“it’s my name on the marquee, I’ll handle the comedy.”). Of course the theater had a strict policy on photographs and videotaping, but at the end of the show Harry posed for a picture with a lady in the front row and all of a sudden everyone had their cellphones and cameras out and were snapping photos. It must have been driving the ushers mad.

Overall, it was a great show and a good time. My favorite performance is still the one we saw in Cleveland during the “She”/”Star Turtle” tour when he was playing with the funk band in the mid-90s, but the jazz and big band shows are really good too and I’ll always go to see  him when I have the chance.

This was the third time for me (once on Broadway with the original cast, here in Tampa during the first tour in 2007, and now again in 2010) but the first time my daughter had seen it, and she absolutely loved it. She’s actually falling asleep in her room right now listening to the soundtrack. She had read “The Wizard of Oz” (but actually hasn’t seen the movie) so it was fun to watch her put the pieces together as the story of Elphaba and Glinda unfolded on stage. I bought her the novel on which the musical is based (Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West“) a few months ago, but strangely she never got around to finishing it … I’ll be she does now, and I’d like to read it  myself once I catch up on my current backlog.

This was the matinee show so a few of the understudies were performing the main parts. I guess I’m a little spoiled because after seeing Edina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth belt out “Defying Gravity” on Broadway, the traveling company just didn’t pack the same punch. Not that they weren’t good! Here’s a funny note: Richard Kline is playing the role of the Wizard. I wouldn’t have recognized him except the playbill specifically mentioned he “is best known as Jack Tripper’s best friend, Larry Dallas on the classic sitcom ‘Three’s Company.’” That’s right, this guy is currently the Wizard of Oz.

I’m not actually new to Geeksta rap … I’ve had MC Hawking and Minibosses tracks in my collection since at least 1998 (and of course a few specific songs by “Weird Al” Yankovic like “It’s All About the Pentiums“).  This is first time I’ve heard it categorized into a specific genre (other than parody), however. Now I’ve been listening to new (to me) stuff by groups like Optimus Rhyme.

Want a quick introduction to nerdcore hip hop? Check out the NerdcoreNow compilations.