Congratulations Rays!
With their win over Baltimore tonight, the Tampa Bay Rays clinched their second playoff berth in three years, eliminating the Red Sox from the wildcard race. Now they just need to hold on for the remaining few games, hopefully extend their half-game lead over the Yankees, and win the Eastern division.
Covering the transformation of Kodacell (formerly Kodak and Duracell) into a network of tiny teams, journalist Suzanne Church goes to Florida and the inventors behind it all, Lester and Perry, who have more ideas than they know what to do with. The New Work takes off, with a mini-startup in every abandoned strip mall in America. But suddenly, it crashes, and things get really interesting. Lester and Perry build an interactive ride in an abandoned Wal-Mart, a nostalgia trip through their glory days, that catches the eye of a vicious Disney exec—and the old corporate giants fight their last battle against the new economic order.
Earlier this week I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” (the e-pub version through Stanza on my iPhone). This is the sixth Doctorow novel I’ve read and the second one that has a lot of Disney stuff in it (the other being “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom“). Since I live near Disney World and tend to go there a lot (we’ve had resident annual passes for the past few years), it’s fun to read Cory’s books that involve a place he obviously has a thing for as well.
Last month I purchased Podcaster for my iPhone (thanks to this thread over on the TiVo Community Forum) and have now been using it for a few weeks.
Podcaster was originally rejected by Apple back in 2008 so the developer put the app on Cydia instead for jailbroken phones. Then in 2009, a slightly stripped down version called RSS Player accepted into the App Store. Finally, this past June, Podcaster for iOS4 devices was approved by Apple (RSS Player is still available for older iOS3 devices).
I knew it was going to be a tough start to the 2010 NFL season because one of my two favorite teams was guaranteed to start with a loss. That’s because the Cleveland Browns were in town playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the season opener. The last time these two teams played each other was in 2006 and this was the first time the teams had met in the opening game of the season.
In other firsts, this was the first time I had gone to a Bucs game in Raymond James Stadium and the first professional football game I took my daughter to. The last Bucs game I attended was back in 1995 when they lost to the Bears in the old Tampa Stadium. I didn’t even live in Florida at the time and the Bucs were still wearing the orange and white with the feather hat logo. In fact, that might have been the last NFL game I’d attended, which coincidentally was also the last year for the “old” Browns before Modell moved the franchise to Baltimore.
Going to the game was actually the only way to see it if you lived in the Tampa Bay area since it was blacked out locally (the first blacked out home game in 12 years). The stadium was pretty empty … I joked with my daughter that they should have let everyone move down into the better seats so the stadium would look m
ore full on TV. Americal Idol finalist (and St. Pete resident) Michael Lynche sang the National Anthem and the F-16 flyover was fantastic … now it was time for some football!
It was hot during the first quarter (heat index of 105), but right before halftime our typical afternoon Florida rainstorms blew through and cooled it off for the second half. I was wearing a Browns jersey, so I was happy for most of the game as the Browns led 14-10. With about 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter, my daughter and I decided to leave so we could beat the crowds and traffic and the more serious weather we could see approaching. As we were walking in the parking lot, I heard the crowd and the cannons announce a Tampa Bay touchdown. We listened to the rest of the game on the radio driving home … the Browns had a good chance to still pull out a victory, but it wasn’t to be and the Bucs won their home opener 17-14. So it was a split decision for me seeing the Bucs win at the expense of my Browns losing, but my daughter and I still had a great time at the game so it was win-win for us.
I’m currently sitting in the Jury Selection room of the Pinellas County Criminal Justice Center waiting to be selected for jury duty. There’s no cell reception in here, but at least there’s free WiFi so I can surf the web on my EeePC while I’m waiting.
In a timely coincidence, just yesterday I was listening to episode #222 of East Meets West which had Tom and Roger discussing the merits (and pitfalls) of jury duty and why people tend to shy away from performing their civic duty as citizens of the United States.
That’s about all I want to say about this topic for now … I don’t want to have to write an essay about the constitutional right to a fair trial after all.
We’re back home after our sixth-annual Labor Day weekend family vacation at Disney World and had a great time as usual. Decent crowds, hidden Mickeys, and those cool FastPass Exchange cards really made the weekend fun.
The plan was to meet an old buddy from high school and his daughter at 8am over at the Ticket and Transportation Center so we got up early and grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel before driving over to the Magic Kingdom. What we didn’t realize was that the 2010 Trek Women’s Triathlon was going on so a lot of the roads around our hotel were blocked off for the cycling portion of the race. We ended up being routed all the way back out to I-4 (!!) and had to find our way back onto Disney property. As a result, we were a little late meeting our friends but still got parking in the first row of the lot so it was a short walk to the gates.
Our reason for meeting early was so we could redeem another Give-a-Day-Get-a-Day voucher for FastPass Exchange cards for the five of us to use in the Magic Kingdom. There was no line at will-call, so getting the cards was quick and easy and soon we were back in the car together (leaving the other one in the lot for our return later) driving over to Animal Kingdom to start the day. Despite our “late” start we still made it into the park shortly before opening.
We got up early on Saturday and drove Hollywood Studios for the Extra Magic hour. Following our usual pattern, we made a bee-line for Toy Story Mania to get FastPasses. By the time we got them, around 8:20am, our return time was three hours later at 11:20am (and the standby line was already 50 minutes)! That’s only 20 minutes after the park opened to resort guests! I could only imagine what the times would be like when the park opened to the general public at 9am.
It’s Labor Day Weekend which means summer is over, school has started, and it’s time for our annual family vacation weekend at Disney World.
I tend to watch for Galleon-related threads on TCF and came across this one earlier this week. Basically it was reported that after making changes in the Music Player options, those changes would not be saved. I don’t really use the music player options but always enjoy a debugging challenge so decided to check it out.
Continue reading ‘Quick fix for saving Galleon’s music player options’ »