Disney Labor Day weekend 2010, Day 2

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.

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Disney Labor Day weekend 2010, Day 1

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.

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Quick fix for saving Galleon’s music player options

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.

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WIJFR: Daemon

Gaming genius Matthew Sobol, the 34-year-old head of CyberStorm Entertainment, has just died of brain cancer, but death doesn’t stop him from initiating an all-out Internet war against humanity. When the authorities investigate Sobol’s mansion in Thousand Oaks, Calif., they find themselves under attack from his empty house, aided by an unmanned Hummer that tears into the cops with staggering ferocity. Sobol’s weapon is a daemon, a kind of computer process that not only has taken over many of the world’s computer systems but also enlists the help of super-intelligent human henchmen willing to carry out his diabolical plan.

The hosts on just about every tech podcast I listen to (Leo Laporte, Tom Merrit, Paul Thurrott, and others) have mentioned “Daemon” by Daniel Suarez at one time or another, so it’s been on my to-read list for a while. I just finished reading this techno-thriller after starting it last month (as I headed to New York on business).

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Foscam FI8904W outdoor internet camera

I’ve been pleased so far with my in-house internet cameras and decided I’d like to be able to keep tabs on the outside of the house as well. TRENDnet sells weatherproof enclosures for their cameras but they won’t work with the night-vision models because the IR just reflects off of the glass. I started looking at other models of outdoor cameras and chose the Foscam FI8904W.

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Inception

Over the weekend I went and saw “Inception.” I didn’t know much about it except that the trailer looked pretty sweet and I had been hearing good reviews about it.

I really enjoyed it! It was like the mind/memory games of “Total Recall” combined with a heist film like “The Usual Suspects” with a healthy dose of special effects from “The Matrix.” The result is Christopher Nolan’s well-paced, action-packed, brain-bending thriller played out by a pretty good cast (although I still think of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the little kid from “Third Rock from the Sun” ;-)).

The way they explained the physics and design (with paradoxes!) and flow of time in the dream world was pretty cool, all without really getting into any heavy details of how the dream-sharing technology worked (which would have been unnecessary anyway). Without spoiling anything, the final sequence, which involves four dream layers (a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream) with different time flows was amazing.

Unrelated side note: I did see the “Tron: Legacy” trailer on the big screen before the film, which wasn’t as exciting as it could have been since I had already seen it on the internet.

Netgear MCA1001 MoCA adapters

Since I was facing a re-org of my media cabinet to set up my new TiVo Premiere, I took the opportunity to make some network changes as well. I’m not quite ready to upgrade my wireless network to the N standard that was finally ratified last year but still wanted good throughput so I could stream and download HD video to the new Tivo box. After doing some research and reading good reviews, I decided to try out MoCA, or ethernet-over-coax.

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TiVo Premiere

It’s been almost three years since I bought a new TiVo, so it was time. I’ve added the new TiVo Premiere to my main home theater setup, relegating my trusty, original Series3 box to home office duty.

I already had the 1TB WD Expander drive from the Series3, so rather than spend the extra cash on the Premiere XL, I went with the base 320gb model and then connected the Expander giving me 190 hours of HD recording capacity.

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Jailbreaking my iPhone

I couldn’t resist any longer: the recent exceptions added to the DMCA for jailbreaking allowed for the return of jailbreakme.com, the easiest way yet to jailbreak your iPhone. Just about every podcast I listen to/watch had talked about this and demoed it live so I figured what the heck? I made a full backup of my iPhone 3GS with iTunes and then fired up Safari …

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