Shopping under gray skies

I guess we should have gone to the parks today instead of yesterday: it was gray and overcast, but cool and not a single drop of rain. Oh well!

img_2384-790133After breakfast and a little personal time at the hotel (Disney’s All-Star Music resort), we headed over to check out Disney’s Boardwalk. We had seen it yesterday while taking the Friendship boats from Hollywood Studios to Epcot and it looked neat. It’s a nice little area, but not that big and there’s not that much to do in the early afternoon. It’s mostly restaurants and clubs (which open later) and a few stores for shopping. It does afford a nice view of the Yacht and Beach Clubs across the lake, though. I liked the tagline for the ESPN club: “we recommend the HD.” 🙂 It’s probably a cooler place to go in the evening.

Since it was just about early lunch time, we decided to try Spoodles, a Mediterranean restaurant on the boardwalk. The breakfast menu was up, but since it was 11:15 we figured by the time we were seated, lunch would be served. Well, after waiting for 10 minutes and then being shown to our table, we were told they don’t serve lunch! Just breakfast/brunch, and then dinner starting at 5:30. We had already eaten breakfast, and there was really nothing appealing on the brunch menu …

… so we left, drove over to Downtown Disney, and had lunch at Bongos Cuban Cafe, which was very good (I recommend the Cuban sandwich). After lunch we wandered around the West Side and Disney Marketplace and did some shopping. Then it was back to the hotel for a family nap.

Refreshed, we went over to Summer Winterland miniature golf and played the sand course. My wife scored two holes-in-one and tied the course record for the day (38). We actually left Disney property 😛 and grabbed dinner at QDoba over in the touristy area on Apopka-Vineland Road.

Back at hotel, we swam a bit in the guitar-shaped Calypso pool and then finished up the day watching a bit of “Finding Nemo” in the hotel food court on the big plasma screen.

Overall, a fun, relaxing day, and we stayed dry the entire time.

Down(pour) and out in the Magic Kingdom

We’re in Orlando this weekend for our annual Labor Day mini-vacation at Walt Disney World.

The day started out great: blue sky, white clouds, nice temperature. We got up early and headed over the Disney’s Hollywood Studios (formerly MGM Studios) since it opened an hour earlier for resort guests. Once inside, we made a bee-line for the new Toy Story Mania attraction. It was only a 30-minute standby wait, so that was the first thing we did … and it was great! You sit in a four-person car (two on each side) and use a toy gun to shoot at targets in the Midway-themed ride. You rack up points as you go, and your score is tallied on a separate screen. I got the third-highest score of the day (177,000+ points) but since we were there first thing in the morning I’m sure that didn’t last long.

img_2352-sm-707691Eventually we took the ferry from Hollywood Studios over to Epcot, where we had lunch reservations at Tappan Edo in Japan. Mmmm … fantastic! Our chef, Akira (not the Akira), put on a good show and cooked some fantastic food.

Unfortunately, while we were inside at lunch, the rain moved in. Unbenownst to us, this was caused by the outer bands of Hurricane Gustav moving through Florida. Actually, by the time we left the restaurant, the rain had stopped and the day had turned overcast. We figured that would be the end of it. But no, the rain continued on and off during the rest of the day, meaning we spent most of it in our rain ponchos.

Disney is well known for the use of cutting-edge technology in their rides and attractions, and rarely do you see public breakdowns. Well, we ran into one on the newly revamped Spaceship Earth ride. The latest remodel has included touchscreens in each car. During the beginning of the ride, you can select your language, where you’re visiting from, etc. Your photo is also taken. Well, unfortunately the system in our car crashed shortly after we boarded, so I got to watch the system reboot … literally. The BIOS screen was first (with a customized Spaceship Earth logo), then strangely, the GRUB boot loader was used to boot Windows XP (Start menu and system tray on the bottom of the screen):

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I watched as the little wireless icon re-connected to the Spaceship Earth network and eventually the system started working again. Unfortunately, by then we were past the photo part of the ride. At the end, the system asks you questions about what you’d like to do in the future and then builds some sort of customized animation using your headshots in it. Since our system was rebooting and never took the photos, we didn’t get to experience our “customized future.” Oh well.

We finished the day at Magic Kingdom, riding Splash Mountain (we were already wet anyway) and Space Mountain, and visiting the Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor (also highly recommended!).

Around 7:45 in the evening we decided to head back over to Hollywood Studios to see Fantasmic. After taking the monorail over to the Transportation Station, and then waiting for the bus, we were informed that the park had closed at 8pm (it was now 8:15pm) since the show was at 8:30 (we thought it was at 9). So we ended up just catching another bus from Hollywood Studios back to the hotel and calling it a night.

By the way, the title of this post is a play on a short story by Cory Doctorow.

Attention to detail

I consider myself to be very detail-oriented, so it bugs me when I run into examples of where it’s obvious no one else is paying attention to the little things.

Take this receipt from today’s lunch at Subway for example:

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Huh? Happy Holidays!? Happy New Year!? It’s August! No one working at this Subway (like the manager) has noticed this? For the past 8 months?

Ok, I can’t completely fault the employees of my local Subway. I must admit that I’ve gone there quite a few times this year and this is the first time I noticed (in my defense, though, I really only glance at the receipt to check the points balance on my Subway card).

I have a (non-technical) colleague at work who is fond of the following phrase when he’s telling me how I should solve a programming problem: “C’mon, it’s just a simple IF statement.” Now I don’t know a lot of about POS systems (point-of-sale, not the other meaning for POS) but in this case I think a simple IF statement would have worked. If the current date is greater than or equal to, say, January 15, don’t print that message anymore!

Sheesh.

Stream to your TiVo

The 9.4 software release for the TiVo Series3 and HD boxes included the ability to stream YouTube videos in H.264 format and the community quickly started re-engineering the feature. pyTiVo developer wmcbrine was the first one to get a basic stream working in his HME for Python framework.

Now, TiVo Community user moyekj has released a small java HME app called tivostream that allows you to stream MPEG and H.264 content directly to your box without the need for transcoding (which is what pyTivo does via ffmpeg).

You drop the jar file into your high-level video directory and run it. A new ‘videostream’ menu item will appear on your TiVo’s Music, Photos, Products, & More menu through which you can browse your video hierarchy and then select a file to stream. Playback starts almost instantaneously. Since it’s a stream, the file isn’t actually copied to the TiVo so there’s no disk space taken up. Also, if you drop out to Live TV or go back into the TiVo menus, the stream is cancelled. So what if you want to pick up where you left off? moyekj has written the ability to jump x minutes into the stream. Just start the stream again, enter a number (in minutes) and press the skip-to-tick button. Pretty slick. Overall, tivostream is still in very early development, but it works and shows promise of cool things to come. You can read this thread on TCF for more details.

One note: if you’re going to run tivostream alongside Galleon, start tivostream first. Both apps try to grab port 7288 but Galleon is smart enough to try 7289 (or the next available port) if 7288 is in use already.

“Snow day” in August

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Luckily Fay is going to track to the east of us today, but last night Pinellas county cancelled the first day of school to be on the safe side.

So my daughter has to wait one more day to start the second grade.

Right now it’s just cloudy and stormy looking outside. The Tampa Bay area isn’t even under a tropical storm watch anymore so we’re just expecting wind and rain, but nothing serious.

Now hopefully we’ll have calm weather for the next two weeks so we can get our new windows installed.

WIJFR: Mossflower

Martin the Warrior finds himself trespassing on the land of Verdagua, King of a Thousand Eyes, as he lies sick and near dying. With his last strength, Verdagua is struggling to make a decision on who should replace him as ruler of Mossflower Country. As Martin and his newfound friend and fellow prisoner Gonff become embroiled in the battle against Verdagua’s ruthless daughter, Tsarmina, a bloody fight between good and evil ensues.

It took us a little longer than book one, but my daughter and I finally finished the second book of Brian Jaques’ Redwall series, “Mossflower.”

“Mossflower” takes place an unspecified amount of time before “Redwall” but in the same general location. The now-familiar cast of woodlanders are all present again: mice, moles, hedgehogs, otters, badgers, and squirrels. The antagonists this time are the usual armies of rats, stoats, weasels, and foxes, led by the evil wildcat queen Tsarmina. The book tells the story of Martin the Warrior: how he came to Mossflower country and his quest to free Mossflower Woods from the armies of Kotir. Along the way he must repair his father’s sword, the same sword that ends up playing a central role of Matthias’ quest in “Redwall.”

It was great seeing my daughter’s face light up as we read together and she put together the pieces linking the characters and locations in “Mossflower” to “Redwall” (especially at the end). She also enjoyed comparing the maps in the front of both books. I think her favorite characters in this one were Ferdy and Coggs, the two young hedgehogs. My favorites was young Dinny, the mole. Molespeech is really hard to read out loud. 😉

My daughter has already read (by herself) the third book in the series, “Mattimeo” (I guess she got tired of waiting since it was taking us so long to finish “Mossflower”). So now I’ll have to read that one next (by myself) to catch up and then we can move onto book four.

What is it about this shirt?

mn1_000048-738149Last month when we were on vacation, I bought this t-shirt at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. Out of all the other shirts in the gift shop, I thought this one was the coolest: it was simple, had no writing (except for the small Rock Hall logo on the back), and just looked sweet. It also helped that it was subtle: the younger people I was with had no idea what the “symbol” was … they thought it was just a cool logo.

I’ve worn the shirt a couple of times since I bought it and every time, at least one person comes up to me to comment on it.

One lady thought it was the disc used in toy guns (like this one, I guess?). One person thought it was a stylized bio-hazard symbol. Most older folks know what it is, though, and just say what a cool shirt it is. I had two people approach me about it just today while grocery shopping!

I have a lot of other t-shirts, but this is the only one that seems to inspire complete strangers to walk up to me and talk about it.

Oh, and if you still don’t know what it is … look here and search the page for “snap-in.”

Here we go!

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Looks like Fay is making a bee-line for the Tampa Bay area! This just figures since our new hurricane windows for the house aren’t scheduled to install for another two weeks. I might have to get the plywood out one last time …

WIJFR: The Call of Cthulhu

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

I’ve had H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in e-book form on my Treo for some time now (reading it slowly in bits and pieces as I found myself with a little time to kill) and finally finished it.

I was first introduced to the Chthulhu mythos back in high school when a buddy of mine in our gaming group bought Chaosium’s RPG of the same name. Up until that point we’d been playing traditional AD&D campaigns and newer games like Shadowrun, TORG, or Amber. CoC was different: 1920s setting, horror genre, gruesome killings, sanity checks, and the occasional dimensional shambler. My friend was big into Lovecraft, as I recall, so running CoC games was his way of sharing his enthusiasm for the genre with us.

The horror element and the chance of having your character go insane was intruiging, but I never really got into it. I was not the best role-player in that I had a hard time becoming the character. I just couldn’t play a 1920s college professor and be serious about it … a source of frustration for the dungeon master, I’m sure. Anyway, the point of all that is that I never actually read the short story that inspired the game. Maybe I would have been more into it if I had.

“The Call of Cthulhu” is written as a first-person narrative. The narrator has found some notes left behind by a dead relative along with a small grotesque statue and through research, investigation, and interviews begins piecing together a story of the Great Old Ones (aliens from beyond the stars), the loathsome cult that worships them, and the ancient city beneath the sea where they sleep “until the stars are ready.” By the end of the story, however, he wishes he had not been able to put everything together … ignorance is bliss sometimes.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

On the lighter side of things, did you know Cthulhu can teach you XML? I love User Friendly. 😀