Not Necessarily Interesting News

Ok, thank God that’s the last time that alarm goes off so early. I’ve been dreading waking up wondering what piece of electronics I’m going to kill next. My iBook died on the morning of day 2. The battery of my camera also wouldn’t hold a charge, so no digital pics. Day three saw the dramatic death of my GPS. I give up. The only piece of working electronics I have left is my phone so I’m wondering when it’ll meet its maker.
(Read on …)

Damn that alarm. I know 7:45 isn’t that early but, geez, it sure seems like it after being up to nearly 1AM. Today we are headed for Animal Kingdom and MGM Studios.

First stop, Animal Kingdom. Got inside and headed straight for their premier attraction the Kilimanjaro Safari. I must say I was impressed at this attraction. The wall and fences are hidden so masterfully you think you really are travelling through Africa and that there’s nothing between you and that cheetah or lion. You think there’s nothing stopping a lion from walking over to a gazelle and getting a quick meal. The giraffes were out and about and walked right up to the truck. For me the coolest part was seeing the Defender 90 they had parked there to look like poachers were working the area. They had treated it to look rusted which made me laugh. Aluminium, which is what the body is made from, doesn’t rust. We did this ride again because it was so neat. We also hit ‘It’s a Bug’s Life’ which had decent effects along the lines of ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Audience’. A few more stops and we are on our way to MGM.
(Read on …)

We woke up this morning to rain. Bummer. The front that passed through Austin 3 days ago made it to Florida. What are we gonna do? Stay in the hotel? I think not. It’s just water. Today we are headed to the Magic Kingdom and maybe Epcot for dinner later.

We decided to eat breakfast at the hotel restaurant. They had wonderful sweet potato pancakes. Very filling and not too expensive. Time to head to the park for some rides and pin trading for Dakota.

Arrived at the park around 10AM. It seems to be quite dead because of the rain. That’s a good thing. Most of their rides are inside things and the rain looks to break up in a couple hours. I’ve been looking forward riding the ExtraTERRORestrial Encounter so we headed that way first. Damnit. It’s closed for renovation. Okay, let’s hit Dakota’s favorite, Buzz Lightyear’s Space Spin. It’s a giant video game you ride through and shoot at the bad guys with laser guns. The rain broke up around noon and it turned into a nice day. We of course hit the scariest ride in all DisneyWorld, It’s a Small World. Then on to what is probably my favorite here, the Haunted Mansion. Dakota just loves looking for the ‘Hidden Mickeys’. Once we got off this we had to hit the attached gift shop. My wife was in heaven. She collects Nightmare Before Christmas stuff and the shop was packed to the gills. I think I got out for under $200. Nice thing about staying on-site is we can have the purchases delivered straight to our room and not carry them around all day.
(Read on …)

This is the first installment in the story of our 4 day trip to the Land of the Giant Rat. My iBook died on the trip so I’m having to transcribe from my notepad into the blog since I don’t have access to the entries on the laptop. I’ll add them with the correct dates as I go.

Oh, Dear Lord. I didn’t realize that there was such a thing as 4 o’clock in the morning. I figured night ended around 2-3AM and days started around 8-9AM. When that alarm went off it scared the hell out of me. Luckily we were all packed and ready to go. Note to self: No more 6AM flights.

We got to the airport about 45-50 minutes before our flight. Usually this is more than enough time at the Austin airport. Not so this time. We figured we’d save space and take just one bag for my wife, son, and me. That was all well and good until Mr. ESL weighed our bag. Oops. We were at 62.5lbs, the limit is 50lbs per bag. My sister had to pull out the extra bag she had packed to bring souveniers back in. We offloaded our battery chargers, batteries, and otehr heavy items. We could have all brought 2 bags each, each one weighing 50lbs for a total of 300lbs. The logic that we had saved 240lbs+the space baffled our little rocket surgeon counter worker. Whatever.
(Read on …)

Well, my iBook died this week while we were on vacation in Orlando. I had been taking notes and went to upload our first day’s adventures and the screen wouldn’t power up. After fiddling with it in the hotel room I got it to come on but then it freaked out and I lost picture again. I could hear it was on and was logging me in when I typed my password.

When we got home this morning I decided to try an external monitor so I could at least get my notes off of it. It worked, for about 3 minutes. It looks like the video chip has gone tits-up.

I had to go old school this week and keep notes in a notebook which prompted the purchase of my only souveneir from our 5 days trip to DisneyWorld, a damn nice pen. I’ll be transcribing the notes from the notebook into the blog over the next few days.

I realized that these past five days was the longest I had gone without Net access in several years. And I didn’t die. Weird.

I was driving home last nite up 183 and noticed the guy next to me in an Acura reading some sort of business presentation. His eyes were firmly on his paperwork in bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic. Nice.

I just love these types. Trying to drive, talk on the phone, put on makeup, and drink their Double Tall Half-Caff Lattes from Starbucks. Do you really think your full attention is on the road when you’re doing this? Geez.

I decided it was time to screw with Mr. Businessman. I managed to get ahead of him. Not a tough proposition when he’s reading and doesn’t notice the car ahead of him has moved. He would roll slowly behind the person in front and notice they’d stopped at the last second. I’d let a good size gap open in front of me and I’d slowly creep forward and let him get used to creeping at like 3-5 MPH right on my bumper and then out of the blue I’d slam on the brakes. He narrowly avoided hitting me a couple of times. I guess having a big ol’ Land Rover stop dead when you don’t expect it wakes you up. I do know that I’d drive away from any ‘contact’ with nary a scratch while my radiator-height trailer hitch would go right though his grill. After a few rounds of this I think he finally gave up on his paperwork out of frustration.

: Mambo 8 from the album “Office Space” by Perez Prado

I was on my way to work this morning and like every morning I get to sit for several minutes trying to get through the intersection at Anderson Mill Road and 183. It was a decent morning. A bit drizzly but I put the top on the Defender so I was staying dry.

For some reason I noticed a black late model Honda Acccord pull into the parking lot at Half Price Books. I watched a quite shabbily dressed lady get out of the car. Didn’t look like she should be driving a car like that. I then watched her walk around to her trunk and get something out. Don’t ask me why I was watching her. You do these things when you’ve got no radio to listen to I guess. It looked like a piece of cardboard or something. I then assumed she was headed to the UPS Store right next door but she didn’t head that way. She started walking towards the intersection with her what I now guessed was a sign. Sure enough. She set up shop on the corner with her sign begging for money. *sigh* I guess there’s enough suckers in the world to make it a decent paying line of work and no tax -free to boot.

It confirmed suspicions I’ve had for years. I have only ever been tempted to give money to one of these folks once. There is a lady that begs on the same corner fairly regularly. I don’t know why but she seems genuinely ashamed that she’s out there. She never looks you in the eye just at the ground and I’ve seen her crying several times. I just wonder where her two kids are they she claims she has on the sign. Probably with the nanny.

I don’t want to spoil the movie so I’ll keep any details to myself.

My wife is a huge Matrix fan so of course we were going to see the new one on opening night. That wasn’t enough though. She wanted to see it on the BIG screen. I heard the IMAX theater in San Antonio was showing Matrix Revolutions and we got tickets to that. Shannon called in the first hour they were available last month and got us a seat.

The great thing about seeing it down there was they have assigned seating. No sitting around for hours to hope to get a good seat. You just need to show up about 10 minutes before the show and find your seat. This is the way it should be. I hate that whole waiting in line thing. We had about the best seats in the house. Middle of the row at the top. You never want to be in the front row at an IMAX showing, it’ll kill your neck craning to see the top of a 7 story screen. Once we were seated, the movie started. No trailers. No commercials. It just started. I hate the 14 commercials that theaters insist on showing these days.

Let me say this about seeing a movie on IMAX. Ho-lee Shit, it’s awesome! When a character’s eyeball is taller than you it’s freaking impressive. An IMAX screen is probably about 4-6 times the size of your average screen. The picture was very clear. You’d think that blowing it up to 70mm would result in resolution loss but it didn’t. The Wachowskis planned on it being released on IMAX and filmed accordingly. As for the movie itself, I liked this one better than number 2. No 10 minute Britney Spears video of people dancing sans underwear like in the second movie. I felt that was a bit gratuitous. The fight scenes were good. They used less computer generated action. I thought the “Burly Brawl” in Reloaded looked very fake and detracted from the film. Of course, anytime you get to see Carrie Moss running around in PVC is a good day.

Of the three films I still prefer the first. Call me a purist. If I had to pick an order I’d say 1 then 3 then 2. If you get the chance to see Revolutions on IMAX though, do so. You won’t regret it.

: One of Us by Joan Osborne

I bought my wife a new toy yesterday. She’s training to run a marathon and needed music to run to. She had been trying to use my iPod but they don’t take well to running and they tend to freeze after a while. They are hard drive based after all and tend to crash when subjected to shocks for too long. I went out and found one of the new Rio Chiba 256 mp3 players. It was perfect for her use. It’s solid-state so skipping isn’t a problem and it only weighs a couple of ounces. It’s main drawback is that it’s only 256MB but that’s still 4-5hours of music so it should be okay. It can take an expansion SDD card up to 512MB for 768MB total, but those are still a bit expensive.

A nice thing about it is it’s supported by iTunes under Mac OS X so you can drag-and-drop just like my iPod. I hooked it up to load some music and couldn’t get anything to copy over. I’d drag songs and they wouldn’t go. I started to get pissed. I finally gave in after an hour and called support. Don’t get me started about outsourcing support to India, I could hardly understand the guy. He put me on hold to talk to someone and came back and said I was probably trying to copy AAC files. I checked and sure enough, I was. I tried an MP3 and it copied over no problem. The problem with this is my wife is not going to be able to use music downloaded from Apple’s music store. Damnit. I can work around that but it’s a big pain in the ass.

Now if I could figure out how to get it to mount in Linux I’d be set. I’ll keep trying.

: Gogos – We’ve Got the Beat

Well, we did our yearly over-indulgence for Halloween again this year. Flying zombies, headless scarecrows, fog machines, and a suicidal pumpkin all were on hand. We set up the grave yard in our yard with two fog machines for atmosphere. A headless scarecrow and blacklights completed the spooky effect.

For the big scare I rigged up our mummy, named Grand Master Z, to do a little flying this year. I rigged up a pulley system I could control from inside the house. I also hooked up our stereo system to a DSP I borrowed from a friend. When a victim/trick-or-treater approached the door I’d let GMZ fly down out of one of our eaves where he was hiding and pump 200 watts of evil laugh right in the treaters’ faces. This caused many a scream that could be heard for blocks according to people I talked to. We had several kids run away and refuse to approach the house to get candy after they were scared. The funniest was a teenage girl who fell down throwing her candy all over the yard and then running away without picking it up.

It was a kind of slow year though. We only got about 75 kids this year with a normal year topping 150 or so. We figured because it was Friday a lot of people had parties and such and the kids were at those. Bummer. I really look forward to scaring kids. Halloween is probably my favorite holiday.