Not Necessarily Interesting News

Well, I brought home my meager belongings from work today. As a contractor you learn not to bring too many personal effects to work as you never know exactly when or how you’ll be leaving. I’ve seen some contractors escorted out the door without a chance to go near their workspace and, as in my case this time, get 2 weeks notice. Everything I brought home would easily have fit in a shoebox. A small hologen lamp, my personal mouse, a small Geomag set, and some hand sanitizer. That’s it. When we moved offices last month my officemate and I, another contrator who was also laid off this week, were able to fit our entire office minus computer and monitor into one standard moving box. Some regulars needed as many as 10-12 boxes to move all their stuff.
You also learn to not keep anything there that is irreplacable to you. No photos, nothing too personal because you may not get time to retrieve your belongings before you’re escorted to the door. It makes for a really fun work environment. All the regulars have photos and toys and such all over their desk. We have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse plus maybe a coffee cup and one small toy we aren’t too attached to. Also, you never know when the hammer will fall. My office mate and I were feeling pretty good about our positions. At the begining of December we were told that our positions were fully funded and approved through the end of next year. Three weeks later we’re told our positions were cut in the semi-annual re-org they seem to do.
On the bright side, I did have a second interview today with a company I really want a position with. I interviewed with them before and was upset not to get the job. They brought me back for another round of interviews this week so that’s a good sign. The only problem is that I have a bad cold this week. I had to do a technical interview on the phone yesterday and I was high on DayQuil and Robitussin. Same with today’s face-to-face. I didn’t give the best showing through the drug-induced fog and stumbled for some answers. When asked what I’d use to schedule jobs in Unix I couldn’t come up with the word cron. I mean, geez, it doesn’t get much more basic than that. I hope they understood. Without the meds there was no way I was even getting out of bed between coughing fits. They are in a big hurry to fill the position by the end of next week so I hope to hear something Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Seeing as I have a bit of free time on my hands next week, I’m going to start re-tiling our entry way and then move on to remodelling my son’s bathroom. Luckily we have most of the supplies so it’s going to be pretty inexpensive. Without a job I can’t afford too much.

Yesterday I was driving home from work and passed a ranch that’s near my house. As I cruised past at about 65MPH I caught an image out of the corner of my eye. Occasionally you’ll see one of the ranch hands out riding the fence. Yesterday I saw one riding along at a slow clip. The best part was he was on a cell phone. By the time I got turned around to try to get a picture he’d turned down a path into the ranch and all I got was his back. I’d have probably been able to make money selling a photo like that. Maybe next time.

Seeing as I lost our whole trip report I’ll just do a quick summary of the high and low lights. It’s taken me a while to write this as I was so upset after our trip that I couldn’t sit down to finish it. Disney really screwed up our trip for us.

One thing that made the whole trip suck was the fact that the national cheerleading and Pop Warner championship was in town the same week. I know Disney had nothing to do with this one but it might have been nice to be told on the phone at reservation time that there’d be hordes of screaming girls running wild. Oh dear Lord, do I have a new found great hatred of cheerleaders. There were about 11,000 girls or so in town ranging in age from 10-16ish. Everywhere you went you were subjected to their screaming and shrill voices. The worst part was their parents/chaperones encouraged it. There were also supposedly 25,000 boys in town for the Pop Warner finals and we never had a problem with them. My wife and son were riding a bus home from one of the parks and got stuck with two cheer teams who decided that the bus was the place to hold an impromptu competition. They were yelling cheers back and forth. The bus driver asked them to be quiet and they didn’t stop. The parents were even yelling along. If I’d have been there there would have been problems.
On another bus there were a bunch of girls in the back and they decided that it was a good time to sing bad Christmas carols. Another girl on the bus that seemed to know them asked them to be quiet and I yelled in agreement. They quieted down and my friend and I started talking to other passengers about how annoying they were. We also started bad-mouthing the cheerleaders, recalling days when they had to look good and have talent. Unlike today where if your parents have the money for cheer camp, you’re on the team. We also noticed that there seem to be a lot more ‘chunky’ cheerleaders than we remembered back in the day. Unbeknownst to us we were standing next to a ‘Cheer Mom’. She got a bit indignant and went off, ‘it’s a big honor. They work hard. Blah blah blah’. We turned our backs and ignored her.

On the second day we visited MGM at night to see the Osborne Family Spectacle of Lights. It’s about 8 million lights on the New York backlot section. It’s absolutely amazing. It was even ‘snowing’ on the street. Ok, it was tiny, tiny bubbles but the effect was actually pretty decent. It was also the most crowded of anything we did. Everyone wanted to see the lights. I do recommend checking them out if you’re ever in Orlando near Christmas.

My birthday was Tuesday and I had a few things I wanted to do. I wanted to go to the Boatwright restaurant at the Riverside resort and have their amazing Sweet Potato Pancakes. If we hadn’t made reservations we wouldn’t have gotten in. This would be a recurring theme to our entire stay.
After breakfast we headed for the Magic Kingdom to ride all my favorite rides. Our first stop was Guest Relations to pick up a ‘It’s my birthday’ button. That button made my entire day so much better. If a cast member sees you wearing it they say Happy Birthday. By the end of the day I’d had literally hundreds of people say Happy Birthday to me. Even complete strangers standing in line would say it. If you ever get a chance to go to a Disney park on your birthday I recommend it. We rode all my favorites, Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Carribbean, Space Mountain, Thunder Mountain and more. The great thing about going in the off season, even with all the cheerleaders, is that lines are short so you get to do so much more in the same time. The longest we waited was about 5 minutes for Thunder Mountain. It lets you get a day’s worth of riding done in about 4-5 hours.
After Magic Kingdom my wife and I rode the Monorail over to Epcot to see about dinner. We got to ride in the front of the train with the driver. A little known thing is, all you have to do is ask to ride up front and as long as it’s not already occupied you can ride there. Some other family was going to but when they saw my birthday button they let us ride up front instead. Normally I wouldn’t have accepted but they said they’d already ridden up there this trip.
At Epcot we went to my favorite restaurant in all Disney, Akershus in Norway in the World Showcase. It was completely booked for the entire week. Even worse, Disney converted it to a ‘Character Dining’ restaurant. You know, meet a princess BS. No more quiet dinners there. Outside were dozens and dozens of strollers. When I go to dinner I don’t want to be surrounded by screaming, out of control toddlers. It used to be you could walk up without reservations and get seated right away, no matter what time of day or night it was. Now you have to book weeks in advance. They ruined one of the best things in Epcot. I had been looking forward to eating there on my birthday all year. 🙁 Instead we ate over in Japan. We had some decent sushi and a couple of bottles of sake. I love sushi so it wasn’t a total loss on my birthday, just not what I was looking forward to.
For my birthday I received The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a hardback collection of every Calvin and Hobbes strip ever printed, and a new 60GB iPod video. I’m still pissed at the giver of the latter gift even though I love it and am using it at this very moment. 🙂 All in all it was a great birthday even though I didn’t get dinner at my favorite restaurant.

The next day we went to MGM and rode Tower of Terror and watched the new stunt show. That is a must see if you’re at MGM. The driving is amazing. Here’s a 12MB video of some of the driving. And that’s the tame stuff. That evening we decided to head over to Pleasure Island to go hang out at the Adventurers Club. This is where our whole trip went to hell. We swiped our cards through the reader at the door and were denied entrance. WTF? We were supposed to have Park Hopper Plus tickets that let us into all the properties. I even called 6 weeks before our trip to confirm that very fact and was told that’s what we had. We went back to the hotel and I talked to the front desk. They said that, no, we do not have Park Hopper Plus tickets and to get them we’d have to pay $300 extra. Even for just the last 2 days of our stay. Needless to say I wasn’t happy but seeing as it was late there was nothing else the front desk could do. I’d have to call in the morning.
I called Reservations first thing in the morning and spent well over an hour on the phone with them trying to figure out where they screwed up. Our tickets said Park Hopper on them when we got them and that’s why I called 6 weeks ago. When I called I was told I had Park Hopper Plus tickets so I thought nothing more of it. While talking to MaryBeth on the phone she kept telling me that I knew what was on the ticket and I shold have said something. I kept telling her that I did say something when I called and what more should I have done. We went back and forth for nearly an hour and the best she could do was upgrade our tickets for $300 more. As we were leaving in two days I told her that was outrageous. She finally got frustrated enough and said she’d comp a few tickets to Disneyquest for us and that they’d be waiting at the window. Not really what I wanted but I was sick of dealing with it and my breakfast was getting cold.
That night we went to the Adventurer’s Club and instead of being $10 to get in as MaryBeth had said on the phone it was $21. Way to go Disney. That night cost us over $100 once you include child care. And we didn’t even eat or drink anything. I wasn’t happy.
The next day we went to a couple parks and we went to Downtown Disney that evening. I decided to check on those comp tix at Disneyquest while we were there. Surprise surprise, they had no record of me or any tickets. I was so upset that I had to walk off before I made a scene. I decided to cut my losses and enjoy my last day there. We caught the fireworks at Epcot which are amazing with the holiday finale.
We had a good last day there and said goodbye to our friends who were flying home the next day. Disney apparently screwed up their return shuttle and they barely made their flight.

This was our 4th trip to WDW in 5 years. It’s my friends’ 17th trip to a Disney property in 18 years. Both of us had never seen such incompetence on Disney’s part. Over all I’d give Disney a 4 out of 10 for their service on this trip. Our days in the parks were great other than the cheerleaders and not being able to get into our favorite restaurant.

Disney did a great job of souring us and our friends on WDW this trip. It’ll be a long, long time before I subject myself to that kind of abuse again.

Well, I got told by my manager at work that as of January 1st I’ll be unemployed. Again. Along with my office mate. Whee! That’s not all. Last night the clutch on my truck went out. There’s a nice present for a soon to be unemployed person.
When I got home to tell my wife the joyous news about my job she asked what’s wrong with my eye. Apparently the stress raised my blood pressure enough to burst a couple blood vessels in my eyes. Enjoy the pictured goodness. It’s spread more since I took that pic.

Well, seeing as I had to replace the HDD in the iBook anyways I decided to upgrade. I went with a 60GB 5400RPM drive. A decent improvement over my 30GB.
I followed the extremely helpful instuctions found on PB Fixit. They have detailed instructions with good pictures for removing and replacing most any part on an iBook.
When I got to the very last step before removing the HDD, which is disconnecting the cable to the internal speakers I ran into a problem. When I carefully pulled on the plug the entire connector came off the logic board. Crap, I’ll be able to get the new drive in but won’t have sound from here on out. Not really a good situation. The connector is located against and partially under a brace for the case. Now I was going to be forced to completely disassemble the iBook to see what I had going on under there.
I got it apart and took a good look at the connector. It has four connections to traces on the board. When it came off it actually pulled two traces off the board. I knew I didn’t have the tools to effect a repair on that. Time to head to Fry’s to look for a good soldering iron.
I cam home with a soldering station and a couple of long sharp tips as the area I was working in was going to be real tight. Like soldering a thread to a needle. I got the first two contacts re-soldered and all looked good. I was happy. It looked like I’d at least have sound in one speaker. The other two, where the traces had pulled up, were going to be the challenge. I bent the legs of the connector to get as close to the pulled traces as possible. I coated them with a dab of flux and got to business. I pulled out my old printer’s loupe and set it up so I could see what I was doing. It was difficult but it looked like I got them done though I wasn’t to hopeful.
I spent the next hour putting it all back together. In the end I ended up with two extra screws but couldn’t figure out where they went for the life of me. 🙂
I got out the Apple Hardware Test CD and tried booting. I booted up but I didn’t hear the standard Apple boot sound. Crap. I ran the tests and everything seemed fine. I went ahead and installed the OS without problem. At first boot I got the little video they have and, lo and behold, I also got sound! From both speakers no less.
The iBook is now up and running better than new with its 60BG drive and it’s currently restoring from backup. Sweet.

Last week we went on vacation to Orlando. I wrote up entries for each day that I planned on back dating and posting when we got back. On the flight back my iBook ate its hard drive and lost all the posts. I’ll go back and try to recreate them when I have time. Luckily, I had downloaded our vacation pics to the laptop but didn’t erase the memory stick so all our pics, the only unrecoverable data, were saved. Thank God for backups. I backed up the laptop the day before we left so all I lost were those posts.

Today we caught a 6am flight to Orlando for 8 days of fun and relaxation at the Land of the Giant Rat(tm). Waking up at 4am is wrong in so many ways. That’s a bed time not a time to wake up.
We usually come here around the week before Thankgiving but decided to come a bit later this year to see Disney’s Christmas decorations and to celebrate my birthday on the 6th. We arrived around 11am and got to our hotel and picked up our Park Hopper passes. Some friends of ours from Austin also came out for the week but arrived the day before. We called them up and found they were at Epcot so we drove over to meet them.
First stop, Test Track. My son’s favorite ride in all the parks. We hung out for a few hours touring the World Showcase and headed back to our hotel for a rest. After a quick nap we went to Downtown Disney and looked around at the decorations.
We’re turning in early as it’s been a long day after waking up long before dawn. We’ll decide where we’re going tomorrow morning.