Kurt Nelson

I have so many things to do today. My company just got bought out by Google which will be excellent in the long run but has generated a massive list of things for me to do. First off, I have to meet with the Google lawyers. They are going to discuss Google policy on legal issues and help me properly merge my assets into the company. Then I get the tour of the Google campus, the legendary Google campus. I get to see the Google way, start a 20% project, eat free food, build ziplines over ditches and put myself in streetview as often as I can. They are going to show me my new offices where my team will move, supposedly it has a great view and is nice and open, with a ball pit in the middle of the conference table just like EA Tiburon. I will eat lunch in their cafeteria and I have been told it is thousand-fold better than what I am used to. This afternoon I have to work on moving into my new home. I have not actually seen it yet, but one of my team who has lived here his whole life picked it out for me. It’s not huge, but it has a nicely sized lot that overlooks the bay. Located on one of the mountain sides, it has a mile long driveway up to it through woods. This afternoon I need to position my furniture that is hopefully there and get my computers up and running. Then I have to figure out what I am going to do for dinner. Microwave pizza?

So much time has been sunk into this thing. I started it fresh out of college. And I am now 37. At least 10 years of working every day at any odd hour to keep everything running. Server down in the middle of the night? I had to go fix it. Someone called in sick, I had to cover. At least I have Ethel who never gets sick or sleepy. No wonder I eat microwave pizza at 2 in the morning. It’s a 10 man operation with all of us pulling silly hours. But the revenue just pours, growth is Hiroshima on steroids, and we run on caffeine. At least I don’t have to write press releases and emails. I have Ethel for that. Students love us, corporations love us, governments love us, I love us. We have put so much time and money into Ethel to get her to perform so well. She gets overloaded often though. Come exam season, we just pour caffeine into our systems to keep going. At least I did not have to find time to write this journal entry, I let Ethel write it.

…oh, I see Ethel forgot to mention exactly what Google bought: her. Our latest product revision, that we at the office like to call “Essays That Hopefully Everybody Loves”

How can tourists be tourists? To be at a park from 9 in the morning till 11 at night requires incredible stamina. Today for example, I woke up at 7AMish and was at Disney’s Hollywood Studios at 9:10. At that time there was already an hour wait for things. After doing the highlights there (I had a 1st timer with me) I moved on to Animal Kingdom. Ate lunch at 1 at Rainforest and was starting to feel very tired by then. That is at 1. After doing the highlights there, we moved on to the Magic Kingdom. Arrived at maybe 3 something. I was beat by then. At about 6 we gave up and quit, and I am now here sitting in bed with my laptop writing this while logs are still falling and rockets still launching for at least another hour. And to do this for 3 or 4 days? Open to close? These tourists are mental.

My legs ache, I am hungry for frozen pizza and parades are still running. These tourists are without a break in their day. And I am beat halfway through. Supposedly at my physical prime. While being beaten by infants. At least I’m not mental.

I went to the Magic Kingdom yesterday and here are a few of my photos:

Even on rails you can have a serious traffic jam.

These Alice in Wonderland cutouts appear on the back path between Tomorrowland and Toontown fair as part of the Halloween Party decorations.

Watch Music at the Grand Floridian

Here is a video I took in the Grand Floridian lobby of a band playing Part of Your World. And I leave you with this one final picture from the top of the Swiss Family Tree House.

The Epcot Food and Wine Festival has always been one of my favorite events. But not anymore. The lines are long, the food is overpriced for even Disney, and there is no place to eat your food.

Having a large selection of booths is a nice thing but it comes with a caveat: For each one I visit, I have to wait in yet another line. And these are not short lines, generally taking about 20 minutes. If I get 3 dishes, this is an hour waiting in line, to pay for something. The bottleneck is not the food but the purchase. I think Disney should move to a token system where the guest purchases all of his tokens at once up front and just turns in 1 or 2 for each item he gets. Along with this should come (generally) uniform pricing. Make all food 1 token, drinks 3. Adjust the portion to match this new price. Stick some token vending machines around world showcase. I do see why Disney currently charges the way they do though: It leads to more spending. If you are paying as you go, you are much less likely to prebudget or realize how much you have spent. If the system was prepurchase, guests could easily buy a specific amount of tokens and stop after they have used them. Still Disney should fix this problem because it kept me from purchasing things today.

I (mostly) understand paying $2.29 for a cup of coke. I can understand paying $24.99 for a buffet. I don’t understand paying $4.50 for part of a slice of pizza. Just plain sausage pizza too, not with caviar or veal or something. After eating your $5 dollar bill, you are still quite hungry. So you go get in yet another line and get a thimble of cheddar cheese soup for $3. By the time you are actually full, you probably have had 4 or 5 things adding up to about $20. For this $20 you have to eat with a plastic fork, while standing up, with no drink, and have to wait in line for an hour. Or you could go drop in to a counter service restaurant and for half the price be full, have a drink, and sit down in air conditioning albeit still with a plastic fork. I like the idea of sampling many foods. I like the idea of the whole festival. But I don’t like the idea of spending $20 on Costco-reminiscent samples. Disney should deflate their prices a bit. Or increase the portions. I think this would increase revenue because people would feel like they are getting a better deal each time they stand in line for 20 minutes. Even if they lowered the price and the portion, it would allow me to sample more things. There are tons of things on the menu I would like to try, but I can only sample 3 or 4 of them (minus the mandatory cheddar cheese soup).

My third gripe is the environment the festival creates. It clogs the pathways, it takes over sitting areas. But it generates more people walking around with food. So Disney, please add some tables or benches or something. I like to sit down to eat my food and not have to worry about my ankles being taken out by a stroller while eating.

I now own a virtual private server with cPanel and centOS powering it. All of my hosting customers are being moved to it. With it, I hope to provide speedier support and higher customization available. The server has 512MB of RAM, and 3 dedicated IP addresses. Also comes the ability for me to now vend reseller accounts which allow unlimited, seperate domains under them, each with their own cPanel.

As I sit here writing this, I am listening to the Epcot China Background Music Loop. Each song in the loop brings to mind a very specific location, such as the one right now brings to mind the path to the right of the bridge while the acrobatic show is going on. Part of the Disney Difference is the music. Islands Of Adventure just has generic music for each land, nothing incredibly specific or unique. With Disney, there is a long loop that consists of entirely different moods of song. Each area of a land has its own set of music, and it all blends together. With all these unique pieces of music, a mental map can be made just from the overlap of song. It attaches a trigger to your memory, listening to the music brings back the experience. Then when you visit Disney a second time and hear the music again, it brings back good memories of the last time you were there. Each time you visit, your new memories get compounded with your old ones, forming a very strong memory. This is a memory that can easily be remembered, a super memory. Once you have this tag to link everything together, you end can call back certain sights and smells and flavors. This song now reminds me of the ginger ice cream in China.

When music is switched out, you are unable to experience the old memories in the same way. With the new Spaceship Earth music, the ride feels entirely different. It feels like it is missing something- I feel the lack of the communication tunnel and the decent. Splash Mountain is another highly auditoryly linked attraction. If I say “How do you do?” it probably brings with it a picture from a specific scene. The park is not just filled with the same style music throughout. What tune could I sing to bring back a memory of a different park?

Music adds the final touch to the experience linking everything together. Background makes the foreground memorable.

jPPP now has a repository along with forthcoming documentation. All releases will now be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/javappp/ The most up-to-date version is in a zip file in the main repository. jPPP now matches with the codes coming off of the GRC website.

While helping a client migrate his blog from Typepad to Wordpress, the most tedious part was updating the post slugs to keep old links intact. I wrote a script that will go through all Wordpress posts, and change their slugs to typepad format. This  can be combined with the forward old slugs plugin to keep old links intact, while still using Wordpress’s much cleaner URLs. The script is available on my download page or can be bought with a donation through my store.

I enjoyed reading short science fiction stories by Phillip K Dick, Issac Asimov, etc. Over the years, I’ve found some podcasts that release short fiction (often weekly) under a creative commons license (i.e. free for anyone to listen to). The ones I enjoy the most are The Drabblecast, “strange stories by strange authors for strange listeners, such as yourself” produced weekly by the wonderful voice actor Norm Sherman, and The Escape Pod, weekly science-fiction stories hosted by Steve Eley. The Drabblecast is typically 20 minutes or less, but Escape Pod episodes can run up to 30-45 minutes or more.

I also enjoy the podiobook Playing For Keeps by Mur Lafferty, a story about a society with super heros, super villians, and some not-so-super Third Wavers, who still have minor powers. I enjoy How to Succeed in Evil, about an evil efficiency consultant so depressed by inept villians that he turns to being a villian himself, but it doesn’t come out frequently enough for me. Other podcasts I know of but don’t really listent to often are The X-1 Podcast, The Great Beyond, Well Told Tales, and Voices of Tomorrow.

I listen to the Pseudonews The Onionin podcast form, and really enjoy this as well.

Parkhopping (verb): The insane act of trying to stuff more things into your day than possible. Pushed by Disney because…?
Today was my first actual attempt at professional park hopping. Before I had just done the amateur switch at closing to somewhere else. Today was my first time visiting 3 parks in less than 6 hours. Parked at Epcot, monorailed over to Magic Kingdom, monorailed back, walked to my car, went back in the park, walked back out to my car, drove to MGM, walked in, walked, walked, walked, finally found the prop shop, realized it was closed, and headed back to guest services. Why? To collect as many free passholder lithographs in one day as possible. (The coupons expire next week, and mine arrived this week) What I do not understand is the actual point of park hopping. Did Disney create it to start marketing to ADD prone Americans? Is it meant to appeal to people with no time so they can do more? The whole irony of park hopping is that less is done. A park hop takes at least 20 minutes, involving waiting and riding two trams, and drive time. From my experience, buses are even slower. Instead, more could be done staying in one park. If you are on a multiday vacation, relax. There is no need to get all the major attractions done in one day. Even if you are on a one day vacation, make the most of it. Don’t waste your time jumping around and doing extra walking. With the way Disney parks are designed, there is always a bit of a main street to walk down in every park. There is distance to help seperate you from the rest of the world, and when you hop, you have to travel this distance. And the worst crime: Hopping to/from Magic Kingdom. Because of the 7 Seas Lagoon, you lose even more time. If you are hopping midday, there are also less monorails running, upping your travel time once more. Ignore the Disney marketing, save money on your park tickets, and have a better vacation. Don’t park hop.