8:49 PM
If you'd like a free FastPass for the Tower of Terror - one without a time 'window' on it so that you can walk right on the ride when you show up - look no further. You can get a voucher for just such a pass online in a matter of minutes!
Go to http://www.hollywoodtowerhotel.com/ Wait for the animation to finish and at the top of the page there is a link to download the TOT game.
I wrote up answers to all the puzzles, so go crazy!
LOBBY:
bellhop- left behind the plant
maid- left behind the fat guy
kid on bike- right behind the plant
BEDROOM:
easy - figure it out
PRIZE: 15% off $75 merch coupon
LIBRARY:
easy - figure it out
PRIZE: 20% off $100 merch coupon
ELEVATOR:
Connect red pipe pieces to boiler to connect all segements
Go to the bedroom
Click the toolbox next to the bike
Use the wrench on the red wheel connected to the boiler
Go to the lobby
Click the table next to the check-in desk
Use the lighter on the boiler's three openings
Click the fusebox next to the elevator - can't do anything here yet
Go to the library
Click on the clickable books (down-right of the tv)
Dust off the titles and open "Wiring Diagrams for Elevators" (blue
book)
Draw the wires that you see on the diagram
Click the elevator button
Follow the bellhop into the elevator.
You're done!
PRIZE: FastPass coupon
The printable voucher that you get is good from May 5th (opening day) through July 2nd and is good for up to six people. Finish the game then reinstall it and play again if you'd like another voucher (they're individually bar-coded to prevent repeat plays!)
I'm all about pre-paid wireless phones. I like having no contract and I hardly use the phone, so it works out to be way cheap.
I was originally with AT&T Wireless who charged around $0.33/min. I was mostly happy with AT&T, and left primarily because of the price.
Then I found Boost Mobile who charged a mere $0.25/min, and I switched to them.
ONE WEEK LATER, AT&T lowered their rate to $0.25/min too. I slapped my forehead and moved on with my life.
Now word comes that 7-11 is launching their own wireless service called "Speak Out Wireless" at an industry-leading 20 cents per minute.
I'm not gonna lie to ya - I'm unhappy with Boost (aka Nextel). The coverage is spotty in the LA area, and the signal strength bars on my phone jump up and down from no signal to full strength when I stand still. AT&T was way better.
Still, Boost does give me free Internet access, and that's tough to pass up...
2:07 PM
Today I'm keeping the blinds in my office shut and I turned the contrast down on my monitors by 50%. I can't believe how much better my eyes feel. I recommend you do the same!
10:07 AM We went on the Tower of Terror yesterday and it was reeeeeally good. I was actually surprised. Given the current trend of Disney theme park cheapness, the Tower of Terror is actually a lushly themed, full-featured, high-tech attraction. It's amazing how great it is. My theory on this is that they spent the money on R&D for Florida, so the smaller budget for our version went a little farther than you'd expect.
Some effects are missing from the Orlando original, but they've been supplanted by some newer technology and you really won't miss them all that much.
It's clear that much more work was put into the Tower than any other attraction at DCA. It is now the single most important attraction at the park, making everything else in the park look cheap by comparison (which wasn't all that difficult a feat, to be honest.) It will be interesting to see if it has any impact on the attendance numbers at DCA this year. I'm sure that's what they're banking on. The Tower of Terror officially opens on May 5th - next Wednesday!
Afterwards we had dinner with Stacy and Steve at the newly opened Tortilla Jo's in Downtown Disney. Service was decent but the food was lousy and expensive. The only thing remarkable about their menu was their giant list of tequillas. They specialize in making no-mix margaritas, where it's just tequilla and lime juice and that's it! It wasn't my thing, but Tammy and Stacy enjoyed them. Granted, the place just opened last weekend, but I think they have a bit more work to do on their menu before we'll go back.
12:20 PM
KCRW's general manager, Ruth Seymour, is a bit of a bitch according to Joe Frank. I sort of suspected it when I heard her doing her best to guilt people into subscribing during their membership drives...she tends to take an accusatory tone. There are better ways to encourage donations, I would think.
I used to listen to Joe Frank's show a lot, and I think I enjoyed it more than anything else on the air at the time, but thanks to its awkward time slot I guess I never realized until now that it's been off the air for two years. Joe Frank weighs in on why that is, exactly. And Ruth is at the heart of it.
Between Joe Frank's secret firing and the whole Sandra Tsing Loh debacle, KCRW is turning into the soap opera of Los Angeles' airwaves!
10:01 AM
I chose to become a paying customer of Dish Network rather than one of DirecTV specifically because of DirecTV's questionable anti-piracy tactics in which they accuse innocent people of stealing their signal, and then extort $3500 out of them to prevent legal action against them.
Now one of DirecTV's own former bounty hunters (also an ex cop) is filing a suit against the company over these very same policies.
The lawsuit claims the company knew that between five and ten percent of their targets were innocent. After a time, Fisher "fully realized the end user campaign was an elaborate extortion racket," the lawsuit alleges. "The letters were full of lies or misrepresentations and the investigators were required to coerce people into paying money for stealing services when we had no proof whether they had done so or not." Fisher resigned in October.
8:13 AM
The "High Quality Team" has put together a collection of high quality PDF scans of NES and SNES game manuals. You know...in case you forgot how to play the games or something.
More and more I'm having these urges to return to Palm Desert. I really like it out there, and I can't explain why. The last time I was there I got engaged!
Maybe it's the cleansing heat, or maybe it's the feeling of isolation that I get out there that makes it so attractive. Or maybe I just associate 'Palm Desert' with 'vacation'. I just seem to have such a great time when I'm there. I sure do miss it. Just a quick weekend at some cheap hotel out there would probably make me happy.
It's weird how I'm jonesing for a vacation so soon after my last one. Our two week honeymoon was only seven months ago!
1:29 PM
Tammy and I flew up to Davis for the weekend to visit my brother and his girlfriend, and to check out Picnic Day. I had never been to Davis before.
It's definitely a college town. I think my four years at Cal Poly definitely didn't give me the 'typical college experience' with the parties and the drinking and the fraternities and whatever. Cal Poly was more of a commuter school that pretty much died on the weekends because so few people lived on campus or near it. But I had a good time there.
It was good to see Kyle again too. He graduates in June, so we'll be flying back up there again before too long!
The CacheCard can improve its performance quite a bit! It's $99 though, and you have to provide a 512MB stick of PC133 memory to make it work... I don't know if I'd be willing to pay that much just to get more responsive menus.
1:58 PM
Relating to my previous post, how would you like a free subscription to Residential Architect magazine? Be sure to tell them you're a construction professional, otherwise they'll try to charge you 40 bucks!
1:05 PM
I think I may have found an alternate source of income that would rock if I can figure out how to do it well.
I'd like to design houses in Chief Architect and then sell the blueprints to people who actually go out and build them!
It sounds crazy, I know, but people like this guy do it, so there must be some money to be made! I'm not sure how much, but I'd be happy with, oh, say 2 to 5 grand per project.
People go to school for years to learn how to be architects, so I doubt I'd be very good at it in the beginning...but I could probably bang out something that looks halfway decent over a weekend or two.
I've done some research, and apparently Chief Architect is what all the professionals use these days. It even spits out ray-traced renders for some truly beautiful previews of the finished product.
Step One is to re-create my current house in CA. I figure that'll be a good way to learn the program before I start creating the awesomest houses ever.
There's only one problem. I downloaded the demo over the weekend, and it is just so confusing. It's actually not hard to use - just insanely complex. Like for example, you can tell it where your plumbing is or even specify the depth of the insulation in your walls - that's how hardcore it is. Once I master that sumbitch I bet I could do anything though.
It's a big project for sure, but it's easier than getting a night job.
1:50 PM
A .torrent of the 1964 World's Fair/Disney 4-CD box set is up for your downloading pleasure over at waxy.org. The release of this audio collection was cancelled for unknown reasons a few years ago.
It's a great audio time-capsule of Disney's inolvement with the World's Fair of 1964, back when the Fairs took place with some regularity. Disney partnered up with Ford, General Electric, Pepsi, and the state of Illinois in developing their pavillion attractions. The cross promotion was a win for everyone inolved - Disney relied on these sponsors to fund the R&D for the new technology involved, and in the end Disneyland wound up with four state-of-the-art attractions.
These CDs have been floating around the internet for about a year now, and I'm actually a little shocked that waxy.org would risk linking to it... You should definitely grab this if you're looking for some truly vintage park audio. All four of the featured attractions eventually made it over to Disneyland, with some interesting tweaks which I will now recall here in case you are bored-
- The dinos from the Ford Skyway were reused in the railroad dioramas. The "Disneyland Skyway" and the skyway at the World's Fair were identical in name only. The Ford attraction had you riding in convertibles - the Anaheim attraction was gondola transportation between Tomorrowland and Fantasyland.
- Progressland was renamed the Carousel of Progress. It was later replaced at Disneyland but was moved and continues to operate on a seasonal basis in Orlando.
- It's A Small World has remained virtually unchanged for 40 years.
- Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln has been was revised a few times, most recently in 2002.
Back in 1964 a young man named Raymond Dashner walked all around the fair with a tape recorder and recorded everything from everywhere. He has since converted those recordings to mp3s and sells CDs full of them online. If you're interested in more aural history of the fair, you can't miss it. A free online stream of his recordings can be found over here.
10:43 AM
Lately I've been trying really hard to find a good piece of home design software. I want to visualize how different parts of our house would look with different colors of paint, new flooring, or whatever - without actually spending the money to find out.
Punch sucks because you can't import your own colors or textures to apply to walls - you're limited to what they ship with the program. Broderbund's software is a train wreck, and it's actually just a mutated version of an earlier version of the BHG software, re-made poorly by a different company.
I only have one real issue with the BHG Home Designer suite. The problem is that the first floor of my house doesn't really have the traditional square-shaped rooms that most homes have. There are walls of varying sizes, and one wall even has an opening in it. unfortunately the $99 BHG Suite can't handle something that complex. You have to spend another $400 for the 'professional' version of BHG Home Designer software before you'll have the tools you need to really create a modern home.
And wouldn't you know it, only the scaled-down $99 version is available on the p2p networks. There is no way on God's green earth that I'm going to spend $500 on a piece of software unless it greets me by name and does all the work for me.
9:26 AM
There are porn sites out there that let you talk to girls who take off their clothes for you on webcams. You tell them what to do and they supposedly do it.
Along those same lines, Burger King has taken cyber-voyeurism to the next level with the creepily obebient subservient chicken.
He'll dance for you, poop, fart - and even remove his costume if you ask him to!
The Nickel Tour seems to be out-of-print now, based on the prices I'm seeing at Amazon for used copies. ($150!?)
Looking through these postcards is really a neat way of seeing how the park has grown so much - yet stayed the same in so many other ways - over the past 50 years. It's really something.
We actually have a large framed copy of this photo hanging over our fireplace.
As of today, it's now official. Farscape is returning as a four-part miniseries!
I'm cool with this. It's awesome just to see it get a good ending. I'm not expecting to see any new episodes after this though, which makes me sad.
Brian Henson and series producer Rockne O'Bannon have claimed that the decision to close out the series was a direct result of the fans' efforts to save the show after it wasn't renewed for a fifth season. In fact, Henson had such faith in Farscape that he actually put up the cash to get the project into production before they even had a buyer for it. That is cool.
So mission accomplished, I guess. I can probably take the banners for savefarscape.com off my site now. :)
10:50 AM
Leo Laporte is leaving TechTV. Actually he's being pushed out.
"management and I had come to a very satisfactory agreement about a new work schedule and salary, but at the last minute TechTV's outgoing owner, Vulcan Ventures, insisted that I sign away all claims to shares they had given me some years ago. I was unwilling to do so, and they held my job as hostage."
He's a cool guy who has taught tons of clueless newbies about computers, so it's a little sad to see him leave.
4:28 PM
Tivo is great, but it ain't cheap. The hardware can be a little pricey, and the monthly or lifetime subscription fees are a little hard to swallow for the uninitiated. And it's actually very limited in what it can do when you compare it to the likes of MythTV and Beyond TV - two seemingly excellent alternatives to Tivo.
Both packages will let you turn any x86 PC into a PVR powerhouse.
MythTV is totally free and open source. Beyond TV is a commercial product, but with no subscription fees. Both have received glowing reviews wherever I've looked. SnapStream has even produced a remote control specifically for use with their DVR software - the final piece of the puzzle that turns the PC into a real life media center capable of stealing Tivo's thunder.
I'm actually getting a little tired of Tivo's interface. MythTV is actually reskinnable!
MythTV can even act as an emulator front end - so you can play all those awesome SNES games right there on your TV if you've got say, a USB->PS2 controller adapter. In fact the more I read about MythTV, the more I want it! I just don't have any spare hardware to install it on. :(
11:25 AM
If you'd like to play those classic MS-DOS games of yesteryear under Windows, BeOS, or Linux, look no further than DOSBox, an x86 emulator that appears to work very, very well!
10:14 AM
Disneyland had a Tower of Terror merchandise event scheduled for April 22-23rd with ticket packages ranging from $125 to $1595 per person. There's entertainment and dinner and stuff included of course, but mostly it's just a way to get on the ride before anyone else and to purchase limited-edition merchandise that won't ever be offered anywhere else.
At $125 per person, we didn't sign up.
Now this morning word comes that there will be a FREE Tower of Terror sneak preview for all annual passholders on April 26th, 27th, and 28. You just have to register online to claim your admission ticket. Registrations start on April 13th.
In related news, it looks like DisneyGallery.com has been reworked to include WDW events too.
We went on the 
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