johnwilker.com

Startups, who’s in to be Apple?

Like most of Nerd America I started Reading the Steve Jobs Biography last night. I got in some good reading at the gym this morning and started thinking. I haven’t made it to the Apple years yet, but as I was reading it, thinking about Apple, about Jobs, startups and about death, a notion started [...]

What I hope to see at WWDC

Blah blah, i know it’s that season (I think I said this last year too) but I was thinking about Devin’s post about possible retail store products for their 10th anniversary and figured I’d throw out my best guesses for the WWDC keynote. Not retail store product options, Devin covered those as well as I [...]

Dear Google and Motorola, you’re doing it wrong

My friend Justin tweeted this and it really called out something I had noticed the first time I saw the Moto Xoom commercial. Motorola (and by extension Google) are doing advertising WRONG. Below are the commercials for the Xoom, and the iPad. Notice anything? Motorola spends their time with spaceships, and flashy weirdness, some dude [...]

The Wrist, Valuable Realestate

I was reading this article the other day, and it pretty much jived with my review(one and two) of the ‘iWatch’ There’s plenty of “I just use my iPhone, why would i want a watch?” people, and that’s fine, as with all things, it takes all kinds. I have a nice large watch box, full [...]

iWatch Review Part two: The Lunatik

I’ve already reviewed the iPod Nano as a watch, this review is an addition to that. Primarily for the Lunatik, watch enclosure. Or “Multi touch watch” as they call it.I got in on this awesome kickstarter project very early, well before they even met their minimum funding level. You can get more info at the [...]

AppleTV vs. GoogleTV… Fight!

I’d kill a kitten, maybe 2 for a device that is a goto media center device. What would that be? Well it’d have access to hulu, Netflix, my local music and video files (On a Drobo over SMB), be able to rent content from somewhere (I don’t care whether it’s iTunes, Amazon, etc since I [...]

Disney world, it’s not so magical

Ok so we spent much of last week and Christmas day in Orlando with the In-laws. Mom-inlaw wanted to do Disney World.

Overall, I had a good time. Having been to Disney World with my mom two years ago, there wasn’t much “awe” happening since in 2 years Disney hasn’t done much to the place.

Magic Kingdom

I was really bummed that the Haunted Mansion wasn’t all “nightmare Before Christmas”-ed out. Must be a CA thing? Overall the park wasn’t too crazy, crowded to be sure, but not bad. It’s funny tho, i was talking to Mike Lee about his recent trip to the Magic Kingdom and he was saying how it’s odd when you see things not go right. Disney (like Apple) tries really hard to manage the entire experience, and when something goes wrong it’s glaringly wrong. Well we definitely had the BMF experience at the Kingdom.

Apparently part of experience now when waiting in line is to have the line be less a line, and more a mob. On two, maybe three rides when the iron bound queue ended and we got into the actual ride building, Disney employees informed us that the line wasn’t single file, fill all available space. I’m guessing as a way to make the lines outside seem shorter, or something. However as in all cases with mobs, it quickly went from “happiest place on earth” to “mob rules; cut in front, elbow and kick your way into the Pirates of the Caribbean”

So that kinda sucked and really ruined the experience of the ride. Thankfully most lines weren’t too long in general, and we fast passed the popular stuff.

Christmas day, we were flying home, so after breakfast with the fam we went to epcot to walk around. To get from breakfast to Epcot/our hotel we had to go past the Magic Kingdom. Here I was thinking, “Who the hell wants to be at Disney World on Christmas day?” Turns out, a lot of people do! We asked the gal behind the counter at hour hotel about it and she said, at around noon that day they were at “level 3″ meaning only season pass holders and resort guests could get in. The park was already turning away folks who were staying elsewhere or driving in. ON CHRISTMAS DAY! She said on New Years Eve day, they’ll be at “level 4″ meaning once you leave, you can’t get back in, and even resort guests and season pass holders might not get in.

I gotta admit, I’m amazed that it’s that busy on Christmas. New Years, sure, I bet it’s a pretty fun party, but christmas?!

Oh and Space Mountain, the new music sucks. I need a fast rock track to make the ride fun, the current music is way to mellow, i found myself just sitting there waiting for the ride to end.

Epcot

My favorite part of being in Orlando is Epcot. Mostly because of the world tour part, and beer. Epcot itself is fun, the rides are cool, and the new (even new to me) Nemo ride is pretty sweet. Actually the ride is lame, but there’s an aquarium attached (you can just walk into that part, the ride exits there) that is really awesome.

It’s funny, we went to a beer/snack cart in the United Kingdom Pavilion, and i got mocked (rightfully so) for ordering a Stella.

Also, if you like trying candy we don’t get in the states, the Twinnings Tea shop has a pretty good, but small selection. SKIP the turkish Delight. This ain’t Narnia!

Thankfully, with the Magic Kingdom being so crowded on Christmas day, Epcot was not. We breezed thru the park using up the last of our meal plan snacks with hardly anyone else around. AWESOME!

Meal Plans

I dont think the meal plans are worth it. Ours was actually free with our package booking, so that was nice. I’d have been annoyed if I had paid for it. For one thing it’s very rigid. A “meal” is an entree, drink (non alcoholic) and dessert. I don’t like dessert and would often prefer an appetizer, no go cowboy! (Props to the waiter at Nine Dragons in Epcot. he hooked us up with some apps for free. Course with a party of 8 and 18% tip built in, why not make sure we’re happy. I know we added a little more tip to the bill)

The way the plan (ours at least) worked was we got 4 meals, 4 snacks, and 4 quicks. After cracking the code on what exactly each of those was, then it was a matter of scoping out the icon on the menus around the parks to see what applied and what didn’t, and then having to tell the worker, “I want a snack, what’s that entail here?” every time.

So overall it was way more effort than it was worth.

Ok that’s a quick and dirty run down of my christmas (oh and along with being at Disney World on Christmas, flying on Christmas is also very popular! WTF) vacation.

All in all, a good time.

My Review, the iWatch

Whether Apple would/will release an iWatch or not has been a source of speculation and flame war for years.

The first thing that came to my mind during the recent Apple event around iPods was “Holy crap, the new nano touch, would make an awesome watch!” I wasn’t alone in that. My Pal Christian made this review before I got mine.

Clearly Apple at least contemplated it as a watch, since it has a built in setting for watch face on wake. Essentially when you touch the wake up button, it comes to life as a watch. Maybe this is Apple testing the water for an honest to goodness iWatch. I certainly hope so, because as much as I like my iWatch, there’s a few things I’d like to see improved.

The Pros:

It’s an iPod. I mean really, that’s it’s main feature and like all iPods it’s good at what it does. Plug in some headphones and away ya go.

How does iThoughtsHD have this and Apple doesn’t?

I caved, and paid $10 for pages. Complete waste of money. I edit a lot of pages files. Sponsor packets,etc. All the time. I’d love to pull one up on my iPad, edit, and without having to think about plugging into iTunes, copying the files out of iTunes back to my iDisk where they live, overwriting the old one.

Pages, and most apps, come kinda close, you can access the file, pull it in locally, make edits, but then you’re stuck, the document is trapped in the iPad and iTunes.

Why not make the iPad apps (at least the Apple ones) more connected to Oh I dunno, say Apple’s own cloud services. iWork.com and mobileMe. Some of us (still) pay for mobileMe hoping it’ll mature and actually be useful. I have no idea what iWork.com is for, but it seems like it’d make perfect sense to tie the iWork iPad apps (maybe the new iLife ones too) to Apple’s own (though dropbox, et. al. would be nice too) services to extend their usefulness.

hulu +, Not the Droids I was looking for

I hope for many, hulu + is a huge WIN. For me, in the short term, it’s not. When I heard the announcement, my first thought was, “ok this is the final nail in Cable’s coffin for our house” Very quickly though the coffin shrugged the nail off. What would make hulu + the killer [...]

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