johnwilker.com

Work With Smart People. Like @bmf and @lordbron

My friend Mike Lee was in town for 360|MacDev and we had a chance to chat a few times. We also chatted a lot when I was in Amsterdam, that’ll happen when you’re sleeping on someone’s couch :D He’s been around the block; helped found companies, worked for Apple, and most recently starting an international [...]

If Your Customer Wants to Pay You. Figure out a Way to Take Their Money

This will be a short one as it just popped in to my head as I emailed my friend Tim. He sent me a reading list for some Green Lantern comics because i mentioned I was reading some. The Comic reader i use on my Kindle Fire (awesome comic reader, BTW) posts to Facebook when [...]

An Open Letter to the Hospitality Industry

I’m writing this hugely annoyed, so my first draft was simply “You Suck” You know an industry is bloated and corrupt when they’re first and only motivation is profit, even and especially at the expense of return business. That’s the Hospitality industry. They don’t care if your event sucks, another is dying to book the [...]

Tips for Travelers. To Make MY Travels easier

This isn’t a ‘help others’ post, so much as it’s a ‘help me’ post. By that I mean if I can get your in and out of the airport faster and more efficiently, well that helps me!  Travel season is rapidly approaching, and in fact I’m traveling soon. I thought I’d share some tips for [...]

Thinking About Death

So obviously with Steve Job’s passing Death has been talked about a lot lately. Of course having such a visionary pass away is a huge loss. But closer to home our downstairs neighbor at Uncubed, Jim recently passed away. I got back from my trip to LA and found out. I didn’t know Jim all [...]

Denver’s Initiative 300. Good idea, bad implementation

I just had a twitter chat (twchat? twat? Chitter? I dunno) with my friend LeVar about Initiative 300 on the Denver ballot. I’m voting no, he’s voting yes. The right answer, there isn’t one, at least not in the current initiative. Here’s my understanding of 300. It forces small businesses to provide paid sick time [...]

My Thoughts on Adobe Abandoning Linux

So what.   I’m sure there’s lot’s of linux users out there, there’s also probably a lot of Pine users and Mac PPC owners, that doesn’t mean they matter. Linux folks are used to adversity and being an undervalued minority, so really nothing is changing for them. If they want AIR, let ‘em compile their [...]

We’re all busy, stop saying it and do something

I see this on twitter, and in real life face-to-face conversations a lot, “blah blah, working on something awesome, super super busy” or some other fairly douchey version of that sentence. Typically said by the same people over and over, as if saying something like that makes you cool, as if repeating it somehow makes [...]

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 [...]

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.

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