October 29, 2005

Okay, first things first. Oreo seems to be feeling much, much better today. It really looks like his stomach was just very upset yesterday and he kept eating and drinking and making himself sick over and over again. He seems to be fine, more or less, now and is happy and hanging out like normal.

The SGL Podcast has finally made it onto the all time most popular list. We are currently Podcast #84 and the Jedi Council Speaks is at #74. We have not left the #50 of the day for an entire week, though, and should be climbing through the all time list at a pretty good pace now.

I woke up to the alarm this morning at 8:30 but then fell right back asleep and didn’t wake up on my own until around 9:20. Oops. I am supposed to be in Springwater in southern Livingston County at 10:00 this morning. I jumped out of bed and got ready as quickly as possible. I wasn’t doing too badly and was out of the door by around 9:40. It is a bit of a haul down to Springwater though. Maybe forty minutes. Not quite I guess. But it is a bit of a drive.

So why am I in Springwater today? I am mentoring a student in programming down there. He is a student that goes to Wayland-Cohocton school down in Steuben County. The school called the Chamber of Commerce and got ahold of me through the Business Education Alliance here in Geneseo and they called me and asked if I would be interested in working with this student. We have been talking about it for about two weeks ever since Eric and I went to Business After Hours a few weeks ago. So today was the first day that he and I worked together. I was down there from about 10:00 until almost 1:30. We got a lot done. I had a good time and I think that it was pretty successful.

I came home and picked up Min and Oreo and we over to the Omega to get some lunch. We came home and Dominica got to work packing up everything under the sun for us to take with us to Florida. Oreo went into the office and enjoyed some of the only sunshine that we have had in weeks.

We just found out that we ARE going to have high speed Internet access while we are in Florida BUT we are not going to have it all of the time. Internet access at our hotel costs $10 a day so we aren’t going to be having it available to us all of the time. We are most likely not going to have it at all on October 31st, Monday, the day that we arrive. And we will definitely not have it on November 7th which is the following Monday when we are leaving. We will most likely not have it the day before that either. That means that the SGL and SGL Podcasts will not be updated on certain days but you can be sure that we will still be working hard getting content together so that we can blast it out on the days when we do have access. We might luck out and find some way to get access everyday but it seems rather unlikely. We will do what we can though. I am trying to get as much stuff in place to make the whole interactive experience even more exciting. Since we are not going to have regular Internet access we will be doing more than expected on SGL 2 through the podcast there to keep people connected since we are able to do untitled audio posts there without having any direct connection to the Internet. The cell phone will be indispensible while we are down there. We are also taking the “new” digital camera with us so we should have lots of great images for everyone by the time that we return. The first thing that we are going to be doing to make the trip more interactive is to add an SGL Flickr Stream that people can check out. If you are using a media aggregator then just point it to the stream and you will be able to see our syndicated Flickr images coming through with RSS. There is also a new Flickr badge over on the right in the navigation menu to make it easier for everyone to get to my Flickr page. You will be able to see the latest images automatically over there but just click on the badge and it will take you to the page.

If anyone is interested in seeing what SGL was like way back when you can check it out at the Internet Archive which is an amazingly cool project attempting to catalogue all human knowledge and is doing a pretty impressive job of it.

Don’t forget that tonight is your chance to set your clocks back an hour. Min and I wanted to hang out tonight so we watched Disney’s Ice Princess. I think that it probably goes without saying that this movie stank so bad that I had to open the windows. Can anyone say “Josh cooking rotten monkfish?” If you want the whole story check the review but definitely avoid this movie. This film is totally, absolute crap and Disney should be ashamed for doing so much to mock figure skaters. This movie doesn’t do to much to encourage people to become movie script writters either. This movie smacks of having been written by a hoard of monkeys. Clearly Disney is not paying anything beyond minimum wage to their writting staff. Can anyone say interns? Dominica is definitely skating on thin eggshells as far as getting to choose movies in the future.

I am working on trying to discover how to do vlogging using the free hosting from the Internet Archive. If it ends up working then we should have some movies from WDW to show you. At least that is the theory.

Min and I needed to forget having watched that awful movie so we popped in Herbie Fully Loaded. We had all ready seen HFL at the drive in but we own all of the other Herbie movies so we couldn’t skip over this one.

I had to order our tickets for Disney World tonight. Let me tell you, the Disney web site… oh wait, they don’t have a web site, they use the crappy GO.com service. No one knows why Disney made the decision to have the smallest web presence of any company with more than twenty employees in America. So anyway, I tried to use the awful web site to order some tickets. First I went through the entire order process (which is confusing because they don’t give you the option of “ordering” tickets anywhere) and then found that the button to actually order the tickets didn’t work. So I went through the entire process again using a different web browser. This was extra annoying since the shopping cart feature on the site didn’t work. Then I discovered that there was a check box that had to be clicked but that was hidden on the page (and I mean HIDDEN so that you had to scroll to find it without anything indicating that it was there.) Once I figured out that bit of sloppy, “I didn’t pass my freshman year of web design” site design then I had to fill out all of my contact information (again… that didn’t get saved either.) Then the site would not let me continue complaining that it needed my email even though the email was clearly filled out AND my username was my email. Then it turned out that the button that I clicked to automatically fill out the shipping information didn’t do anything and they needed that to be manually filled out even though it wasn’t indicated. So I finally got to the point where I could actually purchase the tickets and then, after they took my credit card information (TWICE!) the site said that I couldn’t get a confirmation number because of a system error and that I should wait for an email to tell me the number that I need to pick up my tickets. As you can imagine: that confirmation number still hasn’t come and I am FURIOUS. If I didn’t have plane tickets all ready paid for and confirmed I would not be so sure that going to WDW was such a good idea. I can’t believe that Disney is willing to treat their customers like this. I just spent $500 (or maybe $1000, I have no idea) and they don’t even have the decency to make sure that I have a confirmation number! And I was given no way to deal with not having a number. And they assume that I will have access to my email before I get to Florida (which is only one day away!) Which I might but it really matters when they decide to send that confirmation number. We could very easily end up not getting those tickets.

Well, that is just what I needed just before going to bed. Oh brother. I am getting so sick of Disney that I really am beginning to hope that I don’t have to go back there again. It is so unfortunate because I used to love WDW so much but I find it harder and harder to really enjoy doing any kind of business with them. It makes me unhappy that I have given them my money. They don’t care about me as a customer and so I don’t care to be one.

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