Siriusly

Of course, I couldn't resist working on my own Sirius Satellite Radio "tuner" application. I've got it for PocketPC, Smartphone, and the Windows desktop (don't you love .NET?)

Right now, I'm only ready to release the Windows version, which is here.

Enjoy! (Remember, you need a Sirius online username/password to stream to your desktop).

I like Whole Foods

But this is still funny.

Tablet PC fun

Today at the gym, I used my Tablet PC as a DVD player while I did the elliptical machine. That's why the "slate" (keyboard-less) Tablets are the way to go.

Two episodes of "King of Queens" later, my workout was over. Thanks, Tablet PC!

Oh yeah... my Tablet PC has no DVD player on it. What? How did I watch a DVD, then? That's where DVD Shrink comes in handy. Awesome little app.

News I can use

Sweet.

It's on Sirius!

I'm a big fan of Sirius Satellite Radio (especially 22/First Wave). I was just about to write an application for myself to make it easier to listen to Sirius on the computer via their Windows Media Player streams, but now I don't have to, thanks to ItsOnSirius.com.

The main page shows you everything that is on Sirius. If you install their application, though (which requires that you have a Sirius subscription to get access to the channels -- go get Sirius ... you can try it for free on the computer for three days, or buy a Sirius radio and get it online as part of your subscription), you get all kinds of cool features, like the ability to automatically change channels when your favorite song is on!

Even better, if you sign up for Sirius Backstage, you can get a graphic like the new one I have on my blog sidebar, showing the channel and song that I'm listening to (if I'm not actively listening, it'll just show the last channel I had the computer tuned to, but it is always live info!)

In my car, I usually listen to either First Wave (22, alternative hits from the late 70s and 80s), Raw Dog (147, comedy), Totally 80s (8, 80s hits), or US Hits 1 (1, what the kids are listening to).

Crunk

One of the most important websites ever: The Rap Dictionary.

Yourself!Fitness

We also got "Yourself!Fitness" featuring Maya, the virtual personal trainer. She's no Melanie! (For starters, she never says "Belly button in!")

Stewart House Idol

We just got the XBox game "Karaoke Revolution," where you sing and the computerized crowd judges you. In a direct sing-off, Laurel is the latest Stewart House Idol! (Dave claims voter fraud.)

This time, as a watercolor

I like ArtRage a lot, if that isn't already obvious.

Yet more fake art

Virtually me in my underpants

Talk about a service Laurel is going to love ... My Virtual Model lets you create a 3D model of yourself, such as the lovely Virtual Dave above -- and then use it to buy clothes online!!!

Even more fake art

It's fun!

More fake art

Laurel is a better fake artist than I am

Art?

The above is a drawing I did with ArtRage, an incredible drawing program for the TabletPC. Wow. The thing is, this is a tracing of a JPG ... I have almost no artistic ability whatsoever. But ArtRage is amazing ... Here is the original picture, of me in the early 70s, by my Dad:

Spring cleaning

So, it was either early spring cleaning, or late spring cleaning (OK, actually, like REALLY late spring cleaning, because I'm not sure we did it last year, either) ... but, the house is clean! Or at least getting there. Phew. It is so easy to mess up 3000 sq. ft., and so hard to clean it. Stupid second law of thermodynamics!

New moblog photos

As you can see above (if you're reading this post on the home page of the site), I've changed from using SnapNPost for my moblog photos over to Flickr. The bad thing about Flickr is that it doesn't have built-in support for what I wanted to do (i.e. make it look like SnapNPost but actually work). However, the good things are that: 1. it is a much better service in general, and 2. I could write the code myself ;-) So there you go. Although this is basically only going to show photos that come from my cellphone camera, my Flickr page itself contains a lot more stuff, and will usually be the place I add new sets of photos.

Dave's xmas wish comes true

Way Cool Banshee!

Click here to view the video of Dave and Laurel riding Way Cool Banshee -- a "virtual roller coaster" at DisneyQuest. We're actually inside of a little pod that is spinning us around in sync with the video coaster (which you see between us).

More bad Santas

This time, Laurel found the website that listed the Santas' "plan", and we met them at Pacific Place Mall. It wasn't as fun as the library, but I got some better pix, like this one:



Be sure to check out the updated slide show!

Bad Santas at the Library

Most visits to the library don't include a visit from several dozen crazed Santas. But sometimes you get lucky:



See the rest of the fun here!

Driving in the traffic

I went to Best Buy to get some games, based on some Hotmail I got from Tara Reid. Best Buy is near IKEA, by the way (I saw that on Mapquest when I browsed it with Firefox). I could have ordered them on Amazon or bid on Ebay, and got them via UPS, but CNN says the weather news is good, so I looked up the ZIP codes and called the store on my Verizon phone to see if they had XBOX. I also looked up the lyrics for a song I got on Kazaa, but the lyrics were so weird I had to consult an online dictionary. Um ... and then Paris Hilton quotes some jokes about recipes for my spybot. Yahoo!!!

That paragraph contains all of the most popular keywords for each letter of the alphabet on Google Suggest on Dec. 10, 2004!

Disney Mega Post #4 - The Food

Resort restaurants ranked (fine dining)
1. California Grill (Contemporary)
2. Artist Point (Wilderness Lodge)
3. Jiko (Animal Kingdom Lodge), Yachtsman Steakhouse (Yacht Club, Thanksgiving menu)

Resort restaurants (casual dining)
1. Kona cafe (Polynesian)
2. Beaches and cream (Yacht Club), Yacht club galley (Yacht Club)

Other restaurants (Downtown Disney and themeparks):
1. Wolfgang Puck Cafe (Downtown Disney Westside)
2. Mama Melrose (MGM, Fantasmic package)
3. Portobello Yacht Club (Pleasure Island)
4. Restaurant Marrakesh (Epcot, Morocco), Columbia Harbour House (Magic Kingdom)

Even more (not ranked);
Spoodles (Boardwalk), Electric Umbrella (Epcot), Fountain View (Epcot), Turkey legs (assorted locations throughout all the theme parks), Starring Rolls (MGM)

Ah, Disney food. Better than you expect most of the time, sometimes surprising (in good and bad ways), and ALWAYS expensive. California Grill is great restaurant. Not just great considering it's at Disneyworld, but it stands up to its non-theme park competitors very nicely. Our server was just the right amount of attentive and personal without being clingy. I can't remember his name, but I remember he was from Kentucky. I remember Dave starting with a vegetable flatbread that was really good. I got a salad of some sort that was also good, but kind of heavy on the dressing. Not soaking wet, but heavier than I prefer it. Dinner entree for me was the "free form pumpkin lasagne," which was a special that night. It was very very good. I want to say that Dave got a steak of some sort and that it was equally good. Dessert, which we may have split or perhaps Dave got his own, was a trio of citrus items including a sorbet and a custard. Very nice and light, perfect for capping off a heavy meal. CA Grill's wine list is all Californian and has a good selection of wines by the glass.

I was also very happy with Artist Point at the Wilderness Lodge. It has an all Northwest wine list, which was amusing. Our server guaranteed me that the smoky portobello soup would be the best soup I ever tasted. Well, she was close. It was quite good, though the fresh corn soup at the Herb Farm is still at the top of my list. I had cedar plank roasted salmon which was just as good as any I've had in Seattle. They fly their salmon in from AK within 24 hours of its being caught, I had to ask since we remembered one of the restaurants at which we had eaten earlier in the week serving (gasp!) ATLANTIC salmon. I'm guessing that Dave had chicken, and he can correct if I'm wrong. Dessert was a berry cobbler which served in such a large helping that I'm thinking it was meant to be shared. I don't think I shared very much. The coffee at Artist Point is not Nescafe.

Jiko was kind of a mixed bag. For one thing, we were not seated until nearly an hour after our priority seating time. Also, we had to switch our Dave's chair at the table because it was broken. But after we got seated the atmosphere was pretty nice. i can't remember the appetizers, but I got the vegetarian entree. It was a little too earnestly vegan for my tastes (and I'm someone who eats tofu at least once a day) but it was OK. I got pistachio creme brulee for dessert and that was quite good. The layout of Animal Kingdom Lodge is such that the waiting areas for Boma (the buffet there) and Jiko are very close together with a bank of elevators in between. As the lounge was full we ended up standing in that area for a long time and it got quite crowded. It also seemed that it was very near the doors heading out to the pool. I wouldn't mind coming back and trying Boma.

I already talked about the Thanksgiving dinner at the Yacht Club so there's no need to go back over that.

So part way through the trip Dave and I decided that we just couldn't deal with Nescafe anymore and went off in search of a decent cup of coffee. Our search ended up at Kona Cafe at the Polynesian where they serve (duh) 100% Kona coffee (I noticed that the Kona coffee bar next to the cafe only served Kona blend, so check your menus carefully, folks). We had lunch there starting with a really good salad. I mean very surprisingly, even startlingly good. It was the Kona cafe salad. My entree was the asian stir fry pasta, which was so-so. It was kind of salty. Dave had the BBQ pork sandwich, and I seem to remember that he wasn't all that impressed. We split the chocolate macadamia tart and finally got some coffee. Both dessert and the coffee were very good, though the coffee came out in a thermal carafe instead of the promised French press pot. I think the cafe shared its desserts with 'Ohana, the less casual restaurant at the Polynesian. Even though neither of us was really impressed with our entrees I do remember seeing some very tasty looking items going to the people sitting next to us. I would come back to the Kona cafe in the future. I also remember thinking that the prices there quite reasonable for the quality of the food we got.

I already mentioned Beaches and Cream and the Yacht Club Galley so I won't go into those except to add that next time I want to come back hungry enough for the No Way Jose sundae (peanut butter and chocolate).

Our last night in FL we ended up at Wolfgang Puck cafe. He seems to have a whole fortress at Downtown Disney with the cafe, Wolfgang Puck Express and the Wolfgang Puck Dining room. The meal was just like any we have had his other outposts throughout the country, which is to say very good. We had no priority seating but got in with no wait. It did take a while for our food to arrive but the server was nice and apologetic about it. I had the pumpkin ravioli. We skipped dessert because we were quite full (not just from that meal, but from the entire trip) but I was kind of sad about that when we passed the dessert display on the way out. They looked really good.

We had a special package at Mama Melrose at MGM that included a prix fixe dinner and reserved seating later for Fantasmic. We skipped the flatbread course and split dessert because it was too much food. I don't remember what we ate, but it was good. I think I had salmon, and I remember thinking the salad was one of the better ones I had that week. Our dessert was a sampler of coffee-flavored items and was good. Mama Melrose uses the same coffee as the Brown Derby, which, according to our server, roasts its own. It's not Nescafe, but it wasn't great or anything :)

I can't remember anything about Portobello Yacht Club except that they serve roasted garlic with the bread and they are very proud of that. The meal was perfectly acceptable and completely non-memorable. All I remember is that Dave added shrimp to his entree :)

We ate at Marrakesh on our first night and would probably have been more impressed if we hadn't had a great meal at a restaurant by the same name (see http://www.winisp.net/dstewartms/Marrakesh/) in Seattle this summer. It was acceptable and there was no wait to get in, but the food was kind of institutional and didn't seem very authentic. Of course I'm saying this after ordering salmon, which I'm fairly sure is not native to Morocco, so perhaps I could have ordered better.

The lunch included in our Keys to the Kingdom tour was at Columbia Harbour House in Liberty Square just across from the Haunted Mansion. it was in a semi-private dining area upstairs and was probably the quietest meal we had the whole week. I had a hummus and veggie sandwich which was really good considering it was from a counter service restaurant in the Magic Kingdom. With it, I had veggie chili, which was also good though I was somewhat nonplussed by the black olives in it, and broccoli slaw that was particularly tasty. I can't remember what Dave ate.

As for the others, we had breakfast at Spoodles one morning and it was fine. I don't think breakfast is its specialty. Fountain View had yummy pastries. Electric Umbrella had a good veggie burger. And Starring Rolls had some good sandwiches. Dave will have to comment on the turkey legs, and the pricing of said legs in different locations of the parks.

Disney Mega Post #3 - The Yacht Club Resort

For this trip we stayed at the Yacht Club which is part of the Epcot resort area. I remembered staying onsite once with my parents in the 70s, though evidently I didn't remember it too well since I was convinced we stayed at the Contemporary and was informed by my father that was in fact the Polynesian (I think that's what he said, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). Dave had never stayed onsite. I was very happy with the hotel. The cast members were all very friendly and helpful. We even saw the "Captain" greeting guests in the lobby one morning. The room was large, the view was great.

We looked out over the lake and Boardwalk (3rd floor, room 3135 for those who keep up with those things), The Boardwalk area itself is a nice attraction in itself. There are several restaurants, a marina, bikes for rent, and the swimming pool, though we never got around to using it, looked really good.

The location could not be beat. Unless you're planning on spending every day of your vacation at the Magic Kingdom (in which case you would want to stay at one of the monorail resorts), the Epcot resorts are the place to stay. It was a short and slightly longer walk to Epcot and MGM respectively. And you could get to MK by either cutting through Epcot and taking a monorail or by taking the bus. Animal Kingdom and Pleasure Island were both accessible by Disney bus. An aside about the buses - I was happy enough with the bus service, and god knows I don't know a reasonable way they could improve the service, but buses just aren't very magical.

We ate breakfast at the Yacht Club Galley nearly every morning. We almost never had to wait for a table, the food was good enough, and the servers were all great. They even gave us coffee to go as we were leaving to hit the parks. We had one dinner at the nicer restaurant at the Yacht Club, the steakhouse, and that was Thanksgiving night so I don't know how their regular menu is. I had steak and it was very good. Dave had turkey. The service was pretty brusk, which was odd considering the restaurant was not full by the time we got our seating (8:45). One pleasant surprise was Beaches and Cream by the pool. I had a garden burger which was good, and Dave had a chicken sandwich that looked good too. Neither of us had the huge ice cream sundaes, though the table of 8 next to us got the Kitchen Sink sundae that comes in a huge bowl. They dim the lights in the restaurant and announce to everyone there that someone is going to try to conquer the sundae. They were still eating it as we left so who knows if they finished it or not. My guess (or hope) is no.

All in all, I would absolutely stay there again, and would like to try the concierge level next time. The only reason I would try somewhere else would be if for some reason I only planned to go to the Magic Kingdom, or if I wanted not to spend every day in a park (would try Wilderness Lodge, which is just gorgeous, or would try Saratoga Springs for the spa).

Disney Mega Post #2 - Thoughts on the Magic Kingdom

Magic Kingdom:
We went to MK 3 out of 8 days at WDW. On our first day we got the important tasks done. Upon arrival at Main Street we headed for the Chapeau for mouse ears for Laurel with her name on the back (why oh why do the adult sizes only come in black? pink would have been great, but it was just a touch too small). A surprising number of people asked us where to get the embroidery while we were at the park. As far as I can tell your choices are at the Chapeau and at one of the shops in Fantasyland. I think I remember seeing at least one place in Epcot and MGM where you could do it too. There's probably someplace in AK too. The second task was to get a photo of Laurel with Prince John (from Robin Hood) to go with the picture I have from when I was in high school. Luckily there was a character meet at Town Square with PJ, Robin Hood, Baloo, and King Louie. Yes, I was pretty much the only adult in line for a picture.

In Frontierland we rode Thunder and Splash Mountains, did Tom Sawyer Island (though we didn't find any paint brushes). Dave said Thunder Mountain is the only roller coaster he will ride. We got a Fast Pass for it and got in line for splash Mountain while we waited for the ride window to open for TM. Splash Mountain is fun, but it's really Small World with a drop at the end, which as far as I'm concerned means it's not really a thrill ride. TM is way more exciting even if you don't get wet. We did not do the Country Bear Jamboree, which is entirely Laurel's fault. Every time we were there the wait was just long enough that Laurel would want to pop into the pin store next door. And every time we would end up still in there when the show started.

In Liberty Square we did the Hall of Presidents, which Laurel had skipped the last few times, and of course the Haunted Mansion, which we hit at just the right time because we were able to walk right on.

In Tomorrowland, we did Buzz Lightyear and got FPs for Stitch and Space Mountain (Laurel rode SM alone). Neither of us really "got" Buzz, and Dave remembers it as United Airlines If you had Wings. We did the Timekeeper, which is unchanged from previous trips except that present is now permanently the year 2000 since the NYC footage has the World Trade Center towers in it. We rode the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, otherwise known as the WEDway Peoplemover. The transformation of this ride was a big disappointment. It used to be this very earnest ride about mass transit, and now they have attached a "story" to it and sped it up. As I said in a previous post Stitch was terrible. It was just a big nothing. Not scary, not funny, just nothing.

The 2nd day at MK we took the Keys to the Kingdom tour, which was great. Our tour guide had worked for Disney for 9 years in several areas including playing Mickey. The tour was very informative, and, yes, we saw the Utilidors, We also got to use the VIP entrance to the Haunted Mansion. With hints from our guide we found the Hidden Donald, and saw the Hidden Mickey in the crypt. Another part of the tour was a boat on the Jungle Cruise with just our group. Next time you ride this, pay attention to the what the natives are yelling :) The tour really sparked my interest in MK operations. I wish they did a tour that focuses on running the park, crowd control, and stuff like that.

The last day we went to MK we did a round up of rides we wanted to do again. It rained that night, but the crowds really didn't seem to thin too much. We hit Peter Pan and the Ride Formerly Known As Mr. Toad after the rain because the lines were finally down. I just can't fathom why Peter Pan is so popular as to warrant a Fast Pass, yet it is. RFKAMT (also called the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh) was pretty good. We saw Philharmagic and rode Snow White the first day we were there. Philharmagic was very good, but between it, Tough to be a Bug, and Muppets 3D, it starts to get repetitive. Snow White has really been toned down, which was a disappointment. Small World is down for rehab until May (or March - one of the M months).

Dave rode Space Mountain not once, but TWICE Saturday night. We even rode Astro-orbiter, which I have to say is not as tame as I remember it. That thing is FAST.