Day 2 - Hollywood Studio

We plan a day with an early show start and a return to the apartment for lunch before returning for the evening fireworks etc.

Arriving at the Hollywood studio park after our easiest drive yet, we are before the 9am opening time, but there are still thousands ahead of us. Once inside we decide to head to the Toy Story ride and get funneled into the fast-pass queue, where we eventually get tickets for some 2 hours ahead. Moving on to the very quiet "back-lot" tour, we hit very lucky and all our plans change as we get given Dream Fast Pass special tickets that provide fast-passes to all the major rides in the park. We now decide to make a full day of it to get the best advantage of these special tickets.

Finally get back to the apartment about 5pm and the kids try out the pool while get some more shopping at the local supermarket.

Attractions visited

Backlot tour
Cascade Canyon
Lights, motors, action
Star Tours
Indiana Jones show
Rock 'n' Roll roller-coaster
Prince Caspian
Little Mermaid

Day 1 - Epcot

We do the checking in stuff and take a look at the lovely pool area and, after a quick shop at the very nearby supermarket and breakfast at Dennys (diner), we decide to go to Epcot which is one of the nearer Disney attractions. Once again, although driving is really easy, we seem not to have learnt much about navigating and make a meal of the short journey.

When we finally arrive, it's a slight dissappointment to have to pay $12 to park when we've paid hundreds of pounds for our 14 day passes, but you can't fault the organisation and the sheer scale of everything is simply amazing. We get transferred from the car park to the main park on a road train and quickly get into Epcot. Immediately, the quality and cleanliness is apparent, especially considering the age of the park.

The first area is the modern part with loads of technology exhibits mixed in with the traditional rides. It's Disney's most busy time and the queues are epic, but at least there is the Fast-pass ticket system, where you can get a ticket for 'later-on'. We actually don't bother with this yet and just continue to explore in the sunny, but slightly chilly, weather. (We expected this first day to be un-seasonally cold, and know it's picking up tomorrow).

We manage to get about halfway around the 'world' area before we run out of time and head back to the apartment for tea.

Everyone's pretty tired already and the kids are straight off to sleep.

List of attractions visited

Body parts
Velcro show
Mexican boat ride
Viking boat ride
Segway
Chineese acrobats
China film show
Norway filem show
Stormstruck
Where's the fire?

Florida for Christmas and New Year - getting there

To do the madness that is air travel we needed to get up at 04:45! We loaded up the car with our luggage and dog to make the first trip to our friends Sarah and
Doug in Hatfield where we dropped off the dog for it's 2 week holiday and picked up Doug who drove us to Heathrow terminal 3. Of course, despite my stress and panicing, we arrive in plenty of time at about 06:35. The American Airlines flight is un-eventful apart from the slightly grumpy old maids who pass as air stewardesses and we land in Miami about 10 hours later at 15:00 local time.

Of course, that's the easy bit! Immigration is actually not too bad as I'd managed to fill in the reams of paperwork on the plane, but the baggage reclaim is bordering on third-world, with all the cases just dumped in a heap behind one of the conveyor belts, inviting a scrum! Luckily we make a reasonable escape and then head outside to the steaming hot underground car hire shuttle bus pick up area and hence to the car-hire depot to pick up our Pontiac C6.

Now the fun really starts as we've been travelling already for 17 hours and it's about 17:00 as we head north for the drive up to Orlando. We have a map that I'd taken trouble to print off at home and we managed to find the I95 heading north with no trouble, although in retrospect this might have been the wrong choice as maybe the Florida Turnpike runs the whole route, the map I had was not too clear about this. We stop off for a Mucky Macs tea and then manage to somehow miss a turn to get us heading NW to Orlando, so we have to detour slightly. We get there in end, but still manage to make a complete hash of finding our apartement just a few miles away from Disney, I think fatigue, bad maps and large distances are taking their toll.

We finally arrive at about 21:00, some 21 hours after leaving home and manage to get access to our 3rd floor apartment which is pretty super. Huge and well equipped with 2 double en-suite bedrooms, nice lounge and kitchen with three TVs and free internet access, hence this post.

It's still 75 degrees outside, but we manage to crash out, exhausted!

ddate

Due to my amazingly bad typing skills I discovered a new unix command today:

$ ddate
Today is Setting Orange, the 53rd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3174

Google leads me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar

Learn something new, although maybe not useful, every day.

The most important Agile tool

Having just completed a review of our latest release, a lot of the team complained about the lack of some of the tools and processes that we've become used to in recent times. These shortfalls were mainly due to the fact that we're integrating with a new team but it led me to think about which single tool I'd hate to be without.

The answer is Continuous Integration, we use CruiseControl by the way.

We get a lot of spin-offs for doing this, especially as we're a distributed team, the main one being an implicit communication tool, everyone is using it, so we can all see who's doing what. Other benefits are that we also using several build metrics, so I believe the quality level is kept high, which gives a much warmer feeling, especially when the pressure is on.

Which Agile tool or process would you hate to be without?

Ubuntu and me - the story so far

I've been using Ubuntu in quite a big way for the last 2-4 months and I thought I'd just write down a few points, good and bad.

Good

1. Speed - massive improvement over Windows for day to day use, especially wireless networking and boot up times. The only bad part is using Firefox to upload photos to flickr which seems to cripple firefox. I have now overcome this by using F-spot photo manager instead.
2. Viruses - not come across any yet!
3. VirtualBox - can be used when you really must have Windows
4. Really cool for a lot of development, especially having the command line so handy.
   

Bad

1. Suspend and Hibernate seem impossible to get working on either of my HP laptops and believe me, I've tried.
2. Can't seem to get the microphone working either.
3. I do miss Outlook
4. No Livemeeting which can be a pain in a mostly Microsoft company. But Yuuguu is cool for simple sharing.
   
5. Screen properties are a bit flakey.
6. I'd like to share a printer with other Windows machines on my LAN, but I've still to crack getting CUPS to do this for me.
   

Good Interweb customer service

After quite a long break over the Summer, I recently started to use my Phoenix flight sim again. Checking their site I noticed I was quite a few releases behind, so decided to download the updates and upgrade my installation.

Although the installs all went OK, the results were very disappointing, with dodgy shadows and very clunky slow graphics. As the latest release was Beta, I decided to send off an email to the support address, not really expecting much from what is surely a pretty niche product. To my pleasant surprise, I got an almost instant response, and after a fairly lengthly, but rapid, exchange of emails, my issues were resolved with an upgrade to my Nvidia drivers and also Directx.

Thanks guys!