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General comments I want to make and share with friends.

Daily Blog, Disney Parks, Disney Parks May 2017, Disney Trip May 2017, Disney Trips, Vacation

The end of wishes

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Saw the last wishes show last night. We parked ourselves behind the castle to avoid the huge crowds out front. Not as good a spot as I was in last time I shot form back there as the buildings got in the way.

I stayed after to grab some long lens night shots. No idea how these will come out once I get them home to post process on a big, calibrated monitor.

I have been playing with ‘cluttered’ shots where a long shot of something interesting has some nearer bits in the line of sight. Hoping for interesting rather than cluttered.

Daily Blog, Disney Parks, Disney Parks May 2017, Disney Trip May 2017, Disney Trips, Vacation

Quiet day at Disney…

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Pool and rest day yesterday. Grabbed dinner at Morimoto in Disney springs. Good food though the portobello fries tasted mostly of the oil and coating with little mushroom to them. Sat and had drinks with Lorna while a guitar player ran through his material further down the way after we finished eating.

I’ve been thinking about using my Intel NUC and  wireless router with my tablet as a laptop replacement for vacation purposes. This laptop is getting old (battery no longer holds a charge) and it is rather bulky for my normal vacation needs. I need to be able to transfer photos to hard drives from mhy camera and get at my blog mostly.

The biggest challenge is a display. If the room has a television with an exposed HDMI or DisplayPort connector then that works. If it doesn’t then I need to RDP into the little compute-brick from my tablet and use that as the display and input focus.

I had not fully set that up at home. Yesterday, mid-day I finally worked through all of the relevant setup (I think). I’ll keep using it over the remainder of the vacation and see if it works well enough. I’m thinking that my other option is a surface tablet or something similar…small…decently capable and with a reasonable keyboard and a few USB ports  to connect drives and a chip reader to. I tend to transfer photos to two laptop drives while on vacation as I’d be more than a little upset if I had a drive failure and lost everything from a trip.

 

Daily Blog, Disney Parks, Disney Parks May 2017, Disney Trip May 2017, Disney Trips, Vacation

Having fun at Disney World

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Been down here since last Friday and having a good time. Playing with my 100mm-400mm lens a bit. We’ve been to each of the parks and Disney Springs at least once. This vacation we’re taking it a bit easier than usual…we tend towards keeping running around until we’re exhausted and then waking up the next morning to dive in again.

Getting to the point where we’re working on taking up a slightly more relaxed attitude. Tweaked my left knee the week before heading down here as well so that is slowing my down a bit.

We did the ‘keys to the kingdom’ tour in Magic Kingdom on this trip so we’ve now glimpsed the fable utilidors.

I had my baymax shirt on for the visit to Epcot and we saw a short line to get pictures taken with baymax for real. When we came to the front of the line, baymax acted like I was a long lost friend and then tried to get me to stay and give photos and hugs while he switched over to tourist mode. Very cool.

We saw the new soarin’ and while the list of locations was a bit obvious, the views were spectacular.

Disney Springs is almost completely changed since our last visit. Lots of high end stores that we really aren’t interested in, but pretty cool to walk through. We hit the big disney store, the pin station and grabbed a drink at a little stand on the lower-rent end of the area.

Yesterday we saw rivers of light at Animal Kingdom. The show was visually spectacular, but the timing getting in for the fast pass area and waiting on the stone benches for an hour and a half was very hard on Lorna’s back. The crush of the crowd heading out was worse. I’ll post pictures once I’ve had a chance to post-process them on something with a better screen than this laptop.

Before rivers of light we hit the afternoon kilimanjaro safari. Was very cool as the giraffes and rhinos got in the way of our truck and forced up (of horror) to stay put until they cleared the road ahead.

Dinner at Boma in Animal Kingdom Lodge which was delicious as always. Seems as if this is turning into an eating trip. Lorna grabbed us a surprise reservation for breakfast at Trail’s End buffet this morning…yum!

Saw the hoop-tee-do review and they were more fun than ever (and they’re generally pretty darn good).

Drank ‘german-sized’ beers (I like the grapefruit beer) at the Biergarten in Epcot Germany seated with a very pleasant family (always group seating there). We still need to go back to finish the easter egg hunt through the worlds. As we headed over to dinner we saw the chair stacking street performers in France.

Having fun and still lots to go…waiting on most pictures until I have better facilities at home…posting a few direct to facebook from my phone now and again. Hope all is well on the home front…

Galleries, Photography

Visited the Boston MFA Yesterday Morning

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Yesterday was one of my (mostly) off Fridays at KMC. Lorna and I headed into Boston to visit the museum of fine arts and see what they had that was new.

Visiting a museum is always a good way to reset from the stress of life (and while I enjoy my work it can certainly wear at times). This trip was a mix as we started with the ‘Matisse in the Studio’ exhibit and roamed through some of the permanent collection first.

      

The ‘make way for ducklings’ exhibit was wonderful. The early sketches were very interesting to see and we had not been aware of some of the wonderful children’s books McCloskey created.

They had a series of images from Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man with some amazing textures on the final images. They also showcased Time of Wonder a wonderfully poetic children’s book.

 

Finding our final stop for the morning took us through a variety of other areas including some modern pieces

I didn’t bring my SLR along so the shots are a little less crisp than usual.

Our final stop was a display of photographs taken in the Lodz Ghetto by Henryk Ross. It was a sobering end to an otherwise uplifting day. The terrible things that humans are capable of doing to other humans, prominently on display.

On reflection, the most soul destroying aspect is that this has continued happening since the 1940s in so many places before and since…Rwanda, Armenia, Kosovo, Cambodia, China and more…

We focus on the huge scale of the Nazi genocides and that is important but this sort of things keeps happening on larger and smaller scales for many different reasons.

 

 

 

 

Books, Comments, Daily Blog, Fiction

At Boskone in Boston this Weekend

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This is our second time going into Boston for the Boskone con. Last time we had Alyssa along.

I attended a couple of panel discussions today so far and its reminding me why its worth coming here. It does seem that the number of sessions that I’m interested in this time is smaller than last. The sessions I’ve been in have had their through provoking aspects though…and that’s worth the price of  admission right there.

The panel on fairy tales and their modern reinterpretation had Jane Yolen on it and she is generally insightful. I was particularly struck by the break between the world before infinite copyrights and the one after. We can reinterpret/spin/play with fairy tales in large part because they are out of copyright. Once we pass that magic and largely unmoving boundary, everything is off of the table. I expect to write a bit more on this later.

Later in the morning I went to a panel on technology and its potential issues with Charlie Stross on the panel. He did a wonderful job of pulling the discussion away from a strict AI focus and on a broader slate of issues. It is often hard to pull ones gaze away from the flashy stuff and realize that changes in transportation and the garment industry could be just as transformative (sometime more as they strike at more foundational aspects of our lives) as the flashy, new tech bits.

Comments, Daily Blog

Politics on Disney Cruising Sites

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I just dropped my connection to https://www.facebook.com/groups/DisneyCruising/.

It was interesting…their title banner claimed 50000 members while facebook showed them just over 47000 so perhaps their behavior is already having an impact.

The site has a policy of ‘no political posts’. A member posted a pro-Trump picture on the site (a group appears to have hung a pro-Trump sign over the side of  one of the ships). When other members pointed it out, the admins stated that pro-Trump material was not (in their eyes) political but any protest related material would be considered political and removed. At that point they closed commenting on the post.

I visit Disney sites to see pictures of places that make me happy and images of happy people. I do not expect pictures with a political spin to be present but if they are I expect all sides to be represented and discussion to ensue. Any site with a posted set of rules that chooses to enforce those rules only when the admins whim directs isn’t doing its job properly.

I would encourage others to follow my lead and leave this group. There are plenty of well managed Disney related sites out there that aren’t pushing an agenda.

A friend just told me that this is an ‘under the radar’ commercial site as well. Selling product while pretending to be a fan site. Steer clear!

Daily Blog

RAVPower RP-WD02 Appears DOA

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Feeling a bit disappointed as the travel router I ordered seems to be dead on arrival. It has been on the charger for around 48 hours now. The charging light is still blinking and the power button does nothing even when pressed and held for far longer than the manual indicates. It got quite warm when I first plugged it into the charger (an Anker multi-port charger that I use for most things that need USB power) but by 24 hours in it was at a reasonable temperature.

I’ve tried pushing the factory reset button and that does nothing. I’ve unplugged and replugged several times (and tried the power button when unplugged). When I plug it back in, the charging LED turns red and blinks quickly for a few seconds and then we’re back to slow blinking green.

I’m almost certainly going to send this back to Amazon at this point. I’m inclined to try an exchange as the feature set on the device really does meet my needs. I had been hoping to try this out with the setup I intend to bring along next vacation…and perhaps I will be able to with its replacement…

I’ll post when the new one comes in and talk about whether it works and how it performs…

Daily Blog, Technical Comments

Lighter Transfer Gear for Vacation Trips

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Trying to slim down my vacation gear. Not going to go too far because the SLR and lenses aren’t optional, but I’m hoping to leave my core-i7 laptop behind while still maintaining the ability to transfer pictures to storage hard drives at the end of each day.

I always have my Pixel-C tablet along for a variety of uses and mostly wind up on that device for routine email or web checks. I’m hoping to use it as my display device using RDP and a wireless travel router.

My Pixel-C tablet.

I just bought a small travel router that also has a reserve battery function and micro SD reader that should allow the tablet and the computer to see each other (and to see the internet as well I’m expecting).

So far the new router has been charging (and getting a bit warmer than I like, but it is the first charge) so I haven’t had a chance to try it out. It uses an app on phones and tablets. I’m expecting that it will also connect to a windows PC if everything is set up correctly.

Intel NUC 6i5

I’ll be using the Intel NUC that normally acts as my ‘test target’ for software sandbox work at home. Its small, decently fast and has four USB ports and a full sized HDMI with wireless and bluetooth built in. As long as it can connect to the travel router I expect everything should work out reasonably.

The final pieces in the puzzle are a rather nice bluetooth keyboard and mouse. These should give me options…I can use the NUC with the room television and associate the keyboard and mouse directly with the NUC or I can use the tablet over RDP and connect the input devices to the tablet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our trip to Boscon next weekend will likely act as a dry run (assuming I can get everything set up to my satisfaction before then). Should be interesting and allow a slightly smaller footprint along the way. An additional bonus here is that I like this new bluetooth keyboard much better than the older one I’ve used for travel blogging in the past. It has a nice heft to it and the keys are pleasant to type on. Should make the occasional blog post along the way much nicer to put together.

 

Daily Blog, Disney Stuff

Saw the Live Stream of the ‘Rivers of Light’ Soft Open

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Looked great and giving animal kingdom a night time show should make that park a bigger experience. Looking forward to seeing the show in person and with my SLR in tow.

DIsney theme parks always  boost my spirits, even here in the slow and cold part of the winter. I’m currently kitting up for our DIsbey vacation in May. Going to hit the parks, do a short cruise (two days at castaway key, yay) and then return to the parks for a short stretch.

Lorna has done her usual, masterful job of putting all of the details together. I’m looking at lightening the hardware load a bit. I normally wind up hauling my laptop along with us to transfer pictures from CF and SD cards to a pair of external drives at the end of each day. I have an Intel NUC that I use as a ‘test target’ for software stuff. I’m hoping that I can use the NUC with my tablet (remote desktop) or the TV in the room and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse in place of the laptop.

So far its looking promising. We’re going into Boston next weekend for Boscon and I’m expecting to use that as a dry run. Ideally I won’t need to use the hotel TV as a display (I can’t really count on having access to the HDMI connector) and can use my Pixel-C tablet instead.

I may try to put together some software to facilitate this process. I’ve tended to use either the desktop explorer or lightroom to transfer files. A small C# or C++ application (or service) that looks for the appropriate drives and then transfers the pictures automatically would be a pretty nice thing. I’ll probably also try to dig up my copy of the Canon application for manipulating images as I’m not going to transfer my lightroom license to the NUC.