Tips to make the most of your Disneyland Annual Pass
My wife Jen and I bought Disneyland Annual passes yesterday (3/20/09) and we’ve been working on ways to make technology help us on our trips to The Park. Before we bought our passes (and went to Disneyland) yesterday I started looking on the iPhone to find some apps related to Disneyland and found these two:
- Disneyland California Mini Guide [iTunes, $0.99]
Not the most in depth look at Disneyland by any means but it does not require internet access for the app to work. It displays a map ala google maps of the Disneyland park that can be scrolled around. It includes POI links to various attractions and where the bathrooms are (great since I have a 3 year old going into potty training). Also, the map can find you via GPS if your using an iPhone.
- Disneyland Resort Time Guide [iTunes, $0.99]
This app does one thing and that one thing quite well display times for various events happening at the Disneyland Resort. The data is updated via an internet connection so if your have an iPod Touch you can just update via WiFi before hitting the park. On the iPhone you can update whenever since your internet connected via your data plan. This app is great because it shows all the things you need to know to get the most from your visit: Disneyland Park (DL) Park Hours, Magic Morning Hours, Parade Event, Fireworks, Billy Hill & the Hillbillies, Fantasmic, Flag Retreat Ceremony, Closed for Refurbishment and etc. It also includes times for Disney’s California Adventure (DCA) and times for Downtown Disney (including who is playing at House of Blues that night).
- I also started looking for online resources to help us out one of which is having our Deluxe Passes blackout dates on our iPhones. To pull this off on our Mac’s in iCal we “subscribe” to google calendar that has all these times listed. You can do the same on a PC using Outlook, check out the icons below to inport the Deluxe Pass blackout dates:
- Official Disneyland Resort Podcast [iTunes Link]
What a great video podcast coming straight from the Disney company. - RideMax is a great service for planning out your Disney trip. For $29.99 a year you plan out your day in the most incredible way. Instead of me explaining how the service works you can read their PR speak:
RideMax is a computer software program guaranteed to help you save time waiting in line at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized.Using historical wait time statistics for each attraction as a foundation, RideMax analyzes millions of different ride sequences in order to create a minimum-wait-time itinerary. This schedule is tailored to the expected crowd patterns on the day of your visit, for the attractions you want to ride!
I know this is a partial list so if your an Annual Pass holder and have other tricks of the trade please let me know by leaving a comment and I’ll update the list above.
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Presentation – WordPress and 3rd Party Web Applications – OC Podcasters
At the March OC Podcasters meeting I did a presentation on how to get wordpress to interact with some popular 3rd party web applications such as Twitter & Facebook along with sharing posts on social networks. The day started out with me putting the final touches on my Keynote presentation I’d be showing at the event. If you were to ask my wife she would say I spent all day messing with it… and most of the day before too. Never again will I wait until the last minute to prep my presentation like I did this one. I’ve never used Keynote before and was very impressed with what I was able to do with very little effort. I did have a learning curve but that’s to be expected with a new app. After I learned the ends and outs I was able to make interactive slides that didnt require me to go slide by slide to make elements change on the screen. I also was able to get the Keynote Remote app to work on my iphone which is pretty damn cool.
Anyhow, back to the talk… I started out with a quick intro on wordpress themes (I should have included how a widget works in the slides but I did discuss that which you can see in the video) then later went into something new and fresh: Facebook Connect. This tech enables you to allow your readers to login to your wordpress site using their Facebook login info. The plugin I finally settled with was the one developed by sixjumps which took the basics of just authenticating with wordpress to a new level. With this you can leave a comment on the blog and allow the comment to be sent over to facebook. You can also share links from the site to facebook with ease and lastly be able to see who else is using the site from facebook. Pretty cool stuff to be totally honest.
Later I went into some plugins to connect wordpress with Twitter: TwitterTools by Alex King, TwitMe by Johnny Mast and Tweetbacks by Joost de Valk. I love Alex and Joost’s work and their plugins kick some serious ass. TwitMe and its dev are new to me but there are some great features he put into that plugin. Lastly I discussed sharing posts with friends using using Joost’s plugin Sociable and ShareThis.
One thing I learned with this is the power of the masses… If your doing a presentation on social media or new media, get your audience involved by asking them to get their friends involved. At the beginning of the demo I put a tinyurl link up on the screen and asked everyone to hop on twitter and send that link out to as a tweet so we can get some people in the chatroom. I also learned to have a videotape in the camera before using a sony camera as a videosource. Ends up that without a tape the camera goes into store demo mode and did all sorts of fun with the video demoing how you can do mosaic and sepia and other things. Next time I need to drag Jacob Morales out and have him record me with his kick ass setup. 
Below are various ways to consume the content:
YouTube Video of me doing the presentations:
SlideShare of the Presentation:
PDF and KeyNote if you’d like to use these files for your own presentation.
Below is my Creative Commons info for this project.
WordPress 3rd party web service by Jason Tucker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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MacWorld Keynote
[bliptv 607554]
I talk about my thoughts on the MacWorld Keynote and the products I found to be useful to me. I also do a bit of dreaming as well, Apple style.
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Mac Xmas… MacWorld
[bliptv 607195]
Macworld is here and I’m no where near SF. I talk about various technologies and some changes to my “show”.
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Sick and tired
Tuesday I came home and felt like crap. I laid on the couch as each family member asked me “are you sick?” I didnt feel sick really, it felt more like I was tired and ‘out of sorts’. Later in the evening Jen told me to go to bed(I guess she got tired of me looking all sicklike) so I went up stairs and crashed out. Wednesday I didnt wake up until 10ish, I didnt tell my boss I was sick and there was an email from my boss waiting for me asking if I’m still alive. I replied around 10:30 telling him that I overslept due to sickness and I was still feeling like crap. I’ll be staying home today and hopefully be back the following day.
I lounged at home taking Maalox or whatever it is for my stomach. That pretty much made me feel worse since it does an overhaul on your stomach. I caught up on pretty much all the TV I could stand. Jess was soo excited to see Daddy was home and I played with her while trying to keep her from getting sick. It was sooooo nice to have a quiet house until THEY came home. Those darn kids with their laughing and fighting and crying and screaming… uggghhhh. Jen came home after doing whatever and then left again for softball. Jess was all out of wack and didnt want to play or be nice. Chris noticed this and took her upstairs to play so I could chill for a while in quiet. I had a massive headache and my tummy hurt too so Jess’ screeming and loud laughing wasnt helping with the headache much.
I put Jess down around 9 and then Jen came home, we watched some TV then we both went to bed. When I woke up this morning I felt 1000 times better so hopefully I’ll be all good for today.
I got word that my iMac has been repaired. I heard about this from 2 different sources, one from the Mac Genius that lives in his car “Hi Andy!” and the other from apple directly. I plan to pick up the computer today during my lunch break. Maybe now Jen and I can get the next TuckerTales Podcast recorded and posted.
Have a good day, and stay away from the sick people!
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Weird Mac occurance – My Apple Genius lives in his car
Ok, this is just way weird. You remember how I took my Mac to the Apple Store in Brea? Well, I was looking on Digg today and found this article:
Mac Genius lives in truck for more than a year
geekorati submitted, made popular 6 hours 20 min ago (www.latimes.com)
Bussell was working full time as a “Mac genius” at the Apple Store in Newport Beach, sharing a $1,600-per-month apartment in Aliso Viejo. He had racked up more than $10,000 in credit card debt and was struggling to pay for school and save money for a three-month road trip. So on July 29, 2005, he started living in his truck. More…
Thats the SAME Genius that is working on my Kernel Panicing Mac. After reading that article I thought “is that the same Andy Bussell?” sure enough it was. I clicked the picture of him sleeping in his truck and there he was, the same guy!
Wow, way crazy stuff right there. Andy, if you’re reading this congrats on all that you have done with the resources you limited yourself with.
Link to his blog here: http://gotruckyourself.blogspot.com
Another article with video: here
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About Me
Jason Tucker - Southern California native, Systems Administrator, Podcaster, Wordpress hacker and Social media guy.
