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.

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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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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Macworld is here and I’m no where near SF. I talk about various technologies and some changes to my “show”.

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!

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

Yesterday my Mac began acting weird, the windows on the screen started to do this odd ghosting thing. You’d move the window and the outline of it would stay on the screen and the contents would move around with the mouse. Then the dock started to freak out and wouldn’t do the rolling wave thing. Then Firefox would crash randomly and it wouldnt wake up from its slumber. I gave up and threw in the towel. Something just ISN’T right about this machine.

I called Apple and talked to their AppleCare specialist. His name was Joe and he didnt sound like a Joe. The Indian representative talked me through some trouble shooting and then said “I am unable to diagnose what is wrong, It could be one of three things: Logic Board, Memory or the Hard drive.” uhhh, you think? The next thing we did was try and load up the boot cd. It kernel paniced during that too. Then we tired the AppleCare cd which has TechTool on it. Yeah, still didnt work. He told me “Since I cant pinpoint what is failing, I cant send a tech out to your house. I see you live in Whittier California, you can pack your computer and drive to Brea Califonia and have the people there pack the computer and send it to apple for repair.” I replyed “What? I still have the packaging that Apple used to mail me the computer cant I just put it back in the box and mail this off to you guys? I dont see why the apple store needs to get involved” he replied “Mister Tucker, we only do this for home systems, portables we send you a box and you mail us the computer for repair. This is our only option at this point.”  disgusted I gave in and prepared to backup everything and take the computer to the Apple Store since I too stupid to pack up myself.

I began backing up my data using SuperDuper! in the hope of copying over the file to my portable usb drive I use for my laptop. The backup completed and I attempted to move the disk image to the USB drive. It kept giving me an error that I didnt have rights to copy the data it the drive. WTF! I loaded the drive back to the windows box and changed permissions on the drive and all the folders in it. “Wait… permissions?” I thought, “thats it! the damn Mac cant write to NTFS!” and I was right. My drive was formated for NTFS and the Macs cant write to it. I prolly could have found a way like the Linux guys have in the past. I had 80 gigs of shit to move and no place to put it on my network or drives. Nor did I have 90 gigs of free space to offload my usb drive so I could format it for the Mac.

I packed the baby up and we headed to Fry’s Electronics to look for a FireWire external drive. They dont have a big selection of FireWire drives only USB. I had my choice of 5 different ones ranging from 100 gigs to 750 gigs. I bought a 250gb model and went home to began backing up my stuff in hope of getting the Mac to the Apple store today.

The backup went way smooth with the firewire drive and I boxed up the machine and on our way to see family in South Orange County we stopped at the Apple Store to drop the computer off. Jen and Chris stayed in the car since I was reassured that I could just “Drop and Go” my machine with a tech. Caitlin, Jess and I went into the depths of the mall and went into the Apple Store.  Cailin was mezmerized by the amount of iPods and laptops and took Jess to the kids area to play on some iMacs. I talked to the guy up front and told him I was to have them mail off my computer for repair. He replied “uhhh, hmm, really? lemme get a Genius to talk to you about this”. Andy the Genius came and I told him the story, He was just as puzzled as the first guy, hell just as puzzled as I was when the CSR told me this on the phone. It was 30 mins to closing by now Jess wanted me and not Caitlin so I was at the Genius bar holding her and talking to Andy. He in his many years working and dealing with Apple has never heard anyone taking a computer to the store to be mailed off. He had heard of them mailing the customer a box to ship the computer back in. I explained to him my fustrations and also told him about how if I was a new computer user I would have been 1000 times more pissed than I am now. He totally agreed and offered to fix the computer on site.  He ordered all the replacement parts he could so I’d pretty much end up with a new computer in the end. Logic Board, Hard drive and Memory were all ordered. I was told it would take about 3 days for them to work on it. The CSR told me it would take 2 weeks. Even Andy said that sounded strange ‘Did you call Dell on accident?’ we both joked.

Hopefully my computer will be in working order and I can restore my data without incident. I’ll keep you guys posted.

My trip to the White Mecca went pretty well, I got there 15 minutes early (20 actually) and sat down for my name to be displayed on the big plasma displays above the Genuis Bar. I talked to the “Genius” about my problem, slowly telling him each part of it. He unpacked the machine and plugged in his FireWire drive and got to work looking at the system. “Do you have Disk Warrior?” he asked “No, not yet..”. “Ah, ok… we’ll try it this way then… oh I see, looks like your home directory is gone.” he exclaimed. I replied “Yeah, I tried an archival install hoping it would save my shit, I guess it did until the install died midway, when I kicked off the installer again it didnt give me the option to save my files”. He worked on it some more and told me that the install can bork out from time to time and that its a good idea to have a backup (uh, no shit). He said I should get a .mac account for the time being, they give them away for 60 days. By then I’ll have a better solution setup. He reinstalled via Firewire and said I should also get an external backup and partion it a few times for various tasks. Backup, restore, and essential software. He showed me how his was setup and then said to come back in about 10 mins and it would be done. I gave Jen a call and gave her the lowdown. He finished the install, rebooted a few times to make sure it worked ok and then burned a cd to make sure the optical drive was working. I walked out of there not paying a dime (I really wanted to just start blowing money left and right… damn apple… damn pretty computers and flashy flashy lights… damn awesome software wall.)

My Mac is back up and running. I did an initial backup using SuperDuper! and once I find a decently priced firewire drive I’ll be doing some backups onto that.

When Mac’s die they die hard, the trick is to not store all of your essential documents on your bootdrive or at least have a decent backup plan.

Raise your hand if you own a mac.

I’d have to agree with that. Yesterday I came home from work went up stairs to plug in my iPod into the iMac. Usually when I do this the iMac will wake up and run iTunes to keep the iPod up to date. This time nothing happened, the monitor was off and the only thing showing any signs of life was the “sleep” light on the bottom right of the display. Usually it throbs like a heart beat when its sleeping but this time it was lit up solid.

My plan was to install SuperDuper! tonight when I got home so I could have my first backup. I thought I finally installed all the apps I needed and everything was working quite well. I guess this wasnt the case. I reached behind and turned the poor thing off and back on again, OS X loaded except the desktop kept flashing the windows and icons over and over again. The menu bar wouldn’t load all of its icons (I have MenuMeters installed). I used my OS X disk and had it check the permissions and verify the disk, both came out clean. I rebooted and tested the system using the AppleCare disk to make sure the components were running well. That passed too! I even flashed the PRAM during bootup and thats when things went nutso. The screen came up black (like a console) and it started saying Kernel Panic and talked about how launchd wasnt loading and would keep trying a few more times. It finally gave up and locked up. I rebooted and went into safemode. Safemode said in the black console that Parallels was loading and then it would lock up right after that. I tried to call AppleCare and it was past 6pm so they were closed.

I tried reinstalling the OS, I’ve done this countless times at work on our macs and never once lost anyones home directory or user files. It asked me if I wanted to save my home directory and archive it, then install the OS. I agreed and it began to do so. I had it check the media since I’ve never used it before and it passed that test. It began installing and I went downstairs for a bit. 20 mins later I went back up and it said the install failed and to try again. I rebooted and tried again, I skipped the media check this time and went through the steps, I got to the point where the install asks if I wanted to backup my user files and it was grayed out. Wonderful… I just turned off the machine and called it a night.

This morning I went on the Brea Apple Store Concierge site and made an appointment for a Apple Genius to look at the machine for me. Apple’s support website states that kernel panics could happen for a number of reasons but usually its due to the logic board or memory going bad. Hell if I know, I’m a PC Guy trying to become a Mac Guy.

I cant wait for Time Machine…