Degutis Insights

We decided to make our third day of vacation one of shopping and sightseeing (of sorts). With the dearth of Disney apparel (specifically Mickey Mouse items for Judy) in and around Chicagoland, we planned on checking out everything Disney that can be purchased outside of the theme parks.

Breakfast was, and will continue to be, the standard continental breakfast at the hotel. Why pay for a meal when it’s included with our room.

By 10:30am we were off to our first destination, Premium Outlets Mall which has a Disney Outlet Store amongst it’s dozens of other stores.

On our way out we grabbed some pics.

I thought Faulty Towers was across the pond?

Gators are a real threat here in Florida.

We found a few treasures at Premier Outlets, including a Mickey Baseball jersey for Judy, then headed for lunch at Chicago Pizzeria Uno. Yes, a known good pizza for lunch. I don’t mess around when it comes to pizza.

Next, we headed to Prime Outlets for the Disney Character Outlet store. While at Prime Outlets we checked out the Columbia Outlet store where I purchased a new jacket for winter at 50% off retail.

Our last shopping stop was at Downtown Disney. Numerous stores, restaurants, clubs and boutiques on the lakefront. Below are some pictures from Downtown Disney.

The bridge to Pleasure Island:

Judy trying on some head wear:

The Lego Store had some awesome displays. Here are just a couple (we’ll upload more to Flickr soon). Yes, these where made entirely from Legos.

We ended the day at Planet Hollywood for dinner.

Being a big fan of the burgers at Hard Rock Cafe Orlando (probably the best burger I ever had), my goal was to do a taste test of burgers between Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock which we’ll dine at on Monday night. Unless they’ve completely ruined the burgers at Hard Rock it will be no contest. The mushroom swiss burger at Planet Hollywood lacked flavor. The cheese and mushrooms were good, but the big tasteless beef patty made the burger, in a single word “blah”.

Posted by Al Degutis

We started our day a little later than planned (i.e. got up at 7:30am instead of 7am) because we didn’t realize that the time on the alarm clock was set to AM last night when we set the alarm. This is no big deal since we are on vacation after all but we did have a full day planned.

We grabbed some breakfast via the hotel’s continental offering (”waffles and bagels and donuts, Oh My!” as Judy said), and then headed off to Epcot.

We arrived at Epcot around 9:30am and the park seemed relatively empty. By noon the crowd had increased and we both noticed the extremely large number of stollers parked at any given attraction. As Judy wondered aloud how people could find their stroller amongst the sea of strollers, we witnessed a mom giving a security officer the description of her missing stroller.

We did a few of the rides and attractions including Test Track, Soarin’, Honey I Shrunk the Audience, Nemo and Friends and the interactive chat with Crush (the turtle from Finding Nemo). We also did some shopping. Here’s Judy trying on a hat:

We had lunch at the Electric Umbrella at Epcot.

Our second stop of the day was Disney’s Hollywood Studios where we caught the Disney/Pixar Character Parade and Block Party as we arrived around 2:30pm. After that it was straight to the Rock-N-Roll Rollercoaster, an indoor, very dark (except for a dozen or so neon signs/lights) steel coaster. We got to see Mator and Lightning McQueen make an appearance as we strolled by. We took The Great Movie Ride, a “walk” down memory lane of some of the classic movies. When the rain finally came, we checked out a few of the shows including Indiana Jones Stunt Show (pre-empted by the rain), Star Tours, and the 3D Muppet Movie. I continue to be impressed by the amazing 3D movies that can be produced.

We decided not to wait around to see if the rain would let up in time for the Fantasmic night-time finale, so we headed out for dinner. We dined at P.F. Changs, where we truly enjoy their Chicken Lettuce Wraps and numerous entrees.

Row of palm trees at the Mall of the Millenia:

Posted by Al Degutis

This Saturday we will be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary. To celebrate we’ve traveled to Florida to spend a week in Orlando, which was one of our honeymoon destinations.

Today was a travel day. Our two-and-a-half hour flight was in the middle of the afternoon, but taking the extremely affordable Van Galder bus to O’Hare forced us to depart based on the bus schedule. (Note - taking the Van Galder cost us $36 vs $100 for the 60 mile limo ride.)

We grabbed our luggage and headed for breakfast at IHOP.

Next was the bus ride to the airport. We checked in and found a spot to sit back and checked email to kill time until lunch.

We had lunch at Chili’s in the airport terminal.

Again, more waiting for the flight which was moved to a different gate due to a departure delay with the flight at our gate. Our plane was late as well, arriving shortly after boarding was supposed to begin. We took off about 30 minutes later than scheduled, which isn’t bad. I’m glad I don’t travel much.

After we landed in Orlando, we got the rental car and headed to the hotel. It was coming up on 8pm local time so we stopped for dinner first here:

After dinner, we checked into the hotel and started planning tomorrow’s events which will consist of a lot more than just eating. Probably a lot of standing in lines and sweating with a 60% chance of getting wet from rain.

Posted by Al Degutis

Google’s new web browser, Chrome, has been designed to be fast. How fast is it? Here are the results of a Javascript testing between Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.

The Javascript speed test used is here.

Chrome also did better (overall) in this test.

Robert Scoble also tweeted the results of his quick memory test: “Chrome memory utilization? 61,548 (with Google Reader loaded). Firefox? 215,220 with just Twitter (which takes far less memory). Chrome wins”

Jeff Hicks tweeted his memory test: “Same 3 tabs open in FF and Chrome. Chrome workingset is 105MB and FF is 62MB, that’s including plugins I’m sure.”

Walt Mossberg has posted his review of Chrome here.

So the jury is still out on memory usage, but it looks like Google Chrome is off to a good start with performance.

I’m looking forward to the availability of the Mac OS X version. 

Posted by Al Degutis

Time lapse animation for Summer making faces at me,

Posted by Al Degutis

Luckily I’m unique (in this case I mean in name) according to HowManyofMe.com.

Posted by (the one and only) Al Degutis

From the Oops Comic Strip I created as a teen.

Note - you will need to install the Photosynth browser plug-in to see the images below. At this time you have to install the client and browser plug-in at the same time, which you can do by click on the below.

While I still can’t get Microsoft’s Photosynth to display the web images on my Windows XP or Vista running in VMWare Fusion v1 (Fusion v2 Beta is required), I was able to get some interesting results with a series of pictures I took of our house and property.

The steps to creating a synth are very simple:

1. 1. Take pictures, preferably enough “connecting photos”
2. 2. Feed the photos to the Photosynth program and it does the rest

My first attempt at creating the necessary photos for a good synth was a simple 360 degree view from a center-ish point in the backyard: camera on a tripod, snapping pictures and slightly rotating the camera for the next shot.  Of the 42 photos I feed it, 76% of them were synthy and the following is the result.
Read the rest of this entry »

From the Oops Comic Strip I created as a teen.

Apparently, I am not synthy enough, to borrow a phrase from Microsoft’s Photosynth beta.  Wanting to try Photosynth but using a Macbook Pro as my primary computer, which is not supported natively, I launched Vista Home Premium in a VMWare Fusion (v1) virtual machine to meet the requirements of running it in Windows.  After downloading and installing the software then permitting the browser plug-in to install I took a shot at my first synth.  I grabbed 40 photos of our house and surrounding property taken back in 2003 and feed it into Photosynth.  After it processed and uploaded the finished result to the Photosynth web site, I was presented with the following when trying to view the results: Read the rest of this entry »