Nintendo has dropped the price of the Wii by $50 to $199.99. We’ve enjoyed playing various games on the Wii. There are games for everyone in the family, from the preschoolers to the grandparents. One of my favorite games to play is the Soccer Practice which comes with the Wii Fit Balance Board (sold separately). I do poorly because I crack up when I get hit in the head with a soccer shoe.
The Nintendo Wii is for the causal gamers, which makes it perfect for family game night.
For a few years now, we’ve made it an annual event to attend the International Day of Racing at Arlington Race Track. We’ll be going again this Saturday, August 8, 2009.
This year I’ve decided to test the “wisdom of the masses” and crowd-source the wagering on some of the races. I selected four races, including the Arlington Million, in which I’d like you to help decide which horses to wager on. I’ve created a survey where I list the poll position, horse’s name, origin and odds for each horse. I will wager $10 on each of the horses selected by most popular vote and report the results here on Sunday.
Place your bets… I mean, pick your horses before 8am on Saturday August 8, 2009:
We’re not sure exactly how long it’s been since we’ve spent a weekend at Kishauwau on the Vermillion, down by Starved Rock and Matthiessen National Parks, but our best guess is 12 years or more.
We headed out on Friday, May 15th. It was cool and raining. After doubling back twice due to road closures for construction, we finally made it to Route 39; we were on our way. We arrived two hours later.
This was the first time in this cabin, named Jacks. It’s a two story building, but the lower level is used for storage and unavailable to guests. Jacks has a medium sized, combined living room and dinning area, small kitchen, large bedroom and a hot tub room.
We settled in, got comfortable and did some reading before dinner.
Way out here, cellphone reception is spotty at best. I joked about going through withdrawal from being online. It was an adjustment to be sure. It quickly became apparent how reliant we’ve become on technology. After reading for a bit, we decided it was dinner time. We had planned to cook dinner on the grill that’s on the property, but it was still pouring rain. Plan B was to find a restaurant for dinner. Without the Internet, Google Maps on the cellphones, or mapping software on our computer we had to go analog.
Side note – In the past, about 5+ years ago, I always had a copy of Microsoft Map point on my computer. We’ve been using Google Maps on the laptops and cellphones for a few years now that it never occurred to us that we may want to install Mappoint on Judy’s Windows laptop. Alternately, I could have purchased one of the mapping software with full maps for the iPhone.
Fortunately, the hosts at Kishauwau had a long list of restaurants in the area.
Of course, “the area” is pretty spread out about 20-50 miles. We found an Italian restaurant in Peru that we wanted to try. With a map that was provided by the hosts in the mail for driving directions, and that may have been photocopied from a phonebook, we mapped out our route to Peru to find Armici’s.
The drive was simple enough, even though I overshot RT 6 and had to turn back one street later. While Armici’s parking lot was small and disjointed (on the side and back, accessed separately) it had a very nice atmosphere inside. We were seated in the second dinning room which as decorated as an outdoor cafe, complete with a street lamp in the middle of the floor behind my seat and stars shining in the sky (i.e. ceiling). Dinner was very good, the Riesling less fruity than we’re accustomed to but still good. It was an enjoyable dinner.
On the drive back to the cabin we pick up some ice cream and hot fudge topping for brownie sundaes. Back at the cabin, we played Phase 10 and ate the hot fudge brownie sundaes while listening to the rain and thunder. Life was good.
We slept in on Saturday morning. We got up mid-morning, but by the time we were showered and dressed it was 11:30am, so we skipped breakfast and made lunch. We grilled the marinated chicken that we couldn’t grill the night before. It was a great lunch, one of our favorite meals.
After lunch we headed to Matthiesen State Park where we spotted a Pow Wow sign on Friday. It had been a few years, possibly 6 or more, since we went to an Indian Pow Wow. We checked out all the arts and crafts for sale and display, ate some Indian Fry Bread and watched some traditional Indian dancing, including a very cool hoop dance where the girls worked their way up to eight hoops.
An organization name S.O.A.R. had two trained hawks and an eagle on display there. It was amazing to see these majestic birds up close.
One of our goals for the weekend was to go fishing. We drove to the other side of the park to Matthiessen Lake which was high on the banks and covered with lake scum along the shore. We hiked a portion of the trail after being drawn to it by the sound of a raging waterfall. The trails were muddy and slick at times from the recent torrential rains. We decided to try and find our way to LaSalle Wilderness and Fishing Area, again using the old fashioned map. We arrived at LaSalle, which was located right next to the Exelon Nuclear Power Plant and wind farms. It was very windy and the openess of the Wilderness and Fishing Area allowed us to feel just how windy. We debated whether to try and fish the rough waters or leaving, deciding to give it a try. We both caught a bullhead, but decided that it was too cold to stay out any longer.
We went back to the cabin, where we had grilled ribeye steaks, baked potatoes, corn on the cob and spinach for dinner. After dinner, we had a campfire and roasted marshmallows for s’mores. As twilight was ending, we headed inside to hang out by the fireplace for some reading. As Judy headed to bed around 11pm, I headed outside with my binoculars to stargaze for a couple hours.
Sunday morning Judy made us delicious breakfast of bacon, eggs and fried potatoes. It was unfortunate that the weekend trip was coming to an end. We agreed that we needed one more day and night our here so we can visit Starved Rock and search for more fishing spots.
On the drive home we found an off the path spot for dinner. We found Fritz Wooden Nickel in Stillman Valley, Il, but unfortunately it was closed. Instead we had lunch up the street at the Royal Blue Restaurant where we enjoyed some burgers and fries.
After lunch we returned to Woodstock and spent the afternoon walking around the annual Fair Diddley craft show at the square.
I picked up my copy of iLife 09 the day it came out, eager to try out iPhoto’s face recognition feature. After launching iPhoto for the first time, it took under an hour for it to process all the photos in the library, searching for faces. Once it identified most of the faces you start tagging them with names. As you are tagging names, the process becomes simpler because iPhoto appears to learn from what was being tagged and makes recommendations which you can accept or reject. It’s not perfect and at times suggests the wrong person, especially when it comes to toddlers and infants, but does a fairly good job.
An example of an accurate suggestion:
An example of an inaccurate suggestion:
iPhoto is also Linux friendly, well at least in terms of recognizing Tux:
iPhoto also likes to play Where’s Waldo:
Overall it is an impressive feature. I can’t speak to how it compares to the face recognition feature of Google’s Picasa, other than iPhoto does all the work locally whereas Picasa only provides face recognition on Picasa Web. I’m not about to upload my entire photo library to the web (with the exception of my Amazon S3 backup) so the local face recognition with name tagging is perfect for me.
I’ve wanted to experiment with Photosynth some more, so I decided to try a 360 degree synth of Judy’s Mickey Mouse Christmas Tree. I set up a backdrop behind the tree, put the camera on a tripod and snapped 26 pictures while slightly rotating the tree in between shots. About half way through I realized that as I rotated the tree, I was also inching it forward and to the left so I started inching it back during the remaining shots. I’m not sure how much the movement affected the results, but my goal of having a photo that you can “scroll around” didn’t work out. I also wonder if the problem was the backdrop which kept the background the same. My thought was to keep the background neutral so it only saw changes in the tree. At this point I’m uncertain if the problem was my technique or Photosynth’s limitations.
It claims to have used all 26 photos but I don’t see how they’ve been synth’d. Here’s the result, which unfortunately require Internet Explorer on a Windows PC:
Posted on the September 12th, 2008 under Family, Leisure by Al
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 on the September 11th, 2008 under Family, Leisure by Al
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.
We headed out on Friday, May 15th. It was cool and raining. After doubling back twice due to 
Side note – In the past, about 5+ years ago, I always had a copy of Microsoft Map point on my computer. We’ve been using Google Maps on the laptops and cellphones for a few years now that it never occurred to us that we may want to install Mappoint on Judy’s Windows laptop. Alternately, I could have purchased one of the mapping software with full maps for the iPhone.
An organization name S.O.A.R. had two trained hawks and an eagle on display there. It was amazing to see these majestic birds up close.
We went back to the cabin, where we had grilled ribeye steaks, baked potatoes, corn on the cob and spinach for dinner. After dinner, we had a campfire and roasted marshmallows for s’mores. As twilight was ending, we headed inside to hang out by the fireplace for some reading. As Judy headed to bed around 11pm, I headed outside with my binoculars to 
Sunday morning Judy made us delicious breakfast of bacon, eggs and fried potatoes. It was unfortunate that the weekend trip was coming to an end. We agreed that we needed one more day and night our here so we can visit Starved Rock and search for more fishing spots.
