2009 in Review

Wow, the second half of 2009 has just flown by. I'm obviously not blogging here as much as I used to, partly due to migrating the more personal stuff to Facebook and short stuff to Twitter.

Here's a recap of my year, based on my tweets:

• Bucs fire Gruden and Allen - Didn't like them, so I'm happy
• Steelers win the Super Bowl - Yes!
• N.Y. Times has a great visualization of tweets during the game
• Florida State Fair had "chocolate covered" bacon - it sucked
• Bill Reiss became the first Silverlight MVP
• Bucs cut Brooks, Dunn, June, Galloway, Hilliard - I give up on Bucs
• The St. Pete Times won a Pulitzer for The Girl in the Window
• We joined a chess club over the summer
• Cancer sucks
• Our family spent a lot of time on our First Lego League team
• I got to see my brother graduate from UF
• Facebook "punked" Techcrunch with a fake "Fax this photo" feature
• I'm still really impressed by Dropbox

In other news, we rejoined Disney's annual pass program this year. Their birthday program really hooked us. Still would rather be vacationing somewhere "real" but Disney World is still an amazingly well-run resort. It's getting old for us but it's still a decent vacation value.

Our peanut/legume/soy-allergic daughter has experimented with eating gluten-free with some good success. That really deserves a longer write-up than this. Maybe soon.

Work is about as good as can be, given the economy. We're certainly doing better than a lot of companies.

Finally, five-ish things from 2009 you really should read:

1. Get Excited and Make Things
2. Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
3. There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.
   
4. How I Did It: From $7 and Hour to Coaching Major League Baseball MVPs
5. The Great American Bubble Machine / Obama's Big Sellout

More Free WiFi - Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble just added free wifi for many of their stores, including all of the Tampa locations. I'd love to see Borders follow suit, but not very hopeful.

Besides all the local Panera Breads, I know of free wifi at Atlanta Bread, and most Hillsborough County library locations. I think the Tampa Ale House in Carrollwood and Bar Louie at International Plaza still have free wifi as well.

Tools I Use: Readability

A while ago, I found Readability, an online tool that reformats almost any web page to be more readable. One click of the browser bookmarklet and Readability strips the page down to just the text, in a standard font size, in black on a white background. No more tiny fonts, unreadable color combinations, or annoying blinking sidebar ads.

For example, it takes this:



and turns it into this:

Tools I Use: Dropbox

I'm becoming a big fan of Dropbox. At first glance, it's an online backup service. But it also synchronizes files between computers, keeps a revision history, shares files/folders between Dropbox users, and shares files/photos online. Plus it's cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux). It's like the Google GDrive that has never materialized.

It's practically replaced my USB flash drives. No more digging in my laptop bag, worrying about safely removing the drive, forgetting to take the flash drive with me, or finding a flash drive in the clothes dryer. No more worrying about forgetting to back up all those LOLCats photoshops.

Since I work on several computers during the week, this has saved me a lot of time and trouble. No more having to remember to email myself that document to review. No more wondering if I have the latest copy of the readme file I'm editing. No more wrestling with Windows file sharing at home. 

Their 50 gigabyte plan is $9/month, or the 2 gigabyte plan is free. If you use my referral link, we both get an extra 256 megabytes of free storage.

Obama Team and Social Norms

An interesting article on how the Obama team pulled off a very successful "get out the vote" campaign. Their winner? A simple phrase: "A record turnout is expected". 

Wow. That's the same Robert Cialdini and his descriptive social norm I heard about over two years ago. 

The basic idea is that "everybody is doing it" is much more powerful than "you ought to do it". We use it every time we ask somebody else if they're going to X's party, if they're contributing to their 401k, if they're tithing, if they're on Facebook, etc. 

Robert Cialdini's book is: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials).

Everyone is buying it.

Disney World Money Saving Hacks

Well, we're back to Disney. Their birthday offer was too good to pass up.  Here are some cost-cutting hacks for Walt Disney World - of varying ethics.

1. Ask for water. Every food service that's equipped to serve fountain drinks will give you large cups of ice water for free if you ask. Some Crystal Light mix packets can easily turn that into lemonade, iced tea, or grape drink. Making free lemonade feels like straying into a grey area ethically but isn't too bad.
2. Bring your own food and drinks. Yes, Disney allows this. They don't allow big coolers, glass bottles, or outside alcoholic beverages, but you can certainly bring your own sandwiches, bottled water, and sodas. This is all quite ethical and allowed by Disney.
3. Free salad. I've read about this and have been surprised to see it happen. At 'counter service' burger places (Cosmic Ray's Starlight Cafe or Pecos Bill's), there is a 'toppings bar' with lettuce, tomato, onions, mushrooms, etc. It's possible to walk right up and make a decent salad for free. Doing it to go with your hamburger or other food purchase isn't so bad, but doing that without purchasing anything is really shady. Yet I've seen it done.
4. Drink refills. In Hollywood Studios, the Backlot Express restaurant provides free drink refills. I think it's the only 'counter service' restaurant in the parks that does. Just drinking a couple refills seems perfectly ethical, but you could clearly abuse it to refill drink bottles for free.
5. Resort mugs. The Disney resorts have refillable mugs. It appears that the official stance is that you are supposed to buy new mugs with each stay at Disney. As frequent guests, we buy new mugs each time the design changes or about once every year or so. But I've seen many guests refilling mugs of designs that are from previous years. So there are varying degrees of ethics there.
6. Outside souvenirs. It never fails that the kids will want to buy some Disney-priced item that should be in a dollar store. Before a trip you can stock up on easily packed snacks, glowing necklaces/bracelets, light-up toys, and even Disney items for a lot cheaper than in-park impulse purchases. No real ethical problem there unless you start selling them to other guests.
7. Photo Pass. Photo Pass is a system where Disney photographers at many park locations will take your photo and link it to an account - based on your Photo Pass card - so you can purchase prints later. These prints and downloads can be quite expensive. You can get nearly the same thing for free by asking the photographer to take a shot with your own camera. We've gotten many excellent family photos at Disney this way - for essentially free. It might feel a bit unethical, but this appears to be normal Disney World policy and is well-known.
8. Park for free. There are two easy ways to park for free at Disney World. Resorts will let you park for free if you're there to "eat lunch". Then a quick bus/monorail/boat ride takes you to the park. Parking at Downtown Disney is free, but requires two legs of Disney transportation (to a resort, then to a park). Getting a bus or boat from there to a resort may require showing resort key cards but I've never seen them ask. Both are clearly dipping into unethical behavior.
9. Resort hopping. When you stay at any on-property Disney resort, I believe that you are free to 'hang out' at other resorts and use any of their facilities including dining and any recreation activities they have, except the pool. We've done this quite often - heading over to Wilderness Lodge to eat lunch, doing a kids' activity at Animal Kingdom Lodge, or taking the boat from Downtown Disney to eat some beignets at Port Orleans. Doing this while staying on property sounds perfectly allowed and ethical, but it's quite easy for anyone to do this no matter where they're staying, which may be a grey area.
10. Pool crashing. The official stance is apparently that you can only use your resort's pool. There are exceptions for construction and I think all the All-Stars pools are fair game for any guest in All-Stars resorts. I believe that the only pool that really enforces this is the Beach Club Resort. Supposedly the Wilderness Lodge has started actually checking IDs - because it's a small pool and is very convenient for a quick pool trip by any Magic Kingdom guest. We've never crashed a pool, but have never once been asked for a room key or ID at any pool. Crashing a pool that's mostly empty and unused is probably a lot safer than one that's really busy. This is somewhat unethical at best.

Nintendo DS Game Chamber - No More Missing Games

I came across this amazing game case for the Nintendo DS in an odd place. David Friedman has a profile and photo shoot with the inventor on his photo blog.

The game case has a unique feature that solves a problem that we've really struggled with. You can only take one game at a time out of the case. To get a new game out, you have to put an old one in. No more empty game cases. No more finding DS games all over the house. No more missing games. (Unless you can't find the case.)