Our family just returned from an 8-day journey to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Since I got so much help from forums and blogs before I left, I wanted to offer our experiences and comments.

It is difficult to imagine how incredibly vast WDW is. The official documents say it is 47 square miles, but the number doesn't really tell the story. There are 4 theme parks, two water parks, 6 golf courses, about 25 large resort hotels and a number of vast lakes, and yet it is still mostly empty space. For comparison, the "urban sprawl" area of the city of San Jose, CA, is 61 square miles.

One of the first major decisions you have to make is where to stay. Each of the Disney resorts is themed, and few people are better than maintaining an immersive theme experience than Disney. We have two teenagers, so we wanted three beds. At the time we called, three months in advance, the only resort that could guarantee us bunks was the cabins at the Fort Wilderness campground. We like the cabin experience, so we chose that. Fort Wilderness is about 2/3 RV park and 1/3 cabins. The cabins are about the size of a single-wide mobile home (which they might actually be), and were plenty big enough for our family. It had a full kitchen, and a large patio with barbecue.

If you do plan a WDW vacation, start planning your meals early. I had seen the notes saying that one could make reservations up to 180 days in advance, but I merely chuckled at that. I started two weeks out, thinking I was ahead of the game. I was dead wrong. When I called, all three of the dinner shows (Hoop-De-Doo Revue, Mickey's Backyard BBQ, Spirit of Aloha) were completely sold out, all week long. In fact, of all of the "table service" restaurants we wanted, only one was available for dinner at all. By persistent calling, we did manage to get Hoop-De-Doo tickets, but the rest of the table service meals we ate were at lunch.

I've made each day a separate blog posting, and the file times should allow them to appear in order. Here are links to the entries:

Sunday, Arrival
Monday, Magic Kingdom
Tuesday, MGM Studios
Wednesday, Blizzard Beach and Hoop-De-Doo Revue
Thursday, Epcot Center
Friday, Typhoon Lagoon and Downtown Disney
Saturday, Animal Kingdon
Sunday, wrap-up and go home

Three days after the UK terrorist scare. We were worried that we might have to fly naked. As it turns out, other than the inconvenience of not being able to take sodas, lattes, and contact lens solution on the plane, the security process wasn't significantly different from the last time I flew.

We used the "Disney Magical Express" service to get from the airport. We put special tags on the luggage, and Disney folks pick it up for us and take it straight to the room. This allowed us to concentrate on getting checked in and finding our way around. However, when using this option, be aware that your luggage does not travel on the same bus that you do! We arrived at the Orlando airport at 8:15 PM, and were finally in our cabin by 9:45 PM. However, our luggage was not delivered until 2:20 AM the next morning. Since we could not take toothpaste or contact lens solution on the airplane, this left us in an uncomfortable situation.

When I was charting out our days, it turns out I fell into a trap that nearly everyone falls into: I scheduled the parks in the order they opened. That is, Magic Kingdom, then Epcot, then MGM Studios, then Animal Kingdom. This pattern is so common that Monday is the Magic Kingdom's busiest day, Tuesday is Epcot's busiest day, and so on. Fortunately, the meal problems we encountered forced us to scramble that schedule a bit.

However, we did start our week at the Magic Kingdom. It was much less crowded than we expected. A cast member told me later that the park attendance for the first part of the week was about half of their usual number, and they weren't sure why.

Being Disneyland veterans, the Magic Kingdom was familiar to us. We did our favorites: Pirates of the Caribbean, Thunder Mountain Railroad, Space Mountain, It's A Small World. I made the kids sit through the Hall of Presidents, which I remembered from the early Disneyland days. The animatronics have improved; it is hard to remember that those are not real people sitting on the stage.

Our first Disney meal was a fast-food lunch at the Starlight Cafe in Tomorrowland. We happened to catch a special Disney promotion that saved us a boatload of money. By booking a 7-day stay at a Disney resort, we got the "Disney Dining Plan" for free. This gets you one snack, one counter service meal, and one table service meal per person per day. This is a fabulous deal. We tracked the actual prices during the week, and found that we would have spent just under $1,300 on meals had we not had this plan.

As a general rule, the counter service (fast food) meals end up averaging $13 per person, and table service meals average from $30 to $45 per person.

The Disney meals are expensive, but the food is good, and unquestionably plentiful. On the dining plan, each meal includes an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert. When dining out, we almost never order appetizers or desserts, so right off the bat we were getting more food than usual. Plus, the entrees are large. We spent most of the week stuffed to the gills. At that first lunch, my 13-year-old son got a double bacon cheeseburger, and could not finish the brownie. We had to take it with us.

As it turns out, we got so much food at the meals that we barely used the snacks. By Friday, we still had 20 of our 28 snack credits unused. The snack credits can be used to buy drinks and packaged snacks as well, so we used the last on items to take with us to the airport.

We had our first table service dinner at Tony's Town Square, themed after the restaurant where Lady and the Tramp have their spaghetti and meat ball supper. This was a delightful place, and the food was great. We got seafood, steak, and pasta, and all of it was very good.

One of the advantages of staying at Fort Wilderness is that one can take a boat to the Magic Kingdom. The boats were less crowded and more relaxed than the busses or monorail.

We spent our second day at the Disney MGM Studios. I think this was my favorite of the four theme parks. We did the (Trip through the Movies?), which we all enjoyed. The "tour guide" leaves the vehicle partway through and rejoins later. We did the Indiana Jones stunt show on fast pass, which is well worth the wait. Excellent. We did Star Tours, which I had seen in California. I really liked the Tower of Terror. We also watched the stage show of Beauty and the Beast, which was well done. We did the

We went to the 50's Prime Time Cafe for lunch. The theme here is the TV generation of the 1950's situation comedies. Your experience here depends strongly on your waiter. If he or she plays the part well, and scolds your party for manners violations, it can be really fun. The menu is your basic comfort food. The meat loaf was great. We had warned my son about the elbows on the table thing, and at one point, when the waiter walked in the room, he suddenly sat up straight when he realized his elbows were on the table.

We did dinner at the ABC Commissary. Because we were so stuffed from lunch, we didn't start looking for dinner until after 7. By that time, most of the quick service places have closed. Be warned that your choices go way down after 7 PM, even though the park itself is open until 9 PM.

Today, we headed to the Blizzard Beach water park. I was really looking forward to the water parks, and I thought Blizzard Beach looked to be the more fun of the two. The lockers are small; be prepared to get one small per person, or one large per two people.

My family talked me into floating around the "cross country creek", which runs all the way around the park. You get in and get out wherever you want. This was fun and relaxing, but it meant that we didn't get into the water slide lines until later in the morning. We ended up waiting a long time for one of the two premiere slides (the "Slush Gusher"), and it was over in 30 seconds. We spent the rest of the time in the wave pool.

In the evening, we had reservations for the Hoop-De-Doo Revue back at Fort Wilderness. This was a hoot and a half. We all enjoyed it immensely. The cast of performers are all right out of vaudeville. It looks like it's about one third improvised. They get the audience involved in many ways, all of them hilarious. Plus, the food is great (ribs, fried chicken, beans, corn, salad, cornbread, strawberry shortcake), and it is all you can eat and drink. The waiters are very attentive, and took care of every need promptly.

The Hoop-De-Doo takes two "table service" credits per person. Several people commented that this was not a good deal, and I have to say I agree. A nice table service meal ran about $45 per person (with tax and mandatory 18% tip), and the Hoop-De-Doo runs $50.22 per person.

We relaxed in the cabin after the show. I was surprised to find that they charged $10 per day for high-speed Internet. You'd think that, for $250 a night, they could give me the darned cable modem connection for free.

Today was our Epcot day, and we seemed to catch up to the crowds. We only made it through half of the Future World, and breezed through the International World very quickly. We did do Soarin', which I had done in California and really enjoyed. I believe we did all of the rides in the "Land" pavilion.

The Circlevision 360 movie in the Canada pavilion is worth the effort. I have always liked the Circlevision 360 movies, where the movie is played on movie screens all around the top of the theater, clear back to the old "America the Beautiful" movie at Disneyland. This one was every bit as good.

We had table service lunch at Coral Reef, in the "Living Seas" pavilion. One entire wall of the restaurant is a glassed-window view into the huge aquarium in "Living Seas". It was quite beautiful, although it was rather loud. The food was OK, but there are so many other good choices at Epcot that I wouldn't do it again.

I do want to offer one caution to people using forums as a resource. I had found a menu for Coral Reef that showed lobster tail and filet mignon. Since my daughter is nuts for lobster, we were looking forward to that. It turns out that, when they changed the pricing on the Disney dining plan a few months ago, they changed all of the menus. No more lobster, and the filet was replaced by a New York strip.

Epcot is really a bonanza for foodies. All of the international pavilions have at least one restaurant, and sometimes as many as three. For dinner, my kids went to the teriyaki place in the Japanese pavilion, and my wife and I got brats at the German pavilion. My kids, who do a lot of teriyaki meals, said it was one of the best they'd ever had. The brat was good as well, but I wish I could have been in the Biergarten...

Today, we split up. My son and I wanted to go to the other water park, Typhoon Lagoon. The girls had had enough water, and wanted to go shopping at Downtown Disney.

I have to say that Typhoon Lagoon is, hands down, the better of the two water parks. We got there during the "extra magic hour"; guests of the resort can get in an hour before the general public. That was GREAT! We managed to go down 4 water slides each in the first 40 minutes, and they were all fun. By then, I was huffing and puffing pretty good, so we floated around their "lazy river", and then went into the wave pool.

The wave pool at Typhoon Lagoon is incredible. Their wave generator makes a surfing-quality wave that is at least 8 feet high, which actually breaks as it approaches shore. A number of people actually did body surfing, quite successfully. After running the 8 footers for a while, they switch to a different wave generator that makes, basically, "moguls". It was fun and challenging. I would go back there.

After that, my son and I headed to Downtown Disney for table service lunch at Captain Jacks. This was one of the better meals we had at WDW. I wish we could have been there for dinner instead; they told us the dinner menu is quite a bit better.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at Downtown Disney. We eventually made our way up to the "West End" and spent a few hours in Disney Quest, which is basically a 5-story video arcade. My kids had a fabulous time there. I was worn out from Typhoon Lagoon, so I actually napped for a while in the cafe...

When we got back to the cabin, it was still relatively early -- about 7 PM. It was "extra magic hour" day at Epcot, which means it stays open from 9 PM to midnight for resort guests, so we decided to head down to Epcot to catch the parts we missed. This turned out to be a joke. EVERYBODY heads down to whatever park is open for the "extra magic hours", so it was significantly MORE crowded than it had been the day before. We watched the fabulous fireworks display in the middle of the Epcot lake, and we did catch a nice counter service dinner of burgers and chicken strips at the Electric Umbrella, but we couldn't get into any of the rides. We wanted to do the Test Track, but by the time the fireworks were over, the wait was already up to 50 minutes. Only a few of the rides are open during the "magic hours", although you can bet that all of the stores are open. In fact, the "magic hour" concept appears to be primarily another way to separate you from your money. We went through the Spaceship Earth exhibit (which is a good one), and then headed home in a very exciting thunderstorm.

On our last full day, we went to the last remaining theme park: Animal Kingdom. My wife says this was her favorite part of the trip. We were able to get fastpass tickets for the Expedition to Everest, and I would love to do that again. I've never been on a roller coaster than spend much of its trip going backwards, in the dark...

We actually caught a lot of attractions at Animal Kingdom, even though it was very, very crowded. We did the 3D movie at It's Hard To Be A Bug. The best show in the whole park is the Lion King. Very impressive. You can skip the Pocahontas show; it's nothing but a short lesson in deforestation.

We did a counter service lunch at the Tusker Cafe in the Africa section. This was a pretty good fast-food lunch, with rotisserie chicken and big crispy chicken sandwiches

In the late afternoon, we headed over to MGM Studios, to catch some of the things we missed. My son wanted to buy something at the Star Wars store, and my daughter wanted something at the Indiana Jones store. We caught our last counter service dinner at the ABC Commissary again, and then the skies opened up and it started to pour down rain. My wife is always prepared, so we had plastic rain ponchos in our backpacks. The stores were doing a bang-up business in Mickey ponchos, but a lot of people were just soaked to the skin.

The advantage to the drenching rainstorm is that it clears the humidity out of the air. By the time we got back to Fort Wilderness at 9 PM or so, it was the most pleasant weather we had felt all week. My wife sent the three of us off to the pool so she could repack our suitcases in peace, and we bedded down for our last night.

We debated long and hard about what to do on Sunday. We had been go-go-going all week, and were somewhat cranky as a result. My wife wanted to return to the Magic Kingdom. My son wanted to go back to Typhoon Lagoon. However, the timing would be tricky. Our bus back to the airport was scheduled at 2:50, we had a lunch reservation at the Trail's End cafe in Fort Wilderness at 12:30, and we had to check out of the cabin no later than 11:00. The Disney transportation system is great, but it can really eat up the time.

In the end, I convinced everyone to stay in Fort Wilderness for the day. We had the pool to ourselves for quite a while.

The Trail's End Cafe at Fort Wilderness has a very good buffet. It's basically the same food you get at the Hoop De Doo Revue (in the same building, cooked in the same kitchen), plus a big salad and sandwich bar, and some additional entrees. We ate well for our last table service, because we knew we wouldn't be getting anything on the airplanes.

The most unfortunate part of the trip happened on our way out. As I said, we were scheduled to board a Disney Magical Express bus at 2:50 PM to head to the airport. The bus (#3215) was 5 minutes late, driven by a young woman. As soon as she pulled away from the bus stop, she made a wrong turn and headed into the campground instead of to the highway. Now, this is a 45' bus; you can't just take those into narrow campground roadways! Oddly enough, the DME driver who took us in told us about other drivers that had made that very mistake.

She did manage to get the bus turned around, and in the process told us that it was her first trip on this run. Oh, goodie. She then missed the bus stop locations at both of the Pojrt Orleans resorts, and had to pull out and come in again. She didn't know how to handle the luggage, and there was a huge crowd at Port Orleans Riverside waiting to board. The bus only had three stops to make, and it took an hour before we were on the road and rolling.

Once we got rolling, she pulled out her cell phone and started playing with the camera. I assume that she received a briefing about good driving practice with a busful of passengers, but apparently it didn't stick. She drifted out of her lane and nearly hit the center divide before she put the cell phone away.

So, finally we get on the freeway to the airport. As we're approaching the Orlando Airport exit, I notice that she is in the left lane, making no move to take the exit. Sure enough, as we passed the exit, I heard her mutter to herself in unkind terms that she missed the exit. Now, this is rural Orlando. It's 5 miles to the next exit, and of course, 5 miles back. When we got to the airport, she had no clue which airlines were in which terminal, and she had not written down which airlines her passengers actually needed.

Our pickup was at 2:50 PM. Our flight was at 5:40 PM. Plenty of time, right? We did not escape from the bus until 4:50 PM. Two hours travel time. The bus driver is fortunate that security was easy that day.

Cheney is giving Bush his daily briefing about the world. "And in Iraq, I'm sorry to report that three Brazilian soldiers were killed."

At this news, Bush puts his head in his hands and start moaning. "Oh, no! Oh, my God. That's terrible, dreadful news. Oh, my." He is rocking, shaking his head, seemingly crushed.

Cheney is surprised by this. "Sir, I don't think I've ever seen you react like this to casualty reports. What's going on?"

Bush looks up in surprise. "Well, how many are in a brazillion?"

One of the other quirks in my personality is an excessive fondness for office supplies, and especially for writing instruments. I have more pens than a person could possibly use in a lifetime. All kinds of pens -- rollerball, felt tip, fountain, ball point. My favorites change over time, but I nearly always carry 4 pens in my pocket.

In fact, one of my disappointments this year was that none of the major pen manufacturers (Pentel, Shaeffer, Pilot, RoseArt, Bic) really introduced anything new for the back-to-school season. Usually, there is something really interesting to try out in August and September, but not this year. One of the more disturbing trends this year is that all of the major office supply stores (Office Depot, Staples, Office Max in our area) have come out with their own private brand of writing instrument. This can only mean a continued slide in quality, as these cheap-as-possible knockoffs take up the shelf space that used to be occupied by better pens.

I own a number of fountain pens as well, from an expensive Mont Blanc down to affordable European pens from AW. One of the things I've learned is that "more expensive" does not translate to "better writing". (For me, "better writing" means "smooth and quiet without skipping".) I'm carrying two fountain pens right now that cost me less than $30 that are among the best I've ever used. Ironically, the best writing pen I own is a cheap, plastic pen from AW in Germany with a thin, steel nib.

I'm also carrying a Pilot Precise V5, which is among the best of the rollerball pens. It's too bad the pen manufacturers don't have "beta test" programs, like software firms do. I could be a valuable resource.

My family just returned from a 9-day camping trip through central and north-western Washington.  We had two targets here.  My daughter has a thing about Bavarian villages, so we wanted to see Leavenworth.  Plus, I've lived in Oregon practically all of my life, and have never visited Olympic National Park in NW Washington, which is only a few hours away.  We spent three nights in Leavenworth, and five nights in Port Angeles.  We took our 25-foot trailer.  Here is a blow-by-blow.

Tuesday August 16 -- Drove to Leavenworth.  The mapping web sites all suggested going up I-5 to I-90 to US-97, but I-5 can be a bit of a pain with a trailer, so I decided on on alternate route, up I-84 to US-97. In retrospect, I'm not sure my decision was sound.  It took a lot longer than I expected, although it's a nice drive.

We stayed at the Pine Village KOA in Leavenworth.  I tend to stay at KOAs because (1) they have enforced cleanliness requirements, (2) they always have free showers, (3) they always have a pool, and (4) they have a system-wide reasonable set of rules.  I'm stunned at how many RV parks are openly kid-hostile, and the RV guide books don't tell you that.  KOAs are all safely kid-friendly.

Anyway, the park has some very nice features.  The pool is large and open late.  It fronts the Wenatchee River and has great swimming acccess.  It has a meeting area and game room, and the pancake breakfast so common to KOAs.  However, it is oddly laid out, and many of the sites are less than desireable.  We were shuffled into a "slum" site, only about 30' long.  A path to an upper level started directly behind our site, so we had people running through our site all the time.  However, in their defense, I made the reservation quite late, so I can't be too picky.  All in all, I would cheerfully stay at the Pine Village KOA again.

Wednesday August 17 -- Part of our agenda today was to acquire tickets to Sound of Music at the Leavenworth Summer Theater.  I had tried to get tickets the week before, but it turns out their summer theater performances all sell out.  Fortunately, a lot of their seats are sold in subscriptions, and the subscribers can't attend every performance.  So, the day before a performance, they sell these "rush" tickets starting at 11 AM at their box office.  Fortunately for the kids, the box office is in the Icicle Fun Center, which is a mini-amusement park with a fabulous mini-golf course, an arcade, a small gauge train, some kiddie rides, and a bumper boat setup.  They had 23 rush tickets, and we were second in line, so we were able to get tickets.  The mini-golf course was a lot of fun.

After the fun center, we headed into the Bavarian village.  Don't think that this is a genuine outgrowth of German immigrants trying to recreate their homeland.  No, Leavenworth's Bavarian village is strictly a tourist and marketing outgrowth from poor financial times in the 1960s.  There is some great food and some ecelectic shops, but I wouldn't go back just for the village.  We did have a great lunch of an assortment of various German-style sausages and wursts.

Thursday August 18 -- We had two items on our agenda today: inner tubing and Sound of Music.  There are several companies that do rafting and inner tubing trips down the Wenatchee River.  We went through "Tube Leavenworth".  It was great fun, and may have been the highlight of the whole trip.  They bus you upriver and drop you into the river with fabric-covered inner tubes.  We were out for more than 3 hours, floating, swimming, and tubing.  There are a few little rough sections, just enough to get you wet.

We even took along a lunch, and just paddled over to the bank and sat on a log while we ate.  While we were stopped, my kids pointed out a big log floating downstream.  As I looked at it, I said "that's not a long, it's a black bear!" Sure enough, it swam across and crawled onto the opposite shore not 40 yards from us.  Very exciting.

After a pseudo-German dinner in town, we headed up to the outdoor theater for Sound of Music.  It was an enjoyable performance, with lots of enthusiasm and local flavor.

Overall, I enjoyed the Leavenworth area.  I would like to return to explore the river and mountain areas some more.  There's a lot to see in this area.

Friday August 19 -- Drove to Port Angeles.  This is only a 190 mile drive, but it has some interesting aspects.  US 2 is a very pretty mountain drive.  The high point of the day was the 30 minute trip on the Edmonds-Kingston ferry across the Hood Canal.  However, be warned that it is expensive to take a long vehicle on the Washington ferries: 20' van plus 25' trailer plus 4 passengers totalled about $85.  Still, it cuts about 3 hours off of the paved alternative.

In Port Angeles, we stayed at the Port Angeles/Sequim KOA.  The KOA sits halfway in between Port Angeles and Sequim (which is pronounced "skwim"). This KOA has a smaller pool.  Although it has many grassy sites with shade trees, we got a crappy "new" site, all gravel, with no vegetation at all.  Again, we reserved late, but I was very disappointed in this park.  In addition, we had credit card trouble here.  My credit union claims that KOA's merchant provider doesn't record addresses when they send a card in for validation, so they routinely decline their charges. Personally, I think my credit union is feeding me a line of bull here. I've never heard an excuse like that before.  The Leavenworth KOA took Amex, but Port Angeles was Visa/MC only.  It was awkward and inconvenient.

The weather could not have been nicer.  The Pacific coast of Washington gets vast amounts of rain, but the Olympic mountains on the peninsula provide a large rain shadow over the inland areas, giving Port Angeles the dry weather of a city much farther south.  The whole week had comfortable highs in the mid-80s, although the mornings were foggy and somewhat cool.

Saturday August 20 -- Explored part of the Olympic National Park. Spent some time at the visitor's center, and then headed up to Hurricane Ridge.  This is a 3.2-mile round-trip hike with a 700' rise in altitude up to a peak with a 360 degree view of the Olympic mountains, the local cities, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the San Juan Islands, and Victoria, BC.

Sunday August 21 -- Two things make a visit to the Olympic National Park a challenge: (1) it is big, and (2) it is almost all wilderness.  There are no roads across the park.  To get anywhere, you have to go around.  Today, we decided to drive to the Hoh Rain Forest on the western side of the park. It's about 2.5 hours each way.  The rain forest gets vast amounts of precipitation, and results in huge trees and ferns, and mosses that hang several feet off of the branches.

After the rain forest, we headed to Rialto Beach near the city of La Push on the Pacific coast.  The Pacific coast of Washington is quite different from the Oregon coast we are used to.  The central Washington coast is quite rugged and rocky, with many rock stack islands offshore.

Monday August 22 -- Our agenda today was Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in Canada.  We decided to take the Victoria Express, a 144-passenger ferry that makes the crossing in about an hour.  We took the 8:10 AM ferry over and the 6:00 PM ferry back.  It was a nice day wandering about town, although things were very expensive.  There was a time when US$1 bought as much as C$1.40, but the exchange rate now is closer to C$1.15.  We got a lot of souvenirs, but the kids weren't too much interested in the museums.

The trip back to Port Angeles was quite a kick.  It was a change of tide, and the wind had whipped things up enough that the seas were quite rough. I was very surprised by this, seeing as how the Strait is fairly well protected.

Tuesday August 23 -- Our last day.  I had originally hoped to head out to Neah Bay, which is the very northwestern tip of the continental United States, and visit the Makah Indian Tribal Cultural Center, but I decided not to subject the family to another six-hour car day.  We toured the old Dungeness area and the city of Sequim.  The city is a friendly small town, with a number of cute shops in the downtown.  The Sequim area was once a general agricultural area, with lots of irrigated farmland, but they can't compete with the corporate farms today.  Many of the farms have decided to specialize in growing lavender, which is something my allergy-prone nose did not allow me to enjoy.  We went to the Sequim "marina", which is really just shorthand for "yacht club".

Wednesday August 24 -- Drive home.  We had to choose between taking US-101 down the coast down to Long Beach and inland to Portland, and taking US-101 to Olympia and down I-5.  We finally opted for I-5, which cut about two hours out of the day.  It was an uneventful drive.  There are a lot of resort towns on the south end of Hood Canal that would be fun to explore.

It was interesting that gas was more expensive in Washington than in Oregon. I hadn't expected that.

Well, I got my name in the paper today.

"The Edge", a humorous one-inch-wide daily feature in the Oregonian's Living section, announced a contest last week to create "Hai-Choos", defined as haikus on the topic of allergies. Being both a hack poet and an allergy sufferer, I submitted three pretty good hai-choos, and one of them was chosen as an "honorable mention" today:

Call me a felon
Tried to stop runny nose with
Pseudoephedrine

Life doesn't get any better than that. Or maybe it does.

I am a reasonably normal fellow, but I have certain personality quirks that others seem to find amusing. One of those quirks is a fascination with numbers and numerical patterns. I compute the prime factorization of the mile markers as I drive down the road. I note the statistical distribution of the numbers in the Oregon Lottery Keno games. And I inventory M&Ms.

Let me explain what I mean. M&Ms are just the kind of treat that invite adventures in numerology. There are a variable number of candies in each bag, and the distribution of colors in each bag is variable, although statistically predictable over the long term. For someone interested in numbers, it is natural to separate the contents of a bag into piles by color and count 'em up. It is perhaps a bit unnatural to track those counts on paper, but that's what I do.

In early 1998, I purchased a case of M&M bags from the local Costco. Having an entire case made for an excellent sample population, so I started tracking the color counts, and even produced the occasional Excel pie chart to show the sample distributions. Harmless fun. Several of my partners and co-workers chuckled at my eccentricity, but that's the price we pay.

About halfway through the case, I started noticing some statistical anomalies. Ordinarily, the average mid-sized bag of M&Ms contains about 54 candies, plus or minus 2, with the 6 colors in a relatively predictable distribution. One day, I opened a bag and counted 63 candies, in a startling 1-2-4-8-16-32 distribution. This was a six-sigma event, and I was quite tickled for having seen it. The next day, I opened a bag and again counted 63 candies, this time in a 32-16-8-4-2-1 distribution. Naturally, I shared this once-in-a-lifetime alignment with my office mates, who had a good laugh at my expense. (Again.)

The following week, I encountered a bag with no browns at all. Since dark brown is by far the most common color, this was astounding. Later that same week, I opened a bag with a 18-18-18-0-0-0 distribution, and a matching 0-0-0-18-18-18 bag the week after. I began to wonder if someone at the factory was playing games with me.

A week after that, I opened a bag that was half regular M&M's, and half mini-M&Ms. Again, I marvelled at the anomaly, and wondered what had gone wrong with quality control at Mars, Inc.

The remainder of the case was uneventful, and in time I forgot about it. That is, until the annual company Christmas party in December. Here, my co-workers unveiled a horrible secret that changed my life forever. At a well-lubricated party in mid-year, a co-worker discovered that it was possible to open a bag of M&Ms and then reseal it. The resealed bag would never pass a professional inspection, but to the casual snacker, it looked quite normal. They had absconded with a number of my bags of candy, opened them, dumped the contents onto a table along with a jumbo bag for seed, and refilled my bags with those anomalous counts, knowing that I was taking inventory. The rest of the office had been told that, if they took a bag of my M&Ms, to be sure to grab from the bottom (untampered) part of the case.

I was stunned. I had no clue that I was being scammed. Looking back, I can remember sharing my disbelief with a co-worker, who stifled a laugh behind his hands. I assumed he was laughing at my enthusiasm for numbers, rather than laughing at my gullibility.

And, of course, this makes a great cocktail party story. At business events, I have been introduced to people I have never met, and been greeted with "Are you the guy with the M&Ms?"

The lesson from all of this is "never trust a twin."

But wait, there's more!

Cingular must be hiring high school kids to do their web site, because it seems to be about as robust as Michael Jackson's defense.

Every time I try to log in to their web site, I have to try three times, because the first two inevitably fail with an error saying "our site it having trouble accessing your records, try again in a few minutes".

Today, I went it to verify my list of features to make sure the "Roadside Assistance" plan is outta there. I managed to check the first two lines, but when I check the third and fourth, I'm getting a rather unfriendly and unprofessional null pointer exception from their web site:

Error 500--Internal Server Error

java.lang.NullPointerException at com.cingular.olam.webcomponent.servlets.AddFeaturesToCurrentPPWA.service (AddFeaturesToCurrentPPWA.java:284) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl$ServletInvocationAction.run(ServletStubImpl.java:971) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:402) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:305) at weblogic.servlet.internal.RequestDispatcherImpl.forward(RequestDispatcherImpl.java:301) at com.cingular.olam.webcomponent.servlets.DispatcherServlet.ForwardToPage(DispatcherServlet.java:58) at com.cingular.olam.webcomponent.servlets.DispatcherServlet.service(DispatcherServlet.java:30) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl$ServletInvocationAction.run(ServletStubImpl.java:971) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:402) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:305) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext$ServletInvocationAction.run (WebAppServletContext.java:6350) at weblogic.security.acl.internal.AuthenticatedSubject.doAs(AuthenticatedSubject.java:317) at weblogic.security.service.SecurityManager.runAs(SecurityManager.java:118) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.invokeServlet(WebAppServletContext.java:3635) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletRequestImpl.execute(ServletRequestImpl.java:2585) at weblogic.kernel.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:197) at weblogic.kernel.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:170)

Any web doofus should know that you NEVER expose Java errors and tracebacks directly to end users. Java supports exception handling, but these guys must not know that. Wouldn't it be fun if this traceback included information that hackers could use to break in?

So much for being a "technology company".

I feel like I've been sucked over to the dark side.

I've had a cellular phone with AT&T Wireless Services for 7 or 8 years. Our small company was buying its minutes through a minutes reseller (Comprehensive Solutions, Inc., formerly of Oregon City, Oregon, now apparently in Aloha). That resulted in a reasonably low monthly cost, but the extra layer of non-responsive bureaucracy meant that, for instance, I couldn't transfer my phone number to another carrier. This was not helped by CSI's apparent corporate policy of not answering the phone, responding to answering machine messages, nor replying to e-mail.

Meanwhile, my wife also had an AT&T Wireless Services cell phone on a "family" plan with her monther and our daughter. We've wanted to transfer my phone to the "family plan", but couldn't get the reseller to respond.

Thanks to a major screw-up on the part of the reseller, I was finally forced to take some action in February. All I wanted to do was buy a new phone and add it to my wife's plan. Turns out that is impossible. All of our phones were CDMA, and you can't buy a CDMA phone today. Further, you can't add a GSM phone to a CDMA phone plan. That means, for me to get a phone, we have to replace the three other phones in the plan.

FURTHER, to stay with AT&T, we would give up any right to the phone hardware subsidies that make the phones affordable. Strangely, however, if we transferred to Cingular, we COULD get the phone subsidies, even though AT&T and Cingular are now the same company.

So, that's what we did. We transferred from the comfort of AT&T to the unknown land of Cingular, with 4 new phones. During the sign-up period, the representative at Good Guys told us there was a promotional offer for two free months of their "Roadside Assistance" coverage, which would start costing $3 a month in the third month. I didn't want that, but he said there was NO WAY FOR THE RETAILER TO DISABLE IT. That's a bad sign.

We've had the phones for a month now, so I decided to go to their website and cancel the roadside assistance. Here, I find one of the most annoying things you can find on a commercial website: they have a brightly-lit website where you can ADD services, but there is absolutely no spot for REMOVING services. You have to call their customer service number.

That is incredibly irritating. You can almost hear the marketing grunts in their meeting: "if we make it hard for people to remove services, maybe they'll probably just give up and we can keep on taking their money!" That kind of thinking implies that I am too st00pid to figure out how to use the telephone.

Get a clue, Cingular. If you are going to allow me to manage my account online, then you need to allow me to MANAGE my account online. There's no way I'm going to experiment with new services if there is no easy way for me to remove them later.

Well, I was visited by the scum of the earth again. Within a two minute period, my blog got spammed 18 different times. Some of the slime were advertising on-line casinos, and some of them were just pushing web sites.

They must think people are idiots. The comment will say something like, "Excellent, that was really well explained and helpful", with a link to an online casino. Well, all evidence aside, I am not an idiot.

I sincerely and genuine hope they FOAD. Have a nice day.

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of the company where I am a partner, Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. To celebrate, I brought in a bottle of 12-year-old Glenlivit scotch. The morning has taught me a lesson: I can no longer hold my booze the way I used to. Two small cups, and I've got a serious buzz.

It's hell to grow old. However, it does beat the alternative.

Boy, am I glad to see the snow go away.

I'm sure the Minnesota residents are laughing there arses off at us, but in Oregon we just aren't accustomed to 8 inches of snow capped off with 3 inches of ice. It basically shut down the region for several days, including the first-ever weather shutdown of the PDX airport, and the first-ever weather cancellation of a Trailblazer game.

I live on a hill about 800' above the valley floor, and since Portland does not plow residential streets, it was quite a challenge getting out.

The kids enjoyed an extra week off of school, but I'm just as glad to be back at my keyboard.

I have a 17 gigabyte Seagate hard drive in my primary computer at work. When I installed it, that number seemed obscenely high; who in their right mind could ever fill 17 GB? Well, I answered that question last week.

I had just over 4 GB of free space left on the disk, when a client came in with a task that required the new Visual Studio .NET. I have avoided installing .NET up to this point, just because I knew I would waste time exploring all the cool stuff in the Common Language Runtime, but when a client knocks, you answer. To my horror, the release notes say that a full installation need 3.5 GB of disk space!

So, I popped off to Fry's this weekend and got an 80 GB Western Digital "Special Edition" for $119. It has a 3-year warranty, it runs ATA-100 (my current disk is ATA-33), and it has an 8 MB buffer, which should make things go much faster. I came in Monday morning dreading the thought of Yet Another Brain Transplant, a task which Microsoft makes unnecessarily hard.

When I opened the drive, I discovered a floppy disk inside containing a set of utilities from Western Digital called "Data Lifeguard" that, among other things, includes a drive copy utility similar to Ghost that understands the NTFS format on my disk. Great, I thought; that's a lot easier than doing it the hard way!

Alas, here is the timeline for my misbegotten transplant adventure.

• 10:30 AM -- Shutdown, install disk, tweak jumpers.
• 11:00 AM -- Start WD tools and explore
• 11:15 AM -- Start disk copy
• 1:00 PM -- Disk copy hung at 96%: 10,444 of 10,855 MB copied
• 1:01 PM -- Swear a lot
• 1:10 PM -- Try it again
• 3:00 PM -- Hung again at 96%: 10,445 of 10,855 MB copied
• 3:01 PM -- Swear a lot more, use WD's name in vain
• 3:05 PM -- Remove old disk, make new disk the IDE "master", reboot
• 3:10 PM -- Install Windows 2000, tell it to format the partition
• 3:40 PM -- Format complete, start installing
• 4:00 PM -- Install complete
• 4:10 PM -- Start SECOND install of Win2K into a directory not called WINNT
• 4:40 PM -- Second install complete
• 4:41 PM -- Connect old hard disk in again, boot up new Win2K
• 4:45 PM -- Start recursive xcopy from old to new
• 6:40 PM -- Recursive xcopy complete
• 6:42 PM -- Use regedit to fix up drive-letter-to-serial-number mapping
• 6:45 PM -- Reboot into original Win2K on new disk -- SUCCESS

Now, it's true that I didn't run into any really difficult problems, and except for one stupidity on my part, I didn't lose any data. But if the WD utilities had worked, I could have been done in 2 hours instead of 9 hours.

And yes, the new drive is significantly faster: big programs, especially, load much quicker than before. Color me happy.

And why did I install TWO copies of Win2K on the empty disk? Well, the copy of Win2K on my old disk was in a directory called "\WINNT". In order to copy that to the new disk, I needed to be running Win2K on the NEW disk from a directory with some other name. Unfortunately, Win2K does not allow to you change the name of the system directory when installing to a fresh disk -- it always uses \WINNT. Thus, I had to install a second one (where you DO get a chance to give a new name), and delete the first.

The drive-letter-to-serial-number mapping is one that tripped me up before. In the Win2K registry, in \HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MountedDevices, Win2K keeps a list of the serial numbers of the disks mapped to the DOS drive letters. My old registry, of course, had the old disk listed as C:. If I hadn't changed that, when I rebooted on the new disk, C: would STILL map to the old disk, and the new disk would get assigned something bigger (turned out to be G:). The system would still boot from the new disk (now called G:), but any programs that referred to C: would go to the old disk.

I upgraded the blog software from Pyblosxom 0.5 to Pyblosxom 0.7 today.

For a small increment in release numbers, there were some pretty substantial changes. He redesigned the plugin scheme to make it easier to add featurettes without modifying the existing code, which is a good thing.

One of the things that I'm not sure about is the comment scheme. The 0.5 code didn't have any built-in comment/response mechanism, so I built one. The 0.7 code DOES have a built-in comment mechanism, but you don't see any of the comments on the main page. When you click the Comments() tag below, you get sent to a page that displays this one message, plus all the comments, plus a form for submitting your own comments.

I suppose there is sense to that for a site that gets a lot of traffic -- and therefore a lot of comments -- but for a low-volume site like mine, I think it's nicer to be able to read the comments inline.

Well, Wari has been very receptive to my suggestions in the past (in fact, some of my code is now part of one of the new plugins!). Maybe I'll bring it up.

We had car trouble this weekend. No particular message or lesson here, just a sad story.

We travelled to Oregon's Summer Square Dance Festival in Pendleton this weekend, a distance of about 220 miles from Portland. Pendleton is in Eastern Oregon's desert, and it was plenty warm -- in the 90s. We had both kids, both dogs, and our 25' trailer in tow.

The weekend started out very badly; when we got in to Pendleton at about 10 PM Friday evening, the RV park I had reserved turned out to be a combination trailer court and RV park. It looked like a junk yard. When I knocked on the door of the office, a grumpy old woman in her robe came to the door -- she was already in bed. I don't know how anyone could expect to operate an RV park and not have folks knocking on their door at 10 PM on a Friday. She pointed me to a grassy area and went to bed. Fortunately, she never asked for my name when I made the reservation, so we left.

The real adventure started Sunday afternoon when we headed home. No sooner did we get on the freeway than I noticed some of the idiot lights were on -- the air bag light was solid, and the battery light came and went. Then, I noticed that the battery voltage meter was pegged off the top of the scale -- a sure sign of a dead voltage regulator. I turned on a bunch of equipment, the voltage went down and the battery light went off, so I continued on. Shortly, both lights went out and the meter went back to normal. I held my breath and crossed my fingers that it had just been a freak occurrance.

About 120 miles later, at The Dalles, it became clear that the voltage was steadily going down: the voltage regulator had taken out the alternator, and we were running on battery only. In another 30 miles, at Hood River, the van was dead. Fortunately, I managed to take an exit and get to a side street. After an hour or so, we had called a local tow company and managed to locate the only RV park in town. The tow truck couldn't tow a van and trailer, and no tow truck could take a family of four plus two dogs, so I was hoping the truck could charge the battery enough so I could drive to the park.

Sure enough, he did that, and left us so we could set up and unhook things. When my wife went in to register, the desk folks informed her that ABSOLUTELY no pets were allowed; we would have to lock the dogs in the trailer and give no hint to the residents that they were there. Plus, we could only have the spot until Tuesday. That was the last straw for her.

After more phone calls and pleading and cajoling, the owner of the tow truck company said he would call the owner of the local body shop, who had some cars for rent. The guy came in at 6 PM on a Sunday evening, unlocked his shop, and rented me a minivan (thank you, D&S Collision Repair in Hood River). The minivan was big enough to take all of us plus our critical junk the last 90 miles to our house.

But wait, it gets better. At 8 AM the next morning, I got a call from the towing yard, which also had a repair garage (River's Edge Towing). They had confirmed that the alternator had expired. They had one in stock and could have it done by 10 AM. I was stunned, given my experience with the repair shops in Portland. The wife and I headed out to Hood River, and when we got in at 10:30, the van was fixed, operational, and washed clean. When the alternator in the SAME VAN expired a year ago, Colvin Ford in McMinnville took four days and charged almost $900 to put in a rebuilt alternator. River's Edge in Hood River put in a brand-new alternator in two hours, and charged $380.

We returned the rental, hooked up the trailer, returned it to the lot, and got home by 2:30 PM. As emergencies go, we got off pretty easily.

And again, a big thanks to River's Edge Towing and D&S Collision and Body in Hood River.

I'm a tea drinker. In fact, if you have followed the very early entries in my weblog, you know that I love iced tea, and I'm a bit of a nut about it.

There are a lot of teas available, falling in the basic broad categories of black, green, and white. I've learned through experience that I like basic black teas. In the commercial brands, my favorite is probably Stash (which, coincidentally enough, is made here in Portland, Oregon). I love their English Breakfast and their Irish Breakfast, both of which are basic black tea blends. I also like their "Fusion", which is a green/white blend that doesn't have an awful lot of flavor. Even your basic Lipton tea appeals to my palette.

Because I spend a lot of time at Starbucks, I also discovered some of the Tazo teas. Their Awake black tea is one of my top three as well, but most of the rest of the Tazo leaf teas are just too weird.

For folks who like tea, I would recommend a visit to www.mycupoftea.com. Besides having a great variety of leaf tea, they also have a wonderful introduction to tea varieties and tea growing. I ordered three bags of loose black tea from them ("Trafalgar English Breakfast", "Assam" from India, and "Chinese Keemun"); all three are very, very nice. The quality and clarity of flavor are clearly better than the bagged tea I've been buying, and I find that the hassle of using the infuser isn't that much greater than using a tea bag.

I was pleased to learn that my latest contract is located in a building with a lunchroom stocked with about 15 different kinds of tea, and TWO refrigerators with ice makers. I can make myself REAL iced tea twice a day, and it's much better AND cheaper than hitting the Coke machine.

Well, I managed to make it through the first week of the new contract, and although I did experience my usual stress level, I also seem to have been able to accomplish more than I feared.

My nine-year-old is coming up with more and more inventive ways of getting out of doing his homework. His favorite ploy is simply to forget to mention it until bedtime. We started making him stay up until it was done, so that strategy has outlived its usefulness. He has now learned the technique of spending hours in the bathroom. He heads off quietly, and pretty soon we realize it's been 30 minutes with no word from him.

I would never have thought of such a thing when I was growing up. I had such a terrible fear of authority that I just did what I was told. The sad thing is that, like me, school is pretty easy for my son. If he just came in off of his daydream ship and did the work, it would be done in no time and he could relax.

Ah, well, I suppose we all learn these lessons a bit too late to do us any good.

I start on a new contract tomorrow. Much to my surprise, I'm nervous about it. I shouldn't be; although it's an area that I haven't worked in for a year or two, I know that I'm perfectly capable of contributing in a major way.

I've just had to learn over the years that the first week or two on any new contract are a stressful time for me. I convince myself that I'm in over my head, that I'm not contributing, that I'm a detriment to the project, that I should be swabbing floors down at McDonald's instead. As long as I can hang on through those first two weeks, I generally do just fine.

The other problem is that this client wants work to be done at their location. It is a reasonable request, but my office is a very comfortable place. It's been more than a year since I had an off-site contract, and in that year, I've grown accustomed to where everything is located. My snacks are at arms reach, my ergonomic chair fits me, my reference books are all nearby, it's just... comfortable. Plus, I get about 150 e-mail messages a day, and clients don't like to have me answering e-mail at their location. That means I will have to make special arrangements to be at my office off-hours to take care of the e-mail flood.

Ah, well, I shouldn't complain. 2003 was starting to look like a sucky year; if we hadn't got the contract, we probably would have run out of money in the second quarter. My life is good, and I know it. That's probably why my weblog is a bit... boring...

I've been in four meetings over the last two days. I don't know how managers in big companys do it.

When I was working at the "major microprocessor maker" in the area, I noticed that most of the managers posted their Outlook calendars for the week on the outside of their cubicles. I got out my calculator and figured out that one of the first-level managers was spending 35% of his week in meetings of one kind or another. Each one precious, no doubt.

It would drive me nuts. I'm so spoiled being self-employed. I will have a rude awakening if I ever have to go back to a real company.

Many people complain about the weather in Oregon, but it's impossible to complain about today. After a week of relentless, driving rain, we awoke today to clear, cool, blue skies and temperatures in the 50s. I'd probably feel different if I were a surfer, but in all my travels, I've never found a place I'd rather live.

Well, after expending 14 hours of effort and starting over twice, I was finally able to complete the brain transplant on my laptop. I don't know why Microsoft wants to make this kind of thing so frickin' hard.

A simple drive image copy wouldn't work because of the rather large bad spot. I tried to use the Windows 2000 tools to search for and patch bad sectors, but as near as I can tell, that tool is entirely decorative, because it had no effect whatsoever.

That means I have to use xcopy to transfer the data. That's OK, I know how to script that. And, as it turns out, transferring the data was the easy part. The hard part was getting Windows 2000 to boot when I was done.

In the end, here was my successful recipe:

1. Install Windows 2000 from scratch on the new disk
2. Let it reformat the disk
3. Choose a system directory name OTHER than my original one
4. Boot this new, barebones Win2K
5. Mount the old hard disk (with a life-saving PCMCIA-to-2.5"-IDE adaptor)
6. Xcopy all of the old data (except for the bad directory)
7. Modify boot.ini to include both Win2K's

Here's where I start cursing Microsoft. At this point, it will boot the new (temporary) installation. It will boot the OLD (xcopied) installation up to the point where it asks for my user name. At that point, it tells me there is no swap file, and it can't create one, so it won't let me log in. However, if I have the bad hard disk attached, it boots just fine, but it uses Win2K and the swap file from the bad disk!

After a bit of hacking, I discovered there is a registry entry that maps disk serial numbers to drive letters (HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices). The temporary install had C: mapped to the new drive, and E: mapped to the bad drive. The xcopied install had those reversed, so when it went to find the pagefile on C:\pagefile.sys, it wanted to talk to the old, bad drive. I swapped those two registry entries, and now everyone is happy.

My primary computer at home is a circa 1997 Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop. It has been a real workhorse, doing everything I expected of it, but last night the hard disk started making the kind of noises you do not want to hear from a hard disk, eventually crashing Windows 2000 with a blue screen.

Now, being a technology geek, I know how to do a hard disk transplant, but the frustrating thing about this is it will be the FOURTH hard disk I've plopped in this beast. Even though it is a laptop, I very rarely take it anywhere. It just sits in my desk, plugged into A/C power. I don't understand why the disks should be so delicate. I've used nothing but IBM TravelStar 10GB disks, which have a very good reputation, but it makes you wonder.

I happen to have a spare 10GB on hand, since my wife recently filled the 10GB disk in HER laptop and I replaced it with a 30GB. I'm going to try to mirror my disk using Linux today and hope I can get most of the information from it. I've got all of my DATA burned to CD, but if I have to format and reinstall, the pain-in-the-butt factor will be very high.

There's an awful lot of futzing around to do in order to get a web log rolling.

I plan on having three different kinds of entries in this 'blog:

• Diary entries: unfocused train-of-thought descriptions of what went on during the day;
• Observations: my commentary on the world around me, and
• Opinion: items that would be appropriate for a Letter to the Editor.

Right now, I'm planning on writing mostly the latter, but we'll have to see how this method of writing works out.

Well, here is the first entry in my web log.

I've discovered, as I grow older, that I have opinions on many, many, topics. Letters to the Editor provide an outlet for some of these, but the newspapers refuse to print everything I send in, darn them. A web log seems to me to be the perfect compromise. I get to say whatever I want to say, and folks can either read it or not.

We'll see how far this goes...