When I first thought about it, I wondered how we got along before social network sites like Facebook. I then realized that, actually, we got along by way of lots of niche interest sites. The flaw there, at least in my perspective, is that it's a lot harder to branch out and meet new people, something that I didn't start to realize until things Facebook started to open those doors.

But with the announcement today that Pownce was shutting down, something that I never used, by the way, I started to wonder if the overall online social system was fragile. Then, as if tech blogfolk were reading my mind, Om Malik wrote this piece asking if online social media should aggregate or federate. It's all pretty fascinating to me, especially the technical challenges involved.

The problem with a lot of these discussions is that they ignore a bigger reality that transcends technical problems. The first is that someone has to own something. Your stuff has to live somewhere. The second reality is that it costs money, and someone, in one way or another, has to pay for it.

For example, you know why I haven't started using Tumblr? I don't own it. It could disappear tomorrow and all of what I put into it could be gone. Perhaps I'm just a digital pack rat (I have something like 40,000 e-mail messages synced into Gmail by way of IMAP dating back to 1996), but what I choose to post online is very much a history of my life. Perhaps that has no value to anyone but me, but I'd hate to see it disappear.

There are curves the are largely the inverse of each other that describe the relationship between cost and scale, but I'm not sure if they can ever totally meet. For example, in 2001, I had to make my sites a commercial endeavor or they would simply cease to exist. The cost of running them was too great not to ask for money through subscriptions or ads or whatever. Eventually, the hardware and bandwidth came down, and serving a niche like that is no longer a bank-breaking effort. It's still not free, but at least I don't have to charge up credit cards to do it.

That's all well and good for a niche audience, but what happens with the more universal and broad appeal of a Facebook or Digg? Hundreds of servers and staffers have to care and feed for that kind of thing, which absolutely makes it a bona fide business. If the money runs out, we lose all of the intangibles that we put into it.

Like I said, it's fascinating to watch. I'd hate to see anything ever happen to Facebook, because it's the lifeline that keeps me connected to more than ten years of kids I coached, college friends, former co-workers, etc. Even if the level of some of those relationships is relatively superficial, I still value them. God knows many of them help me out professionally. I just hope that someone figures out the answer to where our online social graph lives and how we pay for it.

How strange... the classic Nintendo64 game is now available on Xbox 360! I have fond memories of that game. Good times indeed!

Between the holiday, the carpet and the vacation, it has been nearly three weeks since I've touched any of my own code. That's really strange! I'm trying to re-engage with it and I don't remember where I was headed with the one project in particular.

Indeed, it's strange in the general sense that I have been coding nearly every day, as I did when I was working. I lined up an interview this week, for which I'm highly skeptical of the company, but we'll see. I can't stand being home all of the time.

I'm starting to remember why I'm so laptop dependent in the winter. My office space/family room gets chilly in the winter when the sun isn't out. My laptop isn't quite as powerful (did I mention the new one is down another fifty bucks on Amazon?), but I can use it in the living room or upstairs where it's warmer!

Apparently there must have been some redistribution of IP addresses or something, because Google seems to insist that I'm in France. Every couple of weeks, Firefox's search bar bounces me to the French Google, and I get AdSense ads from my sites in French now and then.

Time for a random brain dump!

Yesterday in the post-carpeting movement of stuff, we were left with some of my junk that I'd rather not put back into the upstairs closets. The "big closet" downstairs, which serves as a basement essentially since I've only got a crawl space, has a number of plastic tubs, so I figured I'd consolidate those that were upstairs into there.

With that came some discoveries, like some of my wedding photos, and a somewhat hilarious photo from shortly after Stephanie and I met. It was funny because of my hair, which Diana thought was kinda hot, making it all the more funny.

Also "found" was a big box of floppy disks. It was strange to find things like Norton Antivirus for Windows 95. I was hoping to find electronic versions of the stuff I wrote in college, but I don't think such things exist. Maybe on 5-1/4" floppies somewhere, and in some strange format. I have all the printed copies though, so I suppose I could OCR them. I'm not even sure why I'd like to have them.

I also found a huge cache of PC video games. Tomb Raider I through III, Myst and 11th Hour were among them. Also found were collections from the old Sierra Online classics, like Kings Quest, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. I wonder if they'd even work on a modern PC, but it was neat to see them.

We saw Four Christmases yesterday. It was definitely entertaining, but probably forgettable. I like Reese Witherspoon with bangs. And yes, Kara's cat definitely has the same jaw line as her. What's with Vince Vaughn doing Christmas movies?

While at the mall, we ran into Jossie, one of my volleyball kids. She's a junior at OU now. I haven't seen her in a couple of years, aside from Facebook stalking. I really miss coaching.

We went to get Diana's engagement ring inspected today (they'll replace the stone if it falls out, provided you have it inspected every six months). Of course, it's insured anyway with supplemental insurance on my homeowners, but still.

While out there, we went over to Mustard Seed for lunch, but I'm really disappointed with their menu lately. They don't have a good chicken dish anymore. I used to love their burgers (organic beef was so much better). We ended up reverting to Macaroni Grill.

Mustard Seed did have a new flavor of Kettle Chips though... Spicy Thai. Holy crap are they good.

We're watching Elf on USA right now. Mostly because Zooey Deschanel is in it, and I dig her. She was cool in Hitchhiker's Guide too, and will be in that Jim Carey flick.

Home is... homey. Me, Diana and the cats, with soft carpet being squishy between our toes, the Christmas tree and a general warmth I haven't felt here in awhile. It's amazing what her touch does to the place!

Wow... this is some of the most compelling video I've seen yet coming out of the new version of my camera...

http://vimeo.com/2327058

I guess the remaining questions about it are, how do you do audio right, and is it clean to convert down to 24p.

Diana spent the evening putting up the tree and stringing the lights. We even got our first ornament up... fresh from the Walt Disney World. While she was working on that, we played some movies that we had not seen in awhile. First it was Mean Girls, then Clerks II.

After that, I watched the making-of doc on Clerks II. Yeah, it's long, and I've seen it before, but I really find the process fascinating, especially as it relates to the making of his prior movies and trying to figure out what exactly the movie was supposed to be. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that what Smith is getting at in the doc is that the movie was about getting back to doing whatever it is that you really love, which is exactly what he was doing in making that movie following the commercial and critical downfall of Jersey Girl (which, by the way, I thought was Afleck's best movie since Good Will Hunting).

Unlike my usual fascination with coming of age stories, this one is a, holy shit I'm in my thirties, what the fuck am I doing story. That's a fairly relevant thing for someone 35 and unemployed! It also gets me back to thinking about how much I want to make a film. What I have a hard time finding is my voice.

I suppose that someone who just met me could say, "Well just fucking write a script." But I have. I did it in 2004, and I submitted it to Project Greenlight and got very useful feedback. It was a year where I felt very empowered, blowing off a high paying contract gig to write my book and coach the shit out of my volleyball team that year. I wrote it in a couple of days, and it essentially told a somewhat fictionalized version of my journey to finally dating and believing I could be with someone. The movie is kinda all over the place, but it has a lot of my favorite dick-and-fart joke stories. The problem is that it's often too serious or too silly, and I don't feel like the characters are drawn well enough. It's like I was intentionally trying to combine a Cameron Crowe flick with American Pie. I think with some revisions it could be made, but I can't find the Project Greenlight feedback anywhere on my computer. It feels amateurish.

But my biggest fear is that making something autobiographical is both the easy way out (I don't have to invent as much) and the hardest thing to do (it has to measure up to my actual experience). I'd like to write something that's purely fiction, but I'm not sure if I have that in me. On the other hand, I think that Smith taking the pressure of a big Hollywood movie not being what he wants to do and translating that to the Clerks characters not doing what they truly want is a pretty good fictionalization of real things that he was feeling.

I think the biggest story that my voice wants to tell is one of my recovery from that very next year, after I wrote the screenplay and my book. To say that 2005 was, uh, rough, would be an understatement. My self esteem completely went into the crapper when Steph and I split. The interim story between then and now involved two significant, complicated relationships and several really strange, uh, encounters. The story "ends" with me meeting Diana, happy to meet her and also thankful for the experiences of the two prior years.

That's a story that I'd like to tell. To do so, I think it has to be simplified. Maybe elements of the relationships are written as one (though they were certainly very different), and maybe that has to be further distilled into the real point of the story: That others can help you realize all that you have to offer. I mean, the recurring theme in all of my non-trivial relationships has been that woman telling me I have so much love to offer, even if they weren't the right person for me. Maybe it's the reconciliation of the fact that the love doesn't guarantee success. The happy ending can't always be that you get the girl. It can, however, be the idea that you'll find her eventually.

In the mean time, maybe I need to do the short horror film I was thinking about. I mean shit, I can write ten pages, and find a couple of people to shoot it with. I don't know how creepy it would actually be, but expectations for that genre are generally pretty low anyway.

The carpet is in, and the house is fully operational again. There is still some stuff to move around, but it's 100% inhabitable. It's strange that after all this time, we can actually use every room and not worry about the smell.

The whole affair was not without its casualties, mostly from me injuring myself. My thumb was the first, then I stubbed my toes and actually cut the tops of them tripping over our bed frame. I suck at any kind of manual labor, and that bothers me to no end.

So between the self-inflicted wounds and the short temper from moving stuff around, Diana and I would at times get to each other a little. It was mostly me being a dick. I think we've finally found a specific instance where we clash a little. When there's a problem, she often wants to solve it by way of organization, while I want to do so by efficiency. The two approaches are often very opposite of each other. Fortunately these are instances that we move on quickly from, so by most couple standards, I think we handle it pretty well.

I'm thankful that we still have two days left in the weekend, and I'm hell bent on allowing myself to decompress and relax. No worrying about job hunting, the weather or whatever. Diana wants to put up her tree, and hopefully we'll be well on our way to new holiday memories. With new carpet smell.

This has been a seriously odd Thanksgiving. Diana and I didn't go anywhere, which in a lot of ways was kind of nice. She cooked a Turkey breast and made some mashed potatoes (with skins) and we had a quiet dinner while catching up on some of our DVR'd shows.

For me, Thanksgiving always seemed like such a production. When I was younger, it was at my grandparents' house, with 20 some people sitting around the ping-pong table in the basement. For some reason, at my youngest, it was assumed that I didn't like turkey, and my grandmother would always make a hotdog for me. In retrospect, that's really odd, especially since today the only meat that I eat is poultry.

For a lot of family gatherings, when I was growing up, I always wanted to engage in conversation with the grown-ups. Maybe it was because there was nothing else to do, or maybe because I was a nerd. I'd listen carefully for anything subject that I could actually meaningfully contribute to, hoping for the attention. It certainly implies a lot about my personality.

When Stephanie came into my life, things changed a bit. By that time, my aunt and uncle lived down the street and would often host the big holiday gatherings. We were educated people doing interesting things (Steph was really educated), and some of the family took a great interest in us. Most still did not, and I think that's the reason I just feel so indifferent toward much of my family. It's not that I don't like them, I just feel like they didn't pay attention to me as a child. It was, in turn, hard for me to take an interest in their lives because many of them never seemed happy or willing to talk about anything.

Of course, it was easy to roll with my family compared to Steph's. I continually felt bad for her in every way because her relationships with her small family were almost continually fucked up. In a lot of ways, spending time with my family was like a reprieve for her. My fondest memories were of our private holidays, often with a couple of friends. We had a lot of good times together.

I think that's a part of why the holidays are still hard for me, because despite the sometimes difficult conditions, we had our own kind of normal, and it hurt a lot when I didn't have that anymore. My first Thanksgiving alone was truly alone. My second one was with Cath's family, which was one of those overwhelming situations that were hard to fit into (though her dad is easily one of the most interesting people you'll ever meet). Last year was the first with Diana and some of her Toledo family, and it was a small enough affair that it was easy to blend in. I still felt out of place, but it was certainly a warm and calm feeling.

This year, we spent a great deal of time pulling up the carpet and generally being miserable. The dust and pee smell at one point had me wheezing and struggling to breathe normally. A Zyrtec would eventually put me out cold once Diana started to cook. But eventually we got everything upstairs moved into one bedroom, and there is about 1,300 square feet of nasty carpet and pad in the garage.

The carpet replacement is a precursor to moving in the remainder of Diana's stuff, in part so her family has a place to sleep when they're here for Christmas. But one of the things this brings up is Diana's feeling that this isn't really her house. I've lived here since 2001, and frankly it doesn't feel like "our" space either. It's not that I have a heap of negative baggage or anything, as I spent a lot of years with one of the great loves of my life here. But with me and Diana starting a new life together, it's hard to do so when there are so many memories that are a part of this place. Moving in together, and now getting married, is like a reboot for my life. I guess I just want all aspects of it to be truly great.

So for all the negatives abound lately, I'm thankful first and foremost that this great person has been brought into my life. I'm thankful that I'm relatively healthy, if a little overweight. I'm thankful for the skills that I have acquired, and hope they get me back in the world of the employed soon. Above all, I'm thankful for my past and my future, and all of the people who have had incredible impact on me. I am largely a product of what those people have given me.

Diana and I will be spending part of our Thanksgiving stripping the carpet from the rest of the house in preparation for the installers tomorrow. Yeah, I didn't think the scheduling through very well, but the nice thing is that when we wake up Saturday morning, it'll be like having a new house and we can relax the rest of the weekend.

I had one tragic accident, trying to move some shelves, one of them came loose and landed on my thumb. It's swollen and bruised. Doesn't really hurt though, so I'm hoping that I don't lose the nail, because that's six moths to a year of having a gimpy hand. I dropped an Anton-Bauer on my big toe once, and it was deformed for a long time.

We didn't really get that far last night. The stairs and the hallway are finished, and we got half way through one of the front bedrooms. The reason it took so long wasn't the carpet pulling, but moving stuff out of there. The hallway was another one of the super vulgar spots. Luna peed in this one spot between doors over and over.

What I'm concerned about now is that I'm out of Kilz, after getting a second can yesterday. Home Depot is closed today, obviously, so it looks like I'm going at 6 a.m. tomorrow. There are two spots I worry about in the master bedroom, and one in the living room. Installers are apparently pretty sensitive to animal soiling, so I want to avoid any drama.

I have no idea how I'm gonna pay for this at the moment, but I've got a year to worry about it. This is going to certainly change the house for the better, and as much as I wish I didn't live here anymore, at least it'll finally feel like I've reclaimed it from that poor cat.

After at least 20 years, Schwan's seems to have discontinued their green fruity beverage. It's a sad day.

Like so many other lucky folks, I have the red ring of death. And just in time, I suppose, since the warranty extension ends for me in January.

But I have to add my story about interacting with support the way everyone else does, because Microsoft really needs to be held accountable. The trouble began when I tried to open up a repair request online. It simply wouldn't let me, and told me to call. So I did, and that's where the failure continued.

I speak with what I call the "American broadcaster" English accent, in part because I started my professional life as a broadcaster, and in part because that tends to be the way people in my area speak. We all sound like news anchors! So why is it that these voice recognition phone systems suck at understanding me? They never get it right. I had the same problem last week with the dining reservation system at Disney World. Admittedly, it was comical that phone voice guy is made to try and sound vaguely hip, answering with a "hey" instead of hello.

What's even more amusing, at first, is that the guy at the call center in India is apparently instructed by his scripts to use the same casual hipster tone. It's hilariously bad. Anyway, at first he did the necessary check to see that it was the console and not the power supply, and then tried to put in a repair order. That's when things made another turn for the worse.

For whatever reason, they could not "validate" my address, and couldn't create the order. I've been getting mail and UPS packages here for seven years, so I'm pretty sure my house exists. So he asks me for an alternate address. What does that even mean? I'm out of work, so it's not like I could send it to a workplace. I tell him, no, I don't have another address, so figure it out. He comes back and says he can't do anything about it, I tell him to find someone who can. He tries to get rid of me again, so I tell him to make something happen. At this point, 30 minutes have passed, and I'm getting pretty pissed off. He comes back again and tells me to call back in a few seconds because "my system is updating and I can't generate a repair order."

This is the point at which I go ballistic. This jerk has been trying to get rid of me and I start dropping some four letter words. I've been patient as hell and he's not doing anything to help me. I tell him someone there can call me back when it's convenient for them, because I'm sure as hell not going to sit around on hold again like this. He very nearly hangs up (and I guess I would too, what with my sudden aggressive streak), when I ask him to put me through to someone who can actually help me.

Supervisor guy is just as useless, and wants nothing more than to get me off of the phone. I'm too pissed to be constructive at this point, so I hang up and accept that I just wasted 40 minutes.

I go back to the online request mechanism, and what do you know, now it works, which makes me wonder if they did something after all. I have a UPS tag and I'm sending it away.

I've been relatively apologetic about the high failure rate of the consoles, because aside from this I think the 360 is a pretty great system, especially with the NXE interface. The online service, Arcade and the developer farm system with XNA is brilliant. But support is still shit. I still can't use my real name on Xbox Live because it's a dirty word in their eyes.

In a lot of ways, the Xbox kingdom at Microsoft is representative of the company at large. Even within a specific division, there are these great wins just oozing with awesomeness, while some other area fails completely. It's like Xbox 360 vs. Vista, or Visual Studio vs. Hotmail. Sometimes it's amazing to think these products come from the same company.

I just can't catch a fucking break today...

I lost too much time fucking around with that stupid DVR computer today. I should have given up earlier and started reinstalling. Backing up hundreds of gigs of unwatched shows to USB hard drives wasn't exactly going to go quickly, so I got that started and began the dreaded carpet pulling.

Two of the worst spots that Luna destroyed, not counting my former office/spare bedroom that I pulled up last year, were the two landings on the stairs. Even years later, her nasty pee smell would on occasion waft across the living room, given the right temperature and humidity. With the new installation coming Friday, I wanted to get that aired out. So I decided to do the two landings.

It was the most vile and disgusting thing I've ever done. The cheap pad with no lamination sucked that cat piss right up, and has been holding it there for a very long time. I wanted to throw up. My nose was running and I was coughing and it was not easy to keep it together. The tack strips had retained quite a bit of the nastiness too. Fortunately I have a tool designed to pry off the inside of a car door (needed it for my first car to change the locks) that works really well getting them up. Many of the pad staples had rusted to nothing, so pulling them out was not easy.

It was so bad that it didn't take long to realize that we couldn't occupy the house this way. I had a little of the old enzyme cleaner that neutrailzes the stink, so I sprayed that down. Then I went out to Home Depot to buy a mask and some Kilz spray paint to seal in whatever lingered. It worked pretty well on the upper landing, but I may need another coat on the lower one.

Meanwhile, the DVR reinstall seemed to fail at every turn. First I couldn't use my USB keyboard so I couldn't "press any key" to boot from the optical drive. Then the DVD I had for XP was failing, so I had to burn another from my MSDN image. Then once XP was installed, I couldn't get the driver to install for the wireless card. I screwed around with that for a good two hours before I just plugged the ethernet into my laptop and shared its connection, just so I could get BeyondTV up and running. Five minutes into House and NCIS, I had it finally recording from the HD and cable tuners. I still need to get the network issue figured out, plus get the USB HD tuner up.

On a positive note, some good old-fashioned technology, my snow blower, worked like a champ. Primed the fuel, made one pull and it started right up. I was shocked. I figured the oil and gas mixture would be like glue. I poured in the last of the mixture, which I think I mixed about two years ago now. The five gallons or whatever went a very long way.

If I don't get to work soon, I'm going to be completely batty. I need to get out of the house in the worst way.

My BeyondTV DVR has had a total meltdown. Last night I tried updating to the new version, and it hosed it completely. It can't tune over-the-air HD channels, and trying the obvious reinstall of the app and the drivers has only hosed it worse. I screwed around with it all morning.

The good news is that I haven't lost any recorded shows, but who knows if I can get things working again before it has to record tonight. I did lose all of my recording settings, and that blows.

So why do I still use this thing after five years? One word: "SmartSkip." It finds the commercials, and you skip them with one button. It obviously works far better than the standard Scientific Atlanta DVR as well because it's smart enough to know what's new, has moved time slots, what's a repeat, what you missed because of a conflict, etc. It's relatively great software. I just don't understand what happened here.

I hate dicking around with computers like this, and I especially detest reinstalling Windows. Admittedly, there's a good three years of Windows rot on that machine, so that's likely part of the problem. I finally decided about an hour ago to backup the recorded shows (slowly, because they're about 120 gigs), and do a clean install. What a waste of time. I should be ripping up carpet. Or snow blowing.

Presented in glorious HD...

http://www.vimeo.com/2334627

The cats are clearly not happy about us being gone for a week. They're being really needy and shadowing us all over the place. Cosmo hasn't been too far from me since we got home. The boys have never been far away from Diana either. Gideon in particular, she says, has abandonment issues from the three months she was in Florida a couple of years ago when her mom was sick. It's strange how they remember.

Real life back in the cold of Cleveland has been a complete shock to the system, for both of us. Diana woke up last night with the room spinning, and hoping to head it off, retired to the couch try and sleep sitting up. On the positive side, she gets the difference between vertigo dizzy and headache dizzy. On the other hand, this was vertigo dizzy.

As for me, I slept like crap, gained five pounds over the week and hit with the harsh reality that I need to find a job. I'm not in danger of financial ruin or anything, but I need to be booking the honeymoon now, and I don't want to do it on credit. I have a lot of anxiety about that. Diana insists that we can put off the honeymoon if need be, but I absolutely don't want to do that. I want to celebrate getting married when we get married!

I'm all behind on posting news to CoasterBuzz, which made me suck with the podcast. I need to do some house cleaning, schedule the carpet install, remove the old carpet, etc. I got another recall notice for my car (power window motor coupling replacement), so I need to get that taken care of. I just feel a little overwhelmed right now, and find it difficult to just break stuff down into smaller tasks.

Today I just played in escape mode by playing Lego Batman. Then we watched some TV, including the 24 prequel. Diana wasn't in good enough shape to do much of anything today, so this was just the out of order kind of day we were going to have no matter what.

On a positive note, there might be some video contract work for me this week. I'm really hoping that comes together. I'd really enjoy some old-school video work!

I went through a period of many years, well, a good portion of my adult life, hating on Disney for no particular reason other than it was Disney. I perceived the company as a giant marketing machine that consumed people and their money. Maybe that's actually true, but I can't pretend that Disney's product is not a significant portion of my cultural experience, and a great deal of it is of high quality.

My prior experience with Disney included a trip as a small child, once in high school and once with Cath a couple of years ago. Stephanie and I also did a whirlwind through three of the parks (those with coasters) earlier in the decade on a one-day trip free on behalf of a friend of her grandparents, who was a carpenter at Disneyland in the 70's. I also went in February of this year for a certain project that isn't done. So going with Diana was going to be entirely new for her, and I was hoping to do many of the things I had not before. And there sure was a lot I had never seen.

It's strange, because you enter a manufactured alternate reality literally from the time you check your bags at your airport. It's a lot of fun to indulge in that fantasy. I've found that there are several different kinds of experiences you can have there as an adult without children. Some are more intimate (Spaceship Earth, dinner at the better restaurants, "driving" the monorail, etc.), while others you share with thousands of people at a time (Lights, Motors, Action!, Illuminations and such). It's quite a variety.

It also leaves you exhausted. Mind you, we weren't trying to do everything we possibly could, but we did pretty much everything we wanted in the eightish days without rushing around or having some kind of grand plan. You still end up going for about 14 hours at a time or more. As much as we thought about going back to the hotel for a break, we only did it once (on the last day). It was not busy at all, at least, but Disney standards.

It's also worth mentioning that me and Diana felt like we were child shopping. I know that sounds weird, but we're in our 30's and a little late in getting the whole family thing started. Every little redheaded girl we pretty much imagined could be our own. Of course, we saw our share of poor parenting too, which is scary. But today, on our last day on a bus, we ran into a woman in her 40's and it was clear she got a late start with her five-ish girl, and said that it was absolutely the right thing to do.

We had a number of goofy "us" things that developed too. For example, riding Spaceship Earth became a bit of a sport. With no wait, why not? Our goal was to get the various combinations of video options at the end of the ride to see all of the ways they could animate our head shots (you'll likely see them on YouTube eventually). We even did it once in French, which just wasn't the same since it isn't Judy Dench narrating.

I mistakenly told Diana about the hidden Mickey's, which is the wrong thing to do for someone who gets a little OCD. But she found at least two in Spaceship Earth, once of which was non-obvious from most angles.

Soarin' was the big surprise of the trip. I figured it just another stupid simulator film, but we loved it (three times). One of the most relaxing times I've ever had on a ride. I thought it was exceptionally brilliant.

The food was pretty amazing most of the time. Make no mistake, the dining plan is an enormously good deal. Our biggest bill was $91 for one meal. Consider again that the hotel plus meal plan for two was $140/night (with annual pass discount), so I felt we really got the most out of it we could. Unfortunately, the service at Marrakesh is still terrible, but damn is the food good.

Our Segway tour was also a serious highlight. I want one. Or two.

I'm sure there are many things that I'm not thinking of right now, but we had a great time. We're exhausted, but in a good way. In the eight days, we went to Epcot six, studios three, Magic Kingdom two and Animal Kingdom two. I think it'll be at least two years before we do it again. I definitely got the most out of my annual pass, especially with the discounts on the room, dining plan, tours and merchandise.

Photos are forthcoming...

We're fortunate that Diana's issues mostly cleared up by Tuesday morning. We started our day early with the Segway tour at Epcot. It turns out that we were the only people registered for the early session. It was just us and the guides. The Segway is incredibly easy to ride. It's like a natural extension of your body. They have them limited to 6 mph, but I'd love to try one opened up! The truth is, I'd love to own one.

After the tour, we spent about four hours at IAAPA. I didn't get to see everyone I would have liked to see, which is a bummer. If you've been to one, you've been to most. One real highlight was what I can only describe as a personal Top Spin for two from Moser Rides. You could control the rotation and braking with a joystick. A Dippin' Dots guy tried to get us selling their product.

We spent the rest of that afternoon at Magic Kingdom and did several major rides. From there we went to Epcot again for dinner. Most of Wednesday was spent at the studios, where "Chompers" the dancer is still in the HSM show. Trying to get to Downtown Disney from most places is a pain in the ass. Fantasmic isn't a very good show. Too much video.

Today we started at Magic Kingdom and did a ton of stuff. There are a ton of classic attractions there, some of which I did for the first time. I swear we find ourselves "kid shopping" out there. Every kid not screaming for attention gets the aren't they cute comments. Grown up moments are largely made at Epcot, but Magic Kingdom is all about family moments.

We ended up at Epcot again for dinner, and made friends while copiloting the monorail again. We did Soarin' again, which is a wonderful and relaxing ride. We also filled in the gaps by seeing the China Circlevision film. We saw the Canadian-Celtic band Off Kilter, which was pretty awesome. We finally saw Illuminations from the midway too.

One bummer is to see all of the holiday prep, but not see the actual event. Diana loves Christmas, in part because she stage managed A Christmas Carol for several years. Speaking of shows, I really liked Fesitval of The Lion King.

That's all for now. Got an early morning ahead!