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So I tried to hit every attraction in Disney’s California Adventure on Sunday….

If I haven’t pinned you down and explained the intricate details of the most recent meta-Disney habit of mine, I’ll do it quickly here: I’ve started to do “extreme theme park touring.” That is, trying to hit as many possible open attractions in one day, with a pre-established set of rules all the while being a normal, unassuming guest of the park with no special privileges or accomplices. I’ve done three of them so far, all successful: two in the Magic Kingdom, one in Disneyland. To do an Ultimate Touring Plan (or as I like to say, “hack the mouse” [I've also heard it referred to as "the Disney death march"]), you need at least 10 hours, a very solid working knowledge of every attraction in the park, stamina, and the grit to handle minimal food and bathroom breaks. For me, it’s a latest step in my obsession with these theme parks, and considering my job, it’s been really useful to gain more complete insight into park operation.

Anyways, so DCA. Here’s how we did:

The times listed are: time in, time on, time out for each attraction. We were also holding FASTPASSs for Tower of Terror, California Screamin’, and Soarin’ when we decided to call it quits due to some mistakes, the size of the crowds, and finally succumbing to the reality that we needed to drive home to the Bay Area (we made it!). Plus, we decided to attempt the plan a whole 30 minutes before DCA opened this morning, so we weren’t exactly fully committed.

We definitely learned a lot and quickly, though. As you can see from the order, we started with TSM–the first to ride it, actually, which was pretty cool. Knowing that the Fun Wheel can be quite the wait as well, we decided to hit that next, starting with the “Swinging” side, which is the more popular version, and then hit the “Non-Swinging” side. On both rides we asked to join the group ahead of us, which saved us a few minutes, and was more fun to boot. It took us 30 minutes to do both.

We then gambled, going clear across the park to grab a ToT FP, then hit Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor. The theory was that this would be worse than anything else in the park that we couldn’t FP (this ended up being wrong). I also realized then that with DCA, walking distance needs to be considered more closely: from the Pier to Monsters Inc. through the new Bug’s Land walkway was at least 8 minutes in solid stride. Monsters Inc was super short, at least.

We then hit Grizzly River Run, and had some bad luck in that they decided to increase capacity by adding more rafts just when we were right at the front of the queue. Always fun trying to take a picture on the ride but before the water comes. Another mistake after this put us on Golden Zephyr (short wait) instead of Jumpin’ Jellyfish (which was only running one tower), and the line for JJ only grew. We then ran to get a Screamin’ FP, and hit Triton’s Carousel while we were there. As we came around the pier again, Jumpin’ Jellyfish and Mulholland Madness were wicked busy (25 minute standby for each), so we headed to a bug’s land.

After some perfect timing with the It’s Tough to be a Bug! show, we then had to hit all four carnival style attraction in a bug’s land. I’d never been on these until today, and I must say, they are pretty well done for what they are. Unfortunately, with the park being quite busy, and the new pathway connecting Bug’s Land to Hollywood Lot drawing in more guests, we waited 10+ minutes for each attraction, managing to do all four in just over an hour. The crowds and the need to hit the road made us decide to call it quits.

Lessons Learned

• DCA nearly always opens at 10am. With this late opening time, pretty much everyone can make it there by park opening, thus negating any real jump you get on the crowds. In Disneyland, the park might open at 7am for “Morning Magic,” and the park is all yours.
• Capacity matters. Screamin’ was down until 11:15ish. This distributed more crowds around the Pier. Maliboomer only had 1 of 3 towers operating, Jumpin’ Jellyfish 1 of 2 towers, Grizzly River Run very few boats, Tower of Terror only one elevator shaft out of three. Nothing you can really do about capacity, but you need to weigh any wait times with your own sense, and maybe postpone attractions with temporary capacity reductions.
• Don’t worry about the shows? We didn’t make it to the show section, but it seemed like it’s entirely possible that you can get most of the attractions done before doing any shows. With the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom plans, you cannot do this, so you have to constantly be thinking “should I be doing a show right now?” as you tour. Will work on the feasibility of this theory more next time.
• Don’t pick a day when the park is open until 10pm. It’ll be more crowded.

And finally, here’s what I’ll try next time: arrive at 9:30am, grab Soarin’ FP, be first on TSM, then do Swinging Fun Wheel and Jumpin’ Jellyfish. Then cross the park and grab FP for ToT and plow through all the Bug’s Land attractions, before Monsters Inc. Then head back to the Pier and cleanup, using FP for Screamin’ and Mulholland Madness if needed.

Just played around with the new Twitter Lists. Some notes….

-You can follow people on lists but not actually follow them. I’ve stopped following celebs and companies and just added them to lists. I don’t need their tweets coming in the main stream, but I’ll now check them out via secondary streams every once and a while. These are now essentially Facebook “fan pages” for me.

-My “followers” list is now looking more like my Facebook friends list more than ever.

-Nearly all of my lists are private. I think most people will just keep them public, but I’m feeling more comfortable with them private for now. I have however created a Clown list (my college ultimate team) and a a RoboCup list (my other collegiate team) for public record. Essentially, it’s like a private Facebook group page with less meta data + the stream (Facebook could easily add the news feed to groups as well).

-Leonard Speiser had a good point that these new lists would be a perfect for a My Yahoo! / NetVibes / iGoogle type layout.

Overall, a very big change in the way the service works for me (I think, I might just never check the lists). Really looking forward to seeing the Geo/Retweet stuff next.

DisneyParks.com now has a blog–and that’s awesome. Props to @ThomasSmith and the whole @DisneyParks team.

Here’s is a random list of notes about their blog, both technical and not.

• They use WordPress (dot org version, they don’t seem to be a wordpress.com VIP). Not sure what Disney’s history is using open-source software, but rock on! I used and loved WP at TechCrunch.
• They moderate comments, and you have to signup for some type of Disney kind of non-WP user-account system.
• They use Feedburner for both RSS & Email. See http://feeds.feedburner.com/disneyparks.
• Looks like the WP theme was developed externally. If you check out one of their WP theme css files:
  

  Theme Name: Disney Parks
  Description: A custom WordPress theme developed by voce_connect.
  Version: 1.0
  Author: Pete Schiebel

  Here’s Pete Schiebel’s bio on Voce Communications site. They did a great job–the frontend looks great.

• Twitter integration! Disney has been promoting their twitter accounts hard: at the D23 Expo, they plastered their @DisneyD23 account everywhere–and it was super useful for news and annoucements. For the blog, they slurp in the @DisneyParks tweet stream and rotate through underneath the header. They also use CoTweet for managing their Twitter account internally.
• They use WP-PostRatings for rating each post.
• They use both tags and categories for their posts. They even organized their categories hierarchically! Very cool. See the Archives Page.
• They’ve embedded a bunch of nice, branded videos using Viddler. My guess is that they’ve got a pretty big account.
• If you refresh the homepage, you’ll notice they rotate their header image. There’s actually 48 different headers (here’s the first, just keep increasing the number at the end of the URL to 48). The header images are really well done.

Overall, it’s great to see Disney using open-source software, embracing blogging standards, and use a variety of web services. And as a fan, I’d love to see some cool guest posts on the blog!

Continuing in my series of armchair “oh man Facebook should totally do X” posts, I gotta say, it’s a sad to see Beacon die. Facebook could have used it to build one heck of a product search engine.

Facebook’s biggest problem is focus. When you google for a tennis racket, odds are you want a buy a tennis racket. When you’re on Facebook, you’re seeing what your peeps are up to. Targeted ads are great, but despite doing it very well, Facebook’s revenues are not coming anywhere close to Google’s.

So here’s my theory: Facebook needs to bring back Beacon and build a search engine with it. The goal being that FB should be the first place (before Google) you go to when you want to buy something online.

I think it starts with Beacon resuming collection of data passively with permission from users–not publishing anything in the stream–from as many online vendors as possible. Sure, there are some privacy issues (understatement), but I think they could get around them.

The trick to making people feel normal about FB having this data is to anonymize the purchasers. Say I want to buy a LCD monitor. I search within FB and see monitors with price comparisons (like most product search engines), but I also see that people within my network have made purchases. If they are close enough in my network, Facebook will facilitate connecting me with them. And if the purchaser isn’t my girlfriend who just bought me one for my birthday, the purchaser (who is a friend or friend of a friend) can agree to chat about the product. If the purchaser doesn’t want to talk about it the product (maybe it’s embarrassing or they don’t have the time), I’ll never know who they were.

For the vast majority of cases, this is awesome; you gain the power of friendly knowledge. A few months ago, I recommended a LCD monitor I had just purchased to Hendrickson. I did about 3 hours of research to buy my monitor; he decided to buy the same one within two minutes.

Now there are obvious problems here, the primary being that, even within my extended network, no one may have bought a LCD monitor recently. This is when the power of anonymized collective intelligence comes into play. FB could list LCD monitors by popularity across the entire FB network, by popularity by region and by age groups (e.g. “which monitor is popular for people like me”). They could also do trend analysis to see products that are in vogue (sales of monitor X are accelerating), and the trends of pricing as well (Monitor Y has been dropping in price). Moreover, people might actually trust purchasing data on FB more than they trust the reviews and ratings on online vendor sites.

Also, I think you’d have more overlap on product searches than you’d think, especially since 1) friends typically buy similar things and 2) Facebook is being used to connect with not just immediate friends but with people in your professional and online communities (for me, I’m friending more and more people within the startup and Disney communities). Product decisions are often very relevant within communities (”which hosting company should I use for my startup,” “which resort should I stay at in WDW”, etc).

Another issue would the response time from asking your friends. You’d have to take some concepts from the social search world (think Aardvark) plus maybe some incentives and game mechanics to make it work. It may turn out the social part of product search is just a novelty, and the collective intelligence is good enough.

The collision of product information, search, purchasing histories and the social graph could create something really interesting. Something a small startup can’t build (have to connect with all the vendors), and something that vendors don’t want to do themselves (though I do think Amazon+FB Connect would be hot).

Facebook needs to enter the geo-location / mobile social network game, and now is the time to do it. I wrote two comments today on M.G. Siegler’s (p)review of the new sweet-looking Facebook 3.0 iPhone App, and I felt this needed to be properly said.

Now, this app looks freaking awesome. Let me just say that. But I respectively disagree with M.G. one one thing: the most disappointing thing about the app is that it needs a map of where all my friends are (see image below, bottom-right). When I open up this app, it should ask me if I want to share my location. If I say yes, all of my friends on Facebook can see where I am. If I don’t, they don’t. My friends on Facebook are the people I want to share my location with, and this app should be the catalyst to share it (and THEN send out push notifications, rah!).

Here are five awesome reasons why Facebook should start to map mobile locations::

The audience is there and ready. FB and iPhone are both growing like crazy, and the app itself already has a huge audience: consistently in the top 25 free apps, over 100,000 ratings. And I believe M.G.’s word like gospel: this new app version will only make FB more popular on the iPhone.

Second, iPhone has geolocation that works. Not in the background mind you, but it doesn’t matter since people check the FB app so damn often. Everytime you open the app, it updates location (if you want).

Third, iPhone users are exactly the type of audience that first joined and popularized Facebook: affluent, techy early-adopters. And I tell you: if maps of friend’s current locations start showing up in Facebook news feeds, people will start freaking out. OK, some may not so positive, but I’m damn skippy that a lot of them will be. My point is that FB doesn’t need a viral channel to promote this: just stick it in people’s news feeds, and it will grow.

Fourth, big web companies, of which Facebook is quickly becoming, like to take baby steps. Take Google Reader, for example. Instead of just coming out with a kickass version 2 that blows people’s minds, it teases and annoys people with all these weird social features. Facebook seems to be doing this incremental feature thing as well; instead of taking Twitter head on and making all status updates public, they iterate toward to a more open and twitter-like service. Doing optional geo updates via their iPhone app should be a pretty comfortable step towards a location-aware social network.

Lastly, five is obvious: Facebook has the social graph AND the eyeballs; other services (Loopt, Google, Whrrl) may be able to tap into the graph via Facebook Connect, but they would have to do something ridiculous (and awesome) to get their traffic.

So why isn’t Facebook doing this? Maybe they don’t think that people want it yet. Or maybe there are too many privacy settings and legal issues to worry about. But I’ll leave it at this: it’ll be easier to take on the geo/mobile guys now, than later.

Mad props to Jason for the Photoshop wizardy

Here is a Flickr set of a weekend Kate and I spent in Bend, Oregon celebrating @afischer and @shollen’s wedding.

So my car nearly caught fire tonight, something with the starter refusing to turn itself off and messing up stuff internally. But this article is not about the drama (everything turned out ok).

What amazed me though was the speed, response, and ultimately how smooth the towing went. And it’s largely because of tech.

Think about how towing happened thirty years ago. First of all, you were screwed if you weren’t near a phone, and that’s even if you could flag someone down to go and call a towing company and hopefully remember your vague location. Cell phones help _a lot_. Second, AAA is computerized now, so even though I called some dispatch in who knows where, they were able, after giving my location and AAA number, to dispatch a local towing company with relative ease. That company then called me and told me how far they were in route. Even then, since I was in downtown Palo Alto and my car wasn’t in an obvious place, I still had to flag him down somehow. Thanks to my cell phone, and his bluetooth setup, that was super easy; as I was running out of the office to find him, he was driving around and we could talk smoothly until we saw each other. When I caught a ride up with him in the cab, he didn’t have to intimately know the area to find my dealer: he had GPS. And some other GPS-like device that I believe was a queued dispatch list from AAA. Pretty slick.

Overall, the process worked. It’s also fun to think of the next few tech leaps that will be made. One, cars will just be more robust and less prone to breaking down so epically. And they’ll have better sensors and diagnostics to let you know of issues way earlier (think preventive care like in the health care industry). Further, with geo-locator units both in my car and in my phone, they could have found me even easier than they did, and not have to rely on error-prone directions from people who can be quite flustered when their car goes all crazy.

This is the kind of article that I love. Disney pledging aggressive (seemingly) targets for consuming less power across their fleet of theme parks. What’s fascinating about this is that it’s a giant optimization problem, and that environmental concerns are directly in line with operating costs. Use less power == spend less money == save the planet. It’s win-win. And since the scale of WDW is mind-boggling (for example, WDW is the largest single-site employer in the US). So if you change the bathroom light bulbs to CFLs across 28,000 rooms on property, it’s going to have a measurable impact on your bottom-line. This would be an awesome contract for a environmental consulting firm.

The tricky part is when the lowest hanging fruit gets picked, or when they’ve already eliminated the biggest sources of waste. A NYT article on Walmart brought this up, that while Walmart has done great stuff with light bulbs and condensed laundry detergent, think of the dizzying array of products it could make green through the weight of its purchasing power. So when Disney runs out of obvious optimizations, it then has to make tougher economic decisions during what’s bound to be a tough economic period for tourism. Do they cut Wishes to 3 nights a week due to its environmental impact? Do they spend money to upgrade their buses to biodiesel?

Two salient points here: 1) it’s going to be interesting to see what happens to big company environmental efforts with a worsening economy (not that original of a point). 2) Let me just reiterate that how much fun this kind of optimization would be at a company of this scale. You help save the planet, make the company a ton of moolah, work with new, green technology, and go to disney theme parks. What a job.

UPDATE: John Frost has some notes on Disney’s newly released Corporate Responsibility Report.

This has probably been done to death, but for the sake of Random Google Searches (RGSs), here is a quick run through about how to do reCAPTCHA with Rails.

First off, you need to register at recaptcha.net. Then you need to add your domain and get two keys (one public, one private). I created two sites once registered, one for my development environment (localhost), and one for production.

Second, there is a Rails plugin. It’s on GitHub. So install it like this:

$ ./script/plugin install git://github.com/ambethia/recaptcha.git

Third, take those public and private reCAPTCHA keys and place those suckers in your environment.rb or appropriate environment file. Here’s what I added to the bottom of my development.rb, replacing the ‘MY_PUBLIC_KEY’ and ‘MY_PRIVATE_KEY’ with the keys from recaptcha.net (but keep the single quotes):


ENV['RECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY'] = 'MY_PUBLIC_KEY'
ENV['RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY'] = 'MY_PRIVATE_KEY'


Fourth, find the place in your views where you want the reCAPTCHA box to appear. The plugin defines a special view helper named recaptcha_tags. Here’s a basic example:

Ask a Question -- Get an Answer!

<% form_for(@question) do |f| %>
Question: <%= f.text_field :question %>
Human Test: <%= recaptcha_tags %>
<%= f.submit "Ask Question" %>
<% end %>


And here’s what it that basic html looks like:

Each page load will embed code that pings the reCAPTCHA API and generates a new captcha. Note that there are some extra options on recaptcha_tags if you need to handle ssl or want to by default not use javascript (uses an iframe instead).

Lastly, we have to handle the verification in the controller. Here’s how I integrated it:


def create
@question = Question.new(params[:question])
if verify_recaptcha() and @question.save
redirect_to :action => 'show', :permalink => @question.permalink
else
render :action => 'new'
end
end


The verify_recaptcha() method will take params from the POST request, ping recaptcha.net, and then return true or false. Then you can handle it however you want (here in the same block as model validation). If the captcha fails, it’ll render the new page again, where a small error message will show up in the reCAPTCHA box.

And that’s about it. Hat tip to Rob Olson for implementing this originally on Elevator Pitches (I checked out that implementation first).

Finally made the switch from Blogger to WordPress.

All links are now redirected. The feed is now redirected (and hosted on feedburner). I’ve been working with WordPress for over a year now, and so I finally thought I should switch to it for myself.