An Advertisement Worth Watching

My family knows I am a big fan of Disney. That is why it has been so hard for me over the past couple of years. Instead of making family-friendly movies, they have been preaching their own agenda that doesn't match my values nor my demographic. Today I saw an advertisement for the Disney Cruise Line that helped me feel the Disney magic of yesteryear.

Many years ago when I had young kids in my family, I had to go to Orlando to speak at an Oracle convention. I burned frequent flyer miles to bring the whole family and found an on-property hotel the company would pay for that could accommodate my wife and kids. Basically the only thing I had to pay for was park tickets and food. As our room had a kitchen, we just shopped at the local supermarket and came away with a bargain vacation.

Before that work-sponsored trip, our family vacations had consisted of camping in the mountains near our home. Don't get me wrong, I still love camping but really had my eyes opened. Since then my family has joined me on trips all over the country but they always get compared to that first trip to Disney World. For some reason we all found it magical.

Like the ad I saw today, we created traditions that my kids enjoy to this day. Furthermore I am making similar memories with my own grandkids. My wife and I have decided that next summer we are taking all of our grandkids over the age of 5 to Disney World without their parents so we can relive the magic of that first trip again.

Yes you might say today's ad struck a chord with me. Disney did a great job returning to what made them great in the first place. Let's hope they can do it again. 

How Did 2025 New Year's Resolutions Go?

It is almost time to change the calendar to 2026. I thought about posting something about New Year's Resolutions but realize most of them are broken in the first 30 days of the new year. So I thought about how I did with mine this year. As I think about it, I did pretty good but there is always room for improvement.

One of the most easily broken resolutions relates to weight loss. I find that there are smart goals and there are stupid goals in this area of my life. A stupid goal is that I want to shed a certain number of pounds. It is stupid because it doesn't include how to achieve the goal. A smart goal is setting a number of days I want to ski. Skiing is exercise but it is something I love to do. The more days I ski means I exercise more. This year I set the goal to ski over 100 days for the 2024/25 ski season. I ended the season skiing 126 days. Goal achieved!

Unfortunately I can't ski all year long. So what is a smart summer exercise goal? The past couple of years I have not done as many bike rides as I would like and so I set a goal to ride over 1000 miles for the year. I have had some years where I achieved over 6000 so my goal is very doable and stretched what I accomplished the previous year. I have one more day to go but have over 1200 miles ridden so far this year. Goal achieved!

Now while we all have that stupid goal to lose a couple of pounds, did my smart goals help contribute to what I really wanted to do? I can say, "Yes." I am at my healthiest when I weigh less than 160 pounds. The skiing and biking goals helped get me down to 156 but you don't lose weight in the gym, you lose it in the kitchen. I set some smart goals related to eating well and that is what did it for me. If you are trying to lose weight without GLP-1 drugs, the way to do it is by leaving every meal hungry. So hungry you cry. If you can do that, you will drop weight easily. Well I guess it is not so easy as you cry 3 or 4 times a day.

I also had some mental and professional goals and did fairly well with them. This coming year I have set a technology goal that actually applies to computers and technology. My recent post about a single 4K monitor not being enough has me wanting to build a new computer with two 4K monitors. There is more to think about than just purchasing the hardware. I will have to redesign my office to make the space for both 43-inch monitors. I will also need space for my work computer and its second or perhaps third monitor. That is a lot of screens to look at and so I am going to have to build up . . . and maybe down. I will be sure to update readers with how the project is going.

One goal I had for this past year is doing more with artificial intelligence (AI). Fortunately I still have a few months left in my company's fiscal year so I'm not quite out of time. I did get a work environment set up for myself and all I need to do now is a bit of tweaking to tune it for my sample use case. Ultimately I want to be able to type natural language and have it generate the complex SQL to pull the data from a sample database where information is spread across multiple tables. So instead of typing code, I want to type, "What is the most popular movie over the past year and did it effect any video game sales?" The first question is a pretty simple query to a single table. The second is significantly more complicated. I'm close to being able to ask my question but have a little more Symantec modeling to do, which is really just accurately describing the data in natural language terms. I am close though.

As you start the new year, don't create New Year's resolutions without thinking about how you did last year. If you kept some of them but not others, think what you can do to set smart goals and not just boring number ones. Get creative and figure you what you can do to become excited to accomplish what you want. Right now, I'm thinking about going to various Disney parks 4 times in 2026. If you can avoid eating all the food, you really do a lot of walking and can surpass 25,000 steps in a single day. That ought to help with anyone's diet.

Is it too Early for Christmas Songs?

Halloween is over and our next major holiday in the United States is Thanksgiving. My daughters grew up saying that we need to respect the turkey and not get too excited about Christmas until after the giant eat-a-thon. Now they are changing their tunes and think it is fine to play Christmas music a little earlier.

The day after Halloween, the Disney resorts pulled down all their pumpkin decorations and re-themed their resorts for Christmas. On November first I started getting ads for Black-Friday specials and encouraged to start Christmas shopping. It seems that everyone is eager for the largest holiday of the year.

So is it too early for Christmas songs? My personal thought is I have to restrict how many times I hear certain songs that become popular at the end of the year. The most popular Christmas song is Mariah Carey's "All I want for Christmas is you." It turns out that it is also the most hated holiday song. I fall into the later category and want to limit how many times I hear it.

One advantage I see with starting the holiday song list early is it gives me time to learn more Christmas songs on my guitar. I generally take a few weeks to memorize one and if I wait until the month of December, I never really learn them. That being said, I have to like the songs I learn because I play them so many times.

So what do you think? Is it time to play those old familiar favorites or should we wait another month? Let me know your thoughts.

Setting Up Magicband+ For Disney World

Two years ago my wife and I started a tradition with our oldest grandson by taking just him to Disneyland after he turned 5. We found a great deal on the Grand Californian hotel and booked the trip. We had a wonderful time and decided we would continue with the rest of our grand kids. This year we have two of our granddaughters turning 5 and so instead of a trip for each of them, we are bringing the both of them to Disney World. Why Disney World? One lives in Ohio and it is easier to pick her up on the way with the second granddaughter in tow.

Wanting to make sure we maximize our experience in the parks, my wife and I went online and purchased Magicband+ bracelets for ourselves and our granddaughters. Today I went about connecting them to my iPhone where I have the Disney World app installed. For some reason I could not get them to connect. Then I watched a video and saw my mistake.

My Sony smartphones have had Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities for a decade. I didn't think it caught on for other brands but today I discovered it is available in my iPhone. The important thing is to know where the touch point is on the device. For my iPhone it is on the upper-back-right corner. Once I turned the Magicband+ on, all I needed to do was touch it to the right place on my phone. Then I just followed the prompts to connect everything. Before the enlightening video I tried touching every part of my phone with the bracelet except the upper-right corner.

Unfortunately the software engineers that create Disney's theme park apps do an insanely poor job on their user interface. Even though I selected the correct person in the app before linking the Magicband+, the app linked all of them to me. There is no way you can unlink them. I had to call Disney technical support at (407) 939-4357.

Disney is known for having the best customer service and their technical support lives up to that standard. I have to say it is second to none. I quickly navigated the menu to get to the right department and a real human answered the call. Furthermore she spoke English like an American. I don't care if she is in Mexico or India, I just care that I can easily communicate. I explained my problem and she solved it immediately. Furthermore she linked my wife's park ticket with her account. Her help definitely made up for a poor application.

Now we are set and ready to go. The only problem is that the trip is not for a long time. I can hardly wait.

Fixing E-mail SPAM Filters

One of the new benefits from my company I am receiving this year is identity protection. I received an e-mail from our service and it had all sorts of warnings on it that indicated the message originated outside of my company's network. Before setting up the service, I had to review my benefits to make sure it came from the company actually providing the service. Our IT department loves to test our Phishing skills and sends us bogus e-mails about once a month. When we flag it as a Phishing e-mail we are told if the e-mail really is a test. Once I verified the valid e-mail message, I logged in and set up my account.

Our identity protection company suggested using a personal e-mail address. They then asked to verify it. I did and they sent a message with an 8-digit number they wanted me to enter into their website. When the message didn't arrive quickly I looked at my SPAM filter which didn't have the message either. While I waited for the verification code to arrive, I investigated my SPAM filter settings. I don't know why I have not done that before.

Whenever I go through my SPAM report and see an e-mail that should have made it to my inbox, I click the "Allow" button. I assumed this would allow all e-mails from that sender through. When I checked my filters, I had a number from the same companies but with different senders. I didn't realize that companies changed the senders based on the message being sent. While I would have loved getting a message from anyone at Disney.com, the sender looked like:

123abc@disney.com

Furthermore, there were a number of subdomains like:

456def@email.disney.com

What I really want is to receive everything from any part of Disney. In order to do that I had to go into my SPAM filter settings and created rules for "Allowed Domains" and not just "Allowed Senders". I went through all 57 allowed-senders rules and converted them to allowed-domains rules. Then I went back and deleted the duplicated rules in allowed-senders.

I have been spending several minutes a day going through the message subjects of the e-mails caught in my SPAM folder because no matter what I tried, I couldn't figure out why clicking the "Allow" button wasn't allowing all messages from particular companies through. Now I know why and will be proactive in making sure I create the correct rules. In the future, I hope to not have to spend any time reviewing my SPAM messages.

Web Browser Troubles

A few weeks ago I went to Disneyland with my wife and oldest grandson. We found an incredible deal at one of the Disney hotels and booked the trip for a huge discount. I bundled my park tickets with the hotel and all seemed to go well. Then I tried to make park reservations. Unfortunately I couldn't. I thought maybe because I didn't fully pay for the trip and so I paid for everything. A few days later I tried to make the park reservations. I ended up calling a reservation specialist. She told me to try using Chrome as my problems were related to my browser. I didn't believe her but did as she said. Guess what? She was right.

A few days after getting my Disney reservations sorted out, I tried reserving a rental car from Hertz. I attempted to log in using my favorite browser only to have it spin endlessly and never get to the login-successful page. At first I thought it might be because I used the wrong password. Then I remembered my experience with the Disney website and pulled up Chrome to see if it was the same problem. Changing to Chrome worked and I was able to log in. Ultimately I went with another rental car company as they had a less expensive option. It isn't always the case as I have a great discount with Hertz.

It used to be that Netscape was the standard browser and everyone tried to be bug-for-bug compatible with it. That means that they tried to mimic all aspects of the browser, including the bugs. Netscape became Mozilla and is now known as Firefox. Now it seems that Chrome has displaced Firefox as the browser that everyone uses as a baseline for compatibility testing. If you go to use your favorite browser at a website and it doesn't seem to behave correctly, try Chrome. If it still doesn't behave then its not you, its the website.

A New Toy: Amazon Echo Show 8

My youngest son had to catch a plane back to Ohio this morning with his family. We enjoyed having him with us and had our family Christmas party last night before he left. We made sure to exchange gifts as part of the celebration. As with last year, all of my children went in on a gift together for me and my wife. They got us an Amazon Echo Show 8. Both of my sons have them and thought we would enjoy one.

I have thought about getting one of these devices but couldn't decide between a Google Home or the Amazon Echo. Now I don't have to decide as my children made the choice for us. I am quickly discovering there is an entire ecosystem created for these home connection devices. One that my kids want me to play with is the ability to "drop in." It is where I can just connect to their Echo Shows and see what they are doing. That sounds kind of fun but also a reason to make sure I am fully clothed any time I am near my Echo Show. My grandson has already demonstrated that he knows how to say, "Alexa, call Nana" as he talks to her at least once a day. I have a feeling we will get dropped in upon quite frequently.

I'm sure I will have more to write about as I play with the device. I only managed to set it up this morning and enjoyed watching my granddaughter dance to Disney music before she headed to the airport to catch her flight home. I hope it helps create many more similar fond memories.