Don't Use Disney's Genie+ To Plan Your Day

My wife and I recently returned from Disney World and learned a lot. We acted as tour guides for my wife's office trip. We took two couples that had never been to Disney World before and they appreciated our knowledge and help. One of the wives had refrained from going to Disney's Flagship park because of how large it is wanted someone who knew the parks to act as a guide.

One of my wife's coworkers has serious fear-of-missing-out or FOMO and did a lot of research on her own. That meant a constant barrage of questions as to if we would do things and if not, the reason why. We appreciated her thoroughness but it got old quickly. One of her suggestions included using Disney's Genie+ app to help us plan our day. Basically you enter all the rides and attractions you want to experience and it will string together a list of how you should attack them based on crowd predictions. Just to humor her, we entered all the things we wanted to do on our first day. It came back and said we wanted to do too much and would not be able to fit it all in. We assured everyone we would be able to get everything done before the park closed and did.

Ultimately we managed to get a lucky break or two and the projected crowds did not materialize as expected. It also helped to visit attractions close to the ones we just exited. Every day we started at the parks' openings and finished everything we wanted to by 7pm or earlier. At Animal Kingdom we finished everything by 3:30pm.

I am not sure what AI technology Genie+ uses to create your schedule but I do know AI is wrong 80% of the time. That is my personal metric and yours may be different. In the case of Genie+ it told us we would not be able to visit all of the attractions we wanted to experience, yet we did. Your best bet when visiting Disney World is to pick your must-do ride and head there right when the park opens. Build your itinerary from there by visiting the next ride on your list that is near to where you are. Doing that you should be able to get everything in that you want to do. Good luck! 

LLM Demos All Look the Same

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco. As you might imagine, AI played a huge part in the conference. During the product feature keynote speech, Snowflake told us the answer to every question is CoCo, or their form of AI that uses Large Language Models or LLMs.

AI is much more encompassing than just LLMs but that is what everyone thinks of when we talk about AI right now. The downside to LLMs is that all of the demos look exactly the same. Snowflake kept trying to show us new features in their product, would bring up a chat prompt and type in some sort of question. It would think about it for a bit and then spit out a text answer. Sure you didn't need to code or type SQL queries to the database but there really wasn't any difference from one demo to the next.

Last year I attended only 3 days of the conference as I had to get home and couldn't stay for the final day. I should have taken a page out of last year's playbook and only stuck around for 3 days instead of the 4 I did this year. By the last day, I lost all excitement and couldn't wait to get home. In fact, I left the conference at noon and tried to catch an earlier flight back to Salt Lake.

Ultimately I came away from the conference feeling like I wasted some of my time. When all you have to do is pull up a chat prompt and enter your question, there is no need to learn the intricacies of the product. Don't know the syntax to join data from two separate data sources, just let the AI figure it out for you. The conference can be reduced from days to hours.

When I left the conference, Snowflake asked me to fill out a survey. They provided dates for the event next year and asked if I would attend in San Francisco. Naturally I politely declined as it just doesn't interest me any more. Now if they held the conference in Hawaii, I'd be there but doubt I would spend any time at the actual Summit. When it came time to put together a trip report, I could always ask AI to do it for me. 

3D Printing Summer 2026

I had my whole family visiting over the Memorial-Day weekend and we all had a lot of fun. On Monday my oldest son brought over a bunch of fidget toys he printed with his 3D printer. All of the kids loved playing with them and it got me thinking about how far the technology has come since I purchased my 3D printer. The printers you can get today are much more advanced and can do many different things.

My oldest son had a neighbor who got into 3D printing as a business. Every time the neighbor upgrades his printer, he gives the old one to my son. While my printer can print a single color, my son's can print multiple in the same print. There are a number of ways to do that. My son's printer has a single print head (where the hot plastic comes out of) and so it creates purge blocks where it dumps the previous color while waiting for the new one to be ready. Sometimes those purge blocks can be larger than the object you are printing and so you want to be careful with how often you change colors. My son's neighbor has a more expensive printer with multiple print heads, lessening the need to use purge blocks on color changes.

The fidget toys my son brought to our Memorial-Day celebration had multiple different colors and looked very nice compared to what I can print. My younger son who also has a 3D printer also expressed praise for the print quality. This had me asking if I should upgrade to a higher quality printer.

Truth be told, I don't have a lot of use for a 3D printer. Mine sits idle most of the year. About the only time I use it is during the Christmas Holidays when we create ornaments or small and inexpensive gifts for neighbors. It does not make sense for me to upgrade something I rarely use. Would being able to print multiple colors change that? Not really. For me, there is not a compelling reason to upgrade. That being said, there are a number of people using their 3D printers all the time and newer technology will improve what they are making. 

You Did Not Win a Free Cruise

A few months ago I received a letter in the mail. When I opened it up, it told me I had one 1 of several prizes. I looked at all of the rewards and tried to guess what I really won. Was it the free week at a hotel or the free 7-day cruise with airfare. I guessed the hotel but it turns out I won the cruise. So what's the catch? I had to sit through a timeshare sales presentation. Okay it wasn't a timeshare but a travel club. What's the difference? With a timeshare you own the deed to a piece of property you can visit once a year or every other year. With a travel club, you gain access to wholesale room rates for hotels around the world. In both instances you have to come up with $50K or so. Naturally I declined the purchase but followed up on the cruise.

I received an e-mail from Gocrv.com telling me how to redeem the free cruise. Basically I filled out a form indicated the dates I wanted to go and the departure port I wanted to leave from. I also paid a $200 deposit. I then called a number to schedule the trip. I had enough trips planned for the year and so I wanted the cruise to be towards the end of 2026. When I called the number and finally met with the vacation specialist, she told me to call back in May as their inventory had not yet released for dates towards the end of the year. Today I called back.

One thing I have been practicing is being nice to people when I travel. This past weekend I took a trip to Las Vegas to see Donny Osmond and when we went to check into the hotel, we had to wait a half hour before we could get a key to our room. Rather than pitch a fit, I politely waited in line to talk to a real person instead of the check-in kiosk. The gentlemen told me they didn't have any king rooms available. He then upgraded my wife and I to a junior suite. It paid to be polite. It may not always, but it did last weekend.

So I called the nice ladies at Gocrv.com this morning and made sure to be polite. I got to hear a number of fine-print details that they speed over in commercials and I agreed to the terms. Then she put me on hold to see what options I had for a weekend cruise in November leaving out of Port Canaveral, Florida. After about 10 minutes, she came back on the phone and told me she could get me a weekday cruise to Ensenada leaving out of Long Beach, California in October.

I have only been on 2 cruises in my life and the first one was the exact same cruise she proposed to me. Furthermore I would be required to pay an additional $350. I asked if there could be any other cruise available. She said there was not and so I politely told her I didn't want to repeat something I had already done and asked for a refund of my $200. She transferred me to customer service where I politely asked for my refund again. I was told I would get an e-mail with instructions on how to process that refund. That was an hour ago and I'm still waiting.

So here is the question: Did I really win a free cruise with airfare? Not really. When my wife and I went on the Ensenada cruise several years ago, the whole thing cost about $1000. Most of that was an upgraded balcony stateroom. I could have done it for $500 if I opted for an inside lower-deck stateroom like I had won. I could have effectively done the same cruise for $50 less. Ultimately I have learned there is no such thing as a free cruise, no matter what the literature says. The cost for learning that lesson is about 2 hours of my time total. That includes the sales pitch and all of the time spent on the phone talking through details. Hopefully you learn from my lesson and save yourself those couple of hours. 

Who Keeps Trying to Hack Me?

Every day I get a number of e-mails trying to steal my personal information. Normally my SPAM filter catches them and doesn't let them get to my inbox. Some do make it though and they can be annoying. Of course none of them come out and say they are trying to steal your personal information. Most of them are offering you some type of gift you will never receive.

My favorite says it is from Marriott and due to a recent stay they want to send me 2 of their famous pillows. First off, I didn't know Marriott hotels has famous pillows worth wanting. The first giveaway that the mail is a fraud is that they spell Marriott with a single "T" at the end. Anyone who stays at the hotel frequently knows how to spell it. I imagine that the e-mail is meant to trap people that don't stay often but want a free gift.

A similar message comes from a hardware store telling me I have won some free power tool. I've seen the e-mail come from Harbor Freight, Home Depot, and Lowe's. There are similar telltales that let me know it is not really from the company they claim to be. Most of the time it is a poorly-created logo. Ultimately the return address is a dead giveaway too. It might be from marriotpillows@somecompany.com or powertools@somecompany.com. If Marriott or Home Depot is giving you something, the return e-mail will be from their domain, not some other company.

One day I received 4 or 5 solicitations to steal my personal information and it really annoyed me. I decided I wanted to see who kept trying to trick me and if all of the attempts came from the same people. I hovered my mouse cursor over the button to claim my various prizes and made a note of the domain name that the link would take me to. I never clicked the link, I just wanted to see where it would take me.

Then I pulled up a terminal window on my Mac and typed in: "whois somecompany.com" for all of the domain names. Each e-mail had a different one and so all of the e-mails seemed to be coming from different people. The utility whois does a domain-name lookup and tells you who actually owns the domain. As expected all information pointed back to the same company in Bellevue, Washington that acts as a domain name supplier and is not one of the major players. From that I concluded that all of the personal information thieves are related.

I wondered if I should pursue the matter any further but decided against it. I have a lot more important things I can do with my time. Perhaps when I retire I will spend time going after malicious hackers. Not right now though.

Special note: The "whois" command does not come standard on Windows. You will need to download it from the Microsoft website. I think that is a shame as everyone should be able to easily use it without having to do anything special. 

Complicated Solutions

I am currently in the middle of a work project that continues to get more and more complicated and that has me somewhat frustrated. We have a number of groups that we want to onboard to our data platform. Back when I first started my career, that could be as simple as giving someone a user name and password. Thanks to hackers and everyone discovering that data is more valuable than gold, we have had to engineer safeguards to keep our data from falling into the wrong hands.

One of the first barriers we created is locking down the network. We have a system where users of our data platform have to be on our internal network before they can even log in. That is a good start but it is not foolproof. Someone can spoof IP addresses and make it look like they are on our network and so there are several other precautions we have taken to keep bad actors out of our data.

Sony is a large company and sometimes we purchase smaller ones. I am working with a recent acquisition and their network does not meet the company's high standards and so we need them to log into our network. At first I thought it would be as simple as having them log into our virtual private network or VPN. That sounds great except it also opens a number of security vulnerabilities. Instead we need them to log into a virtual desktop interface or VDI. This is the equivalent of logging into a new desktop computer. That allows us to tightly control what software is allowed on it and instantly wipe the computer clean should we discover a security breech. This extra VDI is turning into a major issue for me as I have to support getting all of the new users onboarded and figuring out who to charge for it.

Once I get everything working, I will still have other issues to work through. Using an extra VDI has the potential to slow things down. It also creates a layer of complexity. Imagine downloading a document. While you think it may be on your local machine, it actually resides on the VDI. If you need to get it to your laptop, there is an extra download step. Sometimes it gets confusing and people give up trying to get things to work.

Ultimately today's computing environments require vigilance when it comes to security. The downside is that solutions become more complicated. The upside is your data remains safe and that makes the extra precautions necessary.  

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.