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.