Geek

One of the things that has always fascinated me about Walt Disney World is the way the Disney company hides the vast majority of its critical infrastructure. The Magic Kingdom is built on top of a complex system of corridors to manage the movement of cast members and goods and the like. There’s no power lines. It’s very rare to see a cast member going to or from work.

Disneyland doesn’t work that way.

Because it’s older, and Walt Disney World was built based on the lessons learned of Disneyland, mainly the importance of space, you see elements of Disney’s infrastructure all over Disneyland. This isn’t a bad thing, it just distracts from the ability to “escape the real world” and doesn’t accomplish that task as well as the Orlando property.

For example, there’s two circuits of 220K volt power lines bordering the Disneyland property, right behind many of the rides in Disney’s California Adventure. Disney does their best to hide them, but you can still see them.

I do appreciate that Disney tries to hide them behind some palm trees, though.

My work computer was forced to update to the latest corporate sanctioned version of Windows 10 last night. I have a love-hate relationship with my work computer; it’s alright for the most part but Windows 10 gets in my way a lot when I’m trying to be productive under pressure. In some ways it’s amazing to me that Windows 10 is the mandatory operating system at work, because of the “big three” (Mac, Windows, Linux), I found Windows to be the least productive environment to work in. There’s too much friction in accomplishing tasks and too much attention paid to keeping paradigms established 40 years ago. The whole “shuffle things around on a desktop” is so outdated.

And in their whimsical ways, Windows 10 now let’s you know it’s updating through a modified “blue screen of death”.

It’s a hoot and a half.

I am always impressed with the quality of short sci-fi films put out on the Dust YouTube channel. There’s still plenty of fresh ideas and incredibly talented people out there in the Sci-Fi world.

NASA unveiled the first image from the new Webb telescope today. The telescope is in orbit around the Earth and Sun, about 1.5 million miles away from Earth, and can “see” farther than any telescope to date.

As reported by NASA, this image represents the same area of the Universe as if you were to pick up one grain sand from a beach and hold it out at arms length to look at it. The number of galaxies and other celestial phenomena in this impossibly small area of our Universe should keep everything in perspective. We should be humble. And this is only the first photo.

So, last week I wrote about a new wallpaper I was using on my devices.  Over the weekend I logged on in the middle of the night (because I was bored and couldn’t sleep) and I realized the wallpaper was a touch too bright for the nighttime. It wasn’t super startling, but it was a bit overwhelming. I promptly dug up an old wallpaper I used a while back and found it much more nighttime friendly.

So here it is in its full resolution glory. I don’t remember where I originally found this, so I can’t give proper credit. I didn’t create it; if I find the creator I’ll update this entry with the proper credit. You can click on the image to open up the full resolution version.

premium black and gold lines abstract background

I’ve asked our webhost to move our services to a newer, more robust server in their server farm. Performance on our sites, including this blog, has been poor for the past several weeks. The webhost is going to migrate our data tonight starting at 7:00 PM MST, so my blog may disappear for a few hours. Fingers crossed it will go smoothly.

I have been struggling with WordPress, the platform in which this blog resides and has done so since 2005 or so. The folks at the company that owns WordPress have been throwing feature after feature after feature into the application and it seems a bit bloated to me. I don’t enjoy the new editor they’ve incorporated into the mix; I’m happy there’s a plugin that takes me to the old editor again.

I know blogging of this nature has become quite old-fashioned in this 280 character world with 60 second videos sprinkled about. With the projects at work and my studies for my next Private Pilot rating I have not been writing as regularly as I would like. Rather, I have not been writing as much as I’d like. However, hopefully things will calm down slightly over the next week or two and then perhaps I’ll find the energy to write again.

Someone animated “Star Trek: Voyager” in a traditional Filmation animation style of the early 1970s, much like “Star Trek: The Animated Series”. This is a great piece of art and quite enjoyable!