So much for the daily updates. I have been taking an awful lot of pictures and video (with my Flip mini) but various events have conspired to either prevent or discourage me from actually posting. Fireworks followed lighting of the Olympic cauldron at Canada Place. We attended Ladies Moguls on Saturday and Mens Moguls on [...]

So much for the daily updates. I have been taking an awful lot of pictures and video (with my Flip mini) but various events have conspired to either prevent or discourage me from actually posting.

Fireworks followed lighting of the Olympic cauldron at Canada Place.

We attended Ladies Moguls on Saturday and Mens Moguls on Sunday at Cypress Mountain. There’s more to say about Cypress Mountain but I’m not going to go into it here because it’ll only raise my blood pressure. Do a Google News search for “Cypress Mountain” and you’ll get the gist.

Canadian Moguls star Jennifer Heil prepares for her silver-medal winning run.

We’re persevering, though, and have replaced most of the canceled tickets with other events in town. Mostly hockey. We’ll be seeing a lot of hockey, both Womens and Mens. Speaking of which, why are the skiing events for women called “Ladies” but the hockey events are called “Womens”?

Face-off near the end of Womens USA vs. Russia hockey at UBC Thunderbird Arena.

The aspect of this trip that’s making all the ticketing troubles fade away is the restaurant and bar scene here in Vancouver. The Gastown area, where we’re staying, is almost nothing but pubs, restaurants, bars, etc for several blocks in every direction.

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Not to mention many, many more places in the downtown area and other neighborhoods. We’ve been here six days, have been to a minimum of two different places per day (no repeats) and there’s no end in sight. At some point I’ll list them all here; I have saved all the receipts both for reference and to apply for GST refund when we get home.

The lights of Gastown as viewed from near the Gassy Jack statue.

There’s plenty to do outside of eating, drinking and the occasional Olympic event, of course. VANOC has set up two “LiveCity” locations, one very close to us in the downtown area and one a bit further away in Yaletown. We found ourselves near the Yaletown location on Tuesday night and stuck around for a while to watch some event coverage, medal ceremonies and a musical act. One of the songs they played might be familiar to longtime Disneyland fans…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3txwe0oH_54]

Today is an off day, with no events scheduled (or canceled…) so we’re doing some more exploring. Vancouver is much like San Francisco in that it’s very walkable, but unlike San Francisco the hills are merely “hills” and not “nearly vertical summits”. Public transit is free to visitors during the Games and we’ve used that a few times, but are mostly walking from place to place.

I’ll continue adding pictures to this photo album every couple of days, and do blog updates when I can. You might be interested in following my Twitter feed at least for the duration; most of what ends up in blog posts is Tweeted live as it happens.

The time: early 2000s, probably mid 2001. The place: Cerritos Pontiac, Cerritos, California. We were on our way down to Disneyland for MouseAdventure, and a strange and troubling noise had started coming from my car, a 1999 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP, as we went through Kettleman City. The mechanic at a local gas station said [...]

The time: early 2000s, probably mid 2001.

The place: Cerritos Pontiac, Cerritos, California.

We were on our way down to Disneyland for MouseAdventure, and a strange and troubling noise had started coming from my car, a 1999 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP, as we went through Kettleman City. The mechanic at a local gas station said it was a transmission problem but they couldn't do anything unless I wanted to leave the car for a few days. In Kettleman City.

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We had (and have) AAA Plus service, so elected to keep going and hope we'd make it to Southern California, knowing that if the car failed we could get a tow pretty much all the way. We made it to Cerritos Pontiac, where I'd originally bought the car a few years before, an hour or so before the service department closed.

The service professionals there took a quick look and determined that the transmission was toast and needed to be replaced. The service coordinator, a woman named Solange (memorable name), looked over my warranty details and informed me that although I was still within the 36 month period, I'd gone just a bit over the 36,000 miles and therefore the repair wouldn't be covered.

And then she said, "But we'll cover it anyway, because clearly a three year old transmission shouldn't just fail like this."

We rented a car to drive home and I drove back down a week later to pick up my car, fully repaired and good as new.

I don't know if Solange is still at Cerritos Pontiac, and given GM's troubles I don't even know if they still sell Pontiacs, but this is definitely the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for me and I wish her the best in whatever she's doing.

Back before MouseAdventure got to its current maximum size of 200 teams / 700 players, we occasionally had actual "scavenger hunts" as some of the quests. These days having 200 teams actually bringing us things during the event would be… a little more difficult to deal with. Tabasco sauce packet Having teams bring us Tabasco [...]

Back before MouseAdventure got to its current maximum size of 200 teams / 700 players, we occasionally had actual "scavenger hunts" as some of the quests. These days having 200 teams actually bringing us things during the event would be… a little more difficult to deal with.

Tabasco sauce packet

Having teams bring us Tabasco packets was just part of one of the quests, but it did ensure that we had a ready supply of travel-size seasoning whenever we needed it. For a year.

Invalid FastPass

To get an invalid FastPass, you first have to have a valid one. Most teams figured this out quickly and just hit the same FastPass machine twice in succession to get an invalid one.

Whiz ticket
I couldn’t find a picture of this, and it’s part of the history shared by just a very few people who played the first two a.d.d-quests. One of the items Kevin asked us to find, without explaining, was a “whiz ticket”. I don’t remember how we thought to ask at City Hall, but as it turns out a “whiz ticket” was used, back in the days before ubiquitous credit card terminals, for Disneyland cash handling paperwork. Needless to say City Hall would not let our team have one, but they would let me take a picture and Kevin accepted that.

As a frequent Disneyland visitor and semi-frequent Walt Disney World traveler, I am aware of vacation home rental. The idea is that for extended vacations to popular destinations like Anaheim or Central Florida you would rent an actual home instead of a hotel room. Instead of renting two or three expensive hotel rooms for a [...]

As a frequent Disneyland visitor and semi-frequent Walt Disney World traveler, I am aware of vacation home rental. The idea is that for extended vacations to popular destinations like Anaheim or Central Florida you would rent an actual home instead of a hotel room. Instead of renting two or three expensive hotel rooms for a large traveling group, you’d all stay in one big rental home. With a kitchen, laundry facilities and entertainment options, you could actually save money and that’s definitely a plus. Have I used a vacation home rental myself? Well, no, mostly because the opportunity hasn’t really been there for me. But it’s something to strongly consider next time I travel with a group.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for VacationRental.org via PayPerPost. Though the content and opinions expressed are mine, I am being paid to write it.

My MousePlanet article today is a 135-image photo tour of “HalloweenTime” at the Disneyland Resort. That many photos would have been way too many for a traditional album format, so (since my photos are all on PicasaWeb anyway) I used the PicasaWeb embedded slideshow player. Unfortunately, it has some design issues that bother me: text [...]

My MousePlanet article today is a 135-image photo tour of “HalloweenTime” at the Disneyland Resort. That many photos would have been way too many for a traditional album format, so (since my photos are all on PicasaWeb anyway) I used the PicasaWeb embedded slideshow player. Unfortunately, it has some design issues that bother me: text (caption) color, size and background; speeding by the pictures way too quickly (3 seconds!) and a Picasa logo in the bottom right corner.

A bit of Googling found this blog post at Mat.Su which explains how to set the slideshow interval. The author mentions “taking a peek inside” the Flash file that actually powers the slideshow and so I thought that I might see what other hidden parameters I could find. Note, however, that I don’t know the first thing about Flex or ActionScript except in that it seems to be pretty similar to other C-style languages.

I ran slideshow.swf through Trillix Flash Decompiler and searched through the script code for variables which can be specified via the embed URL. It seems that these are part of a _root array. Some of them are understandable, others are not. Here’s what I found:

host – should always be picasaweb.google.com
port – presumably a TCP port
scalemax – unknown
interval – as described in the linked blog post above
gp – setting it to anything disables the display of the PicasaWeb username and icon, though the user icon is still shown
attachMovie – seems to call a function, but is part of the _root array so included in this list
getNextHighestDepth – seems to call a function, but is part of the _root array so included in this list
feed – the actual PicasaWeb album being displayed in the slideshow, URL-encoded
font – looks like it should control the caption text size, but in experimenting couldn’t make it do anything
text – RGB for caption text
textBackground – RGB for caption background
textAlpha – I think it’s a percentage value, controls the transparency for the caption background
captions – boolean, display captions or don’t
noautoplay – boolean, autoplay or don’t
RGB – frame around the slideshow

Hope this helps someone. I’d love to know what some of those other parameters do.