TechyDad

Our Week In Disney World – Part 7 – Animal (Kingdom) Antics

After our trip to Disney World last year, I started blogging a day by day account of the events. Then I just stopped. I meant to pick it up again, but things happened to distract me. Has it really been 7 months? With Disney Social Media Moms coming up (and thus a new source of Disney World blogging approaching), I decided I needed to finally knuckle down and finish this series up.

While I’m at it, I’m going to change the numbering. The Roman Numerals were cool to begin with, but I can see this is going to take *way* too many blog posts. I just can’t see posting “Our Week In Disney World – Part XXIV” instead of “Our Week In Disney World – Part 24.”

All that said, let’s see where we were last time Ah yes, we had enjoyed a Mother’s Day dinner with “Mom” at the 50’s Prime Time Diner, shopped at Downtown Disney and gone to sleep. This takes us to Monday, May 11th and the Animal Kingdom.

Weight: 197.5 lbs (down 4 pounds)

Average Hours of Sleep: 6 hours

Total Workout Time: 80:36

Total Calories Burned: 531.9

This week I didn’t exercise as much as I wanted to. Various things (mostly my Disney World Photo Book) got in the way. Still, the 80 minutes and change that I did work out must have had an effect as I lost 4 pounds. My plateau is busted! This takes me to within half of a pound of my pre-Disney goal of 10 pounds and nearly 50% of the way to my ending goal (20 pounds).

Part of losing weight/getting healthy is recognizing when something isn’t working and changing it to maximize the effect. Last week, I pledged to work out half an hour per night. During the week, however, I only found time to work out 2 nights. Now, I could either keep the “half hour every night” pledge as-is and feel guilty about all of those missed workouts (thus perhaps making me want to skip them more so I don’t need to think about them). Or, I could recognise that it’s just not working and change it. Given that I don’t think that half hour per night goal is feasible, I’m going to modify it to 30 minutes per night, 3 nights per week. This should be easier to hit.

I still remain a night owl, staying up way past when I should. I know I need to work on this, but I seem to get a second wind at 9pm that lasts until midnight. It’s hard to go to bed when all the other things I have to do and want to do beckon. Perhaps I need to prioritize more.

Aloha Friday: Disney Photo Book

After our last Disney World vacation, I had over 3,100 photos to go through. I could have just let them languish on my hard drive, but, almost immediately, I knew what I wanted to do with them: make a photo book. Obviously, I couldn’t fit all 3,100 in one book so I had to make some cuts. And by some, I mean about 2,800 photos. Still, the resulting photo album is a good representation of our trip.

As much as a photo book appealed to me, I would have been scared off by the price. It normally costs $19 for the first 20 pages and $0.50 for each additional page (up to 100 pages). So a 100 page photo book would cost nearly $60 (plus shipping). Luckily, WinkFlash.com had one of their flat rate photo book sales. Up until January 27th, additional pages are free. So my 100 page photo book will only cost $19. I could order three of them for the price of one.

So my Aloha Friday question to you is: Have you ever made a photo book of your trip? If not, how do you immortalize your vacation memories?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #23

Sid The Downloadable Kid!

I’ve talking about Sid The Science Kid before. I reviewed and hosted a giveaway for a Sid toy. I even mentioned a great episode about vaccines. So how could Sid get any better? How about like this:

Yes, that’s the complete Sid The Science Kid Vaccine episode able to be viewed online. And no, it’s not a pirated version, but a fully approved version. Don’t think it could get better than that? Well, if you go to Flu.gov, you can download this Sid episode for free.

As you may know, I’m a big fan of online video. I stream Netflix movies regularly on my Roku (especially another Henson production, Farscape). I’ve also considered cutting the cable cord more than once. (If we did, I’d be glad that PBS Kids, and thus Sid the Science Kid and Dinosaur Train would be available via over-the-air television.) Being able to watch a Sid episode on my computer via the Internet is great. (Note to PBS Kids: Please consider making a Roku channel to stream full episodes to people’s Roku boxes on demand. My kids would love this!)

Sending Coded Messages

Earlier today, I tried to send a coded message to B via Twitter. I wrote:

Would it be too geeky to tell @TheAngelForever “Number 25 as expressed in binary on one’s hand then translated into ASL”? Yes, yes it would.

Unfortunately, B was too tired to figure out a puzzle. I even sent a hint:

Hint for @TheAngelForever, use this site to find out how to express the number 25 as binary on your hand: http://bit.ly/4vLQf0

After this, she continued to resist spending time on my little game as she was busy doing my laundry. Fair enough, I figured. Still, I wanted her to get the message even if I had to spell it out in a blog post…. so I will.

Let’s start with a photo of my hand:

Now, my puzzle first specified that you must express a binary number on your hand. Binary numbers are Base 2. This means that the digits go from 1, 2, 4, 8, etc instead of the 1, 10, 100, 1000 that Base 10 uses. So let’s label my hand with the number each finger would represent

Now that that’s done, we need to count 25 on my hand. This is relatively easy now. 25 = 16 + 8 + 1. So we’ll raise those digits and leave the others down. Like so:

Finally, my puzzle said to translate this into ASL. ASL stands for American Sign Language. The photo above might be 25 in binary, but in American Sign Language it has another meaning. This next image is meant as a direct message to B when she reads this post

Like I said, very geeky. But that’s me! 😉

Our Week In Disney World – Part 7 – Animal (Kingdom) Antics

Project New Me: Week #3 or Plateau Busted #newme

Aloha Friday: Disney Photo Book

Sid The Downloadable Kid!

Sending Coded Messages