Ride 4 Ronald McDonald House

Ronald McDonald ride -- 45 degree at the 7AM check-in, This 50 mile ride went fast, SAG stops were quick and we rode in large packs. I really wish i took more pics but riding tire2tire did not lend it to me balancing one handed with my phone. we finished exactly at 3hours.


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Thanksgiving in Edisto, SC

We drove up to Edisto Island, SC to be with my Mother's side of the family. On turkey day Chance and I rode around the Island. We woke up to 43 degree weather but it warmed up into the 60s. Chance rode for 15 miles and then picked me up. The Island is beautiful but the pavement is not made for road bikes. The wind is high which makes for a tough ride. The state park has really nice hard packed dirt trails; again not made for road bikes. The trails were fun as the sand sometimes caused the bike to go wonky! When your clipped into the pedals you either recover or fail completely. We both exited the woods without being owned by the sand.

Germany2OrlandoviaAtlantajpg

Atlanta, one of the best cities I have lived in.



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45 minute delay

Oomph, we will be delayed 45 min due to "German" paperwork. Sunny skies 19C perfect plane and we are held-up by bureaucracy. 


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Smoking may reduce blood flow and cause impotence

They take smoking cigarettes very serious but it does not seem to deter smokers.
This is at Duseldorf airport




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Funny story... Embarrassing for me.  After about 45 minutes of seeing road signs pointing to roads going to ausfarht I said "dang all roads lead to the town of ausfarht" when the whole car burst out laughing and telling me ausfarht means EXIT. 


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Map of Location101

Playing with BB gps while on autobahn.

You have received a map location.

http://maps.BlackBerry.com?lat=52.78520&lon=7.16725&z=9&label=Location101



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5AM and we are heading to Dusseldorf to catch a flight home.  The GPS showed how close to London we are.



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Get it right or there are consequences

Little things like power adapters and checking transformers before plugging them in make international travel interesting.  If you plug in a device that is 110 only there will be something not working. Either the power in your room or your device.



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stargate bowling alley.

We found the perfect nerd place tonight. A stargate bowling alley.  From what I am told it is a TV show followed by nerds.  The cast pic is on the wall.  No, we did not bowl just looked.



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Look zach german ice cream!



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P@penburg the sleepy town

Here are some pics of the quiet little town of P@penburg at dusk. I have yet to see it in daylight. We are at the Yard before 8AM and return after 7PM. Work, eat and discuss the next day is the routine.

Yard picture of Hull

Another peek shot- This is the hull steel cross section. Next year there will be water on the lower dark side and insulation on the top.

Pepsi NOT Beer

Look, Dad is drinking diet pepsi tonight. Steph would like it here no ice!
We are at WirtsHaus a German restaurant. I am taking the waitresses advice and having und Schweinefilet Mit Krauterbutter. For me German food is not that different from the food I grew up with. meat, potatoes, beans with subdued spices.

Sadly there is a burger on the menu called Big American Burger. Why are we always referred to as big?

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Bikes, bikes and more bikes

Bikes and more bikes: many employees ride to the yard.

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Well it was very cool to go see the ship. I have been advised to not post pics so I will just do this one low res photo.
The ship is being built in multiple sections called blocks. In the same building is a full Celebrity ship that floats out in February. Some of the Hull sections will have temprary plates put on the ends and then floated to their final destination for final assembly. Some blocks will be lifted into place once the Celebrity moves out. There are massive cranes that straddle the whole building allowing them to pickup the sections.

We found the server room and saw the AC cold water pipes and electrical connections. Crew cabins are pre-built units and we saw a few of them. Actually all cabins are built off-site and brought to the yard and then put in place. Each cabin has its own self contained fans, wiring and plumbing just waiting to be hooked up to the mains supplies.

More too come,


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This is in the small building, a Aida cruise ship 4 months from delivery.



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Espresso in the office!

Hmmm real espresso


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At the yard; the camera cannot do justice to the enormity of the buildings.  The wind is brisk this morning. Temp is around 10C or 50F.
 


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What do Americans do in P@penburg

After one night it is clear a regular night would be very different for me if I lived here in Germany. BBC, CNBC and CNN are the only English channels on the hotel TV. Websites come up in German unless it is a site you have an English account setup on. So what do these 35+ Americans do? Learn to be a nerd and buy a Slingbox. In the simplest terms a Slingbox allows a user to view their television that is in the States anywhere with an internet connection. Either over their laptop or right on their TV. Brent showed me his on-screen BrightHouse remote that allowed him to control his FLORIDA DVR and record and view his BrightHouse Florida TV right in P@penburg. The remote was an exact copy of what my DVR remote looked like. The quality of the picture is quite good . Everyone seems to have a setup that is streaming their video from home back to Germany. People from the UK are wanting american TV. Seems like everyone from VPs to individual contributors use a slingbox. Everyone seems very happy to be here and are figuring out ways to make their time here an experience they will not forget.


Here is a small segment of a Canadian cartoon in German

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Brent's master bath.


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Typical apt. kitchen

We went to see what a P@penburg apartment was like. Brent the logistics and purchasing rep showed us his place.



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Blaine hitting on the waitress


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Head

Where in the US can you get foam like this?



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Turkish dinner



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DCL office at the yard.



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VTC setup that is used for meetings with Anaheim, Orlando and london.



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No ship visit today

It has been a long day and it became too late to go into the ship hangar. Hopefully tomorrow we will get in and get a tour. We saw the new build team don their inspection outfits which made a few of us envious. Cool winter vests, black ballistic cloth over-pants with reflective stripping and large Maglights. The laundry cube went in today and needed inspection.

New Build IT office

Bob and Blaine's office.

Been a full 12 hour day in meetings. We met with a team from Luthansa who drove down from Hamburg. They are installing the phone system which is IP based. Looks like we will have close to 3000 wired phones.   A group from Amsterdam met us to discuss portable phones (Another 2700 phones). The satellite vendor flew in from Lauderdale to discuss how the phone systems would call off the ship.
The day is winding down, we are getting hit with many emails with questions from Orlando since it is just 1PM there and we have our other work to do.

More to come, I hear we are going to a Turkish restaurant tonight.


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Beer

Great beer at the hotel and then we went an ate Italian. That was followed up with a dark draft at "the news pub".

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Bathroom in hotel room

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Hotel room in P@penburg

Autobahn

Cruising down the autobahn. You do the math 1 kph = 0.621371192 mph

This is shot on my Blackberry while on the A3 Autobahn.

Sights along the A3 Autobahn

Pics taken from the A3 while driving from Dusseldorf to P@penburgh

Citroen C6

Rental Car Citreon C6 at Dusseldorf airport. Our flight was delayed from Frankfurt by an hour. The pilot blamed it on the swine flew working through the controllers in the tower. Glad I got my shots! From Dusseldorf we drove 180KM to P@penburg with about 100 miles of the drive on the A3 Autobahn.

Germany Trip #1.jpg

The new build team and I are going to the Myer-Werft Shipyard. My presence is to help the team understand the software integration points with our legacy systems. On this trip is Bob the Manager of IT New Build; Blaine the OPS analyst; Tim the Network Engineer; Alan the Network configuration analyst; and Brian if he doesn't know it he will find it Ops analyst. The corporate team sent a phone god so the ship can communicate to the Disney VOIP system.

Lunch in Frankfort was a Riaota Sandwich (ham and cheese) and a Cappuccino -- We boarded a Lufthansa Flight from Orlando to Frankfurt at 8:30PM Sunday November 15th. 8.5hrs later we were in Germany. This trip is for the IT team to meet with some of the Ship Yards vendors that we have to integrate our systems with. Big names like NEC-Philips, Sea-mobile, Ving and Lufthansa are helping with the new ships. My role is to provide Bob, our IT lead, with the support he needs with application development.

Bob has made 16 trips during the past three years getting ready for the new ship. We are less than one year away from taking delivery and our final payment. Unlike the Italian yards the Germans are never late. Our ship will be floating October 31st 2010 with handover in mid-November. Plan on coming to take a ride on it after January 4th.



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Mock-up of the new ship cabin

Stateroom on the new ships

Mock-up of the new slide

The AquaDuck model

Sailor Mickey Balloon mock-up

Look for my Boss in the air during the 2009 Macy day parade!

The new ships that we can now speak about!

In February 2007, DCL announced the plans for two new ships to add to our fleet. The new build team made the first steel cut in March 2009 at the Meyer Werft shipyards  in P@penburg, Germany for the Dream.  Later that month, the two ships were named. The D1sney Dream is set to sail in 2011. This magical cruise ship will be followed by its sister vessel, the D1sney Fantasy, which is set to sail in 2012.

 How Big Is The Dream?

All of the specifications of the Dream are already being publicized. It is 1,115 feet long, 125 feet wide at its widest area, which means it is too large to pass through the Panama Canal. The "Dream" has 14 decks, which will include a total of 1,250 staterooms. The vessel has a 128,000 tonnage. This means it can comfortably accommodate 4,000 guests.

It will take more than 1,458 members of the crew to take care of these guests during the cruises.

This magnificent ship is using all up-to-date technology along with a very classic design based on the early part of the 20th century. Sounds like a trip back to the time when cruising was at its best!

 

  

 

Well we did it! 106 miles completed. We rode with Jeremy for the first 26 miles then Ed, Chance and I went to finish the Century. Notice Ed got a new bike as well, he was tired of carrying a 5lb wrench to fix his crank. More pics here

Bike riding in Florida has its challenges. One is the storms that can come out of nowhere. While riding by the airport I was able to see clearly that the path home was to head father south from my position. For 20 minutes I stayed behind trees and lost sight of the storm when I came out into a clearing I saw that I was still north with no way to get below it. I called home to a family laughing at me?? I hung up and pedaled with everything I had. As I was going through the neighborhood a neighbor running his trash can up from the curb yelled that I was not going to stay dry. Within seconds the drops started , they were big and cold but home was less than a minute away. Then Chance came out of the house to come find me in the van. I can't wait until he needs me to bail him out!

Well in June there were no excuses, Chance and I purchased him a bike from a starving college student and with Eddie we started to ride together. I got back on my 1999 Cdale and Eddie on his 1980something Trek. We were a rag tag team that was barely making 30 miles in 3 hours. We were determined to get better so we set a goal to do the Savannah GA Century ride in September.

In January 2009 Chance pulled my road bike down and told me I should sell it. I had not been on it for six years. He felt the weight of it and said what is it like to ride this thing??? So off to the orange trail and I clipped him in and pushed him off like I did when he was 5 and he was gone. I followed on Sally's hybrid after a quick mechanical fix but he was long gone. An hour later we met up and he was smiling from ear to ear.

He started going to bike stores and reading online. Then in February he found an article about a 100 mile to raise money for MS. He read about MS and said I am going to do this. Being the optimist :) I explained training for a century would take a lot of training and 10 weeks would be pushing it. Well in the end he pushed himself and finished the ride with a horde of friends at the end to meet him. He raised around $1700 and was just shy of being in the top 100 riders. See here for more pictures

During a training ride he dragged me into a bike store and showed me a poster of Lance saying "No excuses get on your bike and ride"....

Spring Break 2009 found the Wagner's on a 7 day Cruise. We ended up going the Eastern route to St. Croix and St. Thomas. We had a blast as always on the ships. Samuel and Dwight were our wait staff and took great care of us. One thing really stood out was our visit to St. Croix. We ran into Gecko's Island Adventures and took a ATV tour. Chance was thrilled to be able to drive the ATV to the top of the Island. We rode on paved roads, well maintained dirt roads and a few really steep back woods trails. The rented ATVs were 4X4s which were needed to get up a few of the hills while maintaining a safe speed.
The day ended back at the base camp along Emancipation drive where we were given tickets to Rhythms Bar and grill at Rainbow beach. This beach side bar offers good food, liquor, beautiful beach and wifi! We didn't rent a jet ski but they work with Gecko tours for a land sea package. The beach is about a mile from the cruise dock so getting there was a nice walk. If you cruise into Frederiksted, St. Croix plan on spending it with the gang at Gecko Island tours and the laid back folks at Rhythms.
Photos

It sucks getting old!

My road bike took me many places during my five year stint in Statesboro. I rode quite frequently with a group of people from "The Bike Shop". I was comparatively a weak rider but I did accomplish the Bike Ride Across GA, a metric century and two centuries. I trained and trained for those rides and put over a thousand miles on that R800. So my son who is 17 decides he wants to get Dad's road bike down and see what it is all about. It was not long ago he was giving me grief about keeping something that I never ride. I take him to the West Orange Trail explain how the pedal clips work and off he goes. I took our hybrid bike to chase him with but it was mucked up so I lagged about thirty minutes. He was gone by a good ten miles. We talked to each other by cell and then he turned around and we met up and went back to the car. He knocked out 24 miles day one.

Day Two, on his own he went back to the West Orange trail and did both sides, from SR 50, and knocked out about 60 miles. He doesn't seem tired. I keep thinking he was a just a few miles shy of a metric century on his second outing!

Last weekend I took him to the General Van Fleet Trail. I barely could drive the truck to the two stops along the desolate route and beat him. I rode the last 11 miles to the end and back m on my mountain bike. He continued back to the Trailhead but he needed to be back in Otown by 6PM so bailed at about 50 miles.

Today he his on the "fresh air" ride out of Inverness, FL. He plans on riding 48 miles. Hundreds of people are at the event and he is fascinated.

Dinner Club

For the past many months Sally and I have been going out with friends from church to eat dinner. We meet once a month and really enjoy the company. We are very cognitive to not eat at a chain restaurant and we have been trying different ethnic cuisine. Below is a list of the restaurants that we have tried. Each restaurant was great and the group would recommend any of them. We have been very lucky in this regards as we have been doing this for more than a year and a half.


Ceviche House (Peruvian) - Great service and large portions of food. We are all so glad that it is on our neighborhood.
12213 S Orange Blossom Trail
Orlando, FL 32837
(407) 812-1717

Asia Bagus (Indonesian) - My lunch spot, but dinner was a great surprise!
2923 vineland road
Kissimmee, florida 34746
407.397.2205

Bauern-Stube Authentic German Restaurant - Authentic in every way!
8015 South Orange Ave Orlando, FL 32809
407-857-8404

Restaurant Marrakesh (10-2009) - The dancer was mesmerizing and I am talking about the one in jeans!
at Morocco Pavilion at Epcot
(407) WDW-DINE

Epcot Food and Wine Festival (11-2009) – Was there food?

Nono's Italian restaurant (01-2009)– We were pleasantly surprised
13636 village park dr
Orlando, FL 32837
(407) 407-4074

Ichiban Japanese Restaurant
May not be the correct name but it does not matter as it has gone out of business. Huge portions, cooked at your table and many different kinds of sake.

Logan's Bistro (03-2009)– (Eclectic American European influences. Simple but very tasty. ) Excellent fish and chips, Sally had the pot roast which she raved about. We didn't get the name but they had a red Italian wine that was so smooth.
802 Virginia Drive
Orlando, FL 3280
407-898-5688

High Tide Harry's (04-2009)
A casual seafood restaurant and saloon where their goal is to satisfy hunger and thirst with a variety of foods and drinks. Their specialty is reel seafood. The pricing is more than reasonable and the portions are plentiful. The group had crawfish, oysters, shrimp, scallops and crab cakes. The crawfish were boiled with Ball's creole seasoning and I consumed about a pound and a half. Kayla our waitress was a blast, she leaves, well graduates from UCF in 6 months unfortunately for Harry's. This restaurant was Eddie's choice and was a great one. Check Harry's website for specials.

925 N. Semoran Blvd.
Orlando, Florida
(AT 436 & HWY 50)
(407)273-4422

07-09 Three Sisters SpeakEasy in Downtown Kissimmee. This place really surprised us. Not only was the food great but the service and ambiance was perfect for our group. I did not get the waitress name but she was great. It is an upscale restaurant in the heart of Downtown. This is not a Fridays or Bennigans, do not expect a $10 meal. This is great food made by locals and worth every penny!


08-09Mambo is tucked away in a strip mall in St. Cloud. Not the best way to get noticed, so they decided they'd get attention with the food. I never heard the story about how Eddie found this place but it was great. This is award-winning Cuban food with traditional delicacies makes you never want to go to Miami for Cuban food.
4579 13th St. St. Cloud, FL 34769 407-891-7022


Memories of India09-09
This popular Indian eatery, located in a shopping center in the Dr. Phillips area, offers authenticate Indian dishes. There are napkins on the table and wooden-inlaid scenes of Indian life on the walls but the atmosphere remains casual. Gary and Liz brought us here, the food was wonderful but I will admit I let Gary order for me. Amazing how we still have not been disappointed!


Back to the Epcot Food and Wine Festival10-09. This year the event was different but no matter we had a great time drinking with good friends. This was our first repeat!


Chef John's Dockside restaurant 11-09
Back to Kissimmee, this night we almost repeated and went to Three Sister's Speakeasy but stopped at the local wine bar. Vintage Vino Wine Bar is a Tuscan themed wine, cheese and specialty beer bar located at the City's Center in historic downtown Kissimmee. The owners swept the girl's off their feet by finding the exact wine they each preferred. The guys were happy with one of there three specially selected beers. When we started to get hungry they offered to have a waiter from John's or 3 sisters come take our order. We went with John's and were amazed! The girls had Crepes while the men hung with the blackened Salmon over cheese grits. I say it every month but this was the best meal ever!

Gwagg's thoughts on Cloud Computing

When it comes to computing I worry about my data. My home network has a Network Access Shared drive. Network attached storage (NAS) systems are storage devices that can be accessed over a computer network, rather than directly being connected to the computer (such as an external USB hard drive). This enables multiple users to share the same storage space at once. My SimpleShare NAS allows my family to share their data to one location. That is fine when we are in the house but it does not help when on a public network. The tech world has a name for the solution, CloudComputing. Google seems to have the early jump on consumer Cloud Computing. With email (Gmail), Calendar (GCalendar),Pictures (Picasa) and Office documents (GoogleDocs). Google's Blogger and Maps can also be thought as Cloud Computing. Micro$oft is offering similar sites but the only one notable is SkyDrive. It is Cloud storage for any file format and you get 25Gigs for free. Of
course I am waiting for Google's rumored Gdrive. My Motto is go ahead and join them now because Google will take over our Internet usage.

Edit, minutes after posting this I found the below link in my email. This will give alternatives to my my Google mantra. It seems to be from Aug 2008.
Build Yourself A Virtual Cloud To Fall Back On

I am looking at the possibilities of the OS in the cloud; Micro$oft is developing this but I signed up for an account with Cloudo.com.

Went MAC and I am not looking back!

I have been in the Microsoft camp since the DOS days. In 1986 the 1st owner of Tele-Acoustics purchased a IBM PC with a whopping 64MB RAM and a 10MB hard drive. From there I have tried all the Window iterations. I finally grew tired of the overhead of my time. If you are a Windows user think about all the supporting applications it takes to get anything done! I have been watching the costs of supporting Windows servers in an Enterprise environment grow at an exponential pace. All of this cost and there has not been vast improvements with stability in Windows for years.

My shopping for a new computer brought me to some basic needs:
*Portability
*Fully functional web browsing
*Rugged
*Photo viewing, editing and publishing
*Easy to use so my family can enjoy it as well.
The new Netbooks caught my eye and a colleague bought a ASUS eee which was small, ran a flavor of Linux but the screen could not do Internet videos or pictures justice. When I saw the video of the making of the macbook unibody case I was sold on the MAC hardware.


Talks in my office found that 50% of the geeks I surround myself were closet MAC users. Comparison of PC to Macbook specs saw a $400+ premium on the Mac side. The marketing people can easily justify a net zeros difference. With EBAY i was able to shave dollars off and save from paying sales tax. So without further research or trying one I placed a bid on a 2.4GHz 13" unibody Macbook with a upgraded 500Gig HD.

Protecting your portable devices

After Christmas we had a few items that needed cases such as Sally's IPhone and Chance's Android. I stumbled on a YouTube video about ZAGGs skins. Right before I was to place an order I found a site called Best Skins Ever. Seems BestSkins has access to the same military grade material as Zagg and offer it as a cheaper alternative. The skins offer protection from scratches as well as provide a better grip.

After putting the skins on the phones I have some advice. It is imperative that you make sure the skin is equal around all edges. Use a bowl of water/soap to dip your fingers into as you are working the skins on. Chance's phone started to peel just slightly. I think during the squeegee process it moved toward one corner which is the corner that is now peeling. I asked the company about options to fix it and I received a replacement piece along with a hint to use baby shampoo as the wetting agent. I used Dawn which had some additives that might have been a poor choice. Tonight I installed skins on my 13" MacBook. Use rubbing alcohol first to get all oils off. make sure to watch for dust and hair that like to stick to the adhesive. Take your time and they look great.

Rants, Tips, Tricks and Traps

This Blog will be a place where I put my random thoughts on items or places that intrigue me and might be of interest to my friends and family.