The DIS Dad's Club IV - Man Laws & Cheese Balls

[Emma's Dad]

Hey Don (and any other folks who will be going to Busch Gardens, Williamsburg this year)-

Did you know what they're introducing this year? Based on the description on their webiste, it looks like Soarin' but it will feature Europe, of course.
It opens later this spring. I'm guessing it will be where Big Bad Wolf used to be.

A visit to Busch Gardens this season is a visit to all of Europe thanks to the theme park’s newest attraction, “Europe in the Air.” This high-tech simulator takes guests on a fun-filled journey across the terrain, over the seas and through the air over Europe. The continent’s most recognizable landmarks will be featured, like Stonehenge in England, the Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany and the Coliseum in Rome. The journey continues through the streets of Paris, along the Thames River and into the sky over Ireland for a view unlike any other.

Sounds good. No news on the height requirement though.

We're using Busch Gardens as "training" for the kids this year. I want to see how much walking they can handle before the whining starts. Good info to have before the December trip.

Actually, this ride is replacing the 4D ride, "Corkscrew Hill". If you look at the interactive map on the BGW site, you can see it is already named over in Ireland.

Hope it is close to what you experience at Soarin'... but unless they upgrade the mechanical part of what used to be Corkscrew Hill, there will be no comparison. Oh... and the height requirement for Corkscrew Hill was 42"... so I would imagine it will be the same.

The area of the Big Bad Wolf still has the old station... but everything else from the ride has been removed.

 

[stopher1]

Sound like a plan. Who knows, we might make a summer trip out to see our friends in Indy again this summer. A meet could happen there too.

You bet!

 

[Emma's Dad]

For what it's worth, I was starting to organize my thoughts to get started on my TR from our November 7-day stay at CSR. Before I do that, I thought, I better make a little room on the old iMac and I started to clean it up by moving the files around as I usually do. I don't have a backup drive but we do our backups by sharing across the network to other machines. That way, if things fail, we're still in the clear. My iPhoto library was just shy of 75GB with 45,420 family pictures in it, most of which were collected in the last three years since we upgraded to the better Canon 8MP camera. We had movies and pictures, everything from our daily lives cataloged in nice and neat events. Things were swell.

At least until I started to back up my stuff and I found that I didn't have any room to move things where I needed to. Part of my task included erasing my WinXP partition (bootcamp) on the mac, increasing its size, and installing Win7 Home Premium. In order to do that I first had to back that up. I moved some of my iMovie events files (26GB) to another computer, purged some of the old movies and pictures, and deleted that partition. Back to the iPhoto portion, I moved off everything in my iPhoto library from 2001-2007 (9GB) from the file level (./users/me/pictures/iphoto library/original files/2001-2007, ./users/me/pictures/iphoto library/modified files/2001-2007, ./users/me/pictures/iphoto library/data/2001-2007) to help make some room. I had more than enough space to create a new 100GB Win7 bootcamp partition and I gave it a whril. 2 hours later, Win7 was up and running and I was ready to get started on the trip report. I looked at my drive and found that I had 25GB free (with the purchase of a backup drive planned for next month and knowing that I wouldn't take many more pics in the meantime) I opted to copy the photos from 2001-2007 back into my iPhoto library.

You know how, when you copy a directory of files on a Windows machine over another directory with the same directory names in it, the system will automatically append the files?

Example: Copy from
..\awesome\super\duper\
1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg

into:
..\awesome2\super\duper\
4.jpg
5.jpg
6.jpg

you'll get

..\awesome2\super\duper\
1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg
4.jpg
5.jpg
6.jpg

Right? Well... on a mac it doesn't do that.

All of our pictures, all organized in event format, and our videos from 2008-now are gone. When I went to visit my grandma before she died? Gone. When my wife and daughter took their bonding trip to Florida via train to see the grandmas? Gone. My son's last year with the Young Marines, including the pictures of my disabled wife doing a ropes course at 70' in the air - something that will never, ever occur again? Gone. Our trip to Disney with all 7 days cataloged and sorted and ready to be put into a TR? Gone. All in all, I lost 45,000 photos and 1,200 videos.

On the plus side, I now have a wife who will not question my decision to buy a 2TB mirrored backup solution for the house.

I'd throw up the "badpc" smiley but it was my fault. No sense mocking the hardware for my mistake.

BAH!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

What the heck does the Mac do?? Rename the files? I'm not understanding how you lost the files...

 

[AJRitz]

For what it's worth, I was starting to organize my thoughts to get started on my TR from our November 7-day stay at CSR. Before I do that, I thought, I better make a little room on the old iMac and I started to clean it up by moving the files around as I usually do. I don't have a backup drive but we do our backups by sharing across the network to other machines. That way, if things fail, we're still in the clear. My iPhoto library was just shy of 75GB with 45,420 family pictures in it, most of which were collected in the last three years since we upgraded to the better Canon 8MP camera. We had movies and pictures, everything from our daily lives cataloged in nice and neat events. Things were swell.

At least until I started to back up my stuff and I found that I didn't have any room to move things where I needed to. Part of my task included erasing my WinXP partition (bootcamp) on the mac, increasing its size, and installing Win7 Home Premium. In order to do that I first had to back that up. I moved some of my iMovie events files (26GB) to another computer, purged some of the old movies and pictures, and deleted that partition. Back to the iPhoto portion, I moved off everything in my iPhoto library from 2001-2007 (9GB) from the file level (./users/me/pictures/iphoto library/original files/2001-2007, ./users/me/pictures/iphoto library/modified files/2001-2007, ./users/me/pictures/iphoto library/data/2001-2007) to help make some room. I had more than enough space to create a new 100GB Win7 bootcamp partition and I gave it a whril. 2 hours later, Win7 was up and running and I was ready to get started on the trip report. I looked at my drive and found that I had 25GB free (with the purchase of a backup drive planned for next month and knowing that I wouldn't take many more pics in the meantime) I opted to copy the photos from 2001-2007 back into my iPhoto library.

You know how, when you copy a directory of files on a Windows machine over another directory with the same directory names in it, the system will automatically append the files?

Example: Copy from
..\awesome\super\duper\
1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg

into:
..\awesome2\super\duper\
4.jpg
5.jpg
6.jpg

you'll get

..\awesome2\super\duper\
1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg
4.jpg
5.jpg
6.jpg

Right? Well... on a mac it doesn't do that.

All of our pictures, all organized in event format, and our videos from 2008-now are gone. When I went to visit my grandma before she died? Gone. When my wife and daughter took their bonding trip to Florida via train to see the grandmas? Gone. My son's last year with the Young Marines, including the pictures of my disabled wife doing a ropes course at 70' in the air - something that will never, ever occur again? Gone. Our trip to Disney with all 7 days cataloged and sorted and ready to be put into a TR? Gone. All in all, I lost 45,000 photos and 1,200 videos.

On the plus side, I now have a wife who will not question my decision to buy a 2TB mirrored backup solution for the house.

I'd throw up the "badpc" smiley but it was my fault. No sense mocking the hardware for my mistake.

BAH!

OUCH! I had a somewhat similar situation a couple of years ago - hard drive died and a folder that I'd been storing pictures in had somehow not been included in the backup job. (Oops). I was able to recover many of mine, but I lost the file names and directory structure. Eventually, I need to go through and re-name them and try to figure out when they were taken.

A warning about those two-drive mirrored backup solutions. I've had TWO drive controllers in those kind of solutions fail on me. Drive controller failures are particularly insidious, because they are difficult to diagnose and may cause you to take action that ends up causing data loss, instead of avoiding it.

I finally bit the bullet and went with a REAL backup solution. I now have a Drobo with 4 TB of storage space connected to my home network. I also use CrashPlan software to backup my most important subset of files to a computer on my wife's network at her office (and backup my wife's work files to the Drobo, using CrashPlan).

 

[AJRitz]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

What the heck does the Mac do?? Rename the files? I'm not understanding how you lost the files...

It overwrites the files with the same name. Though, IIRC, it asks for your consent to do so before it completes the operation.

 

[Rental01]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

What the heck does the Mac do?? Rename the files? I'm not understanding how you lost the files...

It copies OVER the whole directory. As in it replaces it.

OUCH! I had a somewhat similar situation a couple of years ago - hard drive died and a folder that I'd been storing pictures in had somehow not been included in the backup job. (Oops). I was able to recover many of mine, but I lost the file names and directory structure. Eventually, I need to go through and re-name them and try to figure out when they were taken.

A warning about those two-drive mirrored backup solutions. I've had TWO drive controllers in those kind of solutions fail on me. Drive controller failures are particularly insidious, because they are difficult to diagnose and may cause you to take action that ends up causing data loss, instead of avoiding it.

I finally bit the bullet and went with a REAL backup solution. I now have a Drobo with 4 TB of storage space connected to my home network. I also use CrashPlan software to backup my most important subset of files to a computer on my wife's network at her office (and backup my wife's work files to the Drobo, using CrashPlan).

I have been living in the Win7 partition, transferring back only to get to the items I need on a daily basis - iTunes library specifically for my iPhone syncing. I have some software that I can use to try to restore it but I need to pay for the full version to restore many of the files but it costs $80 more than I have right now. It will be next month before I can attempt it.

What kind of mirrored system did you have before? Was it the HP MyBoook?

I've heard good things about the DROBO but $700 is a little steep for me. I may have to buy one empty and see if I can find a good deal on the drives. I have a spare 160GB drive that may have some of our pictures on it from my wife's old laptop before it blew up.

I just realized that I lost the pictures from my son just after he finished throwing up from riding Expedition Everest 10 times in a row during EMH. Or the pictures of my wife with Stitch (our house is covered in Stitch stuff)... BAH!

 

[Rental01]

It overwrites the files with the same name. Though, IIRC, it asks for your consent to do so before it completes the operation.

Windows does the same but it doesn't replace the directories, it just appends the files.

After restoring all of my stuff in Win7 I assumed that it did the same.

doy

 

[AJRitz]

It copies OVER the whole directory. As in it replaces it.


I have been living in the Win7 partition, transferring back only to get to the items I need on a daily basis - iTunes library specifically for my iPhone syncing. I have some software that I can use to try to restore it but I need to pay for the full version to restore many of the files but it costs $80 more than I have right now. It will be next month before I can attempt it.

What kind of mirrored system did you have before? Was it the HP MyBoook?

I've heard good things about the DROBO but $700 is a little steep for me. I may have to buy one empty and see if I can find a good deal on the drives. I have a spare 160GB drive that may have some of our pictures on it from my wife's old laptop before it blew up.

I just realized that I lost the pictures from my son just after he finished throwing up from riding Expedition Everest 10 times in a row during EMH. Or the pictures of my wife with Stitch (our house is covered in Stitch stuff)... BAH!

I didn't use a MyBook. I used two different brands of enclosures that hold two SATA drives and operate them in either mirrored or JBOD mode (in JBOD mode, the OS just sees them as one huge disk). The MyBook would worry me even more, because it's not designed to be opened up. The ability to pull the drives out of my enclosure was what allowed me to rescue files - I could pop the drive out and connect it to another computer running the data recovery software directly via a known good enclosure.

The things I love about the Drobo are (and I did buy mine empty, and bought cheaper drives on sale):
1. You don't have to use "matching" drives - you just won't get the full benefit of the full space on the larger drives if some drives are smaller than others.
2. It's almost infinitely and instantly upgradeable. If you pop one drive out of the array and slide in a replacement, the Drobo will format the new drive and rebuild the array. In this way, you can do phased upgrades, putting in larger drives as you find them on sale, have spare cash, etc.
3. Early warning - it constantly monitors the health of the drives, and warns you of imminent failures, so you can change out a drive BEFORE it goes bad.

My Drobo is connected directly to a WindowsXP machine, and is formatted NTFS. I installed MacFUSE and the NTFS-3g file system on my Macs, so my MacBook and the kids' Mac Mini can access the NTFS formatted Drobo in native mode.

 

[MiJo]

Nice work, Don. Although I must admit the subtitle of "Man Laws & Cheese Balls" is throwing me off. The first time I saw it, I mentally got the order of those words wrong. ewww....

 

[AJRitz]

Nice work, Don. Although I must admit the subtitle of "Man Laws & Cheese Balls" is throwing me off. The first time I saw it, I mentally got the order of those words wrong. ewww....

Yeah. Because, what is "Laws Cheese" anyway?

 

[MiJo]

I have resubmitted my email to Zazzle. I hope they don't just ignore it again.

Hey, we're up to $560 for GKTW!!!!!

 

[GoHerd1028]

I just got in from work and noticed the new thread up and running. I see there are cheese ball crumbs scattered everywhere!!!! Don has put so much work into this thread and we have already got it all mucked up!!! Sheeesh!!! We can't have anything!!!

 

[rescuetink]

Congrats "that's nice"!!!! You got the last word in on III!!!!!

I tried, but I was too late!!!

 

[MiJo]

I got a couple emails from VistaPrint, one of the companies I was using when working up our T-shirt design. They are offering a bunch of stuff at great discounts including a FREE T-shirt and Hat! (You must pay shipping.) The T-shirt must be made using one of a select number of designs but the hat can pretty much be designed from scratch. I made a DIS DAD'S hat but I'm holding off ordering it until we decide if we can go with Zazzle or not for our shirts. If not, I'm just going to use my text-only design on VistaPrint and get the hat at the same time I order my shirt. I don't know if it's too late to sign-up for a VistaPrint account to get this deal but it goes until some time in May.
This is an example of the printed hat that can be had for FREE! The hat comes in light khaki, too, and can be printed on the back, too, for a small charge. (The text only shirt design I have is just like this.)

 

[MiJo]

I just checked VistaPrint and found that the hat in my previous post and a two-sided DIS DAD'S CLUB (text only) T-shirt can be had for $9.73 + shipping!
Of course, you need to get the email for the Free hat (by having an account).
You might not get Goofy on the shirt but this is still quite a deal!
Here's the shirt design:

It's just like the hat but has the disboards URL added to the bottom.

 

[Captain_Oblivious]

Well, looky here! I leave for a week and you guys move to new digs! I like what you've done with the place!

Wait...did you guys wait to move until I was gone on purpose?

How's this for a nice afternoon at work? I've got two 20" monitors on my desk. One has the DIS (and a few work-related thingy-s) up on it, the other has live streaming HD coverage of the Masters. It looks like a beautiful day at Augusta National.

I need to get a job there! We used to do the live streaming coverage at work. You could walk down the aisle and hear it in stereo coming from the cubicles. The Bandwidth Fun Police made short work of that one.

Speaking of DIS Dads meeting... Captain_Oblivious (Mark) and I were able to meet for a little while today at the local Cheesecake Factory! I'm not going to ruin it by telling what he did this week, but as he was heading back home from the Outer Banks, he realized he was going to swing through Virginia Beach. Couple of FB posts and phone calls later we were able to make it happen. Thanks again for the cheesecake, Mark! You have a lovely family! Too bad mine was tied up in a Princess and the Frog movie get together!

And the proof that it happened:

Thanks for being flexible and making the effort to come see us Don! Great to finally meet you, and sorry I missed the rest of your family. I'm glad my DW timed the picture to capture the appropriate Manly Commercial on the TV there, too.

That's awesome that you guys got together! I hope he was at least able to gave you some face-to-face grief about finishing your TR!
"Hey Don, you want that last piece of cheesecake? Finish your TR." [eats last piece of cake]

Absolutely! I asked him about finishing the TR, but he said he had been working on the DDCIV thread, so I couldn't give him too much grief. However, he did give me a sneak peak at the conclusion to his TR, and I gotta say: WOW. He really pulled out all the stops. Big laughs, exciting thrills, cliffhangers, 3-dimensional quirky characters, and a game-changing twist ending I never saw coming. You guys are in for a treat!

Very, very cool! I saw on FB that he would be passing through... glad you were able to make it happen.

Christopher, let me know if you're ever here visiting your client in Delaware. We'll make it happen!

I also drove near Nate (trennr)'s hometown, but didn't try to meet up since 1) I was driving in a caravan with other family members, and 2) it was Easter Sunday, and I thought he might have slightly more important things going on that day. I did give him a nice hearty wave, though!

Nah... BUT... he did mention that he thought you were witty and funny. Now that I think about it... I shouldn't have agreed with him

Sure was fun getting to meet someone in person that you've known only on the message boards. That reminds me... I wonder how Kevin (KTME) is doing... haven't heard from him in a little while.

Sounds like someone has selective memory going. I hope Kevin checks in. If nothing else, he'll like my sweatshirt in the picture.

Wow, I'm not sure if I should be flattered or creeped out that two guys I've never *actually* met are discussing me over cheesecake 800 miles away.

OK, I'll go with flattered!

Whew...

What's wrong with talking about a cheesehead over cheesecake? My kids made short work of the cheeseballs in the van, by the way. Good thing Don didn't post the stuff we said about the rest of you guys...

ERRRRRRR.........

I think I'd go with CREEPY!!!!!!

At least I've actually met you and am on a first name basic with your kids! (but I'm not talking about you with anyone.. OK? )

Creepy?! Aw, come on, look at that picture! How can anyone say we're creepy?

Wait, do I really look like that? Yeesh. Never mind.

 

[Captain_Oblivious]

Anyway, it's good to be back.

(Actually, it's not. I hate coming home from vacations. I'm dreading Monday like you wouldn't believe)

I'll try to get some pictures posted on Facebook soon. Don mentioned having me to a mini-TR here in the Dads thread, but I'm not sure I want to hijack it for a non-Disney trip here! We did have a great time, though! The kids are really turning into veteran travelers. Long car rides didn't faze them. For the most part. Thank God for portable DVD players.

 

[rescuetink]

I just checked VistaPrint and found that the hat in my previous post and a two-sided DIS DAD'S CLUB (text only) T-shirt can be had for $9.73 + shipping!
Of course, you need to get the email for the Free hat (by having an account).
You might not get Goofy on the shirt but this is still quite a deal!
Here's the shirt design:

It's just like the hat but has the disboards URL added to the bottom.

We have an account and have ordered from Vista before, including last week when we ordered 3 autograph books and 2 passports!! But we didn't get any emails for the free hat and shirt!! I hope it comes, I just checked again!!! Nothing!!!

 

[MiJo]

We have an account and have ordered from Vista before, including last week when we ordered 3 autograph books and 2 passports!! But we didn't get any emails for the free hat and shirt!! I hope it comes, I just checked again!!! Nothing!!!

My email came early this afternoon. I don't know why I got it but it does have my account number on it.

 

[Disney Commando]

Kudos Don! Great Job on the new clubhouse

Wonder if we can hit 500 before Dis Das V