Chicago is a pretty impressive place. I've never spent much time in any of America's old cites, like New York, Boston and such, it's pretty amazing.

Check out the view from my hotel room.



So far today I've already run into Ben Forta (he seemed a bit lost as he passed me twice in 5 minutes...) and I spent about 20 minutes chatting with CFDJ's Simon Horwith. He's a pretty cool guy. It turns out I'm actually staying at the same hotel as pretty much the whole Adobe team here at MAX.

More to come

I found a picture of me (well, kind of. I'm in the back talking to Simon and folding t-shirts while we waited for an Adobe party..) at MAX taken by some random person

flickr.com/photos/7977532@N06/1463942723/in/photostream/



=]

WOW!


What an amazing trip to Disneyland! Our whole family wound up making the trip for at least part of the time we were here. Mandy's Mom and Step-Father came out on Friday, my folks, my Sister, Mandy's Sister's family (Nikki, Jason and Chloe) came out on Saturday with us and then Mandy's cousin brought her boys(Zac and Logan) out late Sunday night to join us at the park on Monday.

Thing went really well, our hotel (The Anaheim Marriot Suites) was a great hotel, not too close, but a quick trolley ride away from the park. Sunday (Adisyn's 8th birthday) went great, most of the family joined us for breakfast at the buffet inside the Grand Californian and the food was really good. The day at the park went as well as could be expected for a weekend at Disneyland, thankfully it's off season and we managed to get on nearly every ride (except Nemo... 2 hour waits).

Monday, my folks left to go visit an old friend, and Jana and the boys met up with us. We didnt hit nearly as many rides as I would have liked, but we did get on Nemo(it's ok, kind of mellow).

Tuesday... Most everyone else left this morning, except us and Jana and her boys. The day was supposed to start early at California Adventures, so we could get that out of the way and focus most of the day at Disneyland riding everything twice!

As usual, we were running late. We skipped breakfast and decided to scale down the plans at CA, and opted to just hit the Tower of Terror and some wilderness themed playground that Logan had his heart set on going on. We made it to the Tower and found absolutely no line, we were into the "elevator" and dropping 10 stories in minutes. It went so quickly in fact we decided to go again... With some grumbling from Logan we headed in and rode it a second time.. as we exited the ride we were met by two of the nicest Disney folks grinning ear to ear, with a video camera in hand... They took us aside and starting chatting us up, assuring us that we were not in trouble and that they were not trying to sell us a time share... It seems that young Logan had managed to sit in exactly the right seat, in exactly the right row on exactly the right car at exactly the right time and won our group the grand prize in the daily "Year of a million dreams" contest! Had we listened to him mind you, and gone off to the playground... it would not have happend...

So yes, the last remaining six of us at Disneyland had won:

• 1 night in the "Mikey Mouse" Penthouse at the Disneyland hotel
• Dinner for 6 at the Blue Bayou restaurant inside Pirates of the Caribbean
  
• We got to be Grand Marshall's of the daily parade down Main Street
• No wait Fast Passes for every major attraction at Disneyland and CA
• A private meet and greet with Mickey Mouse
• Gift Baskets
  

It has been an insane day. This penthouse is UNREAL! It's over 1600 sq feet, 2 and half bath. 3 65 inch LCD TVs, amazing views, a formal dining room, real Walt Disney stuff in glass cases, special staff waiting on us, a private elevator, a special lounge with free food and even a TV inside the mirror in the master bathroom!

More to come...

Well anybody who has spent any time with me knows, I come up with all sorts of wacky business ideas all the time. Sometimes the ideas have some value or could be done, but most of the time they're just plain ridiculous.

This idea I think has some merit, I don't know if there is any money to be made, well at least not directly by me. Nonetheless, I'd still like to see this one done.

Basically, the idea is based on this problem:

Sometimes when I buy something online the seller doesn't send me the shipping information / tracking number,. As a result, I have no way of knowing when it's going to show up on my front door, which of course raises the chances that someone will walk by, see and it'll just dissapear.

Right now I am waiting for Adobe to send me a copy of it's Master Collection (one of the perks of being an Adobe User Group Manager, AZCFUG.org). Unfortunately, they didn't send any of us our tracking numbers. So no one knows when they are going to show up.

What I would love to have is some sort of opted in, reverse notification system with all of the major US shipping carriers (UPS, DHL and FedEx).

In concept, this system would work like this:

People who often receive packages to their home or office could apply to each carrier to have their address stored in a database so that if any package came in destined for that address it would get flagged and you would get notified that a package has been sent to you. Obviously, there would need to be some sort of address verification process required to set up your account, but it would be so worth it.