Disneyland Resort – California Food and Wine Festival

April 14, 2008 Jeffrey GraebnerLeave a comment

My family spent the afternoon at the Disneyland Resort on Sunday, April 14. The primary purpose for this trip was to meet up with a couple friends to experience the special food offerings available at Disney’s California Adventure for the Taste of California Marketplace, which is part of the annual California Food and Wine Festival currently being offered in the park. This is the west coast version of a popular, long-running event that Disney holds every Fall in Epcot at Walt Disney World.

The Taste of California Marketplace offers a selection of fairly small, sampler-style portions of a number of different food items, all designed by California-based chefs and intended to represent the state’s culinary culture. Small cups of California-made wines and beers are also offered to accompany these. All of these items are available at the now-defunct Lucky Fortune Cookery counter-service restaurant, which is located in the Pacific Wharf section of the park. This location provides a good infrastructure for the food service as well a large dining area (shared with two permanent restaurants with a great deal of available tables and chairs. It makes for a much more convenient location than the multiple locations that were used during the first year of the event and which are still in use at the Epcot event.

The sampler-sized portions served at the Marketplace mean that the typical guest is likely to try a variety of choices, particularly if the items are being ordered as a meal rather than as a quick snack. I ended up ordering 5 of the different food selections as well as one cup of wine. Another couple that was dining with us eventually ordered and shared at least one of every item offered.

I initially ordered one each of the chicken and beef California skewers, the Festival Cheese Plate and a cup of Mirassou Chardonnay on a first trip to the counter. The Marketplace also has the usual selection of soft drinks available and, since it was a hot day and the wine doesn’t really work as a thirst-quencher, I did order a Coke as well. After finishing those, I was still hungry enough to try a couple more items, so I went back up and ordered the Pepper Crusted Beef Tenderloin Slider sandwich and, for dessert, the Seasonal Berry Trifle.

I particularly liked the skewers, which included the meat and a few various vegetables with a sweet chipotle glaze. The sauce was fairly strong, but I found it to be extremely tasty and to really complement the flavor of the meat. I generally don’t like cooked vegetables, and I have a strong sensitivity to onions, so I didn’t really eat too much other than the meat. That did make the portions especially small for these (a common problem for me with skewers), but I did really enjoy the portions I did eat.

The cheese plate was ok, although I tend to like somewhat softer textured cheeses than most of the ones chosen for this platter. For one thing, I tend to find softer cheeses to be a bit more flavorful while these were a waxy. The one big exception was what they described as a huntsman cheddar bleu, which I thought was absolutely delicious. I love bleu cheese and it mixed with the cheddar to form a flavor that I found tremendously appealing. The cheese plate also came with some seedless purple grapes which were very fresh and at just the right level of ripeness. The platter also featured a good sized pita crisp. I’m not really much of a wine expert, so I asked the clerk to recommend a wine that would go well with my order. She suggested the Chardonnay as a good compliment for the cheese plate and I found that it did go well with it.

My least favorite of the items that I tried was the Pepper Crusted Beef Tenderloin Slider. This miniature sandwich was served on a small brioche roll and also included onion crisps and what Disney described as a citrus mojo criollo sauce. Due to my sensitivity to onions, I had to remove most of them from my sandwich, although I was able to leave a few on as I’ve found that fried onions generally don’t affect me quite as much as ones that are raw or cooked in other ways. That meant that I was able to get at least a bit of the flavor that they added to the sandwich. The sauce was very heavy on garlic, though, and I strongly expect that one’s taste for this sandwich will be very much measured by one’s tolerance for garlic. I generally do like garlic and initially found that I really liked the flavor. About half-way through the sandwich, though, I found that I had pretty much had my fill of it. The friends we were with pretty much picked this as their favorite item, though, so certainly your mileage my vary.

For dessert, I had actually asked for the Ghirardelli Chocolate Marquise, but was surprised when they gave me the trifle instead. When I checked the receipt, I found that it did show the trifle as well, so I guess that the cashier must have hit the wrong button. Since the trifle was generally to my taste as well, I decided not to bother trying to get it corrected. The berries were strawberries and were very fresh and nicely sweetened by both the vanilla custard and light whipped cream. The pound cake was a tad more dry, but still tasted very good. Overall, it was a good dessert, although I would probably be interested in still trying the other one if I make it back there before the end of the festival.

One thing that should be noted is that the marketplace does not make for an inexpensive meal. The items are priced fairly high for the portion sizes and getting enough food for a filling lunch can quickly run up in costs. They do honor the customary discounts for annual passholders and Disney cast members (employees), which can lower the cost a tad if you qualify. Without discounts or tax, the food items that I ordered came to a total of $24.50. The glass of wine was another $3 and the Coke was the usual $2.50 or so (I don’t recall the exact amount). Those prices for just one person are in the same ballpark as lunch at a fairly high-end table-service restaurant, although with service and presentation that are more in line with fast food.

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that I visited with my family, but I haven’t mentioned anything about my wife and son’s food choices. The reason for that is that neither of them ended up ordering from the Marketplace. The food choices just didn’t really appeal to my wife’s tastes and we also decided that the combination of the high prices and fairly exotic selections were questionable for a 4-year-old, even though our son does tend to be a fairly adventurous eater. This was where the Food and Wine Festival’s setting inside of a Disney theme park was very much an advantage. It was only a very short distance for them to go over to the Farmer’s Market counter service restaurant where both were able to get chicken strips for lunch.

The close proximity between the somewhat upscale offerings of the festival and the more traditional theme park offerings served us well after lunch as well. Our son did get restless with the somewhat longer, more formal lunch (and he was in a bit of a cranky mood anyway), but afterward we were able to easily take him to do things that were more enjoyable to him. Had we not been visiting with a small child, we might have been more interested in exploring more of the seminars and other events associated with the festival. Instead, we park-hopped over to Disneyland where he got to visit with Mickey and Pluto, ride the tea cups and the carrousel, and then finally see the "Enchanted Tiki Room" show before we headed home for the day. It was an extremely hot day, so we were fortunate that lines were pretty short allowing us to do quite a few things in just a couple hours.

California Adventure had been pretty crowded that day, so we were expecting much larger crowds at Disneyland than we actually found when we got there. I suspect the Food and Wine Festival is turning out to be a pretty good attractor for the park, although I’m also sure that the "2 for 1" deal for that gives 1-day at each park for one price is also bringing a lot of people in. I would guess that most weekend visitors taking advantage of the deal likely go to Disneyland on Saturday and California Adventure on Sunday, which would account for at least some of what we saw. I did notice that the lines for the regular restaurants in the Pacific Wharf area of the park were substantially longer than the lines at the Marketplace, which probably isn’t too surprising at the prices they were charging.

I would overall consider our experience with the Food and Wine Festival to be a positive one. The food choices at the Marketplace made for a very enjoyable and interesting lunch, even if the prices were definitely somewhat inflated for what was being offered. Still, it was an overall positive once-a-year experience and I could easily see going again next year.

Slow-down should be fixed

March 31, 2008 Jeffrey GraebnerLeave a comment

Over the weekend, I migrated my sites to a new hosting company. On the advice of a couple friends, I went with Dreamhost, which offers a good mix of features for a pretty reasonable price. In fact, this service generally seems more feature rich and an overall better value than iPowerWeb was, even when it worked well.

I went with Dreamhost despite the fact that they had suffered a pretty serious billing problem that got a fair amount of attention back in January. While researching them, I found that it did cause a fair amount of consternation and that they made a few mistakes in dealing with it (most notably, trying to be too lighthearted in their initial apology), but they did pretty quickly make good on the problem and never attempted to deny or excuse it away. My overall view on this kind of thing is that any company can make mistakes and what I really care about is whether they are resolved quickly and satisfactorily.

That pretty much sums up my frustration with iPowerWeb. Even as I sent in the request for them to formally transfer my domain to Dreamhost, they included a note in their response promising that fixing the MySQL issue was a top priority and that they expected to have it resolved soon. They still didn’t really define "soon", although this morning’s email claimed that they have already added the additional space to the server.

Even if the problem is fixed tomorrow, I’m still glad to have changed over as I no longer trust iPowerWeb. The only information that I have received from them was through direct responses to my inquiries and I’ve had to often ask multiple times. Since this was a known issue, why weren’t they keeping all affected customers informed? Also, this problem has lingered way too long. Since this blog is just a hobby, I let the problem go for a few weeks before taking action. If I were running a business or otherwise making much revenue from this site, I certainly would have jumped ship weeks ago.

Hopefully, Dreamhost will now truly earn my trust and I won’t end up regretting the change. For now, I’m just glad that my site finally loads in a reasonable amount of time again.

Slow Site Loading

March 27, 2008 Jeffrey GraebnerLeave a comment

Visitors to this blog may have noticed that it has been very slow loading recently. At best, it seems to take about 15-20 seconds for a page to load and during really busy times for my hosting company, the delay can be quite a bit longer (even a minute or more).

My sites are all hosted by iPowerWeb and after a bunch of back and forth exchanges with their support department, they have confirmed that it is a capacity issue with their MySQL database servers. The WordPress blogging software that run my blogs uses MySQL, thus resulting in the slowness.

While iPowerWeb support keeps telling me that they are working on adding additional MySQL servers to take up some of the load, they also are refusing to give me even a rough estimate for how soon this will actually happen. As a result, I’m researching other hosting companies and, hopefully, I’ll get this site migrated in the next few days. With any luck, that means that the site should start loading at normal speeds again soon.

For anyone reading this, thanks for looking in on the site, even if it does require a bit of a wait!

Arthur C. Clarke: My Tribute

March 18, 2008 Jeffrey GraebnerLeave a comment

I was saddened to learn of the death of author Arthur C. Clarke at the age of 90. Clarke was my favorite author and so I very much feel the need to write a few words about his work and what it has meant to me. He is well-known as one of the true grand masters of the science fiction genre and I’m certain that a great deal will be written about his life and work over the next few days, so I am going to focus on my own general feelings and reactions to his work. This may come off as a bit rambling as I’m writing it largely off-the-cuff and it honestly has been quite some time since I have read most of Clarke’s books.

I first discovered Clarke’s writing when I was in junior high school back in the early 1980s. Like many people, I first became aware of him after seeing the film version of "2001: A Space Odyssey". I was fascinated (and, admittedly, more than a bit confused) by the movie and became interested in reading the book. Clarke’s collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on 2001 was rather unusual, with the two initially working out the basic story together and then Kubrick going off to write the screenplay (and make the film) while Clarke went off to write the novel. This resulted in a book and movie that had the same basic plot line and characters, but also some substantial differences in approach.

While Kubrick kept the events rather mysterious, at times to the point of obliqueness, Clarke’s writing was much clearer. Reading the book, I was immediately struck by Clarke’s ability to tell a story that was dense in scientific and technical details and filled with speculative elements both about a plausible future and an alien encounter, but still present it in a manner that was very readable and basically understandable. Keep in mind that I was junior high school age at the time as well. Even though I was always a somewhat advanced reader, it still says a lot about Clarke’s writing that he was able to write stories that were so dense in content and unquestionably non-juvenile, but which were still within the grasp of fairly young readers. I don’t know if our school librarian was aware of this or if they simply ordered science fiction somewhat blindly (I suspect the latter), but they had quite a few Clarke books in their collection and I quickly started going through them all, eventually extending that to the collection in the public library and even a few paperbacks purchased.

Work/Life Balance and “Loving Your Work”

March 10, 2008 Jeffrey Graebner1 Comment

Over the last few days, several of the technology-oriented blogs that I read have included some spirited debates about the work/life balance and whether or not loving your work essentially equates to a workaholic devotion to it. This is an issue that I have spent a lot of time thinking about and working out for myself during my career and that has even contributed to something of a career change several years ago.

The online discussion was prompted by a recent blog post by Jason Calacanis, the founder of "human-edited" search engine Mahalo.com. The post focused on various cost-savings tips for people running technology start-ups. Most of the items in the post were pretty innocuous suggestions about things like office furniture and equipment, but there were a couple entries that could easily be interpreted as saying that a start-up should have no use for anyone that would in any way prioritize their personal life over their work life.

The most controversial item was the following:

“Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz.”

He later attempted to soften it a bit by changing "are not workaholics" to "don’t love their work" and then crossing out "it’s not a game" and "if you want balance in your life. For realz." He also wrote a pretty lengthy follow-up post that did help to clarify his view a bit and also shared his own general approach to his work. Particularly in that follow-up post, he seems to be basically suggesting that unless you let your work largely dominate your life, then you must be working only out of necessity rather than actually loving what you do.

Even though my experience with working at start-ups is limited to a short stint at a tiny game developer that ended up folding pretty dramatically about 4 months after I started, I believe that Calacanis is almost certainly correct that a pretty intense career focus is probably necessary to survive during the very early years at most start-ups. Where I take exception is his apparent view that pretty much total devotion to work is a requirement to be able to say that you "love" your work. I don’t believe that having a life balance and actually loving what you do are mutually-exclusive.

Super Bowl Sunday

February 4, 2008 Jeffrey GraebnerLeave a comment

I’m not a football fan.

I have found that making that simple statement can sometimes cause people to brace for an expected tirade on various perceived evils of that sport and professional sports in general. That isn’t going to come from me, though. My views really are as simple as the statement. I don’t have a dislike or moral objections to the sport. I’m just not that interested in it and generally tend to get bored pretty quickly when watching it.

For me, Super Bowl Sunday has never been that big a deal. To be honest, I pay so little attention to the sport that I often don’t even realize the championship game is coming up until the last minute. There have been a number of years where I didn’t even know who was playing by the time the game started or, occasionally, even until I read about the results.

That isn’t to say that I consciously avoid the game at all. Some years, I have watched all or part of the game, although usually while doing other things and basically paying only a bit of attention to the game. There have even been a couple years that I have gone to Super Bowl parties, but mainly for the socializing rather than the game. If I’m around the house, I’ll often have the game on in the background, although it is pretty rare that I’m at home all afternoon on a Sunday.

Although I don’t always think of it, I also will usually set the DVR (or in the distant past, the VCR) to record the game, just in case something interesting happens. If nothing else, there are usually some neat commercials that air during the game, so it is fun to go back and look at the ones that got some attention. Of course, that is not as big a deal now that they have started making all the commercials available online after the game.

Lawry’s The Prime Rib

January 28, 2008 Jeffrey Graebner5 Comments

Last week marked the 9th anniversary of my wife’s and my first date. While that is a milestone that probably declines a bit in significant after our 7+ years of marriage, it still provided a good excuse to get a babysitter and enjoy a dinner out together. Last Thursday, we had that dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, Lawry’s The Prime Rib in Beverly Hills.

My first experience at a Lawry’s restaurant was actually at their location in downtown Chicago to celebrate my 16th birthday. It was almost 2 decades later before my next chance to eat at one of their restaurants, but it always stuck in my memory as one of my all-time favorite dining experiences. Since that first trip to the Beverly Hills location (which is the original one in this format) a few years ago, it has become pretty much my wife’s and my first choice for "date night" special occasion dinners.

As you can probably guess from the name of the restaurant, Lawry’s specializes in prime rib. In fact, when I made that first visit to the one in Chicago back in the mid-1980s, that was the only entree that they offered. Back then, the only menu that they gave you (other then a wine list) was a small flyer listing the prices of the different sized cuts of prime rib. If you wanted something other prime rib for dinner, then you needed to go somewhere else.

Flag Etiquette

January 28, 2008 Jeffrey Graebner4 Comments

I’ve seen something recently with regards to American flag etiquette that bothers me, although I have to admit I kind of feel bad for feeling bothered about it. I have noticed that this week all the Carl’s Jr. fast food locations in my area have been flying their flags at half-staff. I do understand the reason for it as the chain’s founder, Carl Karcher, just passed away. This is something they have decided to do on their own, though, and all other flags in the area are at normal height.

I certainly do understand and empathize the company’s strong desire to pay tribute to their founder. I can imagine that the gesture probably means quite a bit to his family, friends, and long-time employees. The problem is, though, that flag etiquette calls for the lowering to half-staff only under very specific circumstances to honor individuals that had a pretty broad scale impact. As I understand it, the flag should only be placed at half-staff when the president or a state’s governor issues an order calling for it. In those cases, the order is meant to be applied either country-wide (for a presidential order) or statewide (for a gubernatorial order) and not only at specific businesses or locations.

I believe that a lot of the emotional impact of flying flags at half-staff comes from the sense of shared mourning generated from the generally universal participation. When everyone in the country, or at least a community or state, has lowered their flag, that is a very visible and powerful message. That power is diluted when businesses or individuals choose to use that same method to mourn their more personal losses. I certainly don’t mean to diminish Karcher’s death, or anyone else’s, but I do feel that the lowering of the flag to half-staff should remain a rare celebration of lives, or occasionally tragic events like 9/11, that truly had a broad, wide-ranging impact on the entire country or state.

I do feel that flag etiquette should be a set generally accepted rules and shouldn’t carry the force of law. I don’t believe that Carl’s Jr. is or should be subject to any kind of legal consequences for their decision. I absolutely believe that Carl’s Jr. is right to pay tribute to their founder, but I don’t really feel that they picked the right way to do it.

Playing Santa

December 25, 2007 Jeffrey Graebner1 Comment

Although my son Andy has certainly enjoyed the festivities of his past Christmases (having turned four-years-old in November, this year is his fifth), this year is the first year that he has really shared in the overall anticipation of the holiday. Of course, a big part of that has been his first real understanding of the ideas and stories of Santa Claus.

My wife and I have really had a great time playing up the Santa story and helping him to build his excitement. A couple weeks ago, we sat down with him one evening and let him dictate the traditional letter to Santa. His requests were for “An airplane present”, “a blanket”, “paper” (he has been very into drawing and coloring lately), and “more presents”. We were especially amused that he has already learned to hedge his bets with the final “catch-all” request. This letter was written a couple evenings before a babysitter was coming over while we went out to finish our Christmas shopping. We took the letter along that evening and reported that we were going out to deliver it to Santa.

Vacation Signatures – Explained

December 15, 2007 Jeffrey Graebner1 Comment

One of the Disney-related discussion boards that my wife and I both enjoy participating on is called Mousepad. Like many discussion boards, this one includes a "signature line" feature, where it will automatically append a personalized signature to every post you write. Unlike some boards, the software at this site is set up so that if you change your signature line in the settings, it will automatically change the signature on all of your posts, including old ones.

Quite a few of the regular participants (and staff members) on these boards are people that my wife and I have known for quite some time, both online and in real life. Because of this, we have found that it is fun to regularly change our signature lines to cryptic references to various events in our lives, frequently based on funny things our currently 4-year-old son has said or done. I admit to have basically stolen this idea from a good friend, but hopefully she doesn’t mind too much.

During our recent Disney Cruise and Walt Disney World vacation, we started coming up with signature line ideas so much that we finally just started taking down a list. After getting home, I created a web page with the list and my wife and I both just put links to that page in our signature line. Now that it has been up for a while, I figured I’d write up the explanations for each item, since they all represent (hopefully) amusing little anecdotes from the trip. Hopefully this will be a fun little epilogue to my previous trip reports.