The Great Experiment

Wednesday, July 5, 2000: Slept in late, relaxed and lazily recovered from yesterday's adventure at Epcot, spent time finishing up yesterday's web page and chatting with people online about Florida. Although, I'm hungry; I should go out and seek food in a bit. (I know why I'm so lazy today: this is the first time I've been in air conditioning for a long time! Mmmm... air conditioning...)

Oh, by request:

Hi Mom!

Also, some people have asked me about my digital camera. It's a Kodak DC280 ($600) to which I added a 32MB memory card ($100). I chose this camera because computers.com had a lot of good things to say about it; I decided against a lower-end camera because I decided that more pixels are better, and a camera that can do a higher resolution (than, say, 640x480) provides more detail to work with when I edit the photo later.

This camera can take pictures at either 1760 x 1168 or 896 x 592 pixel resolution. To fit more pictures onto the memory card, I've been using the lower resolution for my photos on these pages, and setting the photo quality to Best (minimum compression); with these settings, I got 181 photos on the memory card yesterday. I've been using some image editing tools (GraphicConverter and Adobe PhotoDeluxe) to crop, resize, and color-balance the images (and retouch them if I want to remove something distracting). The camera can't take panorama shots; the pictures here that look like panoramas are actually just photos that I letterboxed. :-)

Evening update

Not all of my luck is good!

Night was fast approaching by the time I realized that I had spent the entire day sleeping, working on my web pages, or chatting with people online. And I probably would have kept right on doing all of that, had my tumbly not gotten a rumbly in it.

So, feeling lucky and having no particular destination in mind (other than the vague hope of finding a fast-food place), I hopped into the rental car and headed down the street.

Lucky sevens!

I stumbled upon what appeared to be an upscale shopping mall named 'Pointe Orlando.' They're bound to have at least some sort of fast food joint, even if it's a pricey one, right? Wrong. It turned out to be a Stanford Shopping Center kind of outdoor mall, so ritzy and upscale that they even charged for parking! There was an Information Center in the middle of the mall, but the clerk was too busy selling tickets to theme parks to tell me where to find a McDonald's. (Everywhere around here sells tickets to theme parks.) The mall did have an FAO Schwarz toy store, and I might go back there with my camera to take some photos of the inside; it was kind of neat. (Besides, I want to pick up the 'Art of Hunchback' book from the bookstore there!)

It's a toybox turned upside down, but those are real cars out front

But by this time I was getting VERY hungry. I hadn't gotten much to eat last night at Epcot, because all the places that looked good were sit-down restaurants, and it would be kinda depressing to go to one of those alone, so instead I nibbled on stuff from street vendors. Tonight was the same deal: lots and lots and lots of upscale sit-down restaurants, from Tony Roma's to Hooters, but no fast food joints!

I continued down the road, and I think my hunger was giving me hallucinations at this point.

Naaw... it can't be.

I kept going down the street... and gradually it became seedier and more run-down... until I think I found an old, run-down amusement park that looked like something straight out of Scooby-Doo. I promise I haven't retouched this photo; this is really what it looked like, right on one of the busiest streets in Orlando.

But -- right next door to it was a Popeye's Chicken fast-food restaurant! Mmmm, chicken! So I pulled into the parking lot.

There was an ambulance pulled up next to the building, with its motor running. This is usually an extremely bad sign for a restaurant.

I was too hungry to care. (Turns out there wasn't an emergency -- ambulance drivers have to eat too.) Food attained, disaster averted.

On the way back to my hotel, I accidentally passed the road my hotel was on, so I had to go a block past it and make a U-turn. Turns out that on the corner where I did my U-turn, there was a McDonald's. If I'd just chosen the other direction when I set out on this crusade, I could have saved myself a whole lot of trouble.

Oh, and the McDonald's had a big sign out front: Buy Park Tickets Here!

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