How Walt Disney Pictures helped start a tech giant

Walt and the many of the smart folks that worked with him were great tinkerers and inventors.  You know all the history behind the Multiplane Camera, the Omnimover, and any other number of fantastic inventions.  What you may not know (I certainly didn’t) is that Walt Disney’s little film company had an indirect hand in starting one of the monsters (in size anyhow) of modern technology.

It turns out that when Walt’s engineers were building Fantasound they did not have an effective way to test and tune it.  No surprise really, since nobody had really done 8 track recordings of this type before.  What they needed was an audio oscillator. 

An audio oscillator is a test device that allows the operator/technician to set a frequency and an associated output level.  The device puts out a constant tone at the frequency set, which allows the technician to observe how well the system it’s plugged into works.  All sorts of other ‘listening’ devices can be placed on the other end of the system to measure things like distortion, amplification, etc.  These devices are very handy, but as you can note in the YouTube link above, they can also be very dangerous when used incorrectly resulting in damage to hearing and even property. 

I think you can imagine how effective that would be in helping engineers and technicians working on Fantasound make sure the system worked as intended… to reproduce Leopold Stokowski’s soundtrack as precisely as possible.  So where did the Disney Company get such a device in the late 1930’s?

It turns out, a young guy by the name of Bill Hewlett, an electrical engineer, was working on his graduate thesis at Stanford.  He had come up with a way to make a better and cheaper audio oscillator using a 3 watt incandescent light bulb.  That invention lead to the first product ever built by a little company in a garage in Palo Alto now know the world over a Hewlett Packard.  That little company sold 8 of the HP200B audio oscillators to Walt Disney Studios in 1939 for use on Fantasound. 

In 1999 HP split the company and formed Agilent.  Agilent took over the test and measurement systems that had defined the young HP and that of courses traces its roots all the way back to that garage, $500 bucks and two friends.  In a twist of fate, WWII would go on the cement HP as one of the greatest technology companies with massive growth throughout the 40’s and 50’s.  The same war, along with the nasty strike that crippled the company in the early 40’s, would almost destroy the Walt Disney Studios as markets dried up and Walt and Roy struggled to keep the company afloat.

You can read more about the HP 200 audio oscillator here, here and here.

Talent Everywhere

Many folks are in a hurry to come and pack as much ‘park’ into their vacation as they can when they come to WDW.  That’s a shame, because you find talented people and performers everywhere if you take the chance to look.

Here are a couple of our favorites that I suggest you check out the next time your in Florida.

The first is Yehaabob Jackson.  Bob has been the regular bar piano player at Port Orleans Riverside since 1997 (back when it was called Dixie Landings).  He puts on a heck of a show and here is just one link to YouTube showing how much so:

The second are the two performing acts over at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa.  The first is the lobby pianist:

And the other is the Grand Floridian Society Orchestra that plays from the upstairs balcony in front of one of the better hidden and nicer bars around as well.  A great place for a casual date or to meet friends and hang out.

So take some time out to rest, relax and enjoy all of the other entertainment options at your disposal when you’re here.

School starts and crowds wane…

It’s still HOT here in central Florida…  very hot indeed.  We’ve been here permanently about a month now, and while it’s hot having lived in South Carolina before here helped get us acquainted to what long hot summers can be.

Most of the month the lines have been pretty long, August still being a pretty busy month around the World.  The usual mix of people trying to squeeze in a late summer vacation before school starts along with a wide array of foreign friends (many Europeans spend more than a couple weeks in America for their holidays) makes the whole area both interesting and sometimes frustrating.  Long lines and high heat make for a strange mix of emotions in both young and old.  This time of year also brings a lot of pop up thunderstorms and spotty rain.  Disney puts on some of the best fireworks around, but Mother Nature routinely steps in with these fantastic lightening shows to remind who owns the sky.

Now that schools are starting back in session, the line lengths around the parks seem to slip by the day.  Thursday night in Epcot it was quite busy.  Friday we took off and just bummed around Animal Kingdom Lodge for views of the animals and to have some Zebra Cakes.  Yesterday we spent much of the morning at Animal Kingdom, where the lines were generally short in the morning (we walked on the flying dinosaur ride twice in a row much to the delight of our 3 year old, and I rode Exp. Everest in single rider twice in about 15 minutes or so). 

Today’s morning was spent in the Magic Kingdom starting off just about 5 minutes or so after rope drop (we’d have been there early had it not been for Daddy’s stop at Starbucks).  The crowds were almost non-existent.  I stopped to get my hair cut at the Main Street Barbershop (thanks to Michal, Rex and Norma for the usual great service, and the fun of watching more than a few get their hair cut for the first time) while Mommy and munchkin went off to ride Dumbo, Peter Pan, the Merry-Go-Round and a couple of potty stops all in the first hour with little to no line.  By about lunch time lines had started to build slightly, but when we left at about 1 o’clock they hadn’t even filled the first section of the parking lot, if you can believe that.

It’s interesting to watch regions of the country (and the world for that matter) cycle in and out of the area as schools start or life picks up and returns to some more structured routine.  As I mentioned earlier, a few weeks back in was a virtual potpourri of ethnicity, citizenship and regions.  This weekend has been noticeably slanted towards the New England region (New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York City) where school appears to not routinely start until around the 1st of September or even after Labor Day.  Or maybe you folks up there are just used to taking your vacations later than all the rest?

Living here so far hasn’t changed our view of the parks, but it has allowed us to slow down and do more what we call random sampling.  You don’t feel rushed to see things and make time to stop and see little things or listen to other shows you might otherwise have skipped. 

For instance, today we stopped and listened to the brass section from the Disney World Band play in Liberty Square along with accompanying percussion.  They played some Dixie Land jazz and some patriotic numbers, including ‘When We’re Human’ from ‘The Princess and the Frog’.  Many people hurried by, taking pictures on the fly or avoiding the area entirely.  We had time to stand in the shade, let the little one dance and wave a flag given out by the guy who is probably the first chair trumpet player, and enjoy the fact that life, for a moment, was not in a hurry to get to the next FastPass line. 

Back from the Dead… Well Not Really Dead…

So it’s been a little longer road back to blogging than I thought I would be.  As usual, there is a good reason for that, and ‘real’ life sometimes gets in the way.

The good news is we’ve moved!  To Orlando, FL!  Yep, we now live a cozy 15 minutes from All Things Diz in Central Florida.  My job prospects with The Walt Disney Company have never quit come to fruition (with no lack of trying on my part, I assure you).  It just became time to consider other alternatives.

Sometimes God (or whatever supreme being you believe in) tells you it’s time to make a change.  That tell of course can be interpreted in multiple ways and sometimes you get a little too narrowly focused in where your looking.  Thankfully for me, I was able to open the aperture of my job search a little bit and do so fairly quickly; and it paid off much quicker too.

Disney is a good company to work for, I have no doubt.  But like the overall economy right now, it’s a bit bi-polar when it comes to the needs of the business as far as hiring goes.  We’ll keep a long term eye out across the way, and hopefully I’ll have more stuff to cover now as time goes on since we are right here.  I’m looking forward to it.

In the mean time, I have a great new job and with a solid, long term company and I’m happy to be employed and living as neighbors to our friends!

More to come!

Real TRON Light Cycle for sale

All I can say is WOW, COOL and I so want one!

For sale via E-Bay with thanks to Giz.

Streaming Disney through Pandora

Looking for that music soundtrack to your Disney life but don’t want to invest a fortune in CDs, streaming equipment, etc.?

I’ve been a long time fan of Mike Newell’s (of WDW Today fame) excellent MouseWorld Radio channels.  This idea/point won’t nearly replace Mike’s self described hours of ‘sitting in a bush with a microphone’ for pure park music ambiance… 

But if you’re a fan of Disney related music, you can make a channel at Pandora and get all your Disney favorites from movies to Broadway streamed to your favorite device.  My channel that seems to be working well so far is a channel based on the selection ‘Walt Disney's The Lion King (Children's) Radio’. 

So far so good…  and since Panasonic (among others) just added Pandora support to their Blu-Ray player line and you can now get Pandora on your iPhone 4.0 and/or Android device, you can have Disney music with you just about wherever you go.

Disney and console games

Despite recent layoffs and closings at some of Disney’s gaming studios, Disney still continues its string of big console game titles with 2 announcements at E3. 

The first is for the Nintendo Wii platform with today’s announcements and sneak peaks of the upcoming ‘Epic Mickey’ title.  Below are two of the many YouTube clips showing the trailer and a light ‘behind the scenes’ title.

The second is a look at the next installment in the ‘Kingdom Hearts’ series for the Play Station Portable from Square Enix.

It’s interesting where the whole gaming front for Disney is going on consoles in general I think.  The 2 titles today both run on platforms with a generally accepted perception of being family oriented (Wii) and/or tween/teen oriented (PSP), vice any games for the more ‘mature’ XBOX 360 or PlayStation 3.  That continues to be the case from both the previous Kingdom Hearts titles as well as other more casual games like Midway Mania on the Wii.

That said, both of these games are much ‘darker’ (or maybe more edgy?) than I’d traditionally expect from someone like Disney or something one would play in a more family environment.  If being edgy and slightly dark like this is what it takes to suck in the tween boy demographic, is it any wonder that Disney struggles with keeping them engaged in the parks and other offerings?  It’s a VERY tough nut to crack.