A few years ago Disneyland opened up a music store on Main St. that contained these nifty interactive kiosks. The kiosks would let you burn custom CDs containing up to 10 tracks of vintage Disneyland attraction audio from the park’s opening in 1955 all the way up to the present. The system was called “Disneyland Forever” and it was a true rip off at $20 per CD. (A complete track listing is here.)

I of course made it my mission to purchase every track available on the system as soon as I’d learned about it. I’m glad I did, because they shut the whole thing down and tore out the kiosks about a year ago. I got some good stuff though! A huge chunk of Yesterland is now sitting on my hard drive in audio format.

Anyhoo, Randy Thornton of Walt Disney Records just made a super duper announcement. The CD-burning kiosks will be making a comeback, and they’ll now contain digitally remastered vinyl albums that have been out of print for at least 30 years. Some of them were only available for purchase at the park, some are park-themed, and some are just old Disney recordings that at one time or another were available for purchase at your local record shop.

The individual recordings in the style of Disneyland Forever as we used to know it will be returning eventually, probably not until spring, but any new tracks that they can add would be welcome. Yay!

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Someone posted this postcard in the bathroom stalls here at work. I found it very funny.

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Yesterday Apple released iTunes for Windows. It seems to be pretty good as a music purchasing mechanism, but it’s iffy as an mp3 player. I like how I can share music with other people on my network, but I don’t like not being able to copy those files locally.

The application seems pretty sluggish and it feels like overkill to launch this huge program just to be able to listen to and organize your mp3s. There’s also no way to maximize the window.

I dunno. I’ll probably use it for another day or two but I’ll probably wind up switching back to Winamp.

Spreaking of which, Winamp 5 was released to beta yesterday as well, and initial reports seem positive, so that’s exciting! Also, the guy who made my favorite Winamp 3 skin, MMD3, also made the default skin for Winamp5. Yay!

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FLASH: Cynthia Harriss resigns as president of the Disneyland Resort

This was rumored to have been coming for a few months now. I bet this would have happened even if that guy hadn’t died on Big Thunder.

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Tammy and I have been playing through Diablo II on battle.net lately. She’s an Assassin and I’m a Druid.

Last night we killed Diablo, after dying about 30 times each (no joke.) The good thing about dying that many times is that you run out of money really quick – so you eventually have nothing to lose by dying over and over.

You can just keep portaling in, grab your body, hit Diablo once (if you’re lucky,) die, then repeat. The whole process takes maybe 20 minutes.

Anyway, tonight we’re going to start playing the fifth act, included in the Lord of Destruction expansion pack.

If you’ve never played Diablo before, there’s downloadable PC and Mac demos here!

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We’re still a long way off from seeing a mod chip that lets you play bootable backups on the GameCube, however progress is being made.

You can now send GC disc images to your cube over Cat5 cable and play them just like the real thing!

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Be sure to tune in to Travel Channel Secrets tomorrow night for a behind-the-scenes look at Disneyland. You see stuff like this all the time when they do documentaries about the Florida parks, especially with WDW’s innovative Utilidoor system. But, for whatever reason, security in Anaheim is a lot tighter, and backstage areas have never been seen on TV before. So this is big!

And if you’ve never been to Club 33 before, now’s your chance to see what it looks like!

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I am having an extremely awesome day today.

My drive to work this morning was amazing. There was no traffic to be found on any of the freeways that I take! It was like driving to work on a weekend! Then Tammy told me it was Columbus Day and it all made sense.

You’d think I’d be a little bummed about working on a holiday, especially when so many other companies have the day off (apparently,) and I sort of am! But it’s just such a nice day that I don’t really care!

It totally feels like Fall (or Autumn, if you swing that way) and I’m loving it. The air is so crisp and clear and it really feels great to be outside. Or to drive to work with the sunroof open.

The thermometer’s pushing 80, and it’s just a beautiful day.

ROCK OUT WITH HAPPINESS FROM THE B-DIZZLE!

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Which Fantasy/Sci-Fi Character Are You?

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In some ways, it’s a blessing to live in California.

In other ways, it’s a curse.

The air is nice (usually), the ocean’s close, they film movies and TV shows all around you, there’s no shortage of things to do, and the rest of the country is jealous of you. (They might say they’re not, but they really are.)

On the flip side, real estate here is horrendously overpriced.

If there were anything worth doing in Boise, Idaho, you could buy a sweet 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath, 3 car garage, 2400sq ft home for $219k.

Something like that in LA or OC might START at $600k.

Not fair.

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