The Beatles and Walt Disney World?

As you may be surmising, we recently took a trip to Orlando, FL, and experienced Walt Disney World. We did stay on property at Port Orleans - Riverside. So, today, we will look at some photos of the resort.

And here is the building where our rooms were. Building 17, in case you wondered. You can see it has a plush landscape with water features all around the complex.

The first thing we did when we arrived was check in at the front desk. Here is the lobby and JV waiting for us in his stroller. You can tell he is ready to go. It looks like his Daddy may be at a desk on the left of the photo.

These last two photos are from our room. This first is taken from the door looking into the room.

And this second is looking back towards the door. No, not a huge room, but an excellent value. Plus, since we were gone from 8:15am-10:30ish pm everyday, it would not be fiscally wise to stay in a more plush room. We really liked the resort and the rooms, so it worked perfectly for us. I would certainly stay there again.

Forty-one years ago, John Lennon was staying nearby at the Polynesian Village Hotel when he signed the paperwork to officially end The Beatles. We did visit that resort and ate there one night. In fact, in coming days, I will be sharing some fireworks photos I took on the artificial beach there. For now, though, I will use the reference to The Beatles to share an article rating their albums from best to worst. The worst at #11 is Beatles For Sale. Surprisingly, the rate Help at #9. I always liked that album, although there were songs I liked more than others. Their third album, A Hard Day's Night, was placed at #6. If you are a Beatle-o-phile, you would likely guess that Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Abbey Road were ranked in the top 4 and I agree. Which was ranked highest? You know I won't share that. Go check for yourself and see their reasoning.

Oh, and also about The Beatles, yesterday was the anniversary of when John Lennon was assassinated in NYC in 1980. Like many other public figures who were killed at an early age, he has never really aged in our minds since then. Still, it is sad.

A follow-up comic about curling.

Back in late October, I read an article about one of the guys who created Siri and sold it to Apple. It has been a while since I was a full-time programmer, but I will share a part of the article and see how you react to the challenge. First, let's see what Adam said, "The hardest technical challenge with Siri was dealing with the massive amounts of ambiguity present in human language. Consider the phrase 'book 4-star restaurant in Boston'  —  seems very straightforward to understand. Our prototype system could handle this easily. However, when we loaded in tens of millions of business names and hundreds of thousands of cities into the system as vocabulary (just about every word in the English language is a business name), the number of candidate interpretations went through the roof. Book is the name of a city in the US, and so is Star. There are eight Bostons in the US; which one am I talking about? Star Restaurant is the name of a restaurant, but I’m not looking for a restaurant name in this example. I remember the first time we loaded these data sources into Siri, I typed “start over” into the system, and Siri came back saying, “Looking for businesses named ‘Over’ in Start, Louisiana.” “Oh, boy,” I thought. It took us a while to climb back to 95+% accuracy on user queries."

So, how would you handle this challenge? Think about the many steps your unconscious mind goes through to filter a statement or question that you hear. How could you make your program correctly interpret the request to "Book a 4-star restaurant in Boston?" I know it would be a challenge, and maybe this can help us all understand why, sometimes, Siri or Cortana don't do exactly what we expected.

Siri, I need to end today's blog post. What should I say?
No explanation needed. Everyone stopped reading after the title.

Maybe that's not what she would say, but thanks for staying with it until the end. Have a Whimsical Wednesday.