Harry Potter In Concert

Posted on by Ian C.

We drove in to Orlando this afternoon, to watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the Walt Disney Theater of the Dr Phillip’s Center, with a live orchestra – and it was just as epic as it sounds!

It’s quite amusing re-watching the first Harry Potter movie (it’s been a while since we last saw it), with such young stars. Mind you, many in the theater had obviously seen it many times, as there was lots of word-perfect narrative from the crowd; the orchestra conductor had encouraged everyone to join in, and they did, with cheers and boos according to character / school in the movie.

During the movie, it’s easy to forget the live orchestra – and then something particularly epic reminds you; I tried to spot instruments playing particular pieces, but it’s hard to do that!

Here’s a few photos before/after (not during, obviously!):

 

The navigation view in my MINI when we arrived was interesting too, with a “3D” Amway center:

Moving to WordPress.com

Posted on by Ian C.

I’ve now completed the first phase of a huge website move – I’m transferring both my websites (GBMINI and MargaretAndIan) to a single blog, hosted on WordPress.com!

Combined MargaretAndIan and GBMINI hosting

 

There’s a few reasons for this – but the primary two are (a) that the gallery format is much nicer with Jetpack which is included, and (b) that it’s often hard to decide whether a post belongs to GBMINI or M&I. In the past I’ve sometimes split a post in two, describing car-related things on GBMINI and trip-related on M&I; I won’t have to do that any more.

Once the transfer is complete, I’ll also be paying less and (I believe) having a more reliable service behind the website.

Today, I’ve completed the transfer of EVERY post from GBMINI over to this new site; while doing that, I’ve tidied up all the posts and made the image displays nicer, and I’ve deleted a few – those that were primarily about some other website that no longer exists, for example.

The next phase is to move all my M&I posts over and do the same tidying up – this is going to take a while yet (especially year 2009 with it’s “post every day”!); but I’m very pleased with the overall results so for me it’s worth doing.

I’ve also moved GPMINI over to it’s own WordPress.com hosting, here, for now; that site really needed work as it’s gallery has been broken for a few years! I will be losing the old GP owners forum when I complete that move, but it’s rarely active so an acceptable loss.