Went to Universal today to see if the Revenge of the Mummy ride was opened for guest previews yet. I didn't think it would be but I heard that they'd at least removed the walls blocking off the ride entrance. They put it in the King Kong space in Universal...so the old NYC Rapid Transit exterior has been turned into a 'Museum of Antiquities' or some such. Anyway, turns out the ride was in technical preview...some ride elements were not finished but it was open for guests. After a 40 minute wait we got to ride it. It was awesome. Great ride! It's an indoor coaster like 'Space Mountain' and 'Rockin Roller coaster' but it also reminded me of the 'Indiana Jones' ride at Disneyland. There are some coaster elements and some of the IJ 'car' elements, because you back up and go another way at one point. Very cool. I could tell some things were not installed yet but all in all it was a great ride.

They don't allow *any* carry-ons so I had to lock my bag and sunglasses and stuff in one of those thumbscan lockers they have...they're pretty idiot-proof, since you just follow the onscreen commands and put your finger or thumb on the scanner when it tells you to. Nevertheless, the group of mid-thirties women in front of me were dumbfounded by this thing and took 10 or 15 minutes to figure it out. Once they were done I used it to get a new locker and it opened a locker that already had stuff in it (which somebody must have used, returned and tried to open it, and then left there stuff in there for some reason so the system thought it was empty now) and so I had to get another one. After exiting the ride I noticed the dopey women were near us so I sped out of the store and into the line for the lockers...thankfully they ended up behind me this time. All the while they were complaining about having to wait and decrying the fact that the person using the locker console was going slow. Talk about IRONY.

Some things are just idiot-proof, if you ask me. This locker thing. The automated ticketing thing at the movie theater and airports. I'm sorry...if you can't figure these things out, go back to grade school. *Sometimes* they do have techincal problems but not very often by my experience. Everything is designed for the lowest common denominator (idiots) in this world and I really think it's holding back a lot of cool technological things that are just on the horizon.