May 2010 Updates

Operating hours have been updated from November 1, 2009 through May 30, 2010. May 30, 2010 is how far out the data goes; no May 31, 2010.

Daylight savings time in the Magic Kingdom on March 14, 2010

I noticed an interesting situation for the operating hours of the Magic Kingdom on March 14, 2010. This day is the second Sunday in March is the day in the United States when daylight time begins. The operating hours are listed for the Magic Kindom on March 14, 2010 as:

• Normal hours: 9:00 AM - 11:00 PM
• Extra Magic evening hours: 11:00 PM - 2:00 AM

Due to the algorithm employed during parsing the dates, I have to determine that the 2:00 AM time listed for March 14, 2010 really means 2:00 AM early the next morning on March 15, 2010. But the date logic that I use knows that March 14, 2010 is the beginning of daylight time, which happens on March 14, 2010 AT 2:00 AM! So the date logic pushes the time component out to 3:00 AM. But then when I push the date over to the next morning on March 15, 2010, the duration of the extra magic hours is wrong because they are 11:00 PM - 3:00 AM, 4 hours. I will need to fix my logic to handle conversions during the date when daylight time starts. Once that is done, I will publish operating hours out past the beginning of March 2010.

Automated updates have arrived

The latest update was performed automatically. I have completed the automatic synchronization program that I alluded to earlier. The program uses the data available from the Park Hours page on the Walt Disney World web site. This synchronization program will hopefully keep MouseCal's data more accurate as Disney publishes new information.

August 2009 (almost) Updates

I have updated May through August 2009 (except for August 31--for some reason it wasn't published by Disney) in MouseCal.

Automated updates, coming soon

I haven't updated the park hours for a couple months now. In my last update at the beginning of January I mentioned that Disney was rolling out a new web site with a new "park hours" calendar. In the past few weeks I have been developing a program to extract the operating hour information from the HTML. Tonight, I have verified that my algorithm is able to successfully extract the operating hour data. Next on my list is to modify the site so that I can automatically synchronize the extracted data into MouseCal. The hope is that an automated process can be used to keep the MouseCal data as up to date as possible.

January 2009 Updates

I have updated the January 2009 calendar. It looks like they are rolling out a new web site for the parks that includes a new calendar. (Though at the time of this writing, their calendar is empty.) They also now have a "park hours" calendar that shows the park operating hours for all of the parks for the next 10 days. This pretty handy for park planning.

November through April 2009 Updates

I have updated all of the calendars from November though April 2009. Most parks had a decrease in hours on a couple of days each month. I suppose this is a response to the economy and maybe related to the number of advanced hotel bookings.