This is crazy! Thanks to Tom Barr once again for this fantastic find.

Here are a couple of guys in Australia who go around to clubs that are packed and act like they are the DJ coming to work. They were just trying to see how often this ploy would work. Check it out!
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Folks, I went to Las Vegas last week for business meetings, but during the evening I did take a little break from working on Layered Technologies and Woopra stuff for a few hours to go have dinner at the Bellagio Buffet, and then do a little gambling after dinner.

Had such a great time that I thought I’d share it with you guys.
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This week I’ve been to Las Vegas, Iowa, and Chicago (where I currently sit writing this post). And of all the exciting things to happen, last night a near record breaking earthquake struck Illinois.

(CNN) — A magnitude-5.2 earthquake, centered 131 miles east of St. Louis, Missouri, shook southern Illinois early Friday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

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George Lawrence used aerial kites to photograph San Francisco after the devastating 1906 earthquake. His photographs appeared in newspapers around the world and generated more than $15,000 for the photographer.

Below is a high resolution GigaPixel scan from the original 4 foot wide photograph. Well, technically it’s only a measly 11,709 x 4,716 resolution - translating to only .55 gigapixels, but we’ll let it slide since this is for posterity’s sake and all that.

For those of you who are unaware, San Francisco experienced a devastating earthquake in 1906 which started fires that burned uncontrollably and essentially destroyed the entire city.
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Last week I was in San Francisco for just one day for a meeting, but I did have time to drive over to Fort Point and take a panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge with my GigaPan.

Now, I’m not really pleased with this Gigapan because I used the wrong camera to take the photo. I was using a Panasonic TZ3, which is a fine little point and shoot digicam, but it lacks some basic manual controls such as manual focus, and a few others, which caused this panorama to not work so well. In addition, I had some of the adjustments off a bit.

Still, having said all that, the image is decently cool. And if you’ve never had the opportunity to see the Golden Gate Bridge in person this is a good way to check it out.
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When I went to Hawaii one of the coolest things I did was check out the live volcano. To this day it was one of the most awesome sights I’ve ever witnessed. Seeing a mountainside with liquid hot magma pouring out of it was enough to make Dr. Evil proud.

Well, since none of us has all night to watch lava make it’s way down a mountain, someone was kind enough to film a lava flow throughout the night and then speed it up for us. So here is a time lapse video taken on the Big Island of Hawaii for your viewing pleasure.
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We really take the little things for granted in the USA, like not having to share the road with mules, comically over-burdened bicycles and crazy pieced together vehicles. But in Vietnam all of these things coexist (not exactly in harmony either).

All of these photos were taken by our close friend Vi just a few weeks ago in Vietnam. In addition to the photos, you absolutely have to watch the completely insane videos she took of the traffic in downtown Saigon. It is truly, unbelievable. People pay zero attention to any sort of traffic signal, and as a result it is a complete free-for-all.
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Ok. This is truly unbelievable. When I say that 75 Trillion (with a T) crabs swarm Christmas Island, I am not exaggerating or kidding. You just have to watch this video, as creepy as it is, to believe this.

By the way, you can read all about the Christmas Island red crabs over on Wikipedia, or on the Christmas Island National Park site.
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Man, have you ever been stuck on an airplane anywhere near the lavatory? It can be a downright miserable experience. And the attached PDF is a scanned copy of a customer letter sent to Continental Airlines by a passenger seated directly beside the toilet on a nice long flight.

Here is a choice quote from the letter, but I’m telling you - you’ve got to read it yourself. It brought tears to my eyes!

I constructed a stink-shield by shoving one end of a blanket into the overhead compartment - while effective in blocking at least some of the smell, and offering a small bit of privacy, the ass-on-my-body factor has increased, as without my evil glare passengers feel free to lean up against what they think is some kind of blanketed wall!

Read the entire letter here.

And now I present for your viewing pleasure about 20 minutes of off-road footage shot during our vacation on the Big Island of Hawaii.

This is all Point-of-View videography, so you’re more or less seeing what we saw when we were driving - at least through the front window. The way I accomplished this was to use a small clamp-on camera mount combined with my Panasonic FX07 digital camera.

The camera has optical image stabilization, so the ride doesn’t look quite as bumpy as it actually was.
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I don’t normally pass along things that circulate the Inter-Tubes via e-mail, but this is pretty interesting information - if it is all true. I have no idea where it originated, but a family member sent it to me. I’d be curious if anyone could actually vet this info and prove / disprove it’s validity.

I don’t know what you guys are paying for gasoline…. but here in California we are also paying higher, up to $3.50 per gallon. But my line of work is in petroleum for about 31 years now, so here are some tricks to get more of your money’s worth for every gallon.

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Waikoloa Village is basically a subdivision on the Big Island of Hawaii that has a wide variety of housing units ranging from single family homes, to condos, to high end hotels. Among the hotels is the Hilton Waikoloa Village, and this is where I spent the week on my recent trip to the Big Island of Hawaii. (View in Google Earth. What is Google Earth?)

The hotel is ideally located for branching out to explore all the various parts of the island, and the facilities are enormous. 64 acres of highly manicured grounds complete with a private bay, swimming pools, and even a dolphin habitat. With over 1,200 rooms, this is a large hotel by any measure. A local man told me that the property was originally developed by a Japanese company for $360 Million, but later sold at a huge loss for $90 Million to Hilton.

Although the hotel is basically a Disneyland for adults, there are some critical flaws which greatly detract from it as a serious vacation destination. At the same time, there is some great stuff to see and do… like swim with the dolphins!
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