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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During my recent visit to Maui, Hawaii I spent the better part of a day traveling along the famous road to Hana. For those of you that are unaware, it’s one of the most famous drives in the world.

According to the T-Shirt, we’re talking about:

617 curves, 56 bridges, 52 miles and 3 hours

… of non-stop driving fun. Of course, the whole point of the Road to Hana is the drive, not the destination.
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While on Maui for three days I stayed at the Maui Coast Hotel in Kihei. I did all the standard research, starting with their Web site, I also checked TripAdvisor and it got a 4.0.

They had a special for a one room suite for $175 / night, which is a great rate on Maui. The hotel is only 3 miles from the Four Seasons, Hilton and Marriott so I reasoned that it would be worth saving 50% and just driving around. Plus there are beaches right near the Maui Coast Hotel as well.

Unfortunately all the logic in the world won’t turn the Maui Coast into a good deal.
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I began my two week vacation to the Hawaiian Islands on Monday. During the trip I’ll be visiting Lanai, Maui and The Big Island with reviews, photos and even a few videos to follow. So, if you’re stuck at work for the next two weeks but would like to take a virtual vaction, feel free to live vicariously through my travels.

I arrived at DFW airport a bit early, so since there was time to kill I did it in the travel lounge. Terminal D has every airline lounge imaginable, so being a member of the Priority Pass program I stopped by the club for some refreshments and relaxation.

The lounge in terminal D is quite nice with lots of free snacks, drinks, and good work space. There were only a couple of other people in the club at the time so it was very quite. It also had some great views of the runway and airplanes, and I snapped this shot from the club.
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I recently purchased and tested out the Sanyo Xacti VPC-E1 (I love Amazon’s Free Shipping!) waterproof camcorder to determine if it was going to be a workable solution for snorkeling around a coral reef on an upcoming trip to Hawaii.

In playing with the camera at home I determined that the video quality was much better than I expected, and photos were decent quality for a 6.37 MP camera. I guess I had been expecting to give up some quality in order to gain a waterproof form factor, but apparently Sanyo didn’t think that was necessary!
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Today while driving from Minneapolis to St. Paul, Minnesota I spotted a White Castle and immediately detoured so that I could relish in the experience made famous by Harold and Kumar as well as the Beastie Boys.

I went inside and immediately spotted the folks at the grill working on those tiny little square burgers that make White Castle famous, and then began to peruse the menu for a half dozen or so cheeseburgers - all the while imagining the delicous taste that was heading my way.
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This review of the Canon XH A1 Camcorder is going to be a little different from any other you might read for one primary reason, this is the first camcorder I’ve ever owned. That’s right folks, my first camcorder was a high-dollar Prosumer model because if I can’t do it right I don’t want to do it at all.

I had some difficulty with actually purchasing this camcorder. First, I couldn’t find a local retailer anywhere in Dallas. So, I had to turn to the Web.

I tried Abes of Maine with disastrous results, then I ordered it from Amazon and got free next day shipping (yeah!), but it turns out I got a defective one with a documented Iris ring problem (boo!), but a 5 minute discussion with an Amazon rep resulted in them shipping me a new one along with an RMA to send the defective one back (yeah!).
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I can’t think of the last time I fell in love with a piece of hardware so fast as I did the Belkin N1 Vision Wireless Gigabit Router (Model: F5D8232-4).

I saw it on the shelf at Best Buy while looking to replace my crappy old Netgear router, and after reading some of the literature I could not resist grabbing the only one they had to take it home and give it a try - despite the $200 price tag.

I picked it up for two primary reasons:

• The cool display on the outside of the router actually looked like it could be useful for seeing what is going on with the connectivity.
• The box claimed a freakishly long range, which I reasoned would be worth it if I could actually get coverage throughout my large house.

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In two words, it sucks.

Now, on to the detail. First of all, I paid $179 for this router earlier this year. I had upgraded to this router primarily for two reasons: I wanted more range, and I wanted Gigabit ports for my wired LAN.

It turns out that I did get slightly better range on my Wireless G laptop than my previous Linksys wireless router, but only slightly. For example my old Linksys router wouldn’t reach from my home office to my bedroom at all, and the Netgear WNR854T did reach… but just barely. I averaged only one bar and this made surfing from bed an excruciatingly poor experience.
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A couple of weeks ago I decided to order some business cards that I could hand out instead of having to write down my domain name on pieces of paper for people when my blog comes up in conversation. So, I went over to VistaPrint.com and gave their process a whirl.

It took me about 45 minutes to search through all of their different designs until I had finally decided on and customized my new cards. By the time I was done I ordered two sided, full color, glossy cards on the heaviest weight paper. Yeah, I’m a sucker for upgrades.
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Google recently acquired a company called GrandCentral, which I was preparing to do a review of anyway after testing the service out a bit. This only makes the offering all that much stronger, and in my opinion it’s something everyone should try out.

Here is the Google acquisition announcement which took about 2 seconds to download directly from my voice mail:

GrandCentral links all of your phone numbers together and layers on a TON of new features. How? They are giving people One Number…for Life - a number that’s not tied to a phone or a location - but tied to you. This number will consolidate your voice messaging, route calls to wherever you are, and even allow you to screen your calls.
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So, I bet you’ll never guess what BlogBackupOnline does. Wow, that’s right! It’s an online Blog backup service. You’re so smart. (Here is their Blog for updates.)

BBO is a new online service provider that intends to give the 70 million or so blog owners out there a little peace of mind by backing up all their content. I heard about it weeks ago, but just got around to trying it this evening because I had assumed it was going to take a little work. Well, that assumption was very, very wrong.

The good news is that the service shows a lot of promise. The bad news is that it doesn’t work on One Man’s Blog or the HTMLHelp Blog.
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