Monday, January 26, 2009

On a recent trip to Hawaii, we did some diving off the coast of Maui. We’ve been diving for 25 years and Maui never disappoints. We obviously saw turtles and fish and urchins. We dove the wreck of the Carthaginian on two dives. During the dive we saw a submarine cruise by. Admittedly it wasn’t exactly the Nautilus, just a tourist sub ... but it was pretty cool nonetheless.

See more and high res photos at Digital Quixote.

On our last day of diving we took a boat to Molokai. At one point we turned our backs on the island and headed straight out to deep blue water. That’s where the sharks are!

All photos are by Nancy. i tried my hand at underwater photography and just don’t have the knack for it!

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Casual Travel
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Friday, January 23, 2009

In January I was in Hawaii and had a chance to photograph windsurfers on the north shore of Maui. The surf was 10 to 20 feet and the wind in excess of 20 knots. This makes for pretty exciting windsurfing. I think you’d need to be at the top of your game to enjoy this!

See full resolution photos at Digital Quixote.

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Casual Travel
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Click to enlarge ...

On a recent trip to Hawaii, I had the chance to photograph surfers on 20-30 foot waves on the north shore of Maui. I’ve never surfed, and I suspect this would not be the best venue for a beginner. But it sure did temp me to learn how!

For ful resolution photos see Digital Quixote.

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Casual Travel
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

You may never need this, but if you ever need it, you’ll need it bad.

Have you ever seen non-sense words like the following?

Vivamus purus. Duis placerat enim. Quisque id velit. Quisque at ipsum. Nullam pellentesque quam eu magna. Vivamus purus. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus condimentum risus. Pellentesque mi metus, porta tempus, viverra eget, porta at, orci. Vestibulum scelerisque, massa eget malesuada fringilla, est lacus ultricies urna, et viverra dui tellus quis lorem. Proin dignissim pellentesque massa. Suspendisse ut neque. Duis vel dolor.

Check out: lipsum.org. On the site, you can generate words, bytes, paragraphs of lorem ipsom text. For grins, I generated 150 paragraphs, over 13,000 words of it in seconds. It supports about 20 different languages. And there’s a fascinating history of the Lorem Ipsom concept. So if you’re a geeky guy like me with time to kill ... it might be fun to see this.

So, what might you use this seemingly nonsensical text for? Here are some of my favorite ideas:

1) Want to see how that newsletter you’re writing will look on the page but don’t have the articles written yet. Fill them with lorem ipsum text to get a feeling for it. No, that’s boring.

2) How about this? Got a long boring paper to write, maybe for law school or that odd MBA thesis? Padding it by sprinkling lorem ipsum paragraphs throughout might make it weightier, make you seem smarter! Better, but we can do better.

3) If you’re feeling a bit grumpy, here’s one of my favorites ... Just received the latest proposal from a Nigerian Leader’s widow offering to share $20 million with you if you help her get the money out of the country? Send her a reply, say, 150 paragraphs of lorem ipsom text. In fact, copy her email address a few dozen times into the “To Field” of your email ... and she’ll get a few dozen copies. That might slow her down a bit.

4) Now we’re cooking! Here’s another gem … just spent 2.5 hours on technical support trying to make your iPhone work, not that that would ever happen, you understand, and certainly not today? Next you get this solicitous email from customer support asking about the quality of their service, right? Let ‘em have your views with a few hundred paragraphs of that good ole lorem ipsum.

5) And here’s my topper. I once got on Barack Obama’s email list and can’t seem to get off. Now I’m getting email wanting me to buy the Obama Inauguration Dollar. I’m saving a particularly direct collection of about 97 paragraphs of lorem ipsum text for my next reply to that one.

You all are a creative bunch. I’m sure there are lots of creative uses for this. Your assignment is to report back with the most creative ones!

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Quotable
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Sunday, January 11, 2009

I take a lot of photos each year (20,000 to 30,000), and at the end of each year I try to sort out the best of best. I’ve narrowed the candidates down substantially, to 19. And with the help of lots of “friends and family” have narrowed it down further to the best 3. So think of these as the “People’s Choice Awards” for my 2008 photos.

The first photo I’ve titled “Glad (to be alone with) Dad.” It was taken on a Seattle street in the Fall of 2008. They were sitting outside a Starbucks. He with his latte and she with what I presume was her latte bianco. It was a cool day but the sun was warm. I love the intimacy of the moment.

The second photo I’ve titled “Taktshang Goemba,” the name of the monsstary in Bhutan in the picture. It’s known in English as the Tiger’s Nest. I took this photo in October. To reach my present vantage point I had hiked for about 2 hours and gained about 1,800 vertical feet.

And the third photo I’ve titled “Kocatepe Mosque,” the name of the mosque in Ankara Turkey. I took this photo in April. At one point we walked from the center of the city to our hotel, a distance of about 3 - 4 miles past this new modern mosque. The mosque, which shared the design of traditional mosques, was beautiful. Richly decorated, it demonstrates that Christianity has not cornered the market on ornate buildings built to the glory of God.

To be perfectly frank, it was pretty hard to go from 25,000 to 19 and finally to 3 photos. If you’d like to see the 19 best, in order, you can see them on my website: Digital Quixote.

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Out and About
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