My buddy Rob invited me to go with him to the North American Buggy Expo (NABX) this year. For you that don't know, a kite buggy is a little three wheel cart that you sit in and get pulled along by a kite at insane and terrifying speeds about three inches off the ground. People live for this shiznit.

This event takes place in the Ivanpah dry lake bed in the Mojave desert near Primm Nevada. This lovely casino is on the border between Nevada and California, about an hour or so out of Las Vegas. We stayed in the Buffalo Bills casino and hotel and went out to the desert every day. I had a lot of fun practicing my photography and just relaxing. I also went on a buggy ride across the desert at about fifty miles an hour, which is just insane when you're a couple of inches off the ground. Here's one of Rob's pictures of me about to set out for my first ride. Notice my pristine white rooky gloves.

It wasn't too hot most of the time with the wind blowing and I met some very interesting people who I probably wouldn't normally run into. People that live to do wind sports. Lots of tattoos, mohawks, and other folks who live for getting dragged around by the wind from all over the world. Ultimately, I don't really think the kite sports are my thing, but I really enjoyed the trip and would go again just to hang out and take more pictures.

I just posted my pictures to my site here. Thanks to Rob, my photo mentor, for the crash course in sports photography I got over the weekend.

Thanks for the fun trip Rob, and remember, "He Drive Slow!".

http://photographyvoter.com. Nice. Kinda like Digg but for photo stuff. Also has a RSS feed if you're into that kind of thing.

Nice. Check out the article here. I'm also partial to velcro.

Here's how to wrap a cable up (if you don't have velcro ), note that this is just one item on the list above.

Between Half Moon Bay, CA and Santa Cruz, CA on Highway 1

I was down for the count for the last few days with some sort of mild virus. Symptoms included inability to stop watching Law and Order reruns. Twelve hour stunt sleeping. The scrambled egg whine (as in "please make me some..."). Power shots of cherry NyQuil. Delusion that a huge blue terry cloth robe and Sorel snow boots was acceptable "outside" attire appropriate for walking the dogs. In the front yard. Sorry. No pictures. Actually, be thankful.

The good news (for me anyway) is that all is well now and I've apologized to my neighbors and the kids that walk home from school in front of our house. They accepted my apology. At least that's how I'm choosing to interpret the rock throwing, picket lines, and subpoenas

Today we celebrated by getting massages at the Spa at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay. (Yes. I am heterosexual. Thanks for asking, Mr Limbaugh.)

Below is a shot of something you don't see everyday. This was taken in the Valet parking area just in front of the Ritz Carlton. Wow. Wow. Wow.

I believe these were two Ferrari 430s and one Ferrari 360 (the closest one). I know for sure the middle one was a 430 because it said so on the mirrors. I think the red one was too, but I'm not sure. The front is significantly longer than the middle one if you look closely so I wasn't sure. Gulp. Sorry about the fugly SUV polluting the back of the shot. I would have fricking paid for the guys valet parking to get it moved out of the frame, though the folks that drove the Ferraris came out in a shiny herd and paddle shifted away into the afternoon right after I took this, leaving me slack jawed and drooling in the tan bark under the rose bushes. I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of hearing a Ferrari zip up through the gears. Holy. God. Pray that someday you do. Just pray. Mozart ain't got nothin' on Enzo Ferrari. That's all I have to say.

After that we went and watched the sunset and I practiced taking landscape and seascape photography. I really like this shot. I shot this hand held, crouching on a rock, praying that my camera would be steady enough. I really need a tripod. A carbon fiber Gitzo is the next item on my Photography wish list. I *really* was wishing for this today at the beach as the light was fading...

We met a seal on the beach. He was sleeping. We were hoping he wasn't sick. We kept barking at him and he would look at us, yawn, and then go back to sleep. He actually doesn't look that healthy to me, so I hope he was okay.

Anyway, Bunny and I had a nice day. Though we spent like eighty bucks on lunch in the bar at the Ritz. Lets just say the view was nice and not talk about the food's worthiness. I had to send back my burger. Yes. Burger. BURGER. Sent. Back. D'oh. Kinda ruins the joy of the moment.

So no more cherry NyQuil tonight, I seem to be okay now. So we now resume our regularly scheduled programming - Shung-Shung!!

My MacBook Pro's hard drive suddenly died. I rebooted the machine and all I got was the gray screen of non bootyness. I tried all the tricks and finally it became clear that the drive was toast when the DiskWarrior tests failed. The drive was a Hitachi 7200rpm 200gig drive. The new one is a 200gig 7200rmp Seagate. I prefer Seagate. I've bought a lot of Seagate drives lately.

Replacing the drive in a MacBook Pro is an easy process - you just need a torx-6 driver and a very small phillips head screw driver. Take every screw you can find out. There are like 20 of them. Lift up the keyboard. Watch out for the flat cable connecting the keyboard to the motherboard. Replace the drive. Put everything back. I recommend you do the job on a table with a towel or something on it so your screws wont roll around.

Easy as pie.

I'm watching practice for the Australian Grand-Prix. I've been reading about the testing and stuff offseason for months and now the 2008 season is here. Of course I'm a Ferrari fan and a Kimi Raikkonnen fan (current world champion). It looks like the top two teams will be Ferrari and McLaren. I'll also be very interested to see what happens with Williams and BMW. Let's see what Nico Rosberg and Nick Hidefeld can do. Lots to watch. I'm just stunned the season is here already. More later. Must watch now.

Just saw this on Chris Pirillo's blog. Never heard of a MacBook Pro catching fire before. Not good.

Daily photos are here.

Here's a beautiful shot of Nelson Piquet Jr in his Renault Formula 1 car. Nelson is one of the rookies for the 2008 and is partnered with Fernando Alonso. Only a few more weeks until the season starts with the Australian Grand Prix. I'm so excited - I can't wait!

This one is for all the hecklers in da house. I bought a new universal remote control AND I freaking well programmed it. That's right. How'd you like dat, biznitches!?

My daily photos are here.

Now, YOU, fail.

Rob shoots Chloe with his fancy ring flash. Nice.

Self portrait taken during the wedding I shot on March 1, 2008. This is with my 10.5mm Fisheye lens, Nikon d300, and Speedlight SB-800 bounced off the white ceiling. This is lens is officially known as the nose embigginator (like I need any help in that department).

I've been planning to do a daily photo project for a while now. I need to practice, practice, practice, and nothing helps like accountability. In high performance driving, we call this seat time. The best modification to your car you can make is to improve the driver. And boy do I need seat time. I'm going to shoot every day and post one shot per day to a flickr page I set up just for this, here. I chose March 1, 2008 to start this project because I wanted to start on the first day of a month, and it was the day I shot my first wedding. Gulp. Maybe I'll post about my experience shooting the wedding once I've recovered. I'll say this though, I was more sore after shooting the wedding than after I was after Skiing at Squaw Valley for two days. I can now see why wedding photographers make so much money. I'm truly in awe of the folks who do this well (golf claps).

My initial plans are to shoot with my Nikon d300, my Nikkor 24-70 lens, and my SB-800 and SB-600 Speedlights. One of my first challenges I've set for myself is to expose all my shots manually.

Here's one of many great posts about doing a daily photo project.

Wish me luck.

I think this picture is absolutely stunning. There are a bunch more in this photostream as well. Wow.

my missed delivery

the doorbell chimes
momentary
lightning ignites a maple
in the dark wilderness
my dream broken
like dropped crockery
fades
the barking is forever
eternal like smashing of swell
against craggily rock
the brown truck
gone
stealing the silence

Here's a picture of our dog Jack taken by my friend Rob over at Murphy Dog Studios. Jack died over the Christmas holidays and we miss him. Jack was a Weimaraner.

Experimenting with off camera flash. I actually held the flash off to the left of my camera.

I'm surprised the wings didn't snap right off.

Fail Dogs is hilarious. We'll, it's possible you need to be a dog person to find it so, but here it is anyway.

For some reason, I was quite amused and entertained by this video of Chris Pirillo unboxing some Logitech Z-5500 speakers. The speakers look nice, though a setup like this won't work for me because I need multiple outputs to hook to my Roland TD-10 V-Drums. So I need to hook the computer to a receiver and the receiver to my drums. I'm actually starting to look around for a new receiver / amplifier. I currently have one I bought off my buddy Reeves but I don't like it much. Largely because its a Sony. But also because the center channel refuses to work with my Xbox 360 and the remote control seems to have bit the big one. Any suggestions? I'm looking for something decent but inexpensive that does surround sound and has several optical inputs, and is NOT a Sony product. Maybe something like this Pioneer VSX-1017TXV-K, though actually this might be overkill for what I need.

I'm having doubts about the FictionBlog (fictionblog.mikefullerton.com). While I've definitely been posting to the fiction blog, I'm not really getting much of a response in readership there. Maybe I'm just not pinging to the right places, or getting the word out into the intertubes about it, or maybe it'll just take more time.

In addition to the small readership, its kind of a pain having two blogs. Well, it was an experiment (so there's that). Either way, I plan to continue writing my fiction blog posts, but maybe they'd be okay within appropriate categories on my main blog. I worry that my blog has a bit of a identity crisis, but maybe that's ok since it's really about the things in my life that are important to me. Some of them anyway. And people can skip over the posts that they aren't interested in. I do this all the time when I visit blogs.

What do you folks think? If you wouldn't mind, would you please leave a comment and let me know what your thoughts are? I'd appreciate it. Also feel free to say why you didn't go read the fictionblog if you'd like - this would be interesting information for me. Only about two or three of you made the trek over to it.

thanks

Here they are. There will be quiz later.

That's a first for me, even after all these years living with dogs. That's it. Move along. Nothing more to see here.