[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Seat of Power”] [/caption]

The last time I really blogged about politics was back around the 2008 election.  Looking over my archives, I found that, by contrast, I blogged about politics quite a bit from 2007 and prior.  My heaviest political post density (for It’s A Binary World 2.0) seems to be 2005-2006.  Why so much back then?  I think because I was already posting pretty regularly about politics and I was extremely frustrated over the second Bush term win.  I think this post best sums up the despair I was feeling at the time.  It was very interesting to read this post with 4 years of hindsight.  First of all, this sentence:  “There haven’t been any abuses of power (that we know of) … “.  Little did I know we’d find out that December about the NSA’s Warrentless Wiretapping which, I believe, would have heavily swung the elections in 2004.  ( THANKS New York Times!)  Second, this fraction of a paragraph:

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Trying to do a candid shot, you can sometimes get spotted”] [/caption]

In yesterday’s post I mentioned how I overcame my shyness and it led to a good picture. That doesn’t mean I stopped taking candid photos. I wonder what she thought when she saw the camera pointed her way. Afterwards I shot some photos of the guy with a million balloons who happened to be passing by in the photo above. Did she think I was aiming for him? Because that was my intention - for her to think that. Although, I did want a photo of him too. I ended up taking about four and this was the best one.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Newspaper Guy Reading the Newspaper, but ready to take photos with tourists”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“180” caption=“This guy was just a block over from newspaper guy. He was also ready to take photos with tourists”] [/caption]

I think everyone has seen a street performer painted in metal and dressed in clothes with a metallic-looking surface. I’ve seen them in Miami, Vegas, and Fort Lauderdale. But only in Honolulu have I seen three of them on the same street only a block from each other. At first when I saw the guy in the newspaper clothing I thought that was pretty creative. But then I saw the metallic guy just a block over. And after that I saw the guy in the “ska” checker board suit. Definitely some points are due for them not all looking the same. But are there really that many people who want a photo with a metallic man that they will take three such photos?

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Quintessential Hawaii Scene: palm trees, the ocean, and surf boards”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Diamond Head from in the Ocean.”] [/caption]

I forgot to mention, in my first post, that since I took all of my camera bodies and my GPS unit, I didn’t want to have to worry about setting it back to EST when I got back home, so I left everything in EST. So I decided to divide my days (for the purpose of these posts) as if it were in EST. So, on Day 2 I continued to take pictures as I walked about. But I also tried out the new underwater housing I bought for Danielle’s camera. It was pretty awesome being able to have the camera with me in the water. I was able to get some photos underwater and, if Danielle had been with me, we could have taken portraits of each other in the water. Nearly all of my photos from that day were with the underwater housing and here is a sampling of those photos.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“On the flight to Chicago, I traveled with many LPGA pros”] [/caption]

Last week I boarded a plane on a business trip to Hawaii. This time my wife couldn’t come along so all I had to do after work was attend to my photography.

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“160” caption=“The view somewhere between BWI and O’Hare”] [/caption]

Unfortunately, the flickr map page for my account only shows the last 30 or so photos on the map. So it’s pretty rare to get it zoomed out this far to show your GPS shots. I keep wishing they’d show all the GPS tagged photos (using some algorithm to combine them into one dot if you’re zoomed out far enough) so you can get an idea of where around the world the users have been. So after uploading a few Hawaii photos, it looked like this:

A while back in time (but only two posts ago) I wrote about my first bike ride on the BWI trail. A few days later I got an email on Facebook:

My name is Marty and I happened along your BLOG about biking at the BWI trail. My first time riding the trail was Saturday June 20th and I had the same incident with the bird. Not sure if we did the loop the same way but I was going pretty fast when the bird hit me. It was my first ride in about 10 years, no helmet and I was going pretty fast …………. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO LOSE IT!!!

And we just about got all the kinks worked out. So update your links to point to http://www.nothingtothetable.com/

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Danielle with her bike”] [/caption]

There were a few things we were excited about being able to do once we had a house - do laundry without sharing the machines, get away from noisy wall/ceiling neighbors, BBQ in our yard, and own bicycles.  Being extremely clean, we were unable to own bikes at the apartment because we had nowhere to store them.  Last Sunday we finally got around to buying some bikes.  After getting them home to tune them up and get the tires filled with air, we contemplated where we should go for our first ride.  Mind you, this would be our first bike ride in at least 3-4 years.  Insanely, I suggested the BWI airport loop trail.  My main reason:  I knew where it was and we had run on it before.  We had never run more than 2.5 miles of the trail, but we had been there and were familiar with it.  So we set off on the trail.  We didn’t know it yet, but it looked like this:

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina, Daniel, Ho, Beo, and Lauren put a lot of work into the decorations”] [/caption]

Last weekend I went to a graduation party Dina and Daniel organized to celebrate Dina, Ho, and Lauren’s graduation this year.  It was a great BBQ event and I had a lot of fun.  I only knew about 1/10th of all the people there, so I kept entertained mainly by ecording the events of the night with my cameras.  I did end up speaking at length with some interesting people.