I hope everyone is having a nice Thanksgiving vacation.  I am home visiting the family.  My parents have been hosting our family’s Thanksgiving holiday since I was a kid. Food was great, tons of Turkey, meatballs, briscuit and of course some sweet potatoes. I did get a 3 mile run in before dinner.  It helps our when you take your second helping of apple pie.

So I am in the market for some new ski gloves this year.  After roughly 12 years I feel it may finally be time to replace my Reusch Racing gloves.  I love my old gloves, full leather and they held up forever as you can tell.  I may go with another pair of Reusch but I have been looking at the Hestra offerings.  Anyway, check out this review on the Hestra Heli 3 Finger glove, raw, uncut and unedited.  Enjoy!

These gloves are just crazy. I use them for skiing but they would be great for snow boarding because you get the pointer finger unlike mittens but they are way warmer than gloves. The hestra people are just genious! So what you look like Yoda, you will stay warm and alot of people think these things look sick (like me). I’m only 13 (well I’m 14 now but when I was using them I was 13) and when you’re younger your hands get colder and my hands got cold only once on a chair lift going to the very top in Utah when it was crazy windy but seriously, any grown man would still be warm. They are really long which is good because when you bite the dust, you won’t get snow in your gloves. The leather palms are really nice and really really tough and pretty grippy. These are well priced for the quality but blowing 100 on gloves can sound crazy to some people but these were sooooo worth it. These are all you need unless your in like the north pole. haha well I love these things and anyone and everyone who skis or snowboards should just buy them.

I am back from last week’s road trip to Dallas.  In an earlier post I talked about the first night where we drove from Albany to Buffalo.  The next day was our longest drive of the trip.  Our trip was from Buffalo to Louisville, Kentucky.  It took us around 8.5 hours with a quick stop for lunch.  We still had enough time to enjoy dinner at a nice Cuban restaurant and head downtown.  We went to an area called 4th Street Live.  In case you couldn’t figure it out, it’s on 4th St. in the city. (more…)

I know I have posted in about a month, it has been a busy summer.  Weddings, work, enjoying the nice weather once the month of rain was over has gotten in the way of posting some new content.  Never fear, I have some new projects and ideas planned which I will be sure to post about here.

Some of you  probably know that my brother is moving down to Texas  to accept a promotion at his company.  The time has finally come, he will be leaving in a week.  Instead of letting him drive down straight through I decided to turn it into a little road trip and make the drive down with him.

I haven’t been to this part of the country so I figured I would make the most it.  We are planning on extending the trip by a day or two so we have some time to stop and enjoy sites along the way. (more…)

As a quick little getaway I headed up to Montreal to catch the tail end of the 2009 Montreal Jazz Festival.  If you like music, I suggest you take the opportunity to check out this event.  The festival basically takes over a major part of the city for about two weeks.  The festival isn’t just about Jazz, though that is obviously a major focus.  They have tons of other types of concerts, performers, art venues and general festival goodness throughout.

As you may have saw in a previous post I stayed at the W, Montreal.  What a great hotel.  It was right in the heart of downtown.  It was a very easy walk to the main festival grounds, Old Montreal, St. Catherine Street and basically everywhere else you want to visit.  (more…)

It has been about a month since I posted a cipher puzzle after reading an article about the Kryptos exhibit at the CIA headquarters.  The solution is posted below, looking back at the answer the puzzle was actually quite difficult to anyone except people who study cryptology.  The major hints in the post was the reference to the Kryptos exhibit and the accompanying Wikipedia page.  This page talked about the basic ciphers and translations used on the panels which have been solved already.  I used two of the basic ciphers. (more…)

I recently flipped through a recent edition of Wired magazine which had a focus of puzzles and riddles.  The sidebars and filler pages had special sudokus, magic tricks and other word puzzles.  I am sure the main article with JJ Abrams had something to do with it.  It’s too bad I didn’t pick up any hints or clues about the Season 5 Finale of Lost, it was an interesting article but that’s another story.

There was another article that I also found very interesting, it talked about the Kryptos artwork installation at the Central Intelligence Agency.  As a quick background, the CIA commissioned an outdoor artwork installation for the New Headquarters Building (NHB).  The Kryptos, as it was named, was dedicated on November 3, 1990.  The two part sculpture is located at the main entrance to the NHB.  The main structure has four panels of ciphered text.

The mystery of the Kryptos puzzles is very fascinating.  The artist, James Sanborn, has stated that he thought all four panels of text would be solved within 7 years.  It has now been almost 20 years and only three out of the four panels have been solved.  To further complicate the mystery, the piece actually contains a riddle within a riddle.  Only after the fourth panel is deciphered can people then attempt to solve the main riddle using the plaintext of the four panels.

In the spirit of these ciphers and puzzles, I created one of my own.  Below is the name and address of a place I am going this summer for vacation.  Good luck, let me know if you figure it out.

E887p OhyRg bnEgv rNd80 NeA
ZJbgR y9Fhe IpbvZ aenDr rUM

The four panels of the Kryptos art installation

I just saw this article (off Digg) about China’s plans for their new green cities.  It sounds like the ideas of the Chinese Government got ahead of themselves a little in their planning. The article also makes mention of the fact that the plans are put in place without the input of the people who ultimately would be affected.

After just getting back from my trip to China I can saw that though these plans may have been scrapped, or are least put on hold there is still a tremendous amount of development occurring right now all over China.  China’s building spree for the 2008 Beijing Olympics commissioned several well-known international architectural firms to design new buildings.

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Finally, after almost a week of collecting, sorting, pruning and editing I have finally posted our main photo gallery for the vacation. 

I tried to pick out images that captured the country we were visiting, from the tourist destinations to people in their everyday lives.  For most of these images I did very basic edits:  crops, straighten, adjust levels.  I also made use of the Lightroom presets in the Develop module along with some presets I downloaded from Camera Dojo.  I used the free Lightroom Essentials, though they also have additional presets you can purchase.

Now that I have these up, I flagged a bunch of images that I want to revisist and spend some more time with processing them.  I will post some of these to my flickr stream.

Without further ado, please head over to the gallery and check out the pictures.  Please post your comments about the pictures or the trip.

It has been almost a week since we arrived back from China.  In short, I had an awesome time.  I learned so much on the trip, I enjoyed seeing all the sites and people.  It was great. When I get some time in the coming days I will write a two part series about the trip.  Part 1 will consist of the travel to China and our stay in Beijing.  Part 2 will consist of our tours in Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai and our travel back to the states.

I think I am now just getting back to my normal routine.  Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were crazy at work with trying to catch up for a missed week and a half.  I was able to go through most of my emails on my blackberry on the busride back from JFK to Albany so that helped a little.

This past week I was suffering from sleep bulimia.  I don’t know if that is a real term or not, but that’s how I am describing it.  My sleep schedule from the jet lag is all messed up.  The first night back I stayed up until 1:00am.  I woke up at 5:00am ready to go.  The following night I went to bed around normal time, but I slept until 10:00am.  On Friday night I was exhausted from work and working out at the gym.  I was falling asleep on the couch around 10:30.  I slept until 11:15am Saturday morning.  Finally on Saturday night I went to bed at a normal time, and woke up Sunday morning ready to roll at 5:00am.  I will say that was one of my most productive Sunday mornings in a long time.  I had accomplished a lot of stuff before 11:00.  (more…)

It’s been about a week since I last posted about my upcoming preparations for my China vacation.  I am now down to a final weekend before I need to get up at 5:30am to catch our bus down to JFK.  I think I got everything squared away at work, or I at least I did as best I can.  I am confident things are in good hands while i am away.

I probably should have started to do some packing in the last day or so to see if I am missing anything.  Well I didn’t, I did pick up a new lightweight rain coat though in case of rain.

Here is a more complete itinerary for our trip.  I plan on keeping a journal while I am away so I’ll write up detailed posts when I get back.

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