I love this photo and I love this palace. Did you know Iolani Palace is the only palace in the United States? Also, it had electricity before the White House? Pretty cool eh?

I would never have imagined that I could have gotten about 4-5 photos in one week on explore ever. It’s been awesome…

With the photo above I have now completed my goal of getting 50 photos on Flickr’s Explore. It was a huge challenge to myself in the beginning of the year and thought I probably wouldn’t make it by August. Then it seemed as if I was getting them every week. Kara pointed out that this week alone I’ve had 4 make it to explore. Now I have to think about my goals for next year…

At the beginning of last year I made it my aim to get 50 photos onto Flickr’s Explore. I’m at 49! I sure hope I can get one by the end of the month!

I took this photo at Ko’Olina, Oahu, Hawaii… Not really much to say about it other then I probably burned my retina trying to take this shot

I got an email from the energy drink company Red Bull today saying that they’d like to use the above photo of mine in their monthly news letter the ‘Red Bulletin’ that they just started making last month. So I said of course on one condition. I get a copy of the newsletter. This is interesting because yesterday I was seriously debating whether or not I should start going into photography more professionally and when I mean that I mean signing up for classes at a University and getting a degree in it. I have called University of Hawaii’s Art Department but since I went to an unaccredited college none of my credits will be transferring. It’s just a nice thought though, I’m sure professional photography is a difficult field to get into whether you have a degree or not. Well, I need to start getting ready for my flickr meet downtown in about an hour.

I have tons of hard drives. Right now, on my desk I have (2) 250GB Drives (1) 500GB Drive and a 160GB Drive. Roughly two months ago I plugged in my hard drive. Probably my most important hard drive because this was the hard drive that I backed up and relocated all my master photos too. I had wedding photos, birthdays, photos I cherished and loved. When I plugged in this hard drive I was shocked to find that all the data had vanished! It was all gone except for some abstract file. I thought the external Hard Drive enclosure had failed. (BTW NEVER! Buy Compusa’s homebrand External Hard Drive enclosures, I’ve gone through about 3 in a year and keep getting them replaced via warranty)

I realized that the hard drive was spinning up, it showed that the entire hard drive had free space. So it wasn’t broken, just that ALL my files had mysteriously deleted themselves.

I now have been trying to 2 months to recover the data off this hard drive. I’ve tried several programs both for mac and PC. The hard drive wasn’t broken the files were just gone. I original had the hard drive formatted FAT32 so it could work on both mac and pc which I didn’t realize until later that made the hard drive incredibly unstable.

Here are some programs that I tried:

Disk Warrior (Mac) - Probably a great program but will not help you recover deleted files

PC Inspector File Recovery (PC) - This free application probably works well with small hard drives or flash drives but was frustrating to work with with my hard drive. After leaving the program on for a week straight I only got to 32% recovery before it would crash. I tried several times but it kept crashing.

PC Inspector Smart Recovery (PC) - Same issues as above. Very unstable took what seemed an eternity.

Free Undelete (PC) -  Probably works well with small devices but couldn’t handle major tasks.

Data Rescue II (Mac) - I am so happy with this program that I’m writing this blog article so you can understand my frustration and relief. This program is amazingly fast compared to the ones listed above and totally reliable! My problem with the software above is that when my hard drive would stop responding, which I have yet to figure out, the program would crash. However, with Data Rescue II I can save where I left off, reboot the hard drive and resume from where I left off…

As of this moment I have retrieved 45/250GB but am doing it so much faster that I have no worries

I’ve told this idea to a lot of people and I am SO glad that someone has decided to do it. The way I envisioned it was using something like twitter to let people know about traffic situations and more importantly where speed traps are located.

There is a ktlink here in Hawaii that displays HPD’s traffic reports so if you’re about to make a trip you can quickly check for traffic accidents or congestions.

However, using trapster you can report and get reports on current speed traps. What I most like about this feature is that you can use Jott.com to actually phone in where those sneaking cops are hiding.

So I hope that helps! I’ve signed up and will be checking it out for a little bit.

I wish I knew about this before I went into college. Having to wear a tie everyday! This could also come in handy if you work a retail job.

 Enjoy!

Fastest Way To Tie A Tie - A New Genus Record - Click here for the funniest movie of the week